Today marks my first anniversary as an OS writer. I’d written and published one academic book, articles for Salon as well as editorials for several newspapers and magazines over the years. My writing life came to a halt when I was diagnosed with bipolar a few years back. Between the Lithium and the cycling I could not even finish a paragraph in a magazine much less a book, nor could I write anything at all for two years. My professional life came to a halt. My writing career seemed to be over. Creatively I had to say, I was a lost cause. I had no thoughts other than the mundane ones devoted to getting by on a regular basis. I was devastated.            

A friend suggested blogging and I scoffed at the idea. It was way beneath me the professional writer and it seemed pathetic—people writing for instant feedback. Where was their self-esteem? Besides, my mind was a fog of mental debris, my hands shook constantly so I couldn’t hit the keyboard keys properly and I had a constant flat feeling that would not go away. If I held a thought it would stay in my mind but never organically unfold into other thoughts. I had one unfinished philosophy manuscript that had been rejected over a four year period for not being academic enough. It was a trade book I was told.

I abandoned the book and decided I would never be published again. Another commercial book I’d written was rejected by twenty publishers and then my agent “fired me.” Seventy-five others had rejected me.I told my doctor to cut the Lithium in half, decided I was going to make it one way or the other—I just didn’t know how, and a friend said again: “start blogging, and I have the perfect place for you, it’s called Open Salon.” I was desperate, so with a shaking hand I penned my first piece which no one read but it got Editor’s Pick. The same day I penned another piece that made front page and from then on I became a writing maniac.

I wrote every day. I added 150 pages to my academic book, wrote a 562 page novel in two months, secured a publisher, got an agent (that story will be told another time) and got commissioned by yet a third publisher to write an academic trade book on cultural differences. I returned to my poetry and got a few published in literary journals. And all this without any mania. All this accomplished by reexamining how great writers on OS went about crafting their wares. Most didn’t write like bloggers. They wrote like professionals. If people worse off than I were doing it, then so could I, I told myself.  

Why do I say OS got me all these things—the book contracts and the agent? Of course it’s not meant literally, but OS was a beautiful training ground. It provided a loving community that was there to offer me encouragement when I thought my shaking hand would win the war of the words; it made me respect the art of writing all over again and taught me that it doesn’t matter how many comments you get, it’s the writing that truly counts—writing is an end in itself; it restored my confidence in my abilities to be creative once more; and it gave me permission to fail without the consequences of losing my ego in the process. It restored my confidence in the beauty of words and in my own capacity to create some order out of the chaos of my inner life.

Three months after I started blogging, as I said, I began a novel and finished it in two months. After three hundred pages I found an agent who said: “I need to see this.” After I finished my second academic book the publisher had heard of me where…..? You guessed right. Even radio stations came a calling after they’d read an article I wrote on the monarchy. When the mere completion of a sentence is an accomplishment for the day, a blog becomes a magnificent triumph.

I neither lost my ego on OS, nor did I gain one. I gained balance and perspective which equipped me with the spiritual ammunition to go back into the world and fight for who is at the core of my identity: a person who loves to write. Nothing more. Nothing less. And that’s what the agent and the publishers saw: a determined person who had emerged from a state of paralysis and walked right back into himself.