It is Spring 2006, 2 years after Sascha and I self-published the first 1000 copies of this barely-proofread zine/book, threw them in the back of my truck, and launched into a guerrilla speaking tour of bookstores, infoshops, colleges, community centers, mental health clinics, and activist houses across the country. I have just finished re-reading the text while sitting on the same couch where we wrote it in 2 months of unbelievable immersion. I am struck by what a beginning this little volume proved to be, and by how deeply it reflects our personal passions, prejudices, privileges, fears and blind spots as individuals with a limited understanding of our own mental health and the context that shapes it. We created the first version of this book in a manic spirit of compiling all the questions we had been trying to figure out and spilling all the paradoxes and insights we had been gaining along the way. After reading through these pages I am left with images of inspiration and isolation; the bipolar person as a brilliant, alienated character struggling against society and his/her own inevitable, biological madness.

I am amazed by the lack of attention we paid to the formative influences of childhood, family, environment, trauma, community, spiritual crisis, addiction, race, class, and privilege. I am struck by our spirit of adamant independence, our deep mistrust of authority, and our fear of our own insanity. Our framework for representing our emotional extremes reflects who we were at the time we wrote this: two privileged, creative, educated white kids who had access to the western medical system at a young age, lived through wild adventures and terrible mental breakdowns, got diagnosed with a major mental illness, took medication, and were terrified of enduring such suffering again. We did not know anyone who had successfully managed their craziness in the long-term without the compromises of psychiatry, and we did not have a diverse community of peers who struggled with the same baffling states of consciousness. Our response to the conventional narrative of "mental illness" was shaped more by our reactions to authority than by an identification with alternative understandings shared by our peers or developed by our elders. Though we had a lot of internal resistance to the medical model that blames everything on biology and treats everything with drugs, we still feared it might end up being right, and that our madness would recur independent of the families who raised us, the lifestyle choices we made, the alternative treatments we tried, the seasons of the year, the substances we consumed, the traumas we'd endured, the relationships we developed, or much of anything else.

Since then, we have learned so much more about all the different ways people experience and treat mental crisis. We have a wide network of mad friends all over the place. We know people who've lived without meds for 28 years and we know people who swear lithium has saved their lives for the last 20. We've read books, participated in workshops, tried new spiritual practices, experimented with martial arts, written zines, taken herbs, travelled back and forth across the country, and had so many conversations. We've been given all kinds of new language, new friends, new guides, and new hope. We have suffered and been crazy as hell and broken hearts and made messes and yet we're still going and we're still best friends. Our worlds keep getting wider and wider, and The Icarus Project manages to reach further and further.

In Autumn 2005 I decided to take a break from full-time work organizing the project to attend to my own health and recovery. After a few whirlwind years of growth, insanity, and tons of Icarus activities, from organizing art shows and redesigning our website to writing grants and leading workshops, my body had reached its limit and I developed a crippling rash in reaction to lithium. In April 2005 I began working with a homeopath, a highly trained natural healer, to get off the toxic medications and start listening to my soul. My life has changed immensely. Layers upon layers of trauma, grief, tumult, and truth started to erupt from their submersion behind the filters of workaholism, psych drugs, and alcohol. The resulting chaos got me into 12-step recovery, where I have finally become willing to take an honest look at my substance abuse, my family history, my thinking patterns, and the many factors beyond biology that contribute to my craziness and disrupt my best attempts at a sane existence.

These days my life is a lot humbler and closer to the earth. I have moved into a collective farm in the country with Sascha and other friends. I work with a homeopath and a shaman as my primary health care providers. I am sober and med-free. My hours are filled with tending goats, planting seeds, teaching art, taking care of children, cooking food with my friends, going to 12-step meetings, writing and facilitating workshops with The Icarus Project, and learning to love and trust the people around me. I make a concerted effort to accept my limitations and attend to my basic needs - not because an authority told me I must, but because I am listening to my body and trusting the people who have walked this path before me. My basic needs seem to be something like: getting to bed early, eating regular nourishing meals, meditating daily, working a reasonable amount, asking for help, taking breaks, being honest, staying in touch with my healers, depending on my community, developing routine, making space for creation, accepting my mistakes, and following through on my commitments. I still struggle, I still fear, and I still resist, but something in my core feels manageable and solid in a way I have never experienced before. I have made a real commitment to waking all the way up. Each day I try to surrender a little more. The ideal of balance and wellness seems possible if I work towards it in a gradual way and call on my guides for help. I am not giving up.