So it happened! I held my book.

So it happened! I held my book.
I was sitting at work when someone dropped two copies on my desk.
For a while, I had wondered how I would react when I finally saw my book. Would I cry? Scream? Be speechless?
It turns out that I did a lot of jumping up and down . . . . and a look-at-how-gorgeous-my-book-is dance [there are no words to describe how silly this was.]
I stared at the book for a long time. I felt the cover, smelled the paper, inspected the binding, appreciated that I didn't look like a freak in my author photo, and oh-ed and ah-ed over the garnet colored endpapers. [Somehow I had forgotten that hardcovers have those.]
Then I ran around the office showing my book to anyone who would talk to me. After I made the rounds, my face was sore from all the smiling.

And then I remembered that thousands of these books are going to be printed and [hopefully] read. Oddly enough, I sometimes forget that--like the process of writing and getting my book published was only for me.
People ask me all the time if that's weird--knowing that strangers will be reading about the worst part of my life. Strangers I can deal with. I don't have to talk to them. I don't have to sit next to them at dinner or in a meeting.
The thing that sometimes freaks me out is that several of my coworkers [and my parents] have read it. Lately, people have been coming up to me at work to tell me congratulations and that they just read my book.
I am always tremendously grateful to hear when someone has read my book. Thrilled if they say they liked it. A little bit sad when they say that they, or someone they know, has an anxiety disorder.

But when the conversation is over, I have to erase it. I can't walk around the office thinking, he knows how I've been on more than a 1/2 dozen different medications or she knows how close I came to hospitalization . . . and then of course, there’s the stuff about guys . . . .

But in reality, I know that what I wrote about isn’t all that different from what other people have gone through. Yeah, the details are different, but the emotions are the same.

We all have problems.

We all have problems.
But that's ok. That's life.
What's not ok is NOT GETTING HELP.

Approximately one in five young people suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. (Department of Health & Human Services)

An estimated two-thirds of all young people with mental health problems are not getting the help they need. (Department of Health & Human Services)

Approximately one in four adults—more than 57 million people—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. (National Institute of Mental Health)

Anxiety Disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S. with 19.1 million (13.3%) of the adult U.S. population (ages 18-54) affected.

As many as 1 in 10 young people (10%) may have an anxiety disorder. (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services)

Nearly 50% of all adolescents who are clinically depressed also have an anxiety disorder. (NYU Child Study Center)

20-40% of all adolescents with eating disorders will also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (NYU Child Study Center)

Bio...

Queens, New York, December 1978. I was born too early and too small. Weighing just shy of four pounds, my father said I looked like a chicken. My mother said I looked like a china doll. I’m not sure what my three-year-old sister thought of me, but I’ve heard stories about toddlers trying to put their new siblings in the trash.

Elementary school started out okay. I have a few select memories from kindergarten: a student’s grandfather, an Italian chef, coming to our class to cook squid on a hot plate; building a toy car out of pieces of wood; and putting milk money into a very, very small brown envelope.

The next few years were mostly all right. The highs included: performing as Jackie and the Beanstalk in a third-grade play, reading Choose Your Own Adventure books (and always cheating), and getting up to “knee-zies” in Chinese jump rope. The lows included: hiding in the bathroom whenever math homework was collected in the fifth grade, frequent feelings of déjà vu, and being told I had “skeleton hands” by the boy I had a crush on.

Sixth grade was the beginning of a new era—private school—where the classes were small and my inability to do math was quickly discovered. This is also when I wrote my first short story. It was based on an old photograph of my mother’s—a man and a woman standing in the woods with their backs to the camera.

My teacher gave me an A, something I didn’t often get. My parents went crazy for the story, and my seeming maturity. The consensus was that I had talent.

At some point in high school I started keeping a journal (not to be confused with the pink diaries with heart shaped locks that I had had before). Every few months I’d go to the drug store to buy a new marble composition book. I’d spend a lot of time decorating the cover with stickers, drawings, photos, and cut outs from magazines. And when I thought the cover was sufficiently cool, I’d start writing in it.

When I was a senior in high school, I took AP Writing. Our teacher required us to write ten journal pages a week. I think I was one of the few in the class who didn’t mind. But by then I was already a journal addict. I couldn’t go anywhere without it. And if I left my notebook at home by mistake, I would write on scraps of paper, napkins, my hand, anything. (This was also the year I discovered Anais Nin--the undisputed queen of journal writing.)
There were two things I loved most about having a journal. The first was that it filled my time. Waiting for a train? No problem. Stuck on the bus? All set. Trying to ignore my classmates during my free period? Super.

The second thing I loved was how my journals felt. Not the weight of the book, but the pages. I loved running my hands over my writing, over the impressions made by my pen. It was like my own version of braile.

When I was ready to begin writing I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, my memoir about anxiety disorder, I took out my journals from senior year of high school through the year after I graduated college. I thought that transcribing all the entries about anxiety would be easy--that there would be enough to fill a book. I was so wrong. My journals from freshman year had almost nothing about anxiety--ironic since I thought I was losing my mind.

Things didn’t look so easy anymore. I needed a new plan. Instead, I used my journals to help me recreate my world. They reminded me who I was friends with, what types of parties I went to, and what classes I was in. Other journals were more helpful—especially the ones from when I was studying abroad in Paris my junior year. Those journals were far more explicit about my anxiety. For the first time, I could actually lift entire poems from my journal and use them in my book (with much editing, of course).

One thing that I noticed throughout all my journals was a constant self-awareness of their significance. I would often scold myself as I wrote: “Must write neater. This is going to be important.” I had always fantasized that one day my journals would be published—although, I was fairly certain that I would have to die tragically first.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. I Don't Want to Be Crazy came out in July 2006, and I'm still here. I live in New York City and work as a children’s book editor at a publishing house. I still write in my journal whenever I can.