Dear Reader,
The chaos of the holidays is hitting full force. I've been madly making gifts and getting ready to bake a ton of cookies. We've been cleaning and trying to get the apartment ready for Yule. I realized yesterday there's no way I am going to keep up with blogging until things settle down. Which looks like that'll be in about three weeks, if I'm lucky.
Dear Reader,
I'll be the first to say it, it is heavy reading and the language is a bit ponderous at times. At the same time, if you're looking to write kinky smut, you get to have a view into the workings of one of the most infamous minds through his writings. It can inspire some scenes or characters with just a cursory reading. If one takes the time to actually chew through the heavy dialogue, there's the reward of understanding just what motivated the Marquis De Sade and an opportunity to take elements from this and apply them to your characters.
Of all the works that the Marquis De Sade wrote, perhaps the most infamous is his novel Justine: Philosophy in the Bed Room. It examines gender roles, power dynamics, and the practical application of various kink oriented concepts. This is not a book for the faint of heart. It is also a product of its time. As a result, there are elements that translate really badly to the modern mindset of readers. If you take the book and examine it as a work of its time and place it into context, you can see just where the Marquis De Sade was standing on the matters of human rights, sexuality, and consent. Again, I warn you, this does not fit the Risk Aware Consensual Kink paradigm.
The collected works of the Marquis De Sade is not only useful to people who are writing erotica that has a darker edge to it. It can also be useful in writing legit torture scenes for characters in horror stories. The Marquis De Sade had a brilliant mind for inventing scenes that are blood chilling. Given his reputation, it begs the question how many of the scenes that he created for his entertainment in his writings did he put to the test. It also leaves the question of what did he choose to leave out because he decided it was too much.
It was a fascinating and horrifying read all at the same time.
I'm just not sure what to write today. I am so tired and run down. And we're still at the beginning of the holiday season. SAD is not my friend. I am in the uncomfortable position of buying stuff for everybody, which makes my anxiety spike. Never mind the anxiety that I have over this entire time of year to begin with. I worry that I'm going to offend someone if I give them the wrong gift. I worry that my gifts will be insufficient (especially if they're home made). I worry that I don't show enough holiday cheer and that I'll be subject to people attempting to forcibly cheer me up. (It's happened in the past, it was a rotten experience that I don't wish onto my worst enemy.) And there's a boatload of trauma surrounding this time of year.
Basically, the holidays suck for me because my brain can't get past the shit of the past to be able to enjoy the present. As this is going on, my kids are growing and I feel like I'm missing out on making special memories with them because I am just too screwed up in the head to do stuff like make tons of cookies to give away and decorate to the point that it's almost ostentatious. Throw in my memory issues and it's hard for me to recall the previous years and what the kids enjoyed. It's awful and I feel guilty for things like not being able to remember my sons' first real yule celebration and what toys they loved the most.
I kinda hate this time of year. I try to hide it. I try to keep a pleasant face. But this time of year stresses me out, makes me depressed, and I have a lot of anger surrounding it based on past events. It's a heavy weight to carry and try to act like nothing's wrong. Because the moment the kids suspect that something's not right with me, they get super anxious and stuff. It's exhausting. I kinda wish I could just turn it all off and not feel anything over the next month or so. But I know that is a bad way to cope, so I have to find other ways to deal with it.
Dear Reader,
I keep talking about book seven of this series but then I realize I forget to post links to the books that are on the market right now. I have this series of books (The Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar) and a mystery novella out under my name. I also have a series of religious books for a small goddess oriented faith that I am apart of out under a pen name as well as a book on the psychic arts. Take a look at the list below. Maybe you'll find something interesting.
The Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar
Vol 1. The Dragon's Daughter
Vol 2. The Dragon Child of Evandar
Vol. 3 Shadow Fall
Vol. 4 Shades of Twilight
Under my pen name Brythwen Sinclair:
Rose Petals: A Filianic Psalter
A Year with Déa: A Filianic Book of Meditations
Garlands of Grace: Filianic Rosary Meditations
Drowning in Light: A Mystic's Notebook
The Unabridged Filianic Calendar Devotional
The Clear Recital: The Children of Déa Version
The Veiled Witch's Ritual Book, Vol. 1: Filianic Rituals and Rites
The Veiled Witch's Ritual Book, Vol. 2: A Lokean Devotional
The Veiled Witch's Handbook for Psychics: A Practical Guide to Divination and the Psychic Arts
I'm beginning to feel like the freewriting exercise that is the Morning Pages is an exercise in futility. I tend to complain and write about trauma instead of writing about anything relating to this blog or anything more interesting. I recognize that I have a boatload of trauma that I'm working through but I feel like it's just word vomit of the most unpleasant nature when I get these posts done. It's frustrating because I want to be writing about other things.
I am still stuck on book seven. I haven't touched it in months. It is a combination of depression and frustration that's been keeping that one in a holding pattern. I'm depressed because I am struggling to make sales with these books. And I'm frustrated because the final scene for the book refuses to gel no matter what I do. I'm half tempted to just delete the whole damn document and start over again. That, however, will get me nowhere and leave me feeling even worse.
I keep trying to write poetry. It's not working out well. I am reminded that I am terrible at acronymic poetry. I don't even know why I started with that form but the stuff I'm producing is really bad. So, I put aside the poetry notebook and don't look at it until it's late in the month and I start swearing and remember my little goal of writing one poem a day. I used to be prolific in my poetry writing. Now, it barely happens. Beloved says it's because of my depression. I don't know if it's that or if I just kinda got frustrated that I couldn't do anything with it and sort of gave up.
I want to write an epic poem on par with Beowulf. I know, that's a huge target and it takes a lot of effort, but watching a friend of mine translate The Hobbit into Old English, I feel like I should be doing something equally challenging. Beloved argues that I am currently doing that by juggling a number of blogs, trying to run two businesses (my writing and my tarot reading stuff), and actively running my household (which means keeping tabs on a preteen and a teenager).
I miss the days where poems came to me easily. Now, it's like pulling hen's teeth and that makes me sad. I feel like I've lost something. I miss painting and drawing sketches of things like birds. I used to be more artistic and engaged but over the last several years, I just kinda gave things up. My plan for 2022 is to try to pick up those threads and get back into it. I think it'll help with my depression and mental illnesses if I was doing those things again. Art therapy is a thing, after all. Right now, I just am tired and frustrated. I'm not sleeping well and my anxiety is high because it is the holiday season. It sucks.
Dear Reader,
Here's a concept that may sound a little weird. Your protagonist is battling against the setting to accomplish their goal. Think of the dangers of extreme weather. An ice storm, for example, is a setting/event that creates dramatic tension, especially when at night. Your protagonist is left questioning if they have sufficient supplies to weather being cut off from civilization. They are wondering if tree limbs are going to fall on their shelter and if they're going to be without heat or power. Nothing is quite like the ominous noise of freezing rain pelting a window in dead quiet after the power goes out. Time ceases to have meaning in that moment until your protagonist has a source of light and, hopefully, a clock.
A hostile environment that the protagonist has to navigate has lead to some pretty interesting narratives. If one considers the movie Cast Away (featuring Tom Hanks and a volley ball), the entire narrative is heavily influenced by the environment. The interplay between Hanks's character and the environment is emotionally charged, which is projected into the character's interactions with the volley ball. The environment as the antagonist isn't just the thing of fiction, for in reading On Walden Pond, we find that the environment is fickle and even Henry D. Thoreau isn't immune to the challenges.
Many historical narratives of catastrophic environmental events are riveting because we see humanity pitting all of their skill and wit against the most merciless opponent, nature itself. We can follow the examples that we have from historical record and put our characters into positions where they are struggling to survive with nothing but the goods in their hands, the clothes on their backs, and their wits. Such stories can be triumphant or tragic, depending on how the author chooses to write the narrative.
Dear Reader,
First, I owe you an apology for this post being two days late. Life has been exceedingly hectic here and I've been struggling to keep up with everything. I find myself thinking that I am turning into a curmudgeon regarding the holidays because of all the stress and general stuff that needs to be done. That rant aside, let's take a look at honesty in your prose.
Honesty in poetry is relatively simple. Especially with blank verse. You can just spit out idea after idea and call it done. In prose, we're tempted to edit as we work. We are tempted to change the phrasing so that it isn't quite as raw and that can weaken your work. Now, I am not saying that you should not edit your work. Proper grammar and such are important. Making sure that your work flows in a reasonable way that makes it easy for your reader to get through is vital. But when in the editing process, take care on what you cut out of your work.
Emotional and psychological vulnerability is a rare thing in fiction and virtually non-existent outside of the genre of autobiography when it comes to non-fiction. Thus, when you write a scene that moves yourself to emotional response, no matter how much it may squick you, don't delete it. Rephrase it for clarity and polish it up for presentation. But do not remove the essence of the scene. You want your readers to feel that connection with your characters. This is part of the essential process of suspension of disbelief.
