What I'm up to.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here; I really would like to get back in the habit. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking, or that I haven’t been writing; in fact, I would say I’ve been doing more of both these last few months than ever before in my life (!). I’m on fire with ideas, and scribbling them pretty much everywhere, sporadically, at all times of the day and night.
I just haven’t been sharing because it’s all very, very messy, and I’m not (yet) entirely comfortable with the idea of sharing the mess. However many times I’ve told myself over the last year and a half, “I’ll just share whatever’s on my mind, whatever’s most salient, don’t worry about making it perfect…”
Well. On average, my posts here probably take a good 4-6 hours more than I think they will. I just haven’t been able to coax, coerce, or cajole myself into pulling the trigger without a bunch of compulsive polishing. I aim to start changing that pattern now, because I’d love to be sharing what I’m working on but haven’t the time or wherewithal to do a lot of polishing.
This is great advice, whoever was the first to share it:
Make it exist first, you can make it good later.
The thing that I am making exist now is my first book. By degrees I’m becoming more and more comfortable saying out loud that I am a writer, that I am writing a book, and that the first won’t be the last. And I want to share it with you, not just the finished product- which I can picture only dimly and which will take who knows how long to actually finish- but the process, too. The mess.
I usually get one of two questions, or both, when I tell people I’m writing a book:
What’s the title? and/or what’s it about?
Excellent questions, both. I’ll sneak out ahead of the first one now by saying, I don’t know the title yet. I have some ideas, but it’s too early to commit to them. See, a title is super important; it does a lot of heavy lifting. It draws a rough circle around what’s going to be in the book and how it’s going to fit together, and I still need a lot of flexibility around that. It’s too early to draw that circle.
What it will be about, that’s beginning to be clearer- it will be about mental health, first and foremost. It will be focused at the point where several different threads converge: my lived experience of being in and out of treatment and on and off of meds for anxiety and depression my whole life; being kind of weird, and internalizing society’s message that being weird is in fact disordered, dysfunctional, and diagnosable as illness; my time spent actually conducting psychiatric research, what I learned there and how being the researcher compares to being the patient; and last but not least a deep dive into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the ultimate source of all those three- and four-letter acronyms that define the boundaries of all the little boxes that our ‘disordered’ experiences get apportioned into. The so-called bible of psychiatry whose greasy fingermarks are all over the place. I’ve come to realize that there is a sizeable gulf between what mental health experts know and think about the DSM compared to the rest of us.
Stay tuned, I’ll be sharing little bits and pieces of what I’m thinking about and working on, with as much consistency and as little polish as I can manage.
The messy middle! You’re well on the way and I can’t wait to read your book. It so needed!