Going to the doctor, going to get evaluated.

I have a doctor’s appointment coming up in about an hour. It is with my psychiatrist, kind of a followup. I have some things I need to tell her today. Some people might be ashamed or afraid to admit that they are seeing a psychiatrist. I made my first appointment 20+ years ago when a person I admired, a counselor, told me she thought I had some form of bipolar disorder.

My first doctor was George Dowell. I have no idea where Dr. Dowell is right now, but I can say with some degree of certainty that if not for him, I don’t think I would be alive today. It’s not that I would have killed myself because I had a friend who killed himself, and I saw the devastation it left behind. I did not want to do that. I also had many positive things going for me at that time. The biggest of which was my little girl, a toddler, whom I adored.

No, I would not have killed myself though there were times I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off dead. What would have killed me was my lifestyle. Not that I was a druggie or an alcoholic or anything like that because I had settled into a happily married, dedicated father role. Our daughter’s birth was a miracle that we never thought possible. My wife and I had been married for 9 and a half years, and we had given up all hope of ever having a child. Then boom; Jean was pregnant.

What threatened my life was that I did stupid stuff, like driving too fast, like not paying attention to what I was doing, like just being careless when I was hypomanic. During those stages which were far less common than my depressive stages, I moved too fast to pay attention to anything. I had also bounced around from job to job because to a bipolar person, the grass always looks greener somewhere else. To my credit though, I always had full-time work. It’s full-time work just to hold down a job when you suffer from bipolar disorder, but I did manage to do that.

Sigh. I have completely forgotten where I was going with this blog. Another side effect of bipolar — sometimes it is hard to focus.

I think maybe I was going to say something about getting help if you suffer from some form of mental illness. It will likely save your life.

Yes, I’m going to see my psychiatrist in about an hour. Yes, she might make adjustments to my medication or advise me to see a counselor. Yes, she might say, we’ll stay the course, but I would like for you to come back next month. I can tell you one thing though. No matter what she says I will pay attention. When you suffer from any kind of mental illness, it’s essential to find some help. In fact, I would say it’s life-saving.

Coming to Terms with self

As an introvert, I am always thinking about my life. I spend a lot of time lost in my own world. I obsess over everything and turn things over and over in my mind.

Lately, I have lost my sense of identity. In some ways, I am like the snake who is shedding his old skin and trying something new. My hope is that my new skin suits me.

I've struggled with a lot of different things lately including my faith and my dreams. Over the years, I have lost my way. I won't go into all of the things that have happened to knock me off my path. I do think I'm working my way back to what I was meant to be before all of my delusions of grandeur steered me down the wrong path.

I wasted a lot of time trying to write in order to make money. This never worked as I chased one trend after another. I was hoping to ride the crest of something that was popular so that I could cash in. My goal was to get rich enough that I could retire from teaching -- unless of course, I became a full-time professor at a prestigious university. That would have been suitable for me. I longed for the acknowledgments that such successes would bring to me.

I have come to understand that I have spent most of my life trying to prove myself to people which made it impossible for me to prove myself to myself. I won't go into all of the reasons for this, but you can probably guess what those are.

My drive to become famous, rich writer who also held down a position at a university actually began when I was about 22. As you might guess, 38 years later, I can honestly say that I have not succeeded in this drive. As a result, for the last five years or so, I have thought of myself as a failure.

You have to understand that low self-esteem and unreasonable expectations are common for someone who suffers from bipolar, especially bipolar two which manifests itself primarily in depression.

When I first began writing, I loved poetry, and I wrote a lot of it, most of it not that great, but all of it was honest. Then, I spent several years not being honest with myself. I began to lose myself, to travel down a path that was not mean for me to travel, when one day, I read something about royalties. I figured that 10% was about standard for royalties on a hardback book, and if one sold for $10 and if it sold 10,000 copies, I could make $1,000 dollars. And if I sold ... well, you get the drift. It was only later that I read that the average successful writer sells about 400 books a year.

From then on, I tried my hand at novels. At another time, I read that over 50% of books sold in our country were romance novels. I decided that I would become a romance novelist -- with a pen name, of course. I went so far as to take an online romance-writing course and buying a copy of Writing Romance for Dummies. Then I read somewhere about what the average pay was for optioning a script, about $30,000. Then I decided I'd become a screenwriter. You can guess how far I've gone there.

The biggest issue with me was that I got tantalizingly close to realizing my dreams, but that was not enough for me. I published plays, short fiction, won some minor contests, and even placed high in some screenwriting contests including one of the top ten in the country, but I never broke through the way I wanted to. As far as my college professorship goes, I never got a Ph.D. so I never taught at a university, but I came very close to getting a full-time job at a community college. That would have been enough for me. I didn't get the job, but I did become an adjunct and have been for 25 years or so. To me, that was a failure. To me publishing the things I published was a failure.  To me, I had failed in nearly everything I did.

