Melissa Burke

"A Small Introduction" As you may (or may not) know, I'm the author of two books - this one being my third. "It's Just One Of Those Days" was published in 2013. It's a story about a young woman who is abducted and trapped. She lives in constant fear and anxiety, unsure if she'll ever make it out alive. It's basically what was meant to be a short story and exploded into something much larger. "Poetry and Short Stories by a Bipolar Girl" was published in 2012. The title speaks for itself and as you may have guessed from it, I have bipolar disorder (among other things). I took a bunch of poems and short stories I'd written while either manic or depressed and put them together to make a book. My goal was to show a little bit about what mental illness does to people, while also making a fun-to-read book of course. Whether I succeeded or not is up to my readers. But I decided that showing mental illness to the world and how it truly affects us is something I still want to do. Which brings us to this book. I decided to change things up a bit (okay more than a bit) and turn all of my journal entries into a book. Yes, my personal journal entries written over the past few years. I figured if I really do want to help people understand mental illness, why not take them directly into the mind of someone who suffers from it? It varies from entry to entry. At the beginning I'm very clearly manic, but for pretty much the rest of it I'm extremely depressed. There are relationship problems, crappy days, hallucinating, depression, paranoia, self harm, anxiety... You name it, it's probably here. I left nothing out of the entries- the only thing I did was change everyone's name (for their sake, yes, but mostly because I was too lazy to ask permission to use their real names). Having bipolar disorder gives you both a great and a terrible outlook on life. As I said, there is a lot of depression in this book - that's "The Darkness." Then there are times when I'm either manic or just feelin

The Darkness and the Light

Melissa Burke is the author of three other books and now brings you her fourth book, 46, which is a book of mostly poetry. Unlike two of her other books that try to bring you into the mind of someone with mental illness, this book is simply poetry and a few stories for you to understand any way you want even though depression and mania do seep through the words. There's love, there's light, there's darkness, there's loss, there's confusion, there's pain, there's the weird, there's the crazy and everything in between. Enjoy.

Melissa Burke

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