The blog of D Kai Wilson-Viola

Author, advocate, designer, mental health advocate and parent. 

Can you step back from your online life?

Can you step back from your online life?

I’ll be honest with you, I’ve spent the last two weeks soul searching and wondering what I’m supposed to do with myself because of an accident that occured this last September.
I’ve always been a fairly independant, sharp articulate woman. I could always spell just about anything (other than my i before e’s – and when my fingers go slightly faster than my brain) but at the moment, I’m finding it difficult.
My memory is shot – and there are definitive gaps where stories, characters, and plotlines used to reside – I think. The only reason I *know* the stories are missing are because I have notes that otherwise make no sense.

So the soul searching is kinda hard. I know that I have some sort of brain damage – though, I have to say, it fees really bad to say that. Like I’m belittling that kind of injury, because I’m almost as functional as I was. But I’ve been going looking for a lot of approval lately.
My partner noticed it first. I stopped writing and wouldn’t continue till he told me it was ‘all right’. Normally I have to beat him and other freinds off with metaphorical crowbars and they have to distract me to read anything that isn’t second to last draft.
I did it again later in the week. I wouldn’t continue with the story I was narrating till someone told me to and got REALLY frustrated, because I couldn’t say what I was waiting for.

And that brings me full circle. I AM waaaay reliant on other people’s opinions – and to be honest, I think that many writers and bloggers are. We seek approval all over the place, and when we don’t get it, some of us start to wilt. I never used to ‘need’ approval, or at least, so I thought, but reading back some of the stuff that I’ve said and done this last year, because a freind said that I wasn’t doing as ‘they’ expected, or because someon had attacked one of my principles, I’m beginning to wonder if that’s part of the deeper problem that’s taking hold. I wonder if I’m being ‘wierd’ like this because I’ve got nothing left to relate to and need to restart with *just* writing.
So I put my websites on ‘dark’. It’ll give me a chance to write, and find myself again, as a gift for Christmas. And to be honest, from some of the emails I’ve had, I think some of you need to do the same.
Give yourself the gift of joy this year and don’t keep putting ‘it’ off. I did and I’m not REALLY regretting it. I might get a second chance, and just watch me, I’m already just itching to grab it with both hands and never let go.

Can you step back from your online life?

Start all over…

After fighting it tooth and nail for the last while, the novels that were ‘pre’ head injury may have to be placed on hold for a while. I’ve got enough fragments of notes to create something that might be similar, but would probably be ‘less’. I don’t want to risk that – so I’m going to wait.

Aleph, in the end, broke down to 12k or so in notes. Out 0f 91k, I don’t think that’s too bad – and I’ll be able to write, I hope for my assignments this week…

Everyone has just left after some giggles, and chatting and sushi games on my DS. I have a small, furry lepoard curled up beside me (aka, my Kushie) and I’m considering what to do about writing, properly, while the house is completely silent and it’s dark out.

One of my major problems right now though is that it feels like I’m being stalked. And actually, there’s a reason for that feeling – I fairly serious one that isn’t going to resolve simply by smiling about it.  And I realised that if I didn’t remove stuff from the public eye, and fast, that it might cause problems for me and more importantly my children.  They didn’t get talked about much on here, and they won’t again now, but they do exist.

So I did.  I removed all of it, including contacting archive.org and asking them to purge the cache – so, if you’re looking for blog archives before NOW, you’ll be really out of luck, I’m sorry.