There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, 'It's okay to be an introvert, but I don't want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.

Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.

With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.

The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

When I talk to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient support groups, I take questions at the end. At one talk I was asked, "What's the difference between yourself and someone without mental illness?". At another talk I was asked, "How do you make the voices be not so mean?". I wish I knew.

Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.