To Live For

Achieving the dream of selling my first book triggered a psychotic episode. Convinced I was about to die, I realized that at last, I no longer wanted to.

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On Sunday, September 19, 2023, I got the news that Madville Publishing, a small press, wanted to publish my short-story collection, Hurricane Baby: Stories, in August 2024. I was going to be a debut author at 53. After years of professional and personal struggle, my lifelong goal was within reach, and I was elated—a state that can be dangerous for me, a person with bipolar disorder.

I didn’t let that interfere with my excitement, but I had a looming sense that something was about to go wrong. I didn’t have any concrete evidence, but I was certain. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that it might just be the subtle ways my own mind had historically worked to steal my joy in accomplishments—my habit of I minimizing myself and my achievements, to keep me from getting “too big for my britches.”   

Then, on Monday, October 2, I woke up with a feeling of impending doom. As a veteran of mental health crises, I knew what to do: I left work and made an appointment with my psychiatrist for that afternoon.

When I got to my psychiatrist’s office, I told him I had been on top of the world for the past two weeks—but had also been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was certain the universe simply wasn’t going to let me have this victory without exacting some kind of terrible price. My husband was going to die, or one of my three daughters, or my parents, or my grandson, or…. I was engaged in magical thinking, believing the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and that after my good news, I now had to do my time in the “taketh away” column.

I was going to be a debut author at 53. After years of professional and personal struggle, my lifelong goal was within reach, and I was elated—a state that can be dangerous for me, a person with bipolar disorder.

He suggested I talk this out with my therapist at my next appointment. After lunch on Thursday, October 4, I started vomiting. Discounting it as anxiety, I upped my anti-anxiety medication and drank clear liquids. Still vomiting the next Sunday after an emergency room visit on Friday night, I went to a different hospital, and had a scan that showed a small-bowel obstruction. They inserted a tube down my nose to pump my stomach. If I didn’t respond to the treatment, surgery to remove the blockage was my next option.

I saw the surgeon very early Monday morning—as in just-after-midnight early. He said it’s possible I had adhesions, scar tissue from on of my many gynecological surgeries—or cancer. After having thrown up my psychiatric medications for four days, I wasn’t even in shouting distance of my right mind. I was left with one thought that ran on a continuous loop in my mind—I’m not going to survive to see my book published.

***

I first began writing Hurricane Baby in the days following Hurricane Katrina. I was covering the storm’s aftermath as a freelance reporter, and doing human-interest stories from my home in central Mississippi while juggling a lot; my two older daughters had been forced out of school by wind damage throughout the school district, and I was also taking care of my six-month-old daughter.

At that time, the manuscript was just one short story called “Still Waters,” in which characters Wendy and Judd, thrown together by the evacuations, have an intimate encounter that results in Wendy getting pregnant. Over the next nine months, I wrote 350 pages of what happened next. The story style was Southern Gothic, dark and full of sin and destruction—a novel that I could not, hard as I tried, find a happy ending for.

When I finished, I landed an agent who loved the book and spent six months trying to sell it. My hopes were high. Then nineteen of the finest publishers in New York City rejected it. So I shelved it.

Order the book…

Five years later, I turned chapters one, three, and five into a play. I changed the name to Hurricane Baby, and sent it to a theatre contest, where it was not only well-received, but also won a staged reading. From there I sent it to larger competitions—and garnered more rejections.

In 2015, I began an MFA program. I had largely put Hurricane Baby out of my mind. But one day I had a fiction deadline I hadn’t prepared for, and I submitted the original first story for workshop. Everyone who read it absolutely loved it. It was very encouraging.

I had a looming sense that something was about to go wrong. I didn’t have any concrete evidence, but I was certain. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that it might just be the subtle ways my own mind had historically worked to steal my joy in accomplishments—my habit of I minimizing myself and my achievements, to keep me from getting “too big for my britches.”   

So after I finished my MFA, in January, 2022 I picked Hurricane Baby back up, determined to make one final attempt to publish it. After another nine months of work, I sent the revised book to 71 independent and university publishers and received 49 rejections. But then I got the email that had the potential to change my life.