It's a vicious cycle. Thinking you can achieve great things to prove to other people that you are special, and then, when you don't achieve those things, thinking that everyone was actually right about you being a loser. I have basically lived with thinking of myself as a failure until just recently.

I discovered Back Deck Devotionals time. At our new house, we have a back deck. I started going out on the back deck to drink my coffee in the morning. It gave me time to meditate and pray. Then I started reading more seriously about my personality type and about bipolar disorder, and I began to understand myself more than I ever had.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I have begun to see what I really am and to understand that I have accomplished a lot, more than a lot of people have. I have also begun to understand that my expectations were unrealistic to the point of being delusional. My continuing goal is to completely understand who and what I am and to fully accept it before I die.  I think I get closer most of the time, but often, it's one step forward and two steps back.

I have given up my delusions and believe it or not, it has given me peace. I don't intend to kill myself with the idea that I'm going to be great. I no longer believe I have to be great, that I am good enough as I am. My writing goals have been the biggest demon to me throughout my life, but I have readjusted them and decided how I will proceed. I'm working on a script, and I'm going to finish it, and I have a couple who have been sent to some places. If these don't work out, then I'm not going to do anymore screenwriting. It is unreasonable for me to believe that I can have a screenwriting career while I'm living in Missouri, and I don't intend to move to California. I am fine now about not making it as a screenwriter. I'm no longer interested in writing a best-selling novel. I've decided that what I like to write is middle-grade and young-adult fantasy that has a touch of humor in it. I used to enjoy writing plays, but I haven't had one published in a long time, but I did look at my publisher's site and discovered that a school in Texas is going to perform one of my plays in November.

I've also decided that I am going to write some poetry again. My goal is to put several poems into a book and maybe self-publish it to leave to my granddaughter.

Here's where my writing stands at this particular moment. I've submitted a couple of plays to different places. As I've mentioned, I have also submitted screenplays to a couple of places. Two of my YA fantasy novels are with editors who are deciding if they will choosed them for publication. I am attending a writer's conference in October where I have entered 16 contests, all with cash prizes.

The results of all of these submissions will guide me in my future writing. If none of my screenplays go anywhere, I just won't waste time writing anymore of them. The same for all of the other stuff. So I have asked myself, "What if none of these get anywhere? What if every single one of them is rejected?"  I have decided that if this happens, I will have received the answer to my quest. I'll write my poetry and content myself with that.  I do have to admit that I especially rooting for one novel. The way it is set up, I could spend the rest of my life exploring and expanding upon it's world. I would like to make it a series of books where I would write at least one every year until I die.

As far as my goal of being a professor goes, I'm officially retired from teaching, but I still teach five classes a year for Three Rivers Community College. I'm content with that.

I know this is a long blog, and I thank you if you have stuck with it this long, but it is long because I felt the need to write it and I wanted to make a comment, to pass on a lesson I've learned for my 60 years of life. If there's one thing I learned, it's this:

You can waste all of your life losing yourself in a search for what you think you should be when what you are is right where it has always been ... inside you.

I am going to set up a link to my Amazon author page, just in case, you decide you might like to purchase my books. If you don't, that's okay too.

My Amazon Page where you can order my books if you'd like.

Mixed episode

One of the worst things that a bipolar can suffer is what is called a mixed episode. It is very difficult to explain because we all have situations where we have mixed feelings about something. For instance, you get a new job. On the one hand, you are incredibly excited about it, but on the other hand, you might be sad that you are leaving good friends behind, and there's always that fear that you are making a terrible mistake.

Now imagine not only having mixed emotions but having extreme mixed emotions at the exact same time. Imagine being totally stressed out and anxious. Unless you have a full-blown mixed episode, you have probably understood nothing of what I just said. I have been lucky in that I have had only one time period where I experienced a mixed episode. It lasted for close to a month, but I survived it.

This is kind of a long prelude to something you might consider a little superfluous. Every year, I have extremely mixed emotions about fall. I love the cooler weather, the cool days and the clear nights, the color changes in the trees, and I even love consumer-driven Halloween. I always have candy left over. I used to love Thanksgiving too, and I still like it, but with Thanksgiving, there is also sadness because my mother died the weekend before Thanksgiving.

