Writing Out The Storm

About the Book

To everyone else, she was a captivating woman and successful educator with a happy  marriage. She had an intriguing life as an author, popular motivational speaker, retreat leader and bohemian world wanderer. Yet for two decades Rebecca Mitchell-Merriman silently struggled through a raging roller coaster ride of hazardous highs and consuming depressions. In Writing Out the Storm: Journal Musings of a Manic-Depressive Wanderer, Merriman invites the reader into a private world where she often teeters on the brink of suicide, feeling hopelessly guilty for not being able to simply snap out of it.  

After a decade of secretly struggling through the storm of mental illness, by age 33 the author was spending each summer alone high in her Rocky Mountain hideaway hiking, writing and calming her increasingly shot nerves. In spite of being elected Teacher of the Year by her peers during her second year, her sixth and final year of teaching was spent mostly hiding in a tiny storage room, afraid that too much exposure might clue-in her students and fellow educators that something was dreadfully wrong with her. After she quit teaching high school , she “wrote a book about, of all things, happiness, and became a professional speaker and consultant on the illusive subject. It’s as if making happiness my life’s work might somehow magically entitle me to it.”

Finally, at age 42, the author decided to seek medical help and went in for her psychological intake. Exactly one year later she was transported, handcuffed and humming, in the back of a paddy wagon, to a psychiatric facility for her first involuntary commitment. It was the first of  three back-to-back psychotic breakdowns, each being worse than the last. What went wrong?

This moving memoir of moods and madness follows the story of Merriman’s long journey toward healing. Arranged as a collection of essays which mix vivid vignettes from her past with deeply personal journal entries and present reflections on her battle with this crippling disease, it describes with unflinching honesty how the storm of mental illness, in spite of its recurrent euphorias, almost swept her from the land of the living. “...these essays are my brave act of vulnerability, my honest attempt to convey the confusion and fear of this disease. A love note to all my brothers and sisters who’ve ever been locked up inside themselves raging against the storm-tossed terrain of their broken brain.”

 A poignant and invaluable account of one woman’s ultimate triumph over  manic-depressive illness, Writing Out the Storm will bring hope to anyone tormented by  the ravages of depression or bipolar illness.

About the Author

Rebecca Mitchell-Merriman spends most of each summer on her Colorado land in the middle of nowhere, where she writes, hikes, meditates and plans her next budget trip abroad. She spends the rest of the year in the Tennessee countryside with Karl, her husband of 18 years, and Sweepy, Happy and Squeaky, their three coddled cats.