All great books manage to suspend disbelief. Usually, it is by way of gut wrenching emotional train wrecks and soaring beauty that makes the reader feel like they're part of the story. Keeping the emotional content in there keeps your readers hooked. The psychological component can give your readers empathy for your characters as they develop, suffer, and grow through the story arc. These two buttons for your readers' brains are excellent tools for you to deploy. Just keep the tension in the story even as you work through it all this way your tale doesn't drift apart before you're ready to end it.
I am desperately trying to catch up on work in a number of areas in my life. I feel a bit like Sisyphus. My kids are clamoring to get the holiday decorations out and up. At the same time, they're trying to dodge doing housework to clean up the apartment so that we can do so. One of my sons is struggling with school work right now and I'm trying to help him get caught up, but that eats time that I should also spend on cleaning up the apartment and putting laundry away.
I try to get my writing done and get my work in on Keen but that's not going too well either. My NaNoWriMo project still isn't finished. I'm trying to wrap it up so that I can move on to something else but it's just not working. I've fallen behind, again, on my blogging. (Sorry about that, folks, stuff like being stuck in the city all day because of a dentist appointment and errands keeps happening.) I haven't touched book seven of the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar since last June because of how busy and difficult things have been.
To say the least, I am thoroughly and utterly vexed with all of this situation. I'm trying so hard to get back to my daily work habits and things just keep getting in the way. It's making me angry and a bit depressed (on top of the Seasonal Affective Disorder fun that's going on right now). I try to think of solutions to this and none of them have been working.
And we still haven't gotten the holidays stuff figured out. I'm panicking a little bit over that one because I don't know what to give some very important people in my life. Usually, I have this settled by the beginning of Autumn. Because this year has been hellish, that didn't happen. The handmade gifts are just not going to happen this year because I can't knit or crochet fast enough to get things done in that length of time. Cookie-mageddon may be happening or I may not have the energy for making six batches of cookies. The kids were helpful in coming up with ideas but they want nothing to do with the cooking process. Again, vexing is the word for it.
I'm trying to catch up but the more I do the more behind I get it seems. I kinda hate the holidays because it adds more pressure on top of everything else.
Dear Reader,
The works of great fiction are filled with all of these details that can be distilled down to a simple set of rules.
1. Great characters must have more than the goal of the plot to motivate them. They need to have depth and multiple dimensions of interest. If that is not in place, they're little more than a painted puppet being moved across a screen. This can be entertaining but it won't really draw your reader in.
2. Great characters interact with their setting as if it were real, because to them it is. You can't conveniently ignore the major problems that you developed in the setting chapters before. Nor can you ignore the major benefits that you set up chapters before. These things need to carry forward because they will have a continuing impact upon the character. Even an interaction with a throw away side character can have major implications for your main character's development.
3. Settings must be more than a mere backdrop for the story. They need to be complex and have dimensional qualities that are going to pull your reader into the story. A simple tree can be ignored but a mighty oak gets a little more attention. Describe your settings as if you are walking through them yourself. The details that you note are going to be the ones that your readers would likely note as well. Don't forget the five senses as you are describing your setting. Many people stick to visual descriptions but you can provider greater realism in your story the more you incorporate other elements of sensory input.
If you follow these three rules, your character will develop and become more real to your reader as the book goes on. This sense of the character being real is what will make your book more memorable and special to your readers. And, there is one last rule that is very important. There are no rules on how to write your own special book. Do what works best for you. Focus on building your own voice. While these three rules can be helpful, they are a guideline not a hard and fast rule of writing like that i before e except when ... oh, you know that one already.
The holiday season brings out a great deal of stress for everyone. I've been trying to clean up the apartment and get stuff ready to start decorating for Yule. The kids have been actively resisting this concept and I swear they are throwing more stuff on the floor than usual. It's really frustrating. My kitchen is a disaster because of NaNoWriMo and my having problems with panic attacks again. (The two are not connected, they just have been happening at the same time.)
NaNoWriMo ate my time by my being sucked into writing my book. I have hit 50k and I'm still not done with my plot. Now I am working into December to try to finish this blasted thing so I can send it off to my friend who is really interested in the short series of books I've written featuring his RPG setting. It's been an honor and a lot of fun to play in his sandbox. It helps that I actually got to participate in the LARP version as the game was going through Beta testing. That gave me a feel for how things work and it gave me an idea of how the mechanics would unfurl in a story. (My friend is a brilliant storyteller and writer. I'm really happy to be working with him.)
The panic attacks have not been so much fun. A guy that assaulted me is out of prison. I've been on edge and worried that he's going to somehow find me. Never mind that it's been almost twenty years since I lived at the location that he knew where to find me. I hear word from friends out in the big city west of us that he's skulking around in neighborhoods that his ex-girlfriends live and it makes me really uneasy. Those websites that let you look up a person's information if you have their name makes it all to easy to stalk them. Nothing unpleasant has happened, but I keep having panic attacks and nightmares that he's going to come to hurt and/or kill me.
Nothing like having a polyamourous relationship go wrong in a horrific way and then finding your third just got out of prison. You're left wondering are they going to try to find you. Are they going to try to destroy what you've got going on in your life now because you kicked them out of the relationship? It's just ugly from front to back. I never should have gotten involved with that guy. But, Beloved and I were fooled by his game and he did some damage before we got wise to what was going on. That's the problem I'm having. I'm afraid that C- is going to show up on my door step and expect us to welcome him like nothing happened. And when that door gets shut in his face, I'm afraid that C- is going to cause trouble because he's a petty and manipulative fuck.
Beloved assures me that C- has no idea where we live. He assures me that because C- is on probation, he's not going to go around and start causing trouble. I'm just anxious and still traumatized from the crap that C- pulled. So, I go around my day getting spacey and uneasy because of my c-ptsd. That makes it hard to function. Then I have panic attacks, which makes it hard to function. And I'm dealing with seasonal depression and the stress of the holidays too. All of this is bullshit and I don't wish it on anyone.
I am depressed right now. It interferes with my functioning on a number of levels. It really messes with my ability to concentrate and come up with creative work. I know that I promised all y'all an update to the serial stories. I feel real bad that I can't even remember where I was going with the plot of any of them right now. I just have a blank in my head where that plotline was. I look at my notes and they just strike me as gibberish. They make no sense to me as I read them. Sure, there's an internal logic to them but my depressed brain just can't grasp that logic and take the bullet points to paragraphs.
I'm going to try, going forward, when I get caught in the grips of depressive spells or other mental health struggles due to my being disabled to blog about it here (and on my other blogs). It is less about the fact that I want to wave a flag and get attention and pity for my situation and more about I'm trying to keep you abreast of what is going on over on this end of the internet. I'm trying to grind my way through these spells and post content that's genuine and, hopefully, interesting.
You may have picked up from my Morning Pages posts that I have a lot of trauma that I'm working through. I've been in some form of therapy for most of my adult life. I've a diagnosis of complex-posttraumatic stress disorder and bipolar II, with a side of seasonal affective disorder. We're entering into the time of year that is really hard for me. There's a lot of trauma-versary dates coming up. There's the stress of being estranged from my toxic side of the family. I'm still mourning the deaths of my beloved grandparents who basically taught me how to be a decent person despite all the crap going down in my parents' house. Between those two facts, the holidays suck more than the fact that we're all basically forced to listen to Bing Crosby 24/7 whenever we go out in public until sometime around the middle of January.
This blog is not going to turn into a disgorging of trauma. I've got my therapy journals for that work. But it may come up from time to time because that's what's on my mind. I'm going to do my best to keep that rambling to the Morning Pages. My mental functioning right now is impaired. I'm exhausted despite a full night of sleep last night. I'm terrified that there's going to be horrible consequences for this post. And I feel like I should just give up on everything because I feel like nothing's ever going to get better. Depression is a beast. Medication helps, it keeps me from being at that place where I've got suicidal thoughts running around in my head. But 'happy pills' don't make you happy. They just take the edge off of the sword stuck in your heart. You're still pumping out emotional blood and wounded, but it doesn't cut deeper than it already has.
The esteemed Chuck Tingle calls this 'the call of the lonesome train'. It's a pretty good metaphor for this feeling. You feel alone and like there's no hope. Because I'm a fighter by nature, I just grimly put up my shield and push forward through the dragur of trauma memories and fucked up brain chemistry. Eventually, I'll get through this. It's just going to be ugly and painful in the process.
Seasonal affective disorder sucks. It's got a shitty acronym: SAD. It screwed up your brain chemistry and strips you of your will to do anything. It's just part of the awful genetic grab bag that I got when I was born and I want to chuck it into the Sun. Right now, I want to just laydown and sleep until my brain is fixed, but it doesn't work that way. I feel like everything's rather hopeless. I kinda want to cry, even though I don't know if this is because of SAD or because the SAD is triggering emotional flashbacks to the abuse that I dealt with as a kid. Either way, it's bullshit.
