I don't know what to write. I feel like I failed Camp NaNoWriMo because I didn't finish my manuscript. I feel like I am just a hack because I am just not able to go out there and make sales. I have never been good at sales. I am the type of person who just makes things and gives them away. I know I want a career in writing. I know that I have been working towards this for pretty much all of my life.
I also know that being disabled fucked up a lot of my life goals. I wanted to go back to school and get my teaching certificate. That got hosed. I wanted to just work in a school as a teaching assistant. That got hosed. Now I look at the situation with my books and I break out into a cold sweat and feel sick over the idea of being on social media. I almost get the feeling that the walls are closing in on me when I think about aggressively promoting my work.
I'm on medication for this. But it doesn't resolve the issues. It just takes the edge off of them so that I can at least stomach watching what other people are posing on social media. I feel like I'm nothing and nobody. It is awful. I know that this is because my brain is at a bad place right now.
A few days ago was the anniversary of my uncle's murder. It's been twenty something years. I still remember the way kids at school reacted to the Inside Edition expose on the crime. I had peers talking about how 'cool' it was that a teacher got murdered. No body except a few very close people in my life knew it was my uncle they were talking about. I wasn't allowed to talk about it, even with the school counselor because my parents were convinced that we'd become part of the media circus.
I was keeping a journal again by then. But I didn't really write about it because I had already had the embarrassment of [redacted] and [redacted] each deciding to pick up my journal and read it aloud to the study hall much to my humiliation. I just did my best to keep my head down and not be noticed. I was depressed and struggling with life at that point in time.
At seventeen, I was a shy, awkward girl who didn't talk very much. My peers decided it was a great idea to vote me most unique in our class. They thought it was wonderful fun. I didn't because these were the same people who had done everything from spit on me to shove me into lockers for not being just like them. One of them literally attempted to light me on fire. It was a mildly traumatic experience. Of course, my bar for mildly traumatic is far higher than most peoples' because of the level of trauma that I have lived through.
If I had been a 'normal' student then I would have rated that having someone trying to light me on fire in the middle of physics class and the teacher ignoring it rate pretty highly as traumatic. But the fact that they didn't succeed and the teacher eventually did say something once they saw that the lab bench immediately behind me was covered in burning alcohol made it less traumatic than the months of sexual assault I endured with a boyfriend that I had two years before.
I don't know why, but all of this stuff from high school has been coming up over the last few months. It has seeped into my writing and it's been impossible to write fiction. My Camp NaNoWriMo project was supposed to be an erotic fiction piece. I got two pages written and it completely changed into my writing about my personal history. I'm not at the half full point of the notebook. I am not sure what my word count is. I gave up on logging that and writing time daily because I wasn't writing daily. Depression and mixed episodes fuck up your plans. But I'm going to finish this damn manuscript this month.
No comments:
Post a Comment