I have asthma, severe major depression and Borderline Personality Disorder. All of these have been kept well in control by medication for some four years now. I no longer have tantrums, nor do I feel suicidal, nor do I wheeze for air. However, I still get tired easily, dislike being in large crowds for more than an hour or so and often have to rest at home the day after I have been to a public event.
I first heard of NaNoWriMo in 2002, when I was in graduate school at UCLA. It sounded intriguing, but I dared not do it, because I was heading towards a depressive episode and already struggling with my coursework. I — doubtless correctly — thought that I could not handle writing term papers and a novel at the same time. After I was obliged to leave grad school because of my inability to concentrate on my studies during my depressive episode, I had a long writer’s block and did not feel like writing fiction. This upset me, since my identity as a (future) novelist is important to me. By this year [2009], however, my condition (both healthwise and financial) had stabilized enough that I felt freer to imagine and to write.
Novel Patient