I keep trying to cheer myself up. I keep failing. It's making me feel like Sisyphus. I can't eat my feelings because I have diabetes. I can't attempt to use the mood booster of any form of sex because when I'm depressed, sex triggers flashbacks to multiple sexual assaults that I've suffered. My hobbies feel like a waste of time and resources. I can practically hear my parents telling me that I should stop wasting my time of idle bullshit and get back to work. I can almost hear them telling me that my writing is a waste of resources and valuable time and I should get back to work.
When they realized that I managed to write my first novel while I was in high school they changed their damn tune from 'this is a waste of time, get back to work' to 'go publish and make us money.' When I went off to college, they were sure that it was going to land me a good job and I could write as a second job. They looked at me and saw a meal ticket. It wasn't the first time they objectified me.
Mom was trying to marry me off to people she met via telephone sales. The night before my wedding to Beloved, she was trying to convince me to call it all off because she had a rich Texan who was looking for a wife who could cook. I was a brood mare in their eyes that they wanted to auction off. My life had no meaning beyond that to them. They were furious that I left N-, though they put on a decent game face of being concerned when I told them what N- had done to me (for about 2 weeks). Then it turned into "You need to get over it." and "You need to stop saying these things about N-, that's slander. You're just doing it because you're mad at him."
Apparently rape and repeated sexual assault doesn't count as a legitimate reason to break up with someone and that you're not supposed to talk about it ever. As this is the time of year that most of those assaults happened, I've been dealing with flashbacks (mainly the emotional kind) and feeling horrible on top of the fact that SAD is screwing up my brain chemistry. So, I am depressed and anxious. I'm trying to do things that help but nothing seems to help.
I just feel like I should give up on it all. I don't have the spoons for the hustle culture of most indie authors. Being disabled makes that hard on a good day and all but impossible on a bad day. I don't even know what in hell I'm doing trying to convince people to buy my books. I keep finding myself thinking about the Communications instructor I had at college who told me that I was the worst student she had ever seen at attempting to write ad-copy and nothing I could do was going to convince her other wise. She said that I should just give up on the idea of making a career out of writing because I was too academic in my work and that my audience was going to be lost after the first sentence.
Kinda hard to recover from that. Especially on the heels of another instructor telling me to stop imitating E.A. Poe and write my own work. When people you respected and were outside of the abusive environment you grew up in tell you that you should just give up and focus on something else, it's fucking painful. Now I'm disabled and I can't just force my way forward. I sit here and see others have success and I'm glad for them but I wonder if the problem is I can't write ad copy and my work is just too boring for the audience. It's depressing.
Dear Reader,
We all have emotions. Some of them can get pretty intense. Instead of bottling those feelings up, grab a pen and a scrap of paper. Write down what comes to mind until you feel calm. By the end you might have a really gripping scene for a story, a powerful poem, or a pile or word vomit that you can just burn and feel better about. In any case, it's nifty to do this with these feelings because you're engaged in transmuting something that is purely in your head/heart into something physical.
You don't have to limit yourself to words. There are countless ways to express intense feelings through art. Some of my most active and intense paintings have come out of my trying to create my way out of a depressive funk and process psychological trauma. If your medium is clay, you can make some awesome sculptures. Heck, you could create a sculpture that represents the cause of your vexation and then destroy it. It's really cathartic to be honest.
The best thing about taking your emotions and creating things out of them is the fact that it's a safe way to express some things that society in general are squicked by. Intense anger is probably the biggest squick factor for a lot of people. Making art out of your feelings is cathartic and you end up with something pretty cool that you get to choose what happens with it. People can look at what you've made and have no idea what inspired it. They can debate until the cows come home just what your painting means, when all you were doing was throwing paint on the canvas until the urge to throw something finally went away. You don't have to tell them that was what was going on. You can just smile and keep it as your little secret.
Last week was chaotic. I was able to steal some time for writing but when ever I went to do blog work the kids kept interrupting me. It was vexing. And then there was the cooking for turkey day. And the drama of turkey day. It all served to remind me that I am really coming to dislike this damn season. It seems to heighten the selfish sense of entitlement that people have. It brings out the gluttonous tendencies of people who preach diet culture, because it's the holidays and it would be rude to turn down every single dish offered to you. And then there are the damn bell ringers trying to guilt you into giving them money for what's actually a scam.
Salvation Army is anti-LGBT+ and pretty much against anyone who isn't their flavor of Christianity. If I had a penny for every time I've had the thought of putting a bell ringer who is telling me that I don't have the charitable spirit of the holidays because I didn't give them all my loose change into a wall, I'd be rich beyond my dreams. If I had a penny for every time I had gotten looks for not heaping my plate with something from every dish on the table, I would be almost as rich. And we won't get into how much money I'd theoretically have if I had decided to 'just make nice' with some of my relatives because 'it's the holidays and you only get one family.'
If you're no onboard the cheerful train, you're scorned and reviled. You're told that you are what's wrong with the holidays. You are told that you're the one bringing down everyone's spirits because you're not joyfully singing along with Bing Crosby. Gods help you if you actually announce that you hate this time of year. Then you get people trying to convert you to liking it by love bombing you and attempting to learn the prefect present to bribe you with.
And oh boy does it get messy if you're not Christian. The cultural attitude that Christianity is the default for the US makes me want to put people through walls. I'm not a violent person despite the violence that I write into my books. But that attitude though. I've had a lot of bad experiences with people who waved the flag of Christianity and I'm doing what I can to protect my kids from it. I don't want my sons to worry about some asshole trying to light them on fire because they're not Christian. (It happened to me, I got even. The guy didn't mess with me again or start randomly flipping switched on equipment in the physics lab. A little electricity goes a long ways.)
Why in fuck can't people just let others celebrate their holidays in peace? Why is it that between now and the end of the year, you will find some of the most aggressive conversion campaigns going on? I don't know. I do know, however, that between people actively telling me that I and my family are going to be tortured for eternity because we don't believe in their god and businesses saying that they're only recognizing the Christian and (occasionally) Jewish holidays that it's all bullshit. It is a season that is actively hostile to non-Christians.
Only Easter is worse. Because there is no focus on gift giving but you get all the rest of the guilt trip about family stuff and how you should 'forgive' people who have done you wrong in horrible ways because they're family. It doesn't matter if you are still wounded, making them feel better about it is more important. I hate that. I'm so sick of holiday music. I'm so tired of the pressure to give the fanciest things. I'm disgusted with the gluttony as a recovered anorexic who happens to have diabetes. And I'm furious with the people who want to act like everything's 'normal' when there's still a goddamn pandemic going on.
/rant
Dear Reader,
It's a busy time of year right now. It's hard to find time to write, make art, or otherwise create something. This is where you have to get sneaky. Keep a mini-notebook with you to put down your ideas. Get a mini-sketchbook and one of those awesome pens that are 4 colors in one. (They make a 10 color variety but the barrel of the pen is HUGE.) When you have those odd idle moments that you are not working on something very important, indulge your creativity and sketch out a stick figure picture or write a silly limerick. Do things on a small scale in those stolen moment. Eventually, life will calm down and you can get back to your Great Work. You may find that the random bits you came up with in the stolen moments are useful and can be incorporated into it.
It's technically still morning so the title works, right? I'm not entirely sure what to write today. I feel badly that I didn't get pages done yesterday and Saturday. It was a rough weekend. I had to face some hard truths about life and I was emotionally done with the day about about noon. I'm still super upset about the fact that my vision issues (I have two astigmatisms in one eye and one in the other.) have rendered me a hazard on the road for night driving. The signs when the headlights hit them are so bright they temporarily blind me. When the headlights of other vehicles hit me, they temporarily blind me and I have to pull over to wait for a few minutes until I get my night vision back.
I asked the ophthalmologist I saw back at the beginning of the year if my progressively degrading night vision was somehow tied to the astigmatisms and they answered no. I went in for them to do an initial series of tests on my eyes to see if I have or am developing glaucoma. The night vision question is basically a matter of genetics and there isn't much that can be done about it. I'll be going back in to see this eye doctor sometime in February 2022. When I do, I'm going to ask if laser surgery can correct the astigmatism. I know that my aunt was developing cataracts in her eyes and had it done, the end result was just about complete 20/20 vision.
I'm depressed about the whole situation. I'm also kinda scared about the glaucoma thing. I've come to realize that I am terrified about the prospect of losing my vision. Way back about three years ago, my blood sugar numbers were real high and they had me functionally blind. Everything was blurry. Somehow, I managed to keep the household running. As my blood sugar got under control, the vision situation cleared up. But it was a terrifying experience.
I now have a resurgence of that fear that I'm losing my vision because of the astigmatism stuff. It doesn't help that I have an anxiety disorder, either. But, I feel like my world has gotten smaller and more limited again because I can't drive after dark. It's not like I have a lot of places to go at night. But during this time of year, I can't just take the car for the day and go do stuff. Because when it's time to pick up Beloved from work, the sun is down and it's pretty awful to be driving at night. It's even worse if it's raining or snowing. I feel defeated and like there's nothing I can do.
