So much to say! I’m not sure where to start… I haven’t really done any journaling since my unfinished post below from almost two weeks ago. I didn’t have a game plan in place for travel so when the traveling began things slowly started to unravel until I finally decided to just put everything on pause.

While away my ONE thing turned into THREE things…

My Original ONE Thing

If you skip down to my unfinished blog post you’ll see that I’ve gotten a lot done towards what I originally set out to do. Today is a good day to reboot everything because I’m pretty fresh from therapy. That’s relevant because I’m planning on doing the in-person peer support group at the same location that I do my therapy. The director of the center was there today and I got to lock in the best time to do the support group. The next step will be publicizing it to find some interested parties and then setting the first meeting.

Two of the three things I wanted to complete will be done after having the first meeting (an off and online support group for foreigners in Taipei). The third thing, a custom management system for people with bipolar, will probably have to get articulated a little more clearly for me to be able to call it “done”. What I think this will become is what I used to call a “bipolar protocol sheet”. This would be a simple document with everything you know about yourself for how to best manage yourself.

The Evolution of my ONE Thing

I’ve created this statement to represent my overarching ONE thing. The thing that embodies everything I think about, do, eat and breath.

Create antifragile self-sustaining and self-propagating systems for personal and societal development.

I’ve been using bipolar and mental health as the lens to view my ONE thing through since January first. Since I’ve almost completed the goals I had set out for myself I need to articulate what’s next. I will do that in a more robust fashion soon, but it will essentially be activities surrounding building my mental health app/service. I need to lay out some measurable and tangible tasks/goals for myself. On the train ride to therapy today I began outlining the features/benefits that I would like the app/service to have. There is a suite of things I’d like it to do. Once I articulate these things I’ll take the most marketable one and try to build something around it.

My SECOND and THIRD Things

What I found interesting about expanding out into additional “one” things while traveling is that… it kind of stressed me out. I had had such a nice run focusing on only ONE thing that when I got back and had a couple more things… I kind of wanted to get rid of them! That’s a weird feeling for me because I’m normally the kind of A MILLION THINGS! lol I always liked pointing out how Richard Branson’s Virgin Group had so many different irons on the fire. Perhaps I’ll one day have several irons on the fire, in a positive way, but for now, I like that I’m trying to stay more focused.

My SECOND thing is this business collective idea that I’ve been floating since the summer. I’ll have to spend a little time articulating the exact idea but in summary, it would, in its first form, be a collection of some of my close friends all leveraging their creative, social, skills and knowledge in ways that made the whole of us greater than the sum of us.

My THIRD thing is establishing my taiji business. Creating regular content, organizing seminars and teaching a regular class here in Taiwan.

Closing Thoughts

It feels good to be back! Back in Taiwan (home) and back to journaling. I want to give a quick shout out to having serious anxiety for a few days this week which has finally passed. Whenever I come back to Taiwan from the US I’m always hit with some kind of mood disorder (depression, anxiety, etc.) I need to do a better job planning for it. My therapist asked me about my expectations being off, and I agreed with that. I knew I’d be off, but I thought I’d be at like 70% capacity a day after landing where 15%, or lower, is closer to reality. I probably just crossed 70% yesterday or today!

Alright… I need to wrap this up and post it. I’ll be going to the MOX Happy Hour tonight so I won’t have time to polish this later.

HA! While looking for a picture to attach to this post I realized I was on my first podcast a little while ago. I’m having trouble finding a link to it though… I’ll post it tomorrow (if I remember!) It was with “Who Are We To Podcast” but it doesn’t look like the episode was uploaded yet.

Day 46 & 47: Pausing the ONE Thing Experiment (This was unfinished sitting in Google Docs)

Things have totally deteriorated from what I set out to do from day 1!

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’ve gotten really close to completing what I originally set out to do in the 108 days. It was these 3 things:

• An in-person bipolar support group for foreigners in Taipei
• An online bipolar support group for foreigners in Taipei
• A guide for creating a bespoke management system for bipolar disorder

On top of those three things I had some content producing goals, but those weren’t the main focus. The main focus was to make sure I was moving things forward with those three things. Here’s where I am with those three things.

An in-person bipolar support group for foreigners in Taipei

I’ve made a lot of progress here. I’m going therapy at the Community Services Center in Taipei and I’ve also gotten permission to host an in-person support group in their space. On top of that, I’ve been working with the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance to start an official international chapter in Taipei. Had I been better focused I would have made a trip to their offices in Chicago to talk about it in person! Actually… I still may be able to coordinate that… I’ll give it a shot!

Thinking about it, I also wanted to do a little more research about how to be a good facilitator for the groups… I’m sure I can get information about that from DBSA.

An online bipolar support group for foreigners in Taipei

For this I was going to simply use Facebook groups to begin with and expand into other platforms or resources as needed. I could, for example, become a moderator on some of the preexisting community forums, but a simple Facebook group will be enough for me to check this item off.

A guide for creating a bespoke management system for bipolar disorder

What I need to do for this is sit down and work through the guides that I’ve found and add whatever I think is lacking. My primary focus is going to helping people create support networks of friends, family, professionals and peers. The thing right after that would be plans for self care, management and crisis. What to do and who to contact in specific situations.

Thought Collection

I haven’t properly collected my thoughts in over a month! It’s something…