Anyone who has followed me for a while already knows that mental illness is a key part of my fantasy debut, Into Shadow, and my own struggle to accept my diagnosis of bipolar disorder was a major reason for writing it. Because today is the start of Mental Health Awareness Week, I wanted to mark the occasion by sharing a deeper dive into mental illness in Into Shadow. 

On a recent reread of Into Shadow, my brother caught some references to mental illness in the book that I hadn’t expected anyone to pick up on. Today, I’m going to dive into those, as well as explore my representation of bipolar disorder within the book.

Bipolar Disorder

When I decided to write a protagonist with bipolar II, I didn’t realize how difficult it would be. I knew I wanted Wren’s inner struggle to relate somehow to bipolar disorder; I also wanted external plot events to be directly impacted by her mental illness. It was difficult to write partly because it was personal, but also partly because bipolar disorder is unpredictable and disruptive. There are things that make a manic episode more likely, but you can’t exactly plan for one. Just as manic episodes are never convenient in real life, writing it into this book was inconvenient. However, I came to embrace that this difficulty was a reality of the illness, and my way around this inconvenience was to make sure that while the manic episode Wren has is random, the consequences have a real impact on the plot. As a side note, the unpredictability of bipolar disorder was one of the things that I found hardest to accept about bipolar disorder; as someone who likes to have a plan, knowing that my plans can be disrupted at any time was a hard thing to accept, even if it has taught me to be better at accepting curveballs life throws my way.

My goal in having a character with bipolar disorder was not to “fix” the mental illness, but to have Wren learn to accept it better and live with it better. That, to me, is much truer to life. Medication can control mental illness to an extent, but it’s something you always live with. Curing it is not realistic, but adjusting to make space for mental illness in your life is.

There are so many facets to living with mental illness that make self-acceptance so difficult: there’s societal stigma, and there’s also, for me at least, a lot of guilt. I know seeing me struggle with mental illness has been hard on the people I’m closest to, and even if I know it’s not really my fault, I still carry that guilt with me.

One thing you may have noticed in Into Shadow is I was not brave enough to write Wren’s mania from another character’s point of view. This is partially because my experience with mania has always been personal, and it’s partially because I’m afraid. I’m scared to look up a video of someone being manic in case it causes me to feel shame. I’ve been told that hypomania is fun for the person experiencing it but scary for everyone else. I don’t want to see a video that will make me more afraid of myself.

I chose to focus on the mania side of bipolar disorder over depression in this book. Depression has always been a bigger struggle for me, but I focused on mania for several reasons. First, it was most relevant to me at the time. My medication was not quite right yet when I started drafting this book, and that meant I was getting manic a lot. Mania is also easier to write in some ways. If you haven’t experienced it, mania is a hard thing to describe, but it’s emotionally easier to deal with than depression. A big reason I chose to focus on mania over depression in this book is just because I find writing about depression, and especially the more severe symptoms of depression, to be extremely challenging for my mental health. I wanted to portray bipolar disorder accurately, but I also had to protect myself.

Wren from Into Shadow is a character I admittedly poured a lot of my own struggles into. Wren struggles with self-worth. She struggles with how to fit into a world that isn’t shaped for people with mental illness. She faces serious consequences for being mentally ill. As a result, this character is very special to me. I love her empowerment arc throughout this book, and my hope was always that other people with bipolar II might read this book and feel less alone. When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I needed a book like this to tell me that having an exciting life was possible, even with my new limitations. For that reason, this book is about bipolar disorder, and yet, it’s also not. It’s about a lot of things: dragons, politics, inequality, love. And I feel that’s as it should be. 

Self-Harm

This topic is a difficult one for me to write about, but I feel I can’t write about mental illness in Into Shadow without touching on it.

Into Shadow has a tally system for the Rooks. For each transgression, a Rook gets a line tattooed on their left forearm. This placement was very deliberate for me, because that’s where I have the majority of my self-harm scars. The most visible on my own forearm are three lines. However, I’m fortunate in that all of my scars are quite faint, and I would guess most people wouldn’t notice them. Of course, I notice them often.

I am not ashamed of my scars. For me, they show that I went through something awful and survived. Was self-harm the best coping mechanism? No. But I firmly believe it kept me alive through some of the worst years of my life.

I want to be clear that I do not condone self-harming. Anyone who has a history of self-harm knows that it’s an addiction. Once you start, it’s very difficult to stop, and it’s stupidly easy to relapse. Please don’t self-harm if you can possibly avoid it.

But while I’m not ashamed of my scars, there’s still something painful about looking at them. Every time I see them, it’s a reminder of horrible memories. It’s bad enough when something horrible happens, but to be reminded of it every time you look at your forearm is hard.

I think that’s why I made the decision to give the Rooks their tallies. It’s marking you forever with not only a mark, but also a bad memory. And while the harm in Into Shadow is societal harm rather than self-harm, there are some parallels to draw. My scars and the Rook tallies are both permanent marks of having survived something awful.

Initially, I wanted Wren to struggle with self-harm, and I even wrote some scenes featuring it. However, I ended up cutting those scenes because I didn’t want to trigger anyone who might have otherwise enjoyed the book, and I also didn’t want to romanticize it. Self-harm is not romantic. It’s ugly and difficult and painful. However, self-harm is also part of my journey, and that’s why these tallies made it into my book. 

Trauma

In addition to noticing the tallies/self-harm parallel, my brother asked me about Timothy’s torture. He wondered if it was a reference to PTSD, and the answer is yes, it was. As someone who struggles a lot with trauma triggers, it was very natural to make Timothy’s torture not physical, but mental. It made sense to me that the worst torture in the world is being stuck in bad memories and reliving them. 

I struggle a lot with trauma, and I’ve learned a lot about trauma as I deal with my own triggers. When you’re triggered, your body viscerally reacts and takes you back to how you felt at the time of the trauma. Of course, in Timothy’s case, I made it worse; his torture is to actually relive his worst memories. 

I don’t know if I consciously made Wren and Timothy represent different parts of mental health that I struggle with—bipolar disorder and trauma, respectively—but looking back, that’s exactly what they do. 

Conclusion 

Mental illness is complex and difficult. I can only speak to my own experiences with it, and that’s what I tried to do in Into Shadow. I’ll always be proud of this book because I put so much of myself into it. Mental illness is a hard topic to talk about and write about, and there’s still so much stigma around it. If I’ve helped lessen the stigma in any way, even for a few people, I consider this book a success. 

I tried to show that while people with mental illness have an extra hurdle in life, we’re also people with unique personalities and dreams, and we deserve dignity and respect. This is something I feel very strongly about, and I hope to continue to explore these ideas in the sequels for Into Shadow.

While this was a difficult post for me to write, it’s an important one. I’ve always felt that I can’t fight against societal stigma around mental illness unless I first combat my own stigma towards myself. It’s scary to post something so vulnerable, but I also think it can be necessary to be vulnerable about mental health topics.

Thanks for reading!