Inching Back To Sane: A Memoir of Mental Illness

I am a 44-year-old author of fiction and non-fiction. The first book I wrote was "Through the Withering Storm" which was about my life with bipolar disorder, a crippling mental illness that seemed to take everything I loved in life away from me. I lost friends, relationships, the comforts of a family and my grip on reality because of this illness. It crept up on me slowly as I was growing up for many years and my life was nearly impossible to manage andI was severely depressed a lot, but when I was 18 I got very ill and was committed to a hospital four times. I wrote down the story of this phase of my life in the book, "Through the Withering Storm". When I finished the book and got it to print, there were a lot of questions from people as to what happened after, and others wanted to see more of what experiencing the illness was like, so I wrote this book, "Inching Back To Sane." When released from a hospital after an extended visit, there is a journey that takes place, a long and arduous one, but thankfully for me, not an impossible one. The concept of a long journey of slow steps to get one's life together was where I got the title of this book from, and I hope it can bring relief from suffering and a new understanding of what mental illness survivors go through. I have to admit the book as it sits isn't as perfect as I would like it to be, but many people have said it still gives a clear message of what I went through. This book won the 2014 New York Book Festival's 'Honorable Mention' in the category of memoirs.