In the summer of 2006, after living with monopolar depression for much of my adult life, I exploded in a vast manic episode. Before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder it seemed that, all of a sudden, nothing held me back. At various times during that summer I thought I was going to be a spiritual guru, an epochal intellectual, or a gay Hollywood celebrity. Instead, during one long night of the soul, I crashed, ending up in jail and then three days in a psychiatric facility. Since then, I've been trying to answer for myself the question of "to be" or "to do"

Going through something like that has been a mixed blessing. For some reason it burned out of my core a lot of longstanding issues (such as jealousy) that had always fueled my depression, and it also gave me access to the knowledge that I was capable of so much more than I ever knew. But it was at great cost to both myself (I'm $60,000 in debt) and my boyfriend (who somehow managed to stay with me throughout the months of hell.)

I wrote a book about it called "Broken Whole," which was published by Chipmunka Publishing in 2010. I have a day job as a writer, but writing software not bookware. There's an awful lot of things I'm interested in, but the issues I write most about on my blog are literature, cosmology, inner development, mental health and spirituality.