My journals are the maps of my crazy journey. They look like the rings of a tree in the history they tell by their appearance. The books I've kept as I was breaking down in psychosis are tattered shreds and barely held together, showing evidence of trauma the same way the inner rings of a tree from a year of fires will be darker and more charred. My handwriting changes between my mania and my depression "” excited sentences taking up enormous spaces and whole melancholy paragraphs carved in sketches in the margins. My dreams are always written down sloppily, in crude half-asleep chicken scratch, nestled between the other entries, marking the space between days. When there are no dreams to mark the space, that in itself becomes a marker that I wasn't paying attention to my dreams.