What inspires you to write? For most of us, creative writing is a side hustle. And for some of us, driving Uber would be a more lucrative side hustle.
Creative writing, including narrative non-fiction provides an outlet for releasing the thoughts that blaze through my mind. It also provides an opportunity to connect with readers and offer insight into significant challenges, such as coming to terms with depression, addiction, and trauma.
Journalism offers similar payoffs but doesn’t tap into creativity in the traditional sense. One of my other side hustles, mental health journalism, taught me that the last three decades have yielded more effective therapies and that much more is now known regarding brain health, the role of trauma, and the nuances of bipolar depression and other brain disorders.
Why then are drug addiction and suicide rates increasing, particularly among young adults? The contradiction between tremendous strides in research and worsening outcomes motivated me to write Intact: Untangle the Web of Bipolar Depression, Addiction, and Trauma. Some other factors motivated me tool.
There are so many memoirs out there. In addition to the memoir chapters, I wanted to offer some insight into how addiction, trauma, and mental health can influence each other, how lifestyle can impact mental health, everyday tools, and some poetry.
On December 6, 2020, I handed in my final draft for editorial approval and am reflecting on the journey it has taken since I began writing Intact in August 2018.
Inspired by What We Lose
Zinzi Clemons’ 2017 loosely autobiographical novel What We Lose portrays the stealthy nature of the never-ending grief experienced by a daughter who lost her mother. Intact tackles that same theme as well as other themes.
What We Lose’s 150 pages captivated me. Some of the chapters were a paragraph, an email, a photograph, or a couple of pages long. These non-traditional techniques intensified the storytelling and inspired me to go ahead with including brief chapters, photos, poems, tip sheets, and three Q&A interviews with experts.
The quote pulled from Vogue magazine’s Megan O’Grady’s Amazon review describes the formatting in What We Lose as collage-like:
“…Boldly innovative and frankly sexual, the collage-like novel mixes hand-drawn charts, archival photographs, rap lyrics, sharp disquisitions on the Mandelas and Oscar Pistorius, and singular meditations on racism’s brutal intimacies. . . “
O’Grady also interviewed Clemons for a June 20, 2017 article in Vogue, “Zinzi Clemons Has Written the Debut Novel of the Year.”
Mental health and addiction
I wanted to address the relationship between mental health and addiction, which is somewhat overlooked. Benzos, benzodiazepines (Xanax et al.) nearly killed me, because they were so effective at ridding me of anxiety that they screamed, “More, more, more.” More, More, More led to a maze of hazards and near-death experiences. I can’t imagine having opioids as an adversary.
Anxiety and ever-so-mild-depression that is far from clinical depression, but feels so, so awful, can trigger a relapse into substance abuse. I had to accept that my daily habits could contribute to that awful feeling and learn how to adjust them in order to make relapse unlikely.
Stigma
Two best-selling memoirs regarding bipolar depression, although exquisitely written, contribute to the stigma attached to bipolar depression. Neither acknowledges the role addiction played in relationship to their illness. Both memoirs made it seem as if bipolar depression meant that they were forever doomed to abuse substances. Self-medicating is common, but substance abuse is a condition unto its own and can be treated.
The television characters with bipolar depression I have witnessed constantly battle extreme manic episodes. I never see characters managing their symptoms and leading healthy, productive lives. Although bipolar depression is a chronic condition with a lot of nuances, there are effective treatments that help people like me learn healthy habits and lifestyle accommodations and achieve stability. A lot of that has to do with understanding circadian rhythms and being able to recognize baby symptoms and address them before they escalate.
Crafting an introduction
Do you read Introductions to non-fiction books? I read the back-cover copy, but, generally, I only read the first one or two paragraphs of the introduction and then randomly turn to two or three pages within the book and read a few sentences on each page.
Memoirs generally don’t have introductions, but Intact consists of narrative non-fiction memoir chapters and brief informative (non-fiction) chapters. I thought I had nailed my introduction and epilogue by the third draft. When I reread them after the seventh and final draft, I realized that something was missing.
It wasn’t the writing. It was that something seemed off compared to the introductions in the non-fiction books I had lying around. Luckily, I found Standout Book’s excellent blog post (“Your Non-Fiction Introduction: Everything You Need to Know”) that guided me through rewriting the introduction.
As Standout Book’s blog post points out, “The non-fiction introduction: the reader’s first real experience of the work and one which often dictates if they’ll go any further.”
Crafting an epilogue
One of my reviewers gave me excellent advice that helped me edit the epilogue, “What do you want to leave the reader with?” The following didn’t fit with that objective:
My childhood yielded some unusual benefits. Because my survival depended upon reading an explosive individual’s moods, I developed a keen ability to read people. The experience of childhood and adolescence is forever etched into my memory.
Epilogues are generally brief, so I dumped most of what I had including those three sentences, even though I was pretty attached to them.
Hopefully, by the beginning of March, Intact, my baby will be born! #MentalHealthAwareness #WritingCommunity #AddictionAwareness