So, I sat down on the couch just to take a break because I had a stress headache. Next thing I know, I wake up two hours later and I'm two hours behind schedule after starting two hours ahead of schedule. This seems to be the theme of 2021. Sit down, work hard, and everything gets fucked up anyways. I am very frustrated and angry with myself. Which doesn't help anything at all.
I was raised in a household that taught me that self care was selfish, vanity, and morally bad for me to do. It was fine for other people but I was taking away from the collective good of the family by taking time to tend to my own needs. Same approach was taken towards food. If I wanted to eat, I ate last after everyone else at the table because my parents decided that I was a glutton. How much food I took was closely monitored and I'd be punished if I took more than a minimum amount (which seemed to get less as time went on). The line that I was told was that I was taking food out of my brothers' mouths and starving them every time I went to have a snack or eat more than that minimum amount I was allowed.
Bitterly, the rest of the family would get seconds and there'd be scraps left because my father would heap up his plate with dinner. I got that minimum first portion and that was it. The only exception was holidays and when we were eating somewhere aside from home. Even then, however, I got the evil eye if I took more than what I was usually allowed if we were at a restaurant. Then my parents wondered as I was in college why I had an eating disorder. They talked about how weird I was as a child that I would stand in the pantry and look at the food in the jars. When I started to finally learn how to eat properly, my parents talked about how I was getting fat. The commentary while I was pregnant was pretty awful too.
Now they wonder why I don't talk to them. When you're constantly being put down for just trying to meet your basic needs, you tend to not want to deal with the people who were giving you grief for it after you get away from them. When the line you hear constantly is that you're a bad person for having needs, you tend to want to run like hell from them at the first opportunities. Now, my family was poor as I was growing up and food was somewhat scarce. But, if my parents had swallowed their pride and actually got help, we'd have had more than enough food.
When the weather was nice, I took to sneaking out of the house to visit relatives who fed me. When it was harvest time, I'd wander the fields before they were brought in gleaning fresh peas to make my stomach stop growling. I'd go through the old apple orchard and eat wormy apples (cutting out the bad parts with my pocket knife). Or I'd liberate some of the produce from my grandparents' garden. My grandmother would joke that she knew that things were ripe when her 'rabbit' came visiting.
Diabetes has made food a fine line to walk. I struggle with the eating disorder again. I struggle with blood sugar numbers that climb high when I'm sick or stressed out. I've gotten bad advice from professionals that basically encouraged disordered eating. It makes it really hard to stick to the healthy eating habits that I was taught by Beloved over the course of a number of years before I could sit down with a sandwich and not feel guilty for eating all of it. I'm rambling and none of it is pleasant. I apologize. I've been stressed out over a number of things and am dreading lunch. That's why today's word vomit revolves around this. I'll try to come up with something more pleasant tomorrow.
Dear Reader,
I am doing NaNoWriMo again this year. I'm up to 41k and my word count goal is 60k. My problem is that I am a little over half through my plot arc for the darn book. I don't think I can wrap it up in 19k. Not a bad problem to have, but it is exasperating.
Book Seven is parked on the editing bench because I have to completely rewrite a few major sections. This is vexing but not as bad as when it looked like I had lost a third of the book (if not more). The plot went off the rails as I was working on it and now I have to trim back the story and try to get the major points of the plot back into line because the next book depends on it. I figure in a month or two, I will be at the line edits stage on this book.
I am in the planning stages of Book Eight. I don't think I am going to get it done next year if this year's shenanigans is any indication of how next year is going to go. The goal I am shooting for is 2023 holiday season as the release date for Book Eight. I don't have a title yet for Book Eight, but I'm not going to worry about that until I have the rough draft done.
Aside from the work that I have been doing on my fiction, a new non-fiction book just dropped this week. It is under my pen name Lady Brythwen Sinclair. It is a devotional guide for people who are devotees of the Norse god Loki. I have several other non-fiction books of a religious nature up on Amazon under that pen name. I also have another blog under that pen name that I'm trying to get back to updating on a daily basis again.
Here's the link to the devotional if you're curious:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LGWWS9N
And here's a link to the religious blog that I have under my pen name:
http://veiledwitch.blogspot.com/
Dear Reader,
Because I'm participating in NaNoWriMo, I am putting the three serial stories that are on here on hold until December. I know that it's been a long wait for more about the adventures of Halthor and more about just what Lady Al-Uzza is going to find when she reaches Acidavia. My poor health and ton of life getting in the way over the last several months made it really hard to work on this stuff. Even the pulpy science fiction story got lost in the shuffle. (I did, however, find when I was cleaning the original story of Angel and Dregan that dates back to 1998. Don't let Elon Musk fool you, I came up with the Neuralink as part of that story long before he started talking about the technology. I just have rephrased it as neural-link because I can't afford a lawyer if that guy decides to get snippy. I'll drop in bits of that original story as flashbacks in the current story as it goes forward.)
When December hits, I'm going to put the NaNoWriMo projects to bed and get back to work on here. It'll be a bit rough at first, but as I hit my groove it should even out.
Dear Reader,
I mentioned a while back that I was going to be combining the Flora & Fauna feature with the Settings feature in my weekly topics. What does this mean for you? Well, I hope to be hitting the following points going forward (provided life doesn't screw with me like it has over the last 48 hours):
I am issuing a formal invitation to you to join me in creating this dynamic world. It is as much yours as it is mine once the books are in your hands.
I don't know what to put down here. I feel like I failed yesterday because I didn't really get any writing done. I got some of my journal work finished but only about half over the course of the entire day. I was running on about 4 hours of sleep yesterday. Every time I tried to rest, construction noises were coming from the trailer park next door as contractors were fixing a busted bay window or working on other random stuff. My brain just was so scattered I couldn't focus.
At the same time, my anxiety wasn't doing so great. I've some relatives who are struggling with some really hard stuff and all I can do is stand on the sidelines and hope my advice is helpful. And then there's the thing that really has my anxiety going full bore. The man who sexually assaulted me back in 2003-2004 got out of prison. He's on parole. This means that I know he's being monitored seriously. At the same time, I'm terrified that he's going to come find me and hurt me again. It is bubbling at the back of my mind, this terror that C- is going to show up on my doorstep, force his way in, and assault me again.
Mind you, I have moved multiple times since then and I have a different phone number. Hell, I got married and have a new last name. Doesn't stop the irrational fear that he's going to use one of those websites to look people up and try to come after me. I keep telling myself that I'm safe but it feels like a lie. I keep telling myself he has no idea where I live or how to get ahold of me.
At the same time, I feel like on some level I'm morally complicit in the crime he committed to land himself in prison and the assaults that went unreported because I didn't break his neck when I had the opportunity. I feel like I bear some of the responsibility of his actions because I didn't report him to the police when he assaulted me. I feel like I bear some of the responsibility of his actions because I didn't put a butcher's knife into his chest when he raped me.
I know these feelings are irrational. I know that they're survivor's guilt. I can't shake them, though. I can repress feelings like a pro but when something like this comes along, they all fly out of the box like a Jack-in-the-Box from hell. The worst part of it all is the tremendous amount of shame that I feel over that whole deal. I feel like I should have known he was going to do it. I am a survivor of sexual assault multiple times over. I should have recognized the warning signs.
The problem is that he managed to hit my c-ptsd buttons and I spaced out. Memories of what happen come back to me in pieces. I have things that scare me for no 'real' reason. I know it's because my brain is protecting me from the violence he perpetrated on me. At the same time, I feel like I should have stabbed him to death when he crawled into my bed to assault me when he thought I was asleep. (At the time, I knew something wasn't right and was having flashbacks to the assaults that happened when I was in high school. The only way that I was able to fall asleep was with a knife under my pillow. When he assaulted me, I laid there gripping the knife frozen with fear, unable to bring myself to draw the blade and defend myself. On the flip side, he physically overpowered me a number of times, so that might have put me into greater danger. Either way, I still feel like I should have killed him when I had the opportunity.)
Dear Reader,
I've moved the Craft of Writing segment to Mondays because the weekends are just too full of family business for me to find time to type much of anything up. The best I manage is a grocery list most weekends. I'm trying to carve out time to get other things going but it's not working so well. Preamble made, let's move on to the planned elements of this post.
Free writing is a big thing for me. Some people call it a 'brain dump' and use it as a time to put down all the things running around in their mind. Other people don't exactly have a name for it but they use free writing to lay the ground work of future projects and develop nuggets of gold that will be dropped into future stories. It's a combination of the two in my case.
It is pretty easy to get caught up in the process and lose about an hour of time to just rambling on the page. To prevent that, I bought myself a little sand timer. It's got bright pink sand in it (why not get the one with my favorite color in it, right?) and the time it runs for is ten minutes. I'm still getting the hang of writing out things like blog posts in ten minutes. My typing speed is slowly creeping up. So is the number of typos that I have to edit out. But, using the sand timer to keep me on task really helps.
