Can you recreate yourself from nothing?

One of my favorite stories is "The Circular Ruins" by Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, a man on a quest seeks to dream another man, creating him during his dreams. He works day by day, creating a hand, a heart, a lung, until his creation is complete and alive.

Through my fiction, looking back over the past thirty years, I see that I too have been seeking to create a new man, myself. Much of my fiction is autobiographical, especially the novels. In 1995, I had a complete meltdown, having never considered that I was mentally ill, although I had been seriously challenged since I was a child. No one ever said, "I think you are depressed" or indicated that something was wrong. It was not a possibility. I was just different, suffering long bouts of depression and bursts of mania. My mother was seriously mentally ill, bipolar like me, but she would never consider mental illness and chalked up her pain to the work of the devil. 

It wasn't until I was thirty-two, fresh out of graduate school, high as a kite and depressed at the same time, that my brain went crazy, and I had to be hospitalized several times. In the process, my first wife and I divorced, and I moved in with my grandparents in a refurbished tool shed. I lost my job at an HMO, and all seemed lost. I was at ground zero and struggling to make sense of my life, and thus began the writing in earnest, so much so that I decided I wanted to be a writer and not a wealthy healthcare professional. I owed nearly $100K from graduate school, and once out of the fog of psychosis, I decided that money was no longer the goal. I just wanted to write, although I didn't quite know why.

Now, I know that, like the character in "The Circular Ruins," I wanted and needed to create a new me that was happy and fulfilled. In the ten years or so after my meltdown, when I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, I primarily wrote poetry, finding the outlet soothing and satisfying. I then realized that I wanted to really tell stories and began in earnest, writing flawed stories and beginning work on my first novel, Famine, which has now stretched into eight volumes of a series called The Vox Humana or The Human Voice in Latin.

After five years of living with my grandparents, whom I took care of while they took care of me, I progressed to working again, but wanted jobs that kept me close to writing. My first gig was producing a literary arts journal at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, which involved no pay but taught me how to lay out, design, and edit creative works. Around this time, I was deeply involved with poetry slams and decided to take a poetry workshop at UAB. Long story short, my teacher, Linda, and I began going out after the class was finished, and soon we were engaged. It became clear to me that I needed a real job, and I landed one as a reporter for a county newspaper that was just two blocks away from grandparents' house. I was thrilled to be writing and getting paid, although the pay was terrible, somewhere around $20K per year. Then I got a job at an outdoor publishing house in Birmingham and moved there to be with Linda, but still keeping close tabs on my grandparents who had been key in allowing me the time I needed to recover and move on.

It's important to note that I refused to take my antipsychotic meds, and took Prozac irregularly. I still didn't want to believe I was mentally ill. It wasn't until about fifteen years ago, after moving to Kentucky with my wife and two daughters, that I hooked up with a mental health professional and finally began my regimen of an antipsychotic with an antidepressant. That has lasted to this day, although with some periods of noncompliance.

Now I teach English at a local university in Chattanooga. I have written sixteen novels and hundreds of short stories. As in "The Circular Ruins," I created a new man who is happy and productive but with a terrible secret. Reduced to nothing, I wanted to be a writer and have done just that, but with the help of medications that truly work. These days I have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but with meds remain stable, although with a remnant of baseline depression, anxiety, and sometimes paranoia. I have created a new man, and that man is me.