After a couple decent snow storms and cold winter like weather for much of November, I figured that winter was coming early this year.  That was until the recent warm up we had over the last few days.  So I’ve been able to get outdoors more this month than last month, especially since my back is feeling so much better.  Been doing the chiropractic treatments on my back for six weeks.  I didn’t realize how much I was being hindered by low grade back pain.  I even had an old injury that had been giving me fits  since age fifteen clear up.  Too bad I had to get my car wrecked to get into this treatment.  But good things can come out of bad events.

Another good thing that came from a bad event was learning I had some talents besides science classes.  Almost all the electives I took in high school were in biology , chemistry, and physics.  I spent the first two years of my college career with the goal of going into medical research.  But the problems from the mental illness prevented this from happening.  In desperation I switched to a business major.  I knew nothing about any kind of money or finance besides being able to balance a checkbook.  I got good enough grades in my business classes to graduate, but it wasn’t the mostly A’s I got in high school.  But I still learned how to budget and how basic economics worked.  As my college career was winding down I found I had a natural talent for writing.

I didn’t do much writing as a kid besides what was required for my classes.  I quit keeping a journal after a few months in junior high after I caught my older brother reading it one day.  I guess I was paranoid even before I became ill.  So that was one of those unknown and untapped talents I discovered in college.  I wrote every day for several throughout the rest of my twenties.  And looking back on those writings, I didn’t realize just how raw and unrefined they were.  How I got even a few poems published in my twenties is beyond me.  But I guess anything worth learning is worth doing poorly at first.

I didn’t learn how to write all at once.  It has taken almost a dozen years of cranking out material to get even where I’m at now.  I wrote for three years before I got a guest article published in the local newspaper.  I wrote for five years before I self published a novel (which was truly lousy even though it was semi-autobiographic).  I wrote for seven years before I sold a few dozen self published books.  And it was over ten years before I had any kind of traction on alifeofmentalillness.wordpress.com.  Even now I’m still learning the writing game.  And I do it even though I don’t get paid for this.  While it would be cool to get paid for some of my work, it’s not the end game of my writing.  I’ll continue to do this blog and anything after this for years to come.  As far as money goes, while I like money as much as anyone it’s not the reason I write.  I write because I can’t imagine not writing.  And this is a thing that, had I never become mentally ill, I would have never discovered.