I finished something today that I began about four years ago.  A few months following my hospitalizations in 2019, I attempted to write down the story of my gradual awakening and illumination, warts and all.  It was a worthy exercise, although in retrospect it was clearly the product of a hypomanic episode.  Such products do not lack validity, however.

After I spewed out about 50,000 words over the course of a week, I dropped the project, as I often do with hypomanically induced bouts of creativity.  I revisited it about a year and a half later and was largely encouraged by what I read, although I hit a wall when I got to chapters detailing the more difficult events of my experience.  I dropped it again, and did not pick it up again until just recently.

It was something of an accident that led me to look at the project again.  Occasionally my computer will glitch on the modification date of a folder and show something as being recently modified when it hasn’t been.  I went to open my ‘writing projects’ folder to look at something else, and the folder containing the old project was at the top.  I just kind of stared at it for a few moments, thinking, “wow, I haven’t thought about that in a while.”  I was afraid to look at it, because the reason I had dropped it before was because I was judging the content as being too “crazy”.

I decided to take a chance, though, and opened up the file for the first chapter.  Since I’m so much better now at not judging myself, it didn’t leave me with the same “crazy” feeling that it did the last time I read it.  I was able to see past the crazy to the potential genius.  “That was just the first chapter, though,” I thought to myself.  “You’d better read the rest before making a final judgment call.”

So I did.  Slowly, because the material is sensitive and I didn’t want to overwhelm myself.  Over a few days, I read the whole book.  And when I was done, instead of feeling embarrassed and ashamed the way I had the last time I had looked at it, I felt proud, not only for having endured the experience in the first place, but for having written it down to begin with, and then for revisiting it all these years later.  I was able to, indeed, see the genius beneath the crazy, and internally apply my writing knowledge in such a way as to know how to present the crazy such that the genius is not obscured.

Mind you, I had written this four years ago.  So much more had happened in my life both internally and externally in that time that I knew I would have to fill in some gaps if I wanted to make a complete presentation of recovery and not just a traumatized person’s crises.  So I went through my blog posts written since that time and used them to fill in those gaps, creating a number of new chapters and adding over 25,000 words to the overall project.

I pasted the individual chapter documents into a book template so I could see what it all looked like as a cohesive whole, then skimmed it to get a sense of the flow.  The final result: a fully completed working first draft of a 288-page book of over 75,000 words.  I was shocked to find that I really had made a cogent narrative of my experience that included most of what I want to tell.  It needs a great deal of editing and distilling for brevity and clarity, but it has flesh and bones and stands up all by itself.

There’s an immense sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing this project, even though it may never see anyone else’s eyes.  It was important that I write it for myself before taking others into consideration, and so this first draft is a gift to me and no one else.  Of course, now that it’s finished and I can see its potential, I do want to clean it up and make it presentable to the public.  I feel strongly that having the neurodiverse tell their stories is critical to the mental health awareness movement, particularly people such as myself who are using the new trauma-based techniques to treat issues typically considered “untreatable” except by medication.

I have no delusions of grandiosity regarding my book, although I do have my daydreams and fantasies, like any author.  At the very least, I hope to join the ranks of others who have written down their mental health stories in an effort to raise awareness of our suffering and treatment.  I happen to think my story is unique and fascinating, and that I myself have a unique ability to articulate matters that are often difficult to understand, if for no other reason than a person lacks the ability to communicate what they’re thinking and feeling.  If I have that ability, I feel a duty to use it to raise awareness.  Easing the suffering of others is, after all, the goal of a bodhisattva.