Be Well and Wander
your weekly intel on wellbeing & travel
This writing journey begins on a psych ward.
I had been pushing my body and mind as a mom, partner, and tenure-chaser until one day I fell apart. I had been bopping about the planet - as I loved to do, with more than 30,000 miles traveled in a couple of months, and my circadian rhythms were totally out of alignment, and that was no good for someone with bipolar disorder. The details of the story are a whole story in itself but for now, just know that being a mental health professional and finding myself on the other side of the treatment relationship, really shook me. My psychiatrist told me that it was my wandering that got me in the hospital, and I had to figure out how to rebuild a life where that would never ever happen again. I was not going to give up traveling, and I was not going to give up my health.
The hospital psychiatrist really liked talking to a fellow mental health professional and we had very engaging conversations, in which he inspired me to write my first book - a book about bipolar disorder. To be honest, even though I was a social worker, mental health was not my specialty. For sure, I was skilled in case management and counseling as I have a BSW & MSW from McGill University. But really my skillset focused on ‘macro’ practice: social work with communities and organizations. However, something about writing the book I needed for my own mental health made sense to me, and 9 pitches later, I found a publisher. That book - Bipolar 101 - eventually sold in excess of 30,000 copies.
Stacks and Substitutes
The publisher of that first book got me a Psychology Today blog, and I was asked that I focused on the junction of culture and mental health. I also authored a bipolar blog that was hosted on blogspot. I later decided to take my policy rants from the classroom to the people and launched a policy blog that I subtitled, ‘from the tower to the streets’. Years later a friend convinced me to leave blogspot for Medium, and I posted a few articles there. Through all of this, I wrote 3 more books on mental wellness for a public audience, edited an academic volume in global public health, and wrote articles on wellness and travel for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Thrive Global, Tracy Anderson magazine, and Condé Nast Traveler.
I have come to Substack as a new home for all my writing. Yeah…. I like the validation of having big names validate my work by paying me (or not🤦🏾♀️), but like most people on this platform, I find it exhausting to continuously go through the cycle of pitch-pitch-pitch-submit draft-revise draft-submit invoice-chase editor for publication link-chase their accounting departments for payment; just to share my words with people. I want to be able to share my writing directly with curious readers who are interested in what I have to say and give me the feedback that really matters.
Readership and ‘Ritership
The last 15 years of my writing and consulting career has focused on mental wellness, and developing and delivering customized solutions for organizations large and small. The motivation has always been to help people live healthier and happier lives that they love. With that in mind, I launched a successful private-pay part-time therapy practice last year. And that’s the community I want to build: people interested in learning how we can all live healthier and happier lives.
I am also a wanderer, with 3 passports🇬🇧🇯🇲🇨🇦 (I could have had 4🇺🇸 but I was lazy). I have built a happy life in 4 countries, and traveled to another 40+, visiting several of these countries 5 times or more. Recently I joined my love of writing and travel and got my first travel pitch published by CN Traveler. That has led to commissions to write more in the travel space. My goal in this newsletter is to highlight places not so often traveled, and to have people re-think how they perceive destinations well-traveled and those less so, and the why, how and where they travel.
Great Expectations
Let me be real…
Never one for long-term consistency, I am ready to do different as I build this writing career of mine. Since Wednesday is a ‘W’ word and wellness and wandering are also ‘W’ words, I plan to publish a new installment from my firing neurons every Wednesday.
Soon you will have the opportunity to sign up for a paid subscription, but we will get to that later.
For now, I’d love for you to share this post, and subscribe so next week you can learn how to relieve your jetlag, and some ways to travel green.
I would love to hear from you. Let me know if you enjoyed this first installment, and tell me what wellness and travel topics you would like me to write about in the coming weeks.
So welcome to my writings on wanders and wellness - on any given Wednesday.