I force myself to keep working as much as I may want to dive into a research rabbit hole to learn everything the internet has to offer about some obscure thing. It restricts how long I have to work and, as such, opens up time for me to get other writing projects done or at least making some headway on them. It also helps me get a bit more control over my schedule. Timed free writing is some days the easiest bit of timed writing. Other days, I feel like I should just write "I hate this." for the entire time limit because I can't think of anything. (Usually, those days, I'm not fully awake and am still on my first cup of coffee.)
On the whole, I highly recommend free writing as a tool to get ideas out on the page. And I really strongly encourage timed free writing (it doesn't have to be ten minutes) to help you focus on what you're working on and avoid losing time for other projects and responsibilities. After all, you don't want to be in the position I was last week when I wasn't using my timer and the kids were asking me when I was going to do the dishes. That was a little awkward.
I do not have enough coffee in my body to make my brain work at 100%. I might be a bit dependent on it now. Coffee is a comfort 'food' for me. At college, I suppose we drank it by the gallon. Good coffee, bad coffee, instant coffee ... it didn't matter, we drank it to power our way through all night study sessions, wake up after said sessions, and keep moving through the day. I supplemented my prodigious coffee intake with soda as well. It was a common sight to see me bolting across campus to class with a bottle of soda in hand and my backpack bouncing on my shoulder.
You'd think that I had a number of bottles of soda explode when I opened them after such treatment but it only happened once. And the situation was so ridiculous that my instructor was laughing too hard to continue lecture for a moment. There I was, sliding into my usual seat in the front row on the extreme right about five minutes late for lecture. I had slept through my morning alarm and missed breakfast. So, on my way through the building to class, I paused at the campus book shop to buy a bottle of soda and a big ol' bag of gummy bears. I then ran up three flights of stairs. (It was a minor miracle that I didn't trip and die.)
I got to the classroom during a pause in instruction as the professor was writing stuff on the blackboard. I snuck in and slid into my seat. As I did so, I attempted to be stealthy about opening my morning wake up beverage. The bottle hissed for a bit. Thinking it was safe, I then fully opened the bottle. A plume of soda went up into the air and landed in the open bag of gummy bears instead of hitting the floor or going all over me. The instructor had turned at the sound of my releasing the pressure off of the soda bottle to say something to me about it. She watched the minor drama unfold and my look of utter dismay at the cola soaked gummy bears. Then she started laughing. A few of my classmates looked at me in confusion.
Once lecture resumed, I thought I was safe. On my way out of the classroom, the instructor stopped me and said, "You really need a more nutritious breakfast than candy and soda." I blushed and stammered something about not having time to stop at the dormitory's cafeteria. Then she said, "Well, next time, make it a smaller bottle of soda this way you can drink it from the bag if it happens again." I regularly had similar mishaps and I think I got a reputation among the faculty and staff of where I attended college as the one to watch for a chuckle. The times where my clumsiness made me into a bit of a buffoon were plenty. The times where I narrowly avoided disaster despite my clumsiness were equally frequent.
I am attempting to complete this page in ten minutes. I have this nifty little sand timer that is exactly ten minutes long. It's got bright pink sand inside it and the kids want to play with it all the time. I keep it up on a higher shelf so that it doesn't go missing when I'm looking to use it. They are, however, getting taller and that tactic isn't going to work for much longer.
I'm really not sure what to write about here today. I feel badly that I haven't blogged in so long. I fell guilty about it, to be honest. I don't feel like these morning pages really count. Still, I'm trying so that has to count for something.
I'm still working on NaNoWriMo. My word count is currently 33k and change. I'm at about the halfway mark for my goal. I will confess that I am cheating a little bit because I started this project last month. That, however is my work-around for the chaos that losing a week around Thanksgiving is going to cause. My kids were off from school yesterday so I didn't get much writing or anything else that I wanted to do done. Now that they're at school, I'm forcing myself to stick to my damn schedule that I put together way back in January to try to hit all of my writing goals for the day.
I can't spend all day working on my NaNoWriMo project when I have blogs to update, other books to finish, and housework to do. I'd like to just sit and write on my NaNoWriMo project until the story is complete but it's not going to happen. I'm still debating taking my laptop with me to Thanksgiving dinner. The polite side of me says that would be a terrible idea and very rude. The rest of me says that it's away to get more work done.
I'm probably going to discuss it with Beloved and get his thoughts on it. I finished the non-fiction project that I was stuck on for a few weeks. It's currently churning its way through the publishing process at KDP. When I reviewed it on-line, it looked good. I ordered a proof copy to stick on my shelf. I will be ordering another copy of a different non-fiction book that I wrote because my proof copy has gone MIA. I just want this little book I wrote to be helpful to people. There's a lot of confusion on how to worship and work with Loki (one of the deities that I am heavily involved with in my spiritual life) and I wrote a devotional to help clear up some of the confusion and give people a starting point in forging their own devotional path.
I don't know how well it is going to be received. I'm going to just hope it works out well. I'm not going to hang my hat on it being a great big success. If I sell a few copies, I'll be happy. The hard part is getting back into my tarot reading stuff. Everything's been so up in the air, that my side project of reading tarot cards for cash has been on hold for literally months. Beloved says that it counts as my losing money when it comes to considering the income questions around it. I just don't know. It feels like an excuse to say that my brain is too screwed up right now to play around with pretty painted cards and tell people what they show me. I, however, have been feeling that way about my brain being screwed up and keeping me from writing.
Mental illness sucks.
I hate being disabled. My brain doesn't want to work right half the time. I'm tired because of my medications and the fact that I haven't slept well in years. (The sleep situation has been particularly bad for the last few months and I can't figure out why.) I've lived through so much traumatic crap that I've been told by a forensic psychologist that I read as a person who has come out of a warzone. It didn't do me much good to hear that. Especially considering that I was holding stuff back when I was doing some of the testing because I was afraid there were going to be problems.
Here I am, a little over a decade later, still disabled and still miserable. Sure, I've got medication to even out my bipolar and to control my panic attacks. Happy pills, however, is a misnomer for what this shit does. It just clamps down on the feelings and lets you get through the day. Sometimes people I used to be friends with made jokes about how I must be having a good time because I was on so many psychoactive medications. I smiled, I nodded, and restrained the urge to punch them in the face.
Then the diabetes hit because I was on the psychoactive drugs long enough that it popped up. Yeah, there was a genetic predisposition towards it but I wasn't on track for developing it until after I was on Seroquel and Geodon for almost seven years. Diabetes is a side effect of antipsychotic medications. Antipsychotic medications are what they use to stabilize the mood of people with bipolar disorder. I was fucked from the word go on this situation. So, now, I take handfuls of medication at various times of the day because of my brain chemistry being screwed up and my pancreas slowly degrading. It's scary and depressing because when ever I have to get my medications tweaked, I get afraid that there's going to be some kind of awful side effect.
My old psychologist was a "nice" person. Who didn't listen to me when I said that I was having problems because of the medications. The solution wasn't to investigate other options but to pump more of the antipsychotics into my system. By the time I had gotten to my current psychologist I was on a combo of the maximum dose of Seroquel and Geodon. I was a walking zombie barely able to function because of all the side effects. Fortunately, my current psychologist took one look at the situation and said "Hell no" and switched me over to a different medication regimen that really improved my quality of life. Unlike the last people I was seeking, this guy takes what I have to say about the situation going on and listens to me, then explains what options there are for solving the problem.
It's still hard living with invisible chronic illnesses. I have people who forget that I'm a social phobe and will randomly be like "Hey, let's go do something." at the drop of a hat. I have people who forget that I am diabetic and try to feed me stuff that I can't eat for fear of making my blood sugar run too high. It's really exasperating when people forget that my bipolar can incapacitate me with depression and they get kinda mad that I'm not 'better' yet. I've gradually moved away from the people who actively expect me to perform like I'm not disabled. I worry at times that my invisible illnesses coupled with my efforts here to write leads to the false impression that I'm lazy when I go radio silent.
I know that's my emotional baggage talking. Growing up in a trumatizing household where there's all kinds of fuckery going on, you come away with it with some challenges and emotional wounds. Writing these morning pages is flying in the face of the garbage that I had literally beaten into me. It's raw, it's scary, and it's honest. I try to just put down what I have on my mind and hope that my readership base doesn't get too annoyed with the regular sob stories. I've got a lot of trauma I am working through and it influences all of my writing. I just hope that these morning pages reaches someone who is struggling like I was, feeling like a freak and all alone in their misery. I hope that they bring someone some little piece of comfort.
Some of the reasons for the morning pages is selfish. It's to get this garbage out of my head so I can function for the day. But, the bigger reason, is the hope that it could help someone in some fashion. Because if I can help someone by describing the crap I lived through and how I'm doing my best to cope with it, maybe it makes all of that garbage worth something.
