I just checked out of my hotel in Orlando. A recap of the last few days:

Thursday

I'm in my hotel room reviewing my talk I will be giving tomorrow at the DBSA conference. The phone rings. It's my good friend, Angela, who leads a parallel life to mine - same cause, same dedication, same intensity, different issues, different time zone. She's just rolling into town.

We spend the day cruising the Disney empire in buses, boats, monorail, and on foot, constantly ducking into air-conditioned lobbies and shops. We don't stop talking the whole time. We parallel life people are like that.

At the end of the day I'm back where I started, in my hotel room reviewing my talk.

Friday

The conference kicks off at noon. I'm floating around the registration area with my "pocket didge," my four-and-a-half foot didgeridoo. "Big boy" is back in California.

For a guy with a didge, I'm keeping a fairly low profile. I run into some old friends and meet new ones. The opening session starts. I'm up in my room, focusing on my talk.

Two-thirty. Showtime. I'm breaking in an entirely new talk. Not a good idea for a national conference. There's something of a disconnect between what's on the printed program and what I'm going to be speaking about. Too late to worry about that. Elizabeth, one of the DBSA staff introduces me. That's my cue. I'm in front of a hundred people with no notes or lectern.

"How many of you think that ‘knowing thyself' is important in dealing with our illness?" I ask. Every hand in the room is up. We have lift-off.

Next thing I know, Elizabeth is giving me the five-minute signal. Wow, forty minutes have gone by, already. I'm having way too much fun. I wrap it up and take questions. I sense that some of the brain science in my talk has confused people. There were some other rough spots. It will take me several more talks - molding and remolding as I go - before it begins to feel just right. But I can chalk this one up as a success.

Time to wind down. While the conference continues below, I'm in my room chilling out. That evening, I'm at a DBSA fund-raising function, where I'm signing books. There's a lot of "high-rollers" in the room, but I wind up spending the bulk of the evening talking to two women in succession who spontaneously burst into tears when they came over to my table.

Pull up a chair, I say. The day I stop talking to real people in order to spend time with the high-rollers is the day I get out of mental health.

Saturday

I sleep through the opening morning session. I'll be doing my "safe" talk today, one I've given about 15 times. But there is 20 minutes of new content. I give the old part of my talk a quick run-through, and thoroughly rehearse the new stuff. It's as good as it will ever be. Time for breakfast, which is really lunch.