It’s been twelve weeks since the worst day of my life, and my voice came back.
I graduated from speech therapy yesterday. My speech-language pathologist, Kayla, told me she didn’t have anything else for me. I told her I had something for her, and handed her a signed copy of my book. She has been a sanctuary in my current storm. She gave me the tools to reclaim what someone else took.
When I asked if I could record the audiobook, Kayla drew a hard line. “No. Three to six more months,” she said. I can’t tax this voice with that undertaking yet. Everyone has been telling me I’d do my own book a disservice to hire a voice actor, that I should be the one to read it. They’re right. They’re also right that I’m not ready.
The voice I have right now is precious. I am newly aware of what a gift it always was.
I may have sung before I spoke. I know I wrote a song before I wrote a poem. My soul speaks in harmony, and for the first time since February 1, I was able to sing.
A worship song. Hesitant at first, not sure what would come out. The voice was there. It positioned words on notes. Structurally, it sounded like singing. Internally, it felt like floodgates opening. For the first time in twelve weeks, I poured out my praise until the melody was buried beneath sobs.
I never valued what a blessing my voice was until it was taken from me. Now that it has been restored, I should raise an Ebenezer, giving the glory to God. Hither by Thy help I’m come.
I changed how I taught these last twelve weeks. Without the authority my voice afforded, I had to find new ways to gather a sixth-grade classroom. Kayla taught me how teachers mistreat their voices like the yelling to quiet a room, the constant projection, and the strain we mistake for control. I won’t go back to those habits. The vocal cords I once treated as utility I will now treasure as gift.
On restoring my voice, there’s more. Two weeks ago, I published a book I had been hiding for seven years.
Fearfully, Wonderfully, and Bipolar-ly Made: From Shame to Sanctuary went out into the world on April 14. Twelve days later, it became the #1 New Release in Counseling & Psychology eBooks on Bipolar Disorder. It is sitting near the top of bestseller lists alongside the books that taught me how to live with my own brain… Kay Redfield Jamison, Frank Mondimore, Terri Cheney, Carrie Fisher. The books I read when I was first diagnosed, scribbling notes in their margins, are now neighbors to the book those margins became.
I am stunned, and I am grateful. I’m also learning that the chart is an up-and-down to ride. The book moved from #11 to #9 to #13 to #6 in a single weekend. Each spike feels like provision, every dip feels like rejection, and deep down, I know neither is true.
The book is not the algorithm. The book is the work.
God is the provider, not Amazon. He gave me the story, the calling, the words. He gave me readers I will never meet. He gave me a former student who wept reading page forty-eight, an old college acquaintance who told me her years near me were cherished, and a former mentor I’d hurt who told me she’d always considered me one of the most naturally gifted teachers she’d known. I can’t write reviews into existence. I can’t will a chart up. I can only do the work and trust the One who gave me the assignment.
Pastor Colin supported Sunday’s sermon with the story of Joni Eareckson Tada: the diving accident that left her quadriplegic at seventeen, and the prayer she had prayed shortly before that accident: “O God, I cannot break free… I want you to change my life. I’m powerless to do it myself.”
She was whole and miserable and unable to stop her own self-destruction. She asked God to do something. The next week she dove off a raft into shallow water and broke her neck.
That is how God answered.
Joni has said, in the decades since, that the wheelchair is what saved her. Not metaphorically. Actually. She would not undo it if she could because the accident was the breaking-free.
I sat sat there and thought: that is what He has done with me, too. I prayed for years to be free of things I could not free myself from. He did not answer the way I would have chosen. He answered in a way I would not have chosen. But I wouldn’t undo it, either.
The world got bigger this week. Bigger and louder and more complicated than I knew how to hold.
There is a real cost to publishing a memoir about your own life. There are people who would prefer you stay quiet. There are people who hear about your past and decide that’s the version of you they’re going to remember. Not everyone celebrates when a woman reclaims her own voice, especially if her silence was more convenient.
But for every voice that wishes I had stayed hidden, there have been ten voices telling me what the book has meant to them. Former students who are now parents and professionals telling me I shaped their writing. Strangers messaging me that they read until the page blurred. A man I barely know writing to say he sat with the book and cried. A friend I hadn’t heard from in years confessing she’d been quietly following my journey because some friends from the harder seasons of life are not always the happy reminder we hope to be — and then, in the same breath, telling me I had never been a bad person, never difficult to love.
I went silent for years because I was ashamed and confused about my mental condition. Publishing this book two weeks ago was me reclaiming my voice in the loudest possible way.
I have not regretted it for a moment. Not even when the cost has been real.
Saturday, my best friend Mary Beth took me to Fort Monroe Beach. Less than two years ago, I got married on that same shore. We walked the dogs. We collected sea glass. She made me hold up both of my books — the one already in the world, and the proof of the second one — and she took a photo with this blog post in mind. An Ebenezer, perhaps?
She has been gently reminding me that I am a published author. She wants me to feel accomplished, recognize the milestone. I keep forgetting because the celebration is unfamiliar shaped — there is no husband across from me at a commemorative dinner, no stepdaughter telling me she’s proud. Some of what I imagined being on the other side of publication can’t come back the way my voice did.
Nevertheless, two books are still shaping. My voice is still working. The Author is still providing in His way, on His terms.
I will raise an Ebenezer.
Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by Thy help I’m come. — Robert Robinson, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, 1758.
Writer's Growth 