The blog of D Kai Wilson-Viola

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

This is grief

This is grief

by | Jun 29, 2016 | Uncategorized

I always thought grief was this huge thing that hit you when you lost something or someone important to you.   It wasn’t about losing self.  It wasn’t about losing what you were.  But you know, I think that was a stupid thing to think.  I’m waaaaaay behind in my grief management just because I didn’t understand what I was feeling was grief.

I guess most of the issue is I should have been feeling this way a long time ago.  I’ve ignored a lot of what I feel because I’ve always been told that what I think is partially to do with a chemical imbalance (bipolar) and partly to do with the ways I learned to deal with that because back when they decided I was bipolar (with a questionable personality disorder to do with self-esteem – they’ve now decided something else which I don’t agree with at all), but all in all, that was the way it was.  I’ve been through a half dozen meds in the last eighteen months, but the empty, sad feeling that they’re tagging as something else, I think is grief.  I’ve lost so many pregnancies, and then, to add insult to injury, it really feels like I’ve lost myself in all of the messes going on right now.  It might sound a bit melodramatic, but a blog post – 300 or so words – takes me all day.  Longer than that, like this post, it takes me a few attempts.  Some of it is Restless leg twitchy feelings, most of it is to do with just not being able to sit still and write for any length of time.  I wish I was more positive but I’m giving it a try.
Anyway, yesterday I talked about some books on Author Interrupted.  Today I’ll be talking about more.

Come on over and check the books out!

And then she said….follow me :)

And then she said….follow me :)

by | Jun 28, 2016 | Fiction, Hosting and Tech, Novels, Gaming and hobbies, The Art of...., Geekery, The Home Office, News, Organisation, things you don't know about me, Op-eds, Other sites, Thrillers and crime, Mental health, Pen names, Vids, A day in the life, Personality, Writing, Announcements, planning, writing habit, Reading and Reviewing, Sci fi, writing well, content, site stuff, Books, Featured, tapping the well, living with bipolar

I know, I know, I said yesterday I’d post something, but we filmed this, we filmed some other stuff, and then…well, other things got in the way, so we changed the order we did the vids in, and stuff.

I’m writing this from my bed today – I’m not having a great week already, but I’m sure it’ll get better 🙂

So, today, I’m inviting you over to Authorinterrupted, which you, Constant Reader, may or may not know, is my ‘professional’ writer’s blog, but which, for a very long time last year was just ‘my blog’.  I’m going to split off the personal posts and either mirror or redirect those to here.

For those of you asking how best to keep up with this instead of remembering where I left off the day before, if you go to ByKai, you should find that all the posts mirror there, though they may appear slightly out of synced order to when I post on Facebook to say there’s a new post live.  But, also as requested, Kai’s Blog Page, or Kai’s Blogging Network as I prefer to call it, has started this week too!  Exciting stuff.

So, without further ado, my promised freebie, and see you later, over on Authorinterrupted.com – let me know what you think!

If it’s not behaving here, I’m launching my own Youtube Channel too, so please join me over there, or on my page at Facebook, where I’ll load it direct!
([youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDMd_U4lGIw])

Uh….ooops?

Uh….ooops?

by | Jun 26, 2016 | A day in the life, planning, and more, living with bipolar, Announcements, diet and lifestyle, Featured, Gaming and hobbies, Geekery, list bloat, Mental wellness, News, Organisation, Mental health, Personality

Time tracking 101Have you ever wondered why people blog?
I have.  I think about it every day, to find the reason that I’m blogging.  A problem though, and a bit of a hiccup to it all is that if I’m not careful, I start trying to justify why I spend time.
Spend is right actually.
Blogging, and time most specifically, is a sort of currency for me.  As is social media, and everything else I do.  But I think what I mean by that is TIME is a currency that I struggle to decide how to spend.  Blogging seems to be something I didn’t want to ‘spend’ on at all, and I don’t really know why.  Or I didn’t until last week.
The thing is, I’ve been given back a lot of time lately.

When last I posted, I was ok.  I wasn’t brilliant, but I was ok.  My life was on a downward trend though.  February 2015 was right smack bang in the middle of the first six months of what I was told was a very short treatment course with the team – anxiety, while hard, was manageable.  I wanted to sleep more,  but it’s taken until NOW.  This week, I can actually say that five days out of seven, I’ve slept more than the goal I have on my fitbit.  It’s taken Haloperidol, melatonin and changing my eating patterns to do it.

And you know, I’m talking about this as if it’s a tiny thing.  It’s huge.  I spent the last year and a half struggling to sleep more than four hours at a stretch, and struggling to go to sleep AT ALL some nights.  I’d be up all night, and my brain wouldn’t stop.  It just wouldn’t stop.  It still doesn’t.  But it’s easing.  The grip on my head is easing, and oh, it’s so nice.  I’m still needing to randomly nap in the afternoon, but I’m finding it so much… not quieter but, I don’t know.  I’m sleeping.  Which seems to make it easier for me.

So, I thought Id talk about this in a way I could understand myself when I look back, but more importantly, in a way that makes sense to everyone else.  I need to work out how to spend my time – though I’m not sure how I’m going to measure it right now – and make sure there’s a nice balance for family, exercise, writing, work, and all of the things I want to do.  If I can’t do that, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

And last week, it hit me.  I stopped blogging because I lost things to say.  It wasn’t so much I didn’t even have stuff to *babble* about.  I just looked at each single blog I had as one blog, instead of a continuum.  It’s going to take a bit of organising, but I think I’ve got an idea that will work.

So, my mission this week is to keep a diary about what I do, and how I’m spending time, and then, from there, I should be able to understand what time I actually have and whether I enjoyed what I was doing, and if there’s anything I can tweak.

My other major projects are sorting out a crowdfunding campaign for a project I’m doing, that I’m hoping will be good for others (it’s not to pay to publish something – it’s a product I need dev money for), and some other things.  But I’m starting small this week – tracking.

And, hopefully, I’ll be blogging here semi-regularly again.  Let’s make it a date, ok?