Hello. Hello all my lovelies… all my lovely and fabulous blogging friends. I am sorry I have been away for so long. I have missed you all. I finally wrote a post this morning and I looked at the date of today’s post and the date of my last post and I couldn’t believe it. It had been over a week since the last time I wrote a post on my blog. That is a long time to go without posting for me.
First of all, I think I needed a little break after accomplishing my goals of writing a post a day for Mental Health Awareness Month and sharing other people’s story every day during the month of May in honor Mental Health Awareness month for my new campaign “Theres Glory in Sharing Your Story.” It was fun and I learned a lot from everyone’s stories and everything I shared. I hope you enjoyed it as well.
I want to thank everyone from the very bottom of my heart who helped me by helping me with my campaign and sharing their stories. I appreciate your participation, your hearts, your strength and courage, your wisdom, your talent, your insight, your lives, your stories, your inspiration, your resiliency and your beautiful souls.
I must say May was a long month and has more days than I realized… hahaha…
It has been a good, insightful, life changing and busy past week.
My youngest daughter Alexia graduated from High School two weeks ago Saturday. That was wonderful, but took some work to get over my PTSD triggers from my parent’s visit. I survived and actually learned a lot from it. It seems that my psychotropic medications helped me cope with my PTSD symptoms. I am remembering and feeling more without psychotropic medications. Usually that is a great thing but not when as it related to my PTSD. I still know the good outweigh the bad for me as my adverse affects from medications were too severe. I am just having to learn to cope with PTSD triggers more on my own. I think my bipolar symptoms are very manageable. I am still seeing a p-doc and paying close attention to my mood poles.
The brain is amazing. I am amazed how I can still be tortured subconsciously from painful childhood memories after they are triggered. The power and intricacies of the brain is amazing and difficult at the same time. I cannot believe I can regress and feel the pain I felt as a child when I am supposed to be a mature adult. Wow. That is another thought for another post for another day.
My Alexia had a small little graduation party last Saturday at my daughter Kylie and Dennis’ new house. They have a fire pit and Alexia wanted to have a fire and roast marshmallows and have S’mores. Yummy. The party went very well.
On Monday all my children except my son-in-love Dennis left me and went on vacations. I am very happy for all of them. They are having great times. They deserve it. I do hope I get a t-shirt. Kylie took Alexia to New York for her graduation present. My Keagan and his wife Brooke went to California for a week.
While they have been gone I have been doing home health care taking care of a 95-year-old gentleman who has Alzheimer’s. I have also been using every spare minute I have to proof read, edit and rewrite my memoir. This has been a time-consuming process as I wrote most of my first draft during the month of November during NanoWriMo. I wrote 66,000 words in November. Can you say “hypomania teetering on full-blown mania?”
Sometimes it is essential and productive to make good use of your mania. It paid off as I finally finished writing my memoir. I had parts of my memoir started before November but could never stay focused enough to finish it. I set the goal in November with NanoWriMo and when I commit to something I commit.
Because I wrote it quickly while even working at a part-time job at Kohls it needed a lot of proofing, editing and rewriting. I started proofreading it and editing it little by little in March after I recovered enough from my suicide attempt and Klonopin withdrawal symptoms.
I can finally say I am done proofreading and editing my memoir. Now I am writing my final chapter which is what led me to my suicide attempt, the suicide attempt and recovery up to today. It might turn out to be more than one chapter but that is where I am with my memoir.
One more chapter to write and after I write the last of my memoir I will proofread and edit the entire thing again. If it seems good I will contact publishers. I am going to give it my best shot to see if any publishers would be interested in it. If they aren’t I will go the self-publish route. I feel like I have to at least try to go the normal publishing route first. I have to try. I know it is a long shot but I must try. I will give it my best educated try. Educate myself more on the process first of course…
I pray you will want to read my memoir. There is so much of my story I have never shared with you on my blog. I have lived with mental illness my entire life and struggled the most the last 25 years of my life. I have lived through and survived many unbelievable things. When I look back at the struggles, obstacles and trauma I survived I cannot believe it. I feel like someone could not even make-up some of the things I survived in my life or if they did they would not sound believable.
My story may sound unbelievable, but believe me it is real. It is my story and I survived and you can survive whatever you are going through too. I have been hospitalized more times than I can count. Lived in halfway houses three different times. Was one day away from having to stay at a State Mental Hospital (that isn’t even in my memoir), been homeless for four months, abused/raped by men (not in my memoir) overdosed, self-harmed and attempted suicide two times.
The difficult part for me was what to put in my memoir. Some people don’t have enough information but I have too much information. I didn’t write about all my bad experiences with men etc. because that is the hardest part for me to write about and most importantly I don’t want my children to read those parts. There are parts I couldn’t write. I included the parts of my life that best tell my story to help educate about mental illness, understand what it is like to live life with a mental illness and most importantly how to survive and thrive with mental illness. I want my story to give hope and inspire to know that you can survive too. You can learn from me what not to do and hopefully what to do.
The most important and best part of my journey and story is how I survived. I found God again, got baptized, began working again, found my purpose and started loving life again. I found the beauty in living. Hallelujah. The best part is that your journey and story can have a happy ending and beginning again too…
I will keep you posted on the progress of the completion and publishing of my memoir. I will accept prayers that my memoir will turn out well. I pray God will write and speak through me… I know there are tons of mental illness memoirs out there. I need to make mine stand out above the rest. Please pray that it can happen…
I hope you made it this far and read my long and rambling words. If you did you are simply amazing and fabulous. I love you. I am happy to be back from my hiatus. I need to read more of your blogs again too. I miss it. However, I still need to focus on finishing my memoir… very soon…
There just isn’t enough time in a day…
Much love and hugs, Sue
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