It's NaNoWriMo and I've been hyper focused on my book project. As a result I have found myself within striking distance of 30k words but it has been at the expense of things like blogging, housework, and a few other things. So, I'm forcing myself to slow down and only work on it for an hour each day. I want to get my blog writing back in gear. (I feel like these morning pages don't really count as blog writing, just a brain dump/rambling in the morning.) I do have another problem with my blogging right now that goes beyond the issue with my forgetting to do it because I'm sucked into a novel.
My notebook that I was using as a writing focused bullet journal is literally falling apart. I'm having difficulty keeping track of my notes for projects and outlines for blog posts. This is what I get for buying a cheap notebook to really first give the bullet journal an attempt. I am about halfway through my pile of notebooks but I don't have any the right size to use for bullet journaling. I am stumped as to how to solve this problem with out going and buying another notebook. I told Beloved that I wasn't going to go pick up more notebooks until I had used up most of the ones that I have.
I've been trying to incorporate some of this planning into my daily planner but that just makes it a confusing mess. I am trying to come up with content but my brain is stuck in book mode. It's making writing for different topics difficult. I realized that being stuck in book mode is a problem when my kids asked me this morning when I was going to be doing the dishes. On Monday, I added 12 pages to my manuscript. Yesterday, in an effort to restrain myself, it was four. But it was difficult to stop and go work on housework. I want to see how the scenes I've been writing are going to unfold but I have to write them to do that.
The perils of NaNoWriMo. I was going to do NaBloPoMo but I'm close to two weeks behind. I honestly don't know if I can accomplish that. Not with multiple blogs. I don't know what I'm going to do on that front. I may save the NaBloPoMo effort for December and just focus on writing a novel in November. I am seriously contemplating bringing my laptop to Thanksgiving dinner this year so that I can get more work in on the book. The way I see it, it's not too different from sitting there knitting as people are talking about subjects that I have zero interest in. I'm going to consult Beloved and get his thoughts as to if this is beyond the pale. I did bring a NaNoWriMo project to Thanksgiving one year but that was a book I was writing out by hand in a notebook. It wasn't quite as obvious that I was working on something then. A5 sized notebooks are great to hide in a bag of knitting projects.
I am undecided as to how long I am going to do these Morning Pages. One part of me says it is a useful free-writing exercise and I get only good things out of writing it. Another part of me says that my rambling, raw words are just a waste of electrons and that no one really wants to hear another sob story or about the mundane details of my life. It's a tough debate. I am tired and that doesn't help much either.
My tiredness isn't a result of a lack of sleep. I actually slept fairly well last night, though I would have appreciated not having recurring dreams of being short on time to get everything I needed to do done. It was ... unpleasant. It wasn't a full on nightmare because there was no real terror involved, just a great deal of exasperation and frustration. Also, I would have slept better if my new sleep medication didn't have the side effect of causing chills during the first few hours it hits your system. I kept waking up and adding blankets. Then I got overheated and had to put a few away. It was really irritating.
I am tired of being stuck. Emotionally, I am not at a great place right now. There's some troubles happening on a couple fronts for the extended family and I functionally can't do a damn thing to help anybody. As much as I want to say damn them all, there are some members of the family that I am involved with and I care very deeply for (the ones who got screwed by the rest of the family, basically). It's hard being estranged from your birth family for the most part.
When things get challenging, you don't have that resource for advice, guidance, or possible fiscal assistance to turn to. You have to figure out how to make it work on your own. For the family members that I'm involved with, I'm basically it for the people on this side of the family for them to turn to. I wish I had enough money and resources that I could help all of them out. I wish I was smart enough to say "Here's the solution to this problem." or at least had the ability to do something more than give advice that as I look at it just looks even more shaky as time goes on.
I'm not the matriarch of the family. There is no matriarch of the family. And the family of my birth is disintegrating due to internecine conflict. My grandparents were the ones who held that family together and when they died, things started to unravel. Relatives started behaving badly and showing their true colors after years of keeping their real feelings under their hat for fear of angering my grandparents. It's disgusting and disappointing. As a result, the younger generation has walked away like I did.
I have no idea how to help these young women navigate young adulthood. I've got some suggestions based on my own screwed up life experiences. I can spot relationship red flags a mile away, usually. But there's a lot that they have going on that I just can only say, "We love you. We support you. And if you need us, we're here for you." Those words feel pretty empty right now because I can't do anything more than that.
It's pure torture. I was raised in a household where I had to help parent my brothers at a young age. The expectation was because I was the eldest child, I naturally had to do so and it was my training to be a mother and a wife when I grew up. The age gap between my brothers and I is less than a decade. I wasn't qualified or even remotely old enough to supervise them. Still, there I was a few years out of diapers changing diapers on my baby brother instead of a baby doll. There I was, just shy of being old enough to be in elementary school and I was monitoring my younger brothers' behavior to make sure that our violently unpredictable mother didn't fly off the handle because some arbitrary (yet mutable on the basis of her mood that day) rule was broken. And I got into trouble for doing it even as I was expected to do so. I grew up with this deep seated feeling that I was personally responsible for the welfare of the youngest members of the family.
Here we are, approaching my forty-third year on this rock, and I can't shake that feeling. I can't shake the feeling that I failed my brothers because I went off to college and didn't stay home to intervene when things got crazy in my parents' house. I can't shake the feeling that I somehow failed my brothers because they grew up to have serious issues themselves and have proven to be unreliable and toxic people. I look at my sons and somedays I see my brothers. I flashback to being a kid and terrified that we're going to collectively be punished for some whim that went awry of my mother's that we had nothing to do with but being in the physical proximity of her when it happened.
PTSD is a bear, y'all. It's been making it really hard to write. I've got the old fear that someone is going to punish me for writing down 'lies' and the newer fear that someone is going to use my journal entries against me to try to destroy my family. I try to write. Then terror grips me and I delete entries. It doesn't matter if it's fiction or not. This has been happening for months. It's why my blog entries have been so few across the multiple blogs that I run. (Except for the reading blog, that's just got nothing because I haven't read a book in about a year. Again, trauma colliding with stress. Hard to relax with a book when memories of people throwing stuff at your head to get your attention while you were reading roll over you. And it was things like shoes and slippers. There was a reason why I'd take my books with me when I went hiking and hid in the woods to read a chapter or two as a kid.)
I suppose I wrote something on this blog for today. I didn't want it to be ugly or depressing. But, this is what's been worrying at my mind for months. And as I learn more about what's going on in the lives of people I love, it just gets more intense. At least I am sort of sleeping now. At least I'm only mildly depressed. I'm sure that this awfulness will pass. I just have to hang in there like a kitten on a window screen, all claws deployed.
Well, I'm no longer flat on my back with bronchitis and a sinus infection. I have a lingering cough and a bit of sinus drainage but it's a lot better than when I last posted. Yesterday, I felt well enough (and the kids were healthy enough) that we went out trick-or-treating for the first time in about ten years. Over the last long period of time, somebody was sick or the weather was down right awful. We lucked out yesterday. It was a strange experience to go trick-or-treating during a pandemic.
There were several bowls of candy set outside of doors for children to collect from. They were mostly full by the time we got there. We only saw one other set of children out collecting candy, they were coming home. I honestly thought we missed all the other kids out trick or treating (which the CDC said was a relatively safe activity as long as people maintained social distancing). The kids, however, weren't aware of the weirdness of virtually no one out. They were too happy to wish every possible person they met, regardless of if they were giving out candy or not, a happy Halloween. They decided that the doors with no candy were the 'trick' doors and the ones with candy were the 'treat' doors. They had a pretty good time, despite a minor scare with a little dog that was freaked out by smaller than adult humans.
The kids decided that they had a good time because we got to get away from some of the street lights and do a little star gazing despite the patchy clouds and, hey, there was candy. For my part, I was recollecting the times where I went out trick or treating as a kid and how just about every house along the street in the town next door (I grew up on a farm just outside of town, no sense trick or treating at fields full of cows.) was lit up and people were at the door giving out handfuls of candy. We even had gone out in a blizzard to go trick or treating (my brothers insisted, I was freezing and got the least candy because I was too busy trying to keep warm). Despite the snow and blowing wind, people were still just as warm and good hearted about throwing candy into pillow cases and plastic bags.
This year, people were peaking out their windows and only opening the door up a few inches to either hand out offerings or tell us they had no candy. We stayed back a good distance to keep everyone safe. It was surreal. So many people around my neighborhood are clamoring to unmask kids at school and insisting that the vaccine is enough to protect us from the covid-19 variants out there. And yet, they were hiding indoors and basically throwing candy out from the safety of their home to the kids looking for it. My family were practicing safety measures as per usual for going out in public. The boys insisted that their covid-19 masks were keeping their faces warm despite the chill breeze, so there were no complaints.