A few weeks later I was in a hospital bed, wondering why no one was telling me the “truth” about how I was surely about to die. I was not so far gone that I didn’t recognize an irony in my situation: Over many years with bipolar disorder, I’d made several serious attempts to take my own life, but now I had a book coming out. And I wanted desperately to be alive for that.

***

As I lay in there, IV in one arm, blood pressure cuff on the other, and the tube down my nose still sucking out bodily fluids, my mind spun, and I grew completely paranoid. Did the medical staff think I couldn’t handle the truth—that I was most certainly about to die—because I was bipolar? Was my husband actually at work, or was he making burial arrangements and breaking the news to my kids so they could come? Was he waiting to tell me during visiting hours, when they were all there? What would my death do to them? Would I ever see my two-year-old grandson again? Would I see my engaged middle daughter get married? Would I live to see my youngest daughter graduate college?

By mid-morning I’d really worked myself up, to the point that I was near tears. So I called the nurses’ station and asked could they send a chaplain to my room. The chaplain, who was paraplegic, came in, sitting in a motorized wheelchair. His physical disability put me at ease. It made me think he’d be more sensitive to my plight, and my mental illness.

 I began talking haltingly about how my doctors said they wanted me sitting up and moving my body in order to try to get the blockage loose—despite the nurses ignoring my questions about what the point was. How they came in like clockwork to give me a syringe full of morphine every few hours directly into my IV. I was suspicious of their motives.

A few weeks later I was in a hospital bed, wondering why no one was telling me the “truth” about how I was surely about to die. I was not so far gone that I didn’t recognize an irony in my situation: Over many years with bipolar disorder, I’d made several serious attempts to take my own life, but now I had a book coming out. And I wanted desperately to be alive for that.

I then began rationalizing aloud about how postpartum women, patients recovering from joint replacements, and cardiac patients were all encouraged to get up on their feet as soon as possible after their surgeries and procedures—even if the patient was unwilling, in pain, or otherwise might not feel like becoming active again so soon.

He nodded. “You’re right.”

“The only times I’ve ever seen medical professionals more concerned with keeping a patient comfortable than in them moving around to get better—is when they know the patient is dying,” I said.

He asked, “Has anyone told you you’re dying?”

I said, “I’m not sure if they would tell me because I’m bipolar, and they may think I can’t handle the truth. Does that make sense?”

“It makes sense that you might think that,” he said diplomatically.

So we talked about that feeling. I said I wasn’t ready to die. I told him about the book and the sudden feeling of doom, as if somebody—the devil, the universe, some other malevolent force—was out to get me since I had finally reached this achievement of selling a book.

He had no answers for this. I felt better just confessing these thoughts to him, and it helped that he didn’t condemn my feelings as crazy talk.

Even after he left, though, I remained settled in my thinking that my life was about to end. In my overactive mind, I started to make plans: I could ask my publisher to go ahead and shepherd my book to publication and ask an author friend to supervise that project. I could give my money and jewelry away to my kids once they got here, making some special belongings were distributed properly. I could tell my husband goodbye, knowing that he would stick by me as closely as he could for the end.

The author’s first meal out of the hostpital.

But suddenly I started getting better. By Tuesday night, I could consume clear liquids, and my medications. Nothing ever tasted as good as that first sip of water, the first orange-flavored Jell-o, the first red Popsicle. The next day I was advanced to soft foods, and an x-ray revealed I had neither a blockage nor cancer.

I’ve never felt more grateful. After eighteen years of having desperately wanted to die on various occasions, with eight admissions to the psychiatric ward for protection from myself, I finally found the will to live the rest of my life—for my kids, my husband, and yes, for me, the author, who had book publication to look forward to.

I’ve never felt more grateful. After eighteen years of having desperately wanted to die on various occasions, with eight admissions to the psychiatric ward for protection from myself, I finally found the will to live the rest of my life—for my kids, my husband, and yes, for me, the author, who had book publication to look forward to.

I was released from the hospital that Wednesday afternoon. When I got home, I ate a meal I will remember for a long time: turnip greens with cornbread and baked chicken. I looked like hell. My hair hadn’t been washed for several days, I was unshowered, with no makeup, and very weak.

But I felt like Lazarus, fresh from the grave. And I was ready to enter the next phase of my life, as a published author.