It’s like this every year. Winter gives way to spring, everything else comes alive, and so do I. Spring cleaning, organizing, sorting physical life. The yard. The closets. The garage. The edges of the driveway that crept in while we were hibernating. Writing is where I clean, organize, and sort the insides.

I took a year off to write a book. Not this blog. No, this blog practically writes itself on Tuesdays the way it has on and off for over a decade, muscle memory and whatever is growing in front of me. The book was different. The book was the story underneath the stories, the one I couldn’t tell here because I was still living it. I wrote it in the quiet while others were at school, at work.

Then, I went back to teaching. Two part-time jobs I manage now alongside a classroom full of sixth graders to teach, a house to maintain, a body to rehabilitate, and a faith to test every morning at Yorktown Pier.

Last week, my mother was there to take the one photograph I can’t get at dawn: me snapping the sunrise. Mama Marci’s painting it in watercolor for the cover of my book when she comes to visit this weekend.

Until then, finding myself in an empty house when spring is bringing everything to life? Muscle memory. I know what to do. Write. Practically nonstop.

For most of my life, I didn’t know I was living with bipolar disorder type II. I explained the highs as passion and the lows as failure, a tempestuous Italian gene that demanded excellence. It took decades, a misdiagnosis, and a silence I couldn’t explain before I had a name for what my brain had been doing all along. I wrote a book about it because I needed to tell the truth I’d been writing around for years… here and everywhere else.

My faith journey largely compelled this manuscript; it was obedience to write the truth with the unique voice the Lord gifted to me. It would be predictable to say I found God and everything got better, but that’s not what happened. For me, it was a long, slow stripping away. The marriages I thought would give me a family, the stability I thought I’d earned, and the version of myself I thought I knew. One by one, the things I had built my sanctuary on were removed, and I was left standing at the water’s edge with nothing but a sunrise and a God I was still certain I could trust.

That’s why I keep showing up. Every morning before the light. And somewhere in that faithfulness, not mine but His, the sanctuary I had been looking for in a husband, in a family, in a name, in a plan, was quietly being built in the only place it could survive. Not in the security of the life I’d longed for, but in the daily, stubborn act of meeting my Creator at the water. What started out as a technique to give me a regular sleep-wake cycle became the very routine that would remain when everything else was stripped away.

It’s the first right choice of every day.

That’s what my first book is about. Not the diagnosis, though the diagnosis is in it. Not the shame, though I lived in it for years. The book is about finding sanctuary in the one relationship that doesn’t depend on me getting it right.

Fearfully, Wonderfully, and Bipolar-ly Made: From Shame to Sanctuary releases two weeks from today on April 14. On Thursday, I will hold a proof copy in my hands. The product of years searching. I can finally see my vulnerability on the printed page.

Yesterday was World Bipolar Day. I posted a photo and told the world what I’d been carrying quietly. The responses moved me. Former students. Old friends. People I haven’t heard from in years stepping forward to say “me too.” One shared his own diagnosis publicly for the first time. That’s why I wrote the book. Right there, in the comments, before a single copy has shipped.

And I’m not done. This spring, I’m also publishing Two-Hour Tuesdays, my blog-turned-memoir that traces the four years of Tuesday night writing that led me here — the garden, the porch, the fairy tale, and the silence that followed. It releases in May. The story before the story.

God is waking everything up, including me. I disappeared this weekend into a much younger version of me, undiagnosed and searching for meaning the only way I knew how… by writing through it. What began as a desperation to connect in March 2015 became a thread of faith in the aftermath of divorce, starting over, finding God had never left, all filtered through garden analogies and grace.

The page is where I do the work of understanding God’s design. My prayers for forty-three were a book and a baby. Spring will give birth to one of those dreams. And then, to a second book.