One morning last week, Santa Billy climbed off his tractor and handed me a $20 bill at sunrise. “For your book. I want an autographed copy.” Funny, I don’t worry how Billy will see me. I don’t think learning about all my biggest mistakes and failures and setbacks will change the fact that I make his morning every time he sees me, and he never stops reminding me of that fact.

Fearfully, Wonderfully, and Bipolar-ly Made: From Shame to Sanctuary has been out for one week. In that week, I’ve sent over two hundred personal messages to former students, childhood friends, family, mentors, colleagues, and people from every chapter of my life. What came back broke me open in a way the writing never did.

A former student messaged to say she’d been diagnosed with manic depression before being re-diagnosed as bipolar II. She wants to interview me on her podcast from LA. She was in my classroom, and I didn’t know she was carrying the same thing I was.

A mother wrote to say she’s reading my book alongside her therapist to better understand her daughter who has multiple mental illnesses. My book, sitting next to a therapist’s notes, helping a mother love her child better isn’t a sale. It’s the whole reason I wrote it.

A healthcare professional wants to share it with her patients. A grandfather ordered two copies… one for himself and one for his granddaughter who was recently diagnosed. A college roommate said she’s grateful for “the words God has put to what was brewing in your heart” back when we shared a dorm room and I didn’t have language for any of it. A fellow teacher in her first year told me she thinks she has “a few ABCs” she needs to get diagnosed, and a childhood friend who bought the book within minutes turned around and sent the link to her sister, who is bipolar, and her sister wrote back immediately that she wants to read it, too.

One message at a time, the book is finding the people it was written for. I get teary-eyed with every returned admission of a similar diagnosis. The stigma’s already shattering.

Sending out messages to former students didn’t feel like advertising. At Nashville School of the Arts, my yearbook staff had a tradition of voting on faculty superlatives alongside senior superlatives. Our artsy kids voted me “Most Likely to Be Your Facebook Friend.” After graduation, I encouraged my students to add me because I wanted a window into their futures. I wanted to see where their dreams, talents, heart, and work ethic landed them. Over the years, kids have messaged their old English teacher to ask for a recommendation letter, update me on some major accomplishment, or even apologize for giving me a hard time because I made them a writer while they weren’t paying attention.

I had relationships with these kids. And while I was their teacher, I was struggling with something I didn’t understand. Until I took a year off to focus on myself instead of the next generation, I was never going to be the best version of myself. When I made my Facebook page a place where my students could reach forward into the future, I didn’t know I’d still have something left to teach them. That’s what these messages became…not, “Buy my book, make me a best seller,” but, “There’s something beyond the English curriculum that might be life-changing for you.”

I can imagine my book in a psychiatrist’s office for that person, like me, who asks what to read next time. I imagine healing in relationships between people who love someone with a mood disorder and didn’t have the language to bridge the gap.

And reaching back to childhood friends? That was the most vulnerable exposure of all. I was always so much, so driven, so extra. In my memory, all my competitive classmates saw something was wrong with me that I was hiding from even then. That was my fear, even if it wasn’t real. And what I’m finding when they reach back across time is that people remember a warm, kind, joyful person who genuinely loved others. Despite my illness? Because of it? While I wrestled internally through middle and high school, that wasn’t my public persona. God actually used me to touch lives and left a lasting impression that twenty or thirty years later still means something.

I was afraid of judgment before I wrote the book. That’s why it started with the working title “Coming Out.” But I came out about living with bipolar disorder long before this title went to print. I’d accepted my public persona, branded myself as a person bridging faith and wellness. The childhood friends see bravery and courage where I’d feared judgment.

I’m not selling a book. I wrote a story about redemption. I gave people hope that they can understand themselves and their loved ones, live well and responsibly with a mood disorder, and find sanctuary from the shame in a relationship with the One who created them.

I loved writing my book. I loved editing it. I loved publishing it. I don’t love marketing it. I’ll keep sending messages, though, because this story could change the cultural conversation about bipolar disorder and faith.

And the work isn’t done. Two-Hour Tuesdays, the blog-turned-memoir that traces the four years of Tuesday night writing that brought me here, is ready to print. It’s the story before the story…for the faithful readers who were with me before the book, the ones who followed the garden and the porch and the fairy tale and the silence that followed. It’s there. It’s coming.

And then there’s Sanctuary in the Storm. The one I’m writing now. The hardest one. The one that picks up where the first book ends and tells the truth about what happened next, about what’s still happening.

I’ve been missing my writer’s perch at my little bungalow in downtown Hampton lately. This weekend, I created a new one on my front porch in Yorktown. I installed a privacy screen in the far corner to give me enough shade to work on my laptop at any time of day. I swept out the cobwebs and the wasp nest and the leaves. I washed the patio cushions. I wiped down the shutters and hosed the pollen off the furniture. I refilled the bird feeders and rehung my butterfly wind chimes.

Every morning, I chase the sunrise at the pier. Every evening, I sit on this porch and write what the day gave me. The first book left my hands last week. The next one is already growing.

I used to think I was the author of my own story. I’m not. I’m the pen. God’s been writing this since before I knew there was a story to tell…and He’s not done yet. The book is in His hands now, the way it always was. The way I always was.

The book is out there now, doing what He designed it to do. And I’m on this porch, waiting for the next sentence the Lord gives me.