May is Mental Health Awareness Month
“Cruel are the times when we are traitors & do not know ourselves; when we hold from what we fear, yet know not what we fear, but float upon a wild & violent sea each way & move.” Macbeth, act 4, sc 2
I wasn’t looking to write a book about tools to improve mental health, but somehow it happened.
Perhaps it was because in 2021, before I left my conventional job, my mental health suffered from the daily stressors of the rat race:
I often bolted upright in bed at 3 am, heart racing and feeling extreme anxiety without specific cause.
If I ate lunch (which was rare), I absently wolfed a sandwich, washing it down with the third or fourth caffeinated beverage of the day.
When my business phone rang, my stomach lurched, anticipating a new emergency that required me to toss aside what I was doing to battle a more urgent fire.
My right eyelid twitched incessantly, a constant reminder that my body was in fight-or-flight mode, even when I was seated in a comfortable chair in an air-conditioned office in a first world country.
My “to-do” list was more than one page, single-spaced. Despite long hours and valiant attempts to tackle the tasks at hand, I’d cross something off, only to replace it with three new items that popped up in the meantime.
My tolerance for torture met its limit in 2021, when I had an epiphany. If things didn’t change, there’d be no need to address my mental health, because I wouldn’t be around to manage it. Something had to give.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, I made the decision to step away from the system that no longer aligned with me or my mental health.
What’s interesting about that decision is that once it was made, unexpected career pathways appeared, pathways that included a new community of supportive souls, several outlets for creative expression, and opportunities for a new life as a writer.
Throughout 2021 and early 2022, I participated in an online certification course taught jointly by Dougall Fraser and Radleigh Valentine, which culminated in an in-person weekend intensive and graduation ceremony that I’ll never forget. We dove into mental health topics such as forgiveness of self and others, tools to develop self-confidence, confronting negative self-talk and pessimism, emotional healing of past wounds, cultivating problem-solving skills, and reclaiming the freedom to express ourselves authentically.
Many of the participants in that course are my very good friends to this day. We support each other through the ups and downs of our lives, knowing that the bonds we forged were brought forth in trust, mutual respect, and love.
In that same year, Dougall Fraser invited me to an event focused on personal and spiritual growth, which happened to be co-sponsored by Hierophant Publishing. Hierophant set up a book publishing contest that was open to event attendees who submitted a book proposal on a topic related to personal development.
I didn’t realize it at the time because I was simply trying to confront and balance my personal psychological health, but all the work I’d put in to address my emotional well-being over the past two years leading up to that event turned out to be the basis for a book proposal about mental health, shared through the lens of William Shakespeare. My idea was that Shakespeare’s enduring works are a roadmap for how to create art and manage mental health during a time of extreme societal upheaval and personal tragedy.
I won the contest and wrote the book with the help of Hierophant’s wonderful developmental editor, Hilary Smith. It was published on April 15, 2025: Shakespeare’s Guide to Living the Good Life: Life Lessons for Comedy, Tragedy, and Everything in Between.
Each chapter is a journey through one of Shakespeare’s most notable plays, sprinkled with Elizabethan trivia, a nod to what Shakespeare might have been experiencing when he crafted those works, and inspirational enactments to explore mental health topics such as persistence, forgiveness, self-actualization, authentic communication, compassion, and communing with nature.
For example, in the chapter about thinking for ourselves, based on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, we learn about Brutus’s folly of succumbing to peer pressure and disregarding his own internal compass. Brutus’s failure to follow his personal North Star not only led to the murder of Caesar, but to the deaths of Brutus and the co-conspirators who tempted him with their lies. This chapter includes several enactments to help us stay strong in the face of peer pressure and destructive outside influences; with practice and intention, we can work toward self-actualization.
For a free preview, check out my earlier Substack post, which includes the full introductory chapter to the book.
If you’re looking for tools to support your mental health, you’re a Shakespeare fan, or you want to know how the political and social climate of Elizabethan England feels a lot like our chaotic modern world, Shakespeare’s Guide to Living the Good Life is available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook formats.
Thanks for supporting a new author and Happy Mental Health Awareness Month!