The idea for Bipolar Blonde began in early 2010, just after Brett and I moved to Beijing. Three years after my diagnosis. Three months after flipping my life completely upside down.

One afternoon, staring out at the yellow-hued haze of the Beijing skyline, I wrote a two-page outline.

Over the course of a few weeks—or months perhaps—those two pages turned into thirty. It was messy. Bullet points from a chaotic life. A stream of consciousness packed with details but no real arc. No structure. No clean ending tied up with a bow.

I printed it out. Gave it a once over. Then slid it into the back of a drawer.

A year passed in the blink of an eye. Brett and I explored every market in Beijing. We traveled all over Asia. I filled my days. Filled my calendar. Filled my closet, honestly.

Then I got restless. Idle hands have never been good for me.

Living as an expat is a fascinating thing. Especially in a place like China. The expectations of my “homeland” seemed to magically disappear the second I landed. I felt free. Free to be fully myself.

I pushed my style to the absolute limit. I tried new things constantly. I met people from all over the world. But mostly, I shared. I shared the real me. The good. The bad. The deeply messy.

Occasionally, usually over cocktails or long dinners, I’d share pieces of this strange little story I had started writing. A discombobulated version of Bipolar Blonde. Not often. But enough. Enough with people I felt truly connected to.

And after a while, I opened the drawer again.

I slipped out the outline. Tinkered with it. Expanded parts of the story. Added more honesty. More detail. More chaos. I even reached out to an editor friend to see if it had legs.

It was raw. Incomplete. Not there yet. And truthfully, neither was I. Back in the drawer it went.

Suddenly it was 2012.

Brett and I got married. In China. In Africa. In the USA. We celebrated aggressively.

Four months after our final celebration, I got pregnant. Brett’s company sold a few months after that, and we made very fast plans to move back to the United States.

Bipolar Blonde took a backseat to baby, breastfeeding, and eventually, Buru.

But through every low, every high, every intrusive suicidal thought, the desire to tell this story resurfaced. Quietly at first. Then louder.

What if it could help just one person? What if it could help end the stigma?

At the end of 2016, we welcomed our sweet baby number two. And with his arrival came a life upheaval that cracked me wide open. I shared parts of it online and was later asked by an editor at Vogue to write about it more deeply.

So I did.

In the depths of new motherhood for the second time, renovating a hundred-year-old home, and then moving to Los Angeles, I started writing again as a form of therapy.

(Add it to my pile.)

And for a brief moment, I caught the bug. The writing bug.

Deep inside a moving box that had traveled from Beijing, China to Murray, Kentucky to Park City, Utah to Los Angeles, California, I found the outline. Fortyish pages long at this point.

I edited it. Whittled it down. Shaped it. Found the arc hidden somewhere beneath the madness.

I made my 2017 goals list.

On it: Bipolar Blonde.

But motherhood and business ownership had other plans.

Life moved fast. Babies grew. Buru grew. Suddenly it was 2019 and I was pregnant…again.

This pregnancy came with more. More candles on the birthday cake. More responsibility. More understanding of my disease and how to manage it. But mostly, more community.

I shared the highs and lows of juggling motherhood, marriage, mental illness and entrepreneurship with our Buru Beauties. The polished version of womanhood never fit me particularly well anyway.

It felt good. Therapeutic even. Honesty over aspiration (the typical recipe for Instagram and social media.)

Then fall arrived.

While packing for one final long-haul flight to Guangzhou—a last factory trip before baby number three's arrival—I opened the bottom drawer of my desk, grabbed the outline, and shoved it into the outside compartment of my carry-on.

With fourteen uninterrupted hours and no WiFi, I was determined to finally move forward.

Somewhere over the Pacific, with Brett beside me, Bipolar Blonde quite literally fell out of me. I typed furiously for hours. Two full chapters with shocking ease.

Finally. I’m doing it.

Ten days later, back in Los Angeles, busy with jet lag, third trimester exhaustion, and keeping up with a seven-year-old and a three-year-old quietly stole my momentum.

I never even printed the chapters. They remained digital. A fleeting little burst of vulnerability floating around in my laptop.

Back to my regular programming.

We rang in 2020. Nine days later, we welcomed Carlyle, baby number three, into our world.

Two months after that, the entire world shut down.

Two adults. One remote first grader. One toddler. One newborn. All on lock down, inside a downtown Los Angeles loft. No dedicated outdoor space. No places open to escape.  Not even beaches or parks.

This does not a recipe for writing make. Or sanity for that matter.

The worst of the pandemic passed. Years blurred together. We opened stores. We moved our sweet family to Pasadena. We kept going. One foot in front of the other. Helping our babies and Buru grow into their best selves.

But through it all, Bipolar Blonde never left me. If anything, its importance only grew louder.

Every morning, while taking my mood stabilizers, I’d think about it. The story. The responsibility of it. The fear of it.

Full of doubt after years of not making it happen myself, I reached out to several ghostwriters for help.

Each one was lovely. Engaging. Talented. None of them were me. And that was the problem.

How could I ask someone else to articulate my darkest, most personal moments? The moments I barely understood myself?

I couldn’t.

After my final meeting—ironically at Bemelmans—I took the elevator upstairs to my hotel room at The Carlyle, opened my computer, and started fresh.

A blank document.

Two pages.

Twenty-six chapter titles.

Numbered. Ordered. Named.

The words themselves weren’t there yet, but the story finally was.

It was the week of my 45th birthday. Eighteen years after my diagnosis.

The next month, through a Buru connection and a healthy dose of luck, a publisher asked if I had ever considered writing a book.

To be continued...

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