book

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Three months ago I posted here that I had begun work anew on the book that has been percolating in my gray matter since 2014.  That was when Dad told me I should write about my struggles with bipolar disorder.  He thought it could be inspirational to others.

And then of course, Dad passed and that knocked me off my feet.  And since then a lot has happened: the journey across America, new career and then changing career (and now, again), new town and new faces… all of this the backdrop against an ever-evolving saga of my mental health.  The book then, in whatever form it was going to take, is radically different from the project now before me.

I am happy to report that after a few false starts with how to open the book, that it is now well on track.  Late last night I finished the first ...

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Dad wanted me to write a book, about my life with bipolar disorder.  He thought it would serve as an inspiration for others.  He was really proud of how I had gone forward with having a mental illness, how I was trying to use my experience with it to help others.  I like to think he would be proud still of my work the past three and a half years at a state department of mental health, where I’ve been employed as a peer support specialist.  I’ve gotten to utilize my knowledge and experience just about every day of that, toward assisting others to have more full and complete lives despite their diagnoses.

I had been working on a book, and had quite a lot of it completed, before Dad passed away in November of 2014.  And that… took the wind out of my sails, to put it mildly.  A ...

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Some of this blog’s longtime readers may recall how I was writing a book about having bipolar disorder.  That was a project I’d been working on for some time, and then Dad passed.  It sort of took the wind out of my sails, but I vowed to finish it someday.

Guess what?  It’s still nowhere near finished.  The last time I committed a word to that endeavor was in winter of 2015.  And so much has transpired since then.  It will make more sense to write a new book drawing from the experiences of the past four years especially.

Someday I’ll start to work on that.  In the meantime, I do get to rightfully proclaim that I have finished the manuscript of my first book.

The idea for it surfaced about ten years or so ago, and it’s been percolating in my gray matter all this time.  Perhaps I needed ...

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YYYYAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Well, this section of the book is now finished.  The first draft of Chapter 25 was completed a short while ago.  It follows the one that had stumped me since February, up until a week and a half or so ago.  The one that took me so long to crack and I couldn’t have done it without a dear friend being here to give support and encouragement.

So the complete draft of Chapter 24 was done, but 25, well… I could see the shape of it, the general form, but the particulars were eluding me.  So I thought “maybe I should write the next chapter while waiting for 25 to really present itself”.  And that’s what I did.  So there was 24, followed by 26, with 25 in between still to be written.

This past hour, Chapter 25 was done.  I wound up waking up for some vague ...

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Let’s recap, shall we?

Dad’s passing in November threw everything out of kilter, particularly writing the book.  Not just out of being in grief and recovering from losing my last remaining parent, but also because of everything that comes with a death in regard to paperwork, his estate, and so forth.  So the project I’ve been working on since last May, my book about having bipolar disorder, had to be put on the back burner.

In January I felt okay enough to continue working on it.  And I did.  At least for a little while.  A few more chapters were completed.

Then in February, everything slammed to a halt.

I had reached a place in conveying the narrative where my mind could not, would not, proceed any further.  It had hit a solid wall and nothing I did could break it down.  It was my memories, very painful memories, that ...

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…I am writing for my book.

Let’s summarize for a moment.  Last May and up until late October, my book was going at a very good pace.  Oh sure, there were some fits here and there, and I made a few mistakes from which I learned a great deal (and made the book much better, I think) but as this sort of thing goes, it’s my understanding that this was going along better than a lot of first-time authors.

Then Dad had his stroke.  And a little over two weeks later he passed away.

Things have been in turmoil since then.  And the past few weeks especially.  I am now looking at some very drastic life changes which I had not had to consider anytime during the course of my life.  And on top of all of that, work on my book practically ground to a halt.

Then in late ...

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Who can say where the road goes,
Where the day flows?
Only time… 
And who can say if your love grows,
As your heart chose?
Only time… 

— Enya, “Only Time”

Manic-depression has a time dilation effect. There are periods when time slows to a snail’s pace. There are others, like what I’m going through right now, when time goes by too fast.


Either results in the same thing. An oppressive sense that time and life itself is being wasted. That the harder I try to wrest control of time the more it flees away from me. I think, for me anyway, that is the source of a lot of the paranoid thoughts. My mind is either extrapolating situations and outcomes beyond rationality or it is deathly afraid of being “left behind” by the rest of you who have a normal perception of time. I’m too fast or
...
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Late last night I finished another chapter for my book about having mental illness and specifically bipolar disorder.  So depending on how you figure it, that’s three chapters I’ve done in the past few weeks.  Three chapters done since I picked up the project again in the wake of Dad’s death.

In all honesty, I never expected to have come this far along, so fast.  I don’t know if I could have before now.  Maybe I had to go through some things before I could arrive at the place where I am now.  Dad’s death… well, it changed me in some ways.  Most of all it renewed my faith in God, that His timing is perfect though we often can’t see that.  That aspect has made me realize anew that everything that I’ve gone through, everything that has happened, has had some purpose.  It hasn’t been for naught.  What that ...

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I think… I think… that Chapter 23 is in a form which I can be content with.

I refuse to say “comfortable with”.  There is nothing comforting about this chapter.  This has been difficult to write because it is becoming very painful to write about some things.  Indeed, at the moment I’m trying to take steps to help more accurately convey what was happening at that point in my life.

Chapter 23 has been rough, to put it mildly.

The next few are going to be the harshest of the book by far.

The thought of revealing the original title has been floating around.  The more I think about it the more I find myself of the notion that it was a great title at the time.  That it may have been the best that I could have come up with, that it was the title that got ...

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