When you are chronically alive, you spend each minute of your life living in the present and enjoying the moment to the best of your ability.  The past is gone, you can’t go back and edit it.  While the future is unknown, you also have to hold in the back of your head that you don’t have years and years to live a meaningful life.  Everyone in the world wants to feel l like they have accomplished something that changed the world in some way, big or small.  To do that you need to set goals.

You can pick a reasonable list of five to ten little goals that you can achieve one at a time, some people call this their bucket list. I didn’t do this.  I chose one major goal.  “To use my writing to validate, inspire, and instill hope in others suffering from chronic physical and/or mental health conditions. I want to remind the world that mental illness doesn’t magically innoculate you against physical illness. I need to change the way people with invisible but serious health issues get treated by the medical community and even the general public.  My writing can be the catalyst for ending the stigma around chronic physical and mental illness.

Maybe I am crazy for hoping my website can do so much, but maybe not. To quote Steve Jobs, “People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

In every day, there are 1,440 minutes. That means we have 1,440 daily opportunities to make a positive impact

Was I Ever Normal is my latest novel, which was just released at the end of August 2022. Although it is a completely fiction book, I too suffer from childhood-onset schizoaffective disorder and went through multiple psychiatric hospitalizations as a young child and teenager. The main character is based on all the different kids I met on the various psychiatric units, all rolled up into one character which is Cassie. She’s a young girl with schizoaffective disorder who is so determined to hide her psychosis from the world that she spins an intricate web of lies to protect her secrets. When she finally realizes that she needs more help than she can give herself, and tries to tell the truth, no one believes her. They accuse her of “manufacturing symptoms to avoid working on the real therapeutic issues”.