Mary Beth came to the pier last night with my camera, the same one I use to photograph every sunrise, and she told me where to stand.
I wore my mother’s pink vintage floral dress from decades ago. I wanted her with me. I wore a butterfly pendant that matched, given to me by someone who once cherished me. Summer Sarah was strapped across my shoulder, not because I planned to play my ukulele, but because she made me feel more like myself. A companion, a security blanket. Something to hold besides the book.
It was in the seventies. I climbed out onto the rocks barefoot and held the proof copy in my hands, and Mary Beth started shooting.
Her husband asked why I didn’t hire a professional. Well, I didn’t need a professional; I needed Mary Beth. She’s one of the few people who can make me smile for real, not just for a picture. I used to model — started at four, continued into my late twenties — but then I became the yearbook teacher and spent the next decade and a half behind the lens, capturing my students reaching milestones they didn’t yet understand the weight of.
Last night, Mary Beth captured me reaching mine. She made me feel beautiful in all my bipolarity. She made coming out in my book feel like something worth celebrating.
Fearfully, Wonderfully, and Bipolar-ly Made: From Shame to Sanctuary is available today on Amazon.
The title comes from Psalm 139: I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
For most of my life, my soul did not know it very well. I spent decades masking the symptoms of bipolar II disorder. I called the sleepless nights creative inspiration. I called the crashes failure. I attributed the highs to being filled with the Holy Spirit and the lows to spiritual warfare. I self-medicated when prayer wasn’t enough and blamed myself when neither worked.
This book was a nudging from God. When my former beau Joshua died, I knew I couldn’t stay quiet anymore. I needed to live for both of us. Living meant writing. I started again — blogging at first, posting a poem a day in April 2023, then writing inspiring stories for REV magazine — until I understood I was being called to write my story, not someone else’s.
After two years of writing, a year of editing, and two rounds of rejections, I self-published through Writer’s Growth Press, the imprint I named after this blog, the place where I write and I grow. I pray through my published words others will read and grow, maybe even unearth a calling to write and grow themselves.
Then she told me she was impressed with my theology. That both shocked and delighted me. My mother is the most theologically literate person I know — a woman whose singular passion is the study of God’s Word, who has read and either embraced or rejected every major theological text she could get her hands on, who would have been a pastor if the church had let her. Jesus is not a concept to Mama Joy. He is her best friend. So when she said she was impressed with my theology, I believed her.
Dr. Sam Storms believed it too. He was my professor at Wheaton, a theologian who influenced me in my formative years and whose devotionals still sneak into my Daily Joy podcast. He read my manuscript and wrote his name across the back cover. His endorsement is there because he saw what my mother saw. The theology holds.
The theology holds because it’s the gospel. The reality is that I didn’t find God and then get better. That’s not my story, my truth. What happened was everything I’d built my sanctuary on was stripped away — the marriage, the family, the stability, the name — until I was standing at the water’s edge with nothing left but a sunrise and a question: was God still there when everything else was gone?
I’ve been answering that question every morning since. I’ve been chasing the sunrise since November 2024, and nearly every morning since the January that followed. Before the light, I stand at this pier and let the answer show up with the sky. Some mornings the answer is gold and obvious. Some mornings it’s grey and I have to trust it’s behind the clouds.
The answer keeps showing up. “Yes.”
I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I also live with bipolar disorder. Both things are true, and my soul knows it very well now.
For those still hiding and those who love them.
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