For Jack Taylor, writing his first book wasn’t going to be about fame and fortune, and it wasn’t going to be anything less than honest.
Taylor, a former Stratford resident now living in Collingwood, recently published The Black, The White, and The Grey, a recounting of his journey through the peaks and valleys of dealing with mental illness. The book of poetry is split into three parts, which Taylor says was done to mimic the stages many people go through when fighting with the disease.
“It’s a metaphor for bipolar disorder in that each section represents a different part of it,” he said. “The black is like the deep, dark depression that people describe suffering, while the white is like the euphoria that some associate with manic episodes. The gray represents the numbness that comes in between the other two, so all of the poems fit into one of those three categories and are placed into each section accordingly.”
Taylor has been writing since his teen years and says much of the work in The Black, The White, and The Gray is an accumulation of more than a decade’s worth of his poetry. Some reviews online have stated that the poems speak to difficult feelings many encounter and range from the despair of addiction to the pain of a loved one’s death. Taylor said it was the happier parts of the book that were the most difficult for him to write.
“It’s supposed to be the stuff at the end of the tunnel, and I think it’s easy to write about pain and loss and grief,” he said. “Where I struggled was writing about the good days because you get less inspiration when nothing’s going wrong. But I hope that if someone who is struggling is reading this, that they don’t feel like they’re alone. Somebody understands what you’re going through and it’s not wrong or abnormal. I wrote this book because I want to help at least one person see that.”
While he struggled in writing about the good days, he said one of the most difficult things about this process he had to face was the sense of feeling guilt over his condition.
“I think the hardest thing was always feeling guilty for being depressed, and I think the guilt is actually worse than the depression,” he said. “That stems from knowing that someone always has it worse than you. I didn’t have a rough upbringing and I don’t have a sad origin story like Batman to draw back on, so I would ask myself where do I get off feeling so crappy? I needed to let myself not feel guilty for feeling how I did.”
The experience of becoming a published author is a dream come true for Taylor and he’s looking forward to being able to hear stories from people who’ve read the book and can relate to his words. The book published in September, so he’s hoping that time will help get it some traction – and help people to understand they’re not taking the journey alone.
“Everything in the book is related to and draws from each other, so if you were to just read one part of it you might wonder what the hell is wrong with me,” he joked. “But it gets brighter, and that’s the point of the narrative: things get better if you work through them. Just keep going towards the light at the end of the tunnel.”
