Gum on My Shoe

Check out our top posts for the past month. Posts are listed by number of pageviews, most popular first. 1. What My Mantra Means to Me: Healthy Boundaries 2. One Day in the Life of Marty 3. 6 Things I'd Quite Like to Do in 2017 4. How Our Book Came to Be: The Title 5. Connection and Challenge: A Look Back at 2016 6. How to Write the Best Acknowledgement Page for Your Book The three most visited pages were Contact Us , About Us , and our Book Page .  

The most important sounds we can ever share with another person are our own voices. The above quotation is from the chapter in our book where we discuss how we make our 3,000 mile, transatlantic, friendship work. We believe there are many kinds of distance that can separate people, and not all are measured in miles or time zones. What keeps our relationship fresh and alive is our willingness to keep the channels of communication open between us, no matter what. Reading together is one way we honour that commitment, and amongst the most rewarding. Young children—and parents of young children—know this instinctively. And yet as adults we rarely read to one another. When was the last time you read to your adult child, to your partner, or to a friend? Geography need not be an obstacle. Fran and I live on opposite sides of the world, yet read together regularly on our video calls. We do this both for simple pleasure, and because Fran finds it helpful. She has difficulty maintainin...

Whether you have recently started writing your book or are close to publishing it, there is no wrong time to start thinking about your acknowledgement page. We have brought together a few ideas and lessons based on our own experience writing High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder . Make a (Contact) List and Check It (At Least) Twice! You will meet many people in the course of writing your book. Not all will warrant a mention in the acknowledgements, but you don’t want to forget someone who contributed early in the process simply because they weren’t actively engaged at the end. Don’t rely on memory. Make—and maintain—a list. If it’s good enough for Santa... It doesn’t matter how you keep track—on paper, on index cards, or in a Word document—but start recording everyone you encounter. You never know when you might need to contact that guy you met at the library, or the lady at the coffee shop who said she’d introduce you to her nephew at the radio sta...

      When I am happy I make soup When I am down I make soup When there’s drama I make soup When there’s peace I make soup Then, I have to give.   Fran  

This is the first in an occasional series—originally suggested by Aimee Wilson who blogs at I’m NOT Disordered —looking at how our book, High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder , came into being. We start by looking at how we arrived at our book’s title. From the beginning, it was important to me and Fran to have a strong working title for our book. In January 2013, the month we started on it in earnest, we worked through the exercises in a book called Writing Successful Self-help and How-to Books , by Jean Marie Stine. Here are a few of the many brainstormed ideas we came up with: Dancing on the Ragged Edge: A Bipolar Relationship Dancing the Ragged Edge: My Bipolar Friend and Me Gum on My Shoe: Life, Learning and Laughter with My Bipolar Friend Gum on My Shoe: My Bipolar Bestfriend and Me My Best Friend Is Bipolar and I'm Not Afraid! Growing Together with My Bipolar Friend Be Who You Are, Do What You Can Along the Ragged Edge: Journeying Joyfu...

I’m not big on New Year Resolutions, but here are six things I’d quite like to do in the year ahead. 1. Volunteer with Time to Change I had a great time last year volunteering for mental health charity Time to Change at Newcastle Mental Health Day (#NCLMHday) in February, and Newcastle Pride in July. At these events, and December’s Festive Networking Event (see this report by Aimee Wilson), I’ve met some amazing people, and can’t wait to continue my connection in 2017. If you’d like to get involved with Time to Change in any capacity, check out their Champions page . 2. Visit a Pub Specifically, Wylam Brewery at the Palace of Arts in Newcastle upon Tyne. I first visited the brewery’s new venue last August, on the day of Newcastle’s Fiesta Festival on the Town Moor. The place was heaving and I didn’t stay, but I can’t wait to pay a return visit. The Palace of Arts has a long and interesting history . 3. Fundraise for a Mental Health Charity I’ve done a few fundraiser...

In a recent post I mentioned the mantra I’ve employed for the past couple of years, and chosen to carry forward into the coming year. Well boundaried. Well focused. Well challenged. Well loved . But what does it mean? The resonances have changed over the past two years, and will likely continue to change. But what does my mantra mean to me right now? Of the four statements, “well boundaried” is perhaps the least obvious, and I will devote this post to exploring its relevance. I don’t think I had ever heard of the word “boundary” in a psychological context before meeting Fran in May 2011. I can’t recall precisely when or how it came up: most likely from us discussing the various therapies Fran had undergone or was undergoing. Or perhaps one of the online meditation classes we took together. However it entered my vocabulary, it took a long time for me to see the concept of boundaries as healthy. To me, it implied an unhealthy erecting of barriers between me and the world, at a ti...

I don’t really do New Year Resolutions. Instead, I began 2016 by reaffirming the mantra which had served me well throughout the previous year: Well boundaried. Well focused. Well challenged. Well loved. In January, Fran signed up for Brené Brown’s online LIVING BRAVE semester, and for the next few months we worked through the lessons together. I read the books that accompanied the courses ( Daring Greatly and Rising Strong ) to Fran, and we shared our answers and responses to the weekly lessons. It was an intensely challenging experience for me. Early on, we were invited to explore our core life values (in my case, Connection and Challenge) and choose two or three areas in which to work (Brené Brown calls these “arenas”). I chose three, and will share one with you here. (The others I choose to keep private, as there is still work for me there.) The first arena I chose was: “To engage fully with local mental health groups.” Within days, I was presented with the oppo...