I have a feeling that there's going to be a sea change in how people look at this pandemic. The school district is operating on a 'substantial transmission threat' status, despite the fact that there is no evidence of covid-19 spreading in the school. This is because of a combination of the fact that our county is in the 'high transmission threat' status and the fact that there is a cluster of students that are sick with covid-19. No evidence via contact tracing that they caught it at school. All signs point towards parents refusing the mask up and taking their kids maskless out in public as if the pandemic ended last year.
We're entering the beginning of cold and flu season. A nasty cold (which gave me the damn bronchitis and the stupid sinus infection) blew through the school at the same time that cohort of students came down with covid-19. It's going to be a long winter. I'm trying to figure out how to schedule the flu vaccine shots for the family. It's challenging right now because we're in a position of waiting for our car to get fixed. A damn deer decided to use the hood and the windshield as a trampoline a few weeks back. It's at the repair shop right now and theoretically it'll be fixed sometime around the end of this week or the beginning of next week. They're waiting on a windshield and a hood to come in. In the meantime, we're borrowing a car from a generous family member so that Beloved can go to work. It's been a bit crunch here.
If Halloween is any evidence of how people's attitudes are changing, I think we're going to see more people wearing masks again. Over the last few months, while the weather was warm, there were a lot of people running around with out masks despite the high transmission status of the county. Meanwhile, we've been getting dirty looks for our masks. We've taught our kids to keep their heads held high and wear their masks with pride because they're keeping themselves and their family safe. When school pictures came along, the kids had the option of taking off their masks and they kept them on. I have a feeling there's going to be some grumbling by some family members over the fact that they can't see the kids' smiling faces behind the masks. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to say if that happens. I can't exactly be sure that it's going to be something tender and coddling their outraged feelings about how masks are 'oppression'.
We make a point of not discussing this stuff with them. And yet, Thanksgiving is coming up and I know, down deep in my bones, they're going to be ranting about this. I'm going to have a hard time keeping my tongue in check. It's been grating on me over the last year or so to listen to people bitch about how they can't go to church because of Covid-19, how they have to wear a mask, and they can't get right up close to people in stores when they're in line to check out. I swear, if that plague doctor mask fit me properly, I'd be wearing that thing everywhere. I would be the specter of death on the street. Because apparently they need a visceral reminder that this shit is killing people. This is the new normal. There is no going back to pre-Covid-19 life.
I've accepted it. A lot of my neighbors and a good number of relatives haven't. There's a reason why I don't talk to a bunch of them. They claim oppression and then fuss about the people who are involved in BLM, insisting that their mask oppresses them more than a systemic policing problem that is killing black people and people of color way out of proportion of the rest of the population. But, you know, they can't breathe comfortably in their mask and their glasses fog up so the inconvenience is more important and immediate than some black man who got murdered in police custody. /rant
I have been sick for the last two weeks because of a combination of a head cold, bronchitis, and a sinus infection. Week one was spent with a moderately high fever and a lot of time where the world felt like it was spinning around. Four days into weeks one with this monstrosity (two days into the antibiotic treatment), my eldest son comes down with this bug. Some where around this time, Beloved catches it. The two of them have a moderate head cold, I'm sick to the point where I really should have been sleeping in bed but I had a child to mind.
I wasn't so feverish that I was hearing colors but it was a close thing. I'd close my eyes and see swirling colors in neon shades. It made the evening conversations with Beloved weird as the patterns shifted based on the sounds I heard. The fever has come way down and it in the moderate to low range. All hail Tylenol. Alas, in the course of the week right before I caught this damned virus, I developed an allergy to Aleve (which was my go to for migraines for the longest time) and shellfish. So, now I have burned through all over the counter migraine medications and I can no longer have my favorite soup (clam chowder). I am highly annoyed with all of this.
I have been trying to write off line but it's pretty much all been gibberish because I haven't been well. Now that I am feeling a little better, I am hoping I can get back to writing. I am so close to finished on the print copy of the Lokean devotional that I wrote. I've been starting to get feed back from readers on the Filianic stuff that I've written. It's been a mixed bag. I've come to the conclusion that I need a form letter to reply to the mass of email that have been hitting my inbox.
I guess I'm going places with my non-fiction because I'm getting responses to it. Things have slowed down on the book revenue front. I'm also not out there heavily promoting material because I've been sick and my brain's been weird for the last few months. I'm mildly depressed because I'm experiencing more dissociation. My psy doctor has been working with me on it. I've been doing a lot of therapy journaling. My sleep has been rotten. At first because of brain stuff, then it started to settle down with a med change and then this stupid virus hit me.
This being disabled business is bullshit. And being sick on top of it it is just the worst.
I hate my disabilities. For one, they're invisible and people around me frequently forget that I have them and get irritable when I can't be neurotypical. (Beloved and the kids don't, but we're all not neurotypical in this household. We have to give each other a lot of understanding and try really hard to work with each other to make things function on a halfway normalish level.) I hate the fact that my traumatic past is rearing it's head and making everything hard. I hate the fact that I am sliding into depression and I'm not sure if it is because of my bipolar II or if it is because of my seasonal affective disorder. (It's a great thing, a double whammy of suck that lasts for months. -5/7 stars)
I have been tired because I'm not sleeping well. I think my doctor's got the medication angle pinned down. I am not happy with the medication because I have a lot of bad emotions attached to it. But, despite those feels, I am actually sleeping better. I still wake up on occasion in the night disoriented and not sure where I am. As I am falling alseep, I've taken to running my fingers across the wall next to the head of the bed to make sure that the wall is smooth and lacks the rough board that was at the same place in my parents' house in my room to cover up an enormous hole. I know it's anxiety and the fact that I'm fighting derealization. I spend just about all day fighting derealization.
Complex posttraumatic stress disorder is bullshit. It fucked up my brain so hard that I have times where I can't tell what's fully real or not. It's terrifying to be sitting in my living room wondering if this is a hallucination and that I'm actually in my parents' house, hiding from them so they don't beat me for some random reason. Reality testing, like running my fingers across the wall, is a thing I do every day, multiple times a day. Getting this major haircut change was one of the best decisions I have made this year.
One, it's a look I have wanted for years. Faux-hawks just look cool. I'd have gone for a full mohawk but I know that would have not worked for me because it requires more care than I can do. It's awful that the first thought I had upon getting home and some of the excitement about my new haircut was wearing off was that my father would have said I looked like a 'bull dyke' with a tone dripping with scorn. My father's a real winner. He's got issues.
The second reason that going from shoulder length hair to this faux-hawk was a good decision is it completely eliminates my passing resemblance to my mother. I look enough like her that when my hair was longer, catching a glimpse unexpectedly in the mirror set off a minor panic because I feared that I was looking at her. Like my father, my mother's just got issues that I don't think a ton of therapy is going to resolve. When I wear my faux-septum ring, I have momentary pang of panic that someone's going to rip it out.
Why? Well, when I was in my late teens and I was expressing interest in getting more piercings, she said that she was going to rip a septum piercing out of my face because they're for leading bulls around by the nose. She had similar comments about getting additional ear piercings. It has taken me approximately thirty years to experiment with faux jewelry to see if I like how it looks with the way my face is shaped and such. It's taken me an equal length of time to truly embrace the fashion style that I have always wanted to wear.
So, I'm kicking around in all black in a pretty generic goth style. I don't have my parents bitching at me that I'm dressed for a funeral or that I look like a freak. It's liberating to finally dress authentically. I was working towards that goal since I hit college a little over a decade back and I started therapy. People bitch about the masks and the inconveniences of them because of the pandemic. I love the fact that I can wear a mask as I am out and about doing my thing.
Between the haircut, style change, and the mask, my parents (who live near by) wouldn't recognize me if I passed them by on the street. It makes me safe from their harassment and emotional abuse. It lets me be authentic and wear things that help me stay grounded in the present. And, I have the added benefit that my teenage sons think I look cool now. Beloved has said if I suddenly started dressing like one of the normals, he'd be concerned that something was wrong because of how comfortable and happy I am with the style changes I have made.
I wish that my brain was as easy to fix. But, somehow in the process of making that break from what I was taught was 'normal,' I have been dealing with a lot of repressed stuff coming up to the surface. I don't know how to handle it. It's been sucking up at least 4 hours of my day as I do my journal work and I try to sort out what's going on in my head. I want to blog more. I want to get back into my fantasy writing. I want to finally finish book seven of the Umbrel Chronicles because I finally know how I'm going to do it. But, therapy comes first because it helps me function better.
I'm not ignoring you all. I'm just going through a really hard time right now. I am trying to move forward, but I have this baggage holding me back and lots more brain weasels than usual gnawing on my psyche.
For the last three months, I have been having problems sleeping. I'm working with my doctor to get that sorted out but it really sucks. I wake up a lot during the night and I am waking up with this disoriented sensation that I can't fully tell where/when I am. I and my doctor concur that this is a manifestation of my brain having issues with my c-ptsd. What do I do when I wake up like that? Well, I get out of bed and wander around the apartment checking on everyone to make sure they're ok before I get a drink of water and try to get more sleep.