While I love the fall, I always feel restless. It's not just a passing phase; it settles in for months. There's a difference between restlessness and depression, so it's not a SAD type of malady. I think I know where it might have originated from. Fall means that summer is over for one thing, but I also always went back to school in the fall. Many times in my years of teaching I wondered if I was "being all that I could be."  I was for the most part, but I couldn't see that. No matter what I accomplished in my life, I wasn't satisfied, and these feelings seemed to intensify beginning near the end of September and basically lasting for weeks. It isn't that the feelings are with me 24 hours a day because they aren't, but they are always lurking.

I experienced them most intensely when I was lost in my own thoughts, frequently when I was journaling. This is tough because my personality is an INFP. An INFP is an introverted thinker, so I am frequently in my own world, lost in my thoughts. In fact, I am mostly aloof. It's tough to get to know me, and I won't say much about myself until I know you well.

Well, the restlessness is back again this year. I think it's here for two reasons. One, I'm getting on in years. I am metaphorically speaking in the fall of my life. I think the next thing is that I don't feel as if I am as successful as I always wanted to be. This is because I have not been as successful with my writing as I had hoped. This is the worst thing I should desire to be successful in. Face it, you're only as good as your last book or play or screenplay. A writer is always proving himself or not proving himself (or herself). Furthermore, even if you do succeed in something, you've likely had several failures.  It's a tough business.

Well, that's really all I wanted to say in here today. I am going to give you a link to my Amazon author page just in case you might be inclined to buy one of my books.  Sales for September have been slow.

My Amazon author page: biography, blog, and books for sale

A thank you, and a plea.

Several people viewed my last post. I did make one mistake. Your views pushed me past 35,000 views, not 40,000. That's still a lot of views. I wonder though if some of those were some kind of bots or spam. I had not been averaging many views, and then suddenly I hit over 60 in one day. That's a little suspicious.

Oh, well, never mind. I'm participating in something I've never done before. It's called a pitch party, and it happens on Twitter. You put in a pitch about a book you are trying to sell, and if a publisher or agent likes your pitch, he or she or it will like your tweet and then you query.  It's actually kind of cool because it's a challenge to sum up an entire book in about 200 characters. Actually, I've heard and believe that if you can't encapsulate your book in one or two sentences, then it needs work.

However, since this is my first attempt, I have already made a costly mistake. You can tweet three times during the course of the day. I didn't think I was doing it right so I used two of my pitches within a few minutes of each other. Oh, well, I'll know better the next time this happens.

I have had one publisher request my material which is one more than I have lately. I filled out my query and I hope I made it interesting enough that they will want to see the entire book. The whole process is actually quite fun, a good experience, I think.

Now comes the plea part. I'd like to ask you to at least check out my books on my Amazon author page. I have several, some are young adult and some are middle-grade books. One is even a verse novel for young adult audiences. A few of them have been published before, but rights reverted back to me for various reasons, one of which was that the publisher who published one -- and had lined up another one of my books to publish -- went out of the business. This is fairly typical of my writing luck.

One other time, I had a producer who wanted to film one of my screenplays. We had gotten to the point we were talking about money, but at the last minute, he changed his mind.  AARRGH!

Anyway, I'm still at it, so take a peek at my page. I think there are some where you can even read a few pages. I would appreciate it.

Amazon Author's Page

Only five views away from 40,000. Updates on me if you are interested.

This photo is from about six years ago. I have, in some ways, come a long way since then. In other ways, I have stalled out, and I wonder if I will ever get going again.

Let me give you the good news first. I seem to have found the most effective medication to control my bipolar disorder. I take Lamictal which is actually an anti-convulsant medication. In some way not quite understood, bipolar is active in the same part of the brain as epilepsy, and the drugs help it. The only thing that worries me sometimes is that I occasionally have an anxiety attack. I never had those before, and they're a little scary.

I haven't done as well in my writing as I like. I've done several free giveaways of ebook versions of my work, and they are widely downloaded. But it seems like people don't really want to pay for what I write. I can understand it up to a point, but the reviews I get on my work are usually fives out of fives, so I'm inclined to believe that what I write is effective. I have six books listed on my Amazon author page. I'll give you the link a little later in case you want to check them out.

While I'm glad that people are reading my work, I would be much gladder if they all would review it and support me by buying some of the ones that are not free. While I have a good pension from my years of teaching, I am still making far less than I was when I was working. The added income from the writing sales would be helpful.

The one thing that bothers me about me more than anything else is that this world has made me cynical. I used to have a wonderful sense of humor but it seems like every year, that humor shrinks a little and the cynicism grows. I am going to attempt to regain some of my humor in my writing. I write a lot of dark, contemporary young adult fiction, and I think I might try to lighten it up a bit.

I have used my Wordpress blog a lot, but I think that perhaps I enjoy using this one better, so from now on, most of my posts will come from it. I would appreciate the support.

My Amazon author page. Order any of my books from here. Check the page out.