What did you do to turn your life around?

I began writing on Quora.

Yes, it turned my life around. Although I can’t really say I thought it would change me for ever, I have been very pleased with the results. My therapist is, too, and says I am a different person from the one he met years ago. I feel like a different person, too.

I wrote my first question on Quora in 2015. It was a stupid question about IQ. I didn’t think it was stupid at the time, but looking back I feel a flush rushing up my neck and over my cheeks. So I won’t tell you what the question was.

Needless to say, I got a lot of very rude answers and didn’t think of Quora again for six years. Six years I wasted rather than turning my life around. At least I know that to be true now.

You may be wondering how on earth writing on Quora can change your life so I shall tell you. I began writing about what I know best and that is bipolar disorder. Seeing as I have had this cruel disorder since I was 15 I had a lot to say about it and soon many people were reading my posts. I now have more than 15,000 followers.

I wrote about bipolar for a couple of years and learned a lot more about it myself because teaching is the best way to learn. You have probably heard that said before and it is very true. I also studied bipolar so that my answers would be correct.

After a while, I decided to branch out from writing solely about bipolar disorder, so I wrote on many other subjects most of them relating to mental illness but not all. I have got a lot of pleasure out of that.

One day, a woman who does not have bipolar disorder contacted me and said I should write a book. To be very honest I had heard this said to me on many occasions because I have had a very adventurous life, for good and bad. I thought immediately that she meant for me to write a memoir of certain things that have occurred in my life, but she said I should write about bipolar.

I must say, It had never occurred to me to write about bipolar or anything else in book form because I thought I would have nothing to say and filling up hundreds of pages is no mean feat. I thought I might be able to manage a chapter but as for the rest of the book, I had no idea where to start. However, I had written over 600 answers on bipolar by that time, so I decided to put 125 of them into a book. It was not easy and it took me a long time to figure it out, but I did just that and it worked. I had written a book.

You will be pleased to know that little book has sold every day since June 2021. It is my best seller.

Once I had written the first book, I realized I could write another book, so I did, but this time I wrote it from scratch. It is about bipolar still but about bipolar 1 exclusively. There are a number of people who fall under that category and there are very few books out there on that subject, so once again my book did well. I had great fun writing that book, I have to say. I included many things that pleased me like yoga, tai chi, and qi gone. I also included many Mediterranean recipes and had great fun making them up from things I had cooked before. It is great when you write your own book because you can add what you like.

So, by now I was bitten by the bug. The Book Bug. I was now so pleased that I could write books that I got addicted to it and wrote a book on loneliness and a poetry book. Now today as a matter of fact, I have finished writing a workbook on bipolar and it will be published in April. I think I have done bipolar to death now and will find a different subject for the next book.

Writing books has been very therapeutic for me. I live alone with a cat so it has been easy to find the time and the place to write. And I find I can turn out a decent book in three months.

So, the long and short of it is that writing on Quora has changed my life. I hope it will do that for you, too.

Author:

“How to Live with Bipolar”
“Bipolar 1 Disorder Rescue Plan”
“A Practical Guide to Overcoming Loneliness”
“We Never Did Mornings” (poetry)
“37 Symptoms of Bipolar Depression” (being published in April.

All my books are available on Amazon. If you should be tempted to buy one, I would be very grateful if you would leave a review on Amazon. That helps other people know what the book is about and if you liked it. Thank you.

Sally