Last night, I only woke up twice. For some insane reason, I am completely drag-ass tired today. I feel like I didn't sleep at all. It'd be easier if I could still remember my dreams. I'm on some serious medication to help me sleep and one of the effects is it basically makes me forget what I was dreaming. My brain is working overtime to try to process something and I can't figure out what it is. But the end result is random flashbacks during the day, existential dread, derealization, and major sleep problems. It really sucks to be a trauma survivor.
The other day, I saw some person on the internet posting that trauma makes you stronger. I wanted to reach through the internet and high-five them with a brick to the face. Trauma doesn't make you stronger. You've always had that strength inside you. People are resilient as hell. Trauma just fucks up your brain, scars it in ways that other experiences can't, and leaves you operating at a bit of a deficit compared to neurotypical people who just don't understand what the hell your problems are like.
I get angry with neurotypical people who tell me that I'm brave because I survived horrible shit. I get furious with it. I am not brave because of it. I simply didn't let them kill me. I endured awful shit with the grim determination that if I can get through one day, I can get through the next. That wasn't courage. That was just survival mode. Courage was standing up to my parents when they went to go after my brothers when we were small and I was four foot nothing and a bean pole. Yep, I got my ass beat for pushing my way between my parents and my younger brothers when they were about to whoop the hell out of them for just being typical boys. But it switched their focus from my brothers to me, which gave my brothers a chance to spirit off to their room and hide until my parents were done with me and got that rage out of their system.
That was courage. Not the grim process of getting up and facing the day where you didn't know which rules were getting changed as per the parent's whim. I regularly pushed my way between them and my brothers. I also did shit like keep my brother from getting kicked out of a second story window because my mother woke up out of a night terror and flailed. The screen went flying, but I had a solid grip on my toddler brother and dragged him back in the window. I was six. I don't know if that stuff qualifies as courage, to be honest. I just saw that there was a problem and somebody had to do something to solve it. I got punished for it, damn near every time, to be honest, but I kept doing it because my parents basically put me in charge of my brothers' welfare up until all three of us hit elementary school.
Then I got into trouble for being a 'little mother' to them. Never mind that I was changing diapers, supervising them, and acting as a 'little mother' when my mom didn't feel like doing it. Which was pretty often. My parents called me their problem child. Which is pretty damn funny, in a really dark way. I did my best to follow the rules, no matter how rapidly they changed. My brothers, on the other hand, were out doing stupid shit and my parents turned a blind eye to it. I tried to stop them. I was the reason why my brother's alcohol problem got caught in high school and I was the reason why my brother was intercepted trying to run off with some rando he met on the internet at fourteen.
But, I was the problem child. Why? Because I refused to lie when they wanted me to. Because I stood up to them or resisted their demands when they ran contrary to what I had been taught was right and wrong. Because when mom started using me as her therapist, I said I can't do this at 10. At 12, I ran away from home because mom was doing the 'therapy' thing and telling me that she was going to divorce my father but I couldn't tell anyone. At which point I said, "Fuck this noise." and walked out of the house. I stayed with a friend for about two weeks. My parents made contact through a neutral party who knew us and the friend's parents. I was told that I was making my father cry because I wasn't coming home. I told my mother if she wanted me to come home, she had to tell my father everything and get marriage counseling.
Next thing I know, I've got my parents setting up family counseling sessions. We did it for a month. It was useless because my brothers and I had been trained via regular beatings not to talk about shit that happened in that house. My parents theoretically got their marital differences sorted out. I will say, mom stopped throwing cast iron across the house at dad after that happened. The damage, however, I think was done. Because things have never been quite right between them and only gotten weirder as time has gone on. And I kept getting called on to be the person to smooth things over between them.
I confronted them about this and the history of psychological abuse at the urging of my therapist in college. She said that it was an opportunity to clear the air and rebuilt a healthier relationship based on the fact that I was a grown adult. Yeah, that went about as well as expected. I was called the bad guy because I made my mother cry and my parents threatened to kick me out of the house and pull me out of college if it ever came up again. That crazy bullshit continued into my mid-20s. I still have days where I wake up and I am left wondering if my life that I have now is real or if it's an elaborate fantasy that I created to escape my parents. Derealization is an awful thing and I don't wish it on anybody.
But, my timer is up. I've done my word vomit for the morning. I apologize if this was distressing for anyone to read. I've been writing down the really ugly stuff in my therapy journal. It's just been preying on my mind for weeks and real hard to cope with. So, I write about it and that takes a little of the pressure off.
My snake plant is blooming. I've had this plant for over ten years and it's never bloomed. Rumor is that it will have a pleasant smell. I attempted to smell the blossoms but all I could smell was the wet soil from watering it earlier in the day. I kinda hope that they don't smell like dirt. It'd be different, but a little bit of a disappointment. Another rumor that I picked up about this plant is that when pollinated, the flowers turn into orange berries. I think I'm going to do like my Grandfather did with his orange tree and pollinate it with a paint brush.
Going back about twenty years, my Grandfather decided to plant the seed of a sweet orange to see if he could even get it to grow in our WNY climate. I watched him put it into a 5 gal bucket and patiently water it regularly. He kept it in one of the warmer, more humid rooms of his house. After most of a year, he had a seedling. Summer came and the bucket lived out on the front porch.
Most of the family were a bit exasperated with Grandpa for his experiment. Grandma and I were entirely unsurprised. He was a science teacher by education and a farmer by way of the family business. He grew up out on Long Island on a potato farm. It was a big fight between him and Great-Grandpa when Grandpa wanted to go to college, but he finally talked his father into it. While at Cornell University, my paternal grandparents met and fell in love. A little while after graduation, they got married.
Before they moved up here into the boonies of WNY, Grandpa was teaching science at a school downstate. His family was growing and Grandma wanted to move closer to her parents in the Southern Tier. His farm that's on the other side of the hill from where we live and about ten minutes south west was the only house he could find close enough to drive there. (It's about a 3 hour drive from the farm down to where my Grandma's parents lived. Slightly closer than Long Island but a trickier drive because of the hilly landscape.)
He took up farming and with his sons and some employees raised a lot of corn, soybeans, and peas. Sometime in the 1970s, farming by itself wasn't quite enough to pay all the bills. Owning your own tractor is expensive, y'all. So, Grandpa got a job across the valley doing grounds keeping for the state prison. Things were such that he was able to afford to keep the farm, not work it full time, and afford to get his pilots license and a small personal airplane. That thing was his biggest hobby.
Every weekend, Grandpa and Grandma were off at fly-in breakfasts when it was the season for it. I remember the scandal among my parents' generation when Grandpa decided to put an airstrip right down the middle of the property. They were all concerned about how much land was being wasted. Grandpa answered it was his land and it was cheaper to keep the airplane on the farm than at a rented lot at the airport in the next town over. Someone tried to appeal to Grandma. She just chuckled and kept knitting. That's how my brothers and I knew that the air strip was probably her idea.
So, the story of the airstrip is one of those ones for another day, but my paternal grandparents were people who enabled each others' hobbies and catered to each others whimsies. So, when Grandpa decided he was going to try to grow an orange tree in her downstairs bathroom, Grandma's response was to water the bucket of dirt until something green came up in it. Mom insisted that the tree wasn't going to grow, being from Florida and a self-styled expert on the topic. Grandpa's answer was, "Wait and see."
After about three years of tending this slender sapling in a bucket with a handful of leaves sticking out off of it, it blossomed. Grandpa carefully pollinated it with a small paint brush and waited. The tree gradually got a tiny orange on it. My brothers weren't impressed but I thought it was the coolest thing to see an orange tree growing in my grandparents' house, with fruit on it, in the middle of January. To support the experiment, Grandpa bought a grow light and hung it up in the bathroom. After the orange tree experiment came to its conclusion, the grow light was moved to the alcove in the living room where Grandma had a veritable jungle of different plants.
So, the orange tree had an orange on it. It looked about the size of a plum. It smelled like an orange. Grandpa waited for it to get bigger but it didn't. So, after it was ripe, he picked it. He peeled it and handed my brothers and I each a piece of this orange while saving some for himself and Grandma. When Grandma got in the dining room, we tested the results of his experiment. All five of us were surprised. The seed came from a sweet orange but what we had was bitter and tasted like a cross between an orange and a lemon.
Now, I've been reading about snake plant. It'd be nice if my Grandma, whose degree included a minor in botany, was still alive. She told me that she hadn't seen a snake plant blossom here. When she gave me the plant, she said that they were from the desert and that they just show interesting leaves here. I think she'd be delighted to see the flowers. And I think Grandpa would be proud of how my indoor 'garden' is going. With the exception of the African violet, everything has been flourishing. I learned well from them how to care for houseplants. They always joked it was simple, keep the green side up and the roots down. That's what I've been doing for twenty-ish years and now something really cool is happening. I just wish they could have seen it before they passed on.
