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.
No comments:
Post a Comment