The book is finished! I already talked to one agent and she declined to work with me because she said mental health is too hard to sell. It is not so much of a mental health book as a self-help book. It is about finding your way back from the lost places and embracing who you really are inside your truest self and doing what is yours to do in the world. Those of us who have been to the places called mental illness often get stuck being broken and we lose sight of our own truth and purpose. We forget that we are healers and that people need us to be whole.  My book is about how we can find our path out of the places where we are lost and into the places where we are completely found. I don’t know exactly what my next steps are but a friend who is my writing angel emailed me a list of small publishing companies. So next weekend I will see what I need to do about that.

Yesterday I told my story with the CIT officers and some representatives from NAMI. It feels good to be so welcomed and held by all kinds of people when I tell my story. I am never sure how people will respond, because I talk about how my journey into what people call mental illness was and still is a very spiritual experience for me. One of the police officers asked if I felt like the spiritual stuff I was exploring fed into my delusions. I like to be able to answer those kinds of questions from my heart and not from how the world sees what I went through.  I told him that for a long time I blamed myself for my experiences because I felt like during that time in my life I was too open to everything and I lost my filter. I also said that now I see it differently because  a lot of what was happening back then does make sense now. When I was in the places that led me to going to the hospital I told everyone I was a healer and that everything I was going through was about healing and helping people. And now I really do help people heal because of my perspective and where I have been. And especially because I was able to come back from there. So, even when you go to the places where the world sees you as lost you can come back later and find a way that you are found. I am in a place in my life now where I know that everything that happens to me has a purpose and I trust that I will go where I need to go. It took a lot of work on myself to get here. But it is a beautiful place to be.