Dragonflies
There are some posts you just never want to write. Some things that you just don't want to say. Last week, my grandmother passed away. And while we've - not callously prepared, but
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Mental health
It’s not desertion…
Recently, I talked about a few ideas I had about boundaries with a few friends, and for the most part, I’ve had great conversations about how to segment off time. But… I wanted to talk about something that had come up, and something I think it’s hard to talk about because when we do this stuff, it’s supposed to be positive and empowering.
It all started with a share…
So, I shared this a few days ago – and one friend said to me that I was far too focussed on how I was feeling right now. So we talked about that and she said that all I need to focus on now is making sure that we *all* survive in the community – that ‘community’ won’t survive unless people get their heads out of their asses.
And that literally left me…well…breathless.
I’ve been trying to articulate a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and it’s beginning to come down to a couple of concepts.
1) I’ve got some fairly cruel-to-be-kind friends – a good or bad thing, depending on what I’m doing.
and 2) If I’m suffocating/drowning/got no spoons, I’m useless to my community, and in real world communities, those that can’t contribute and have in the past are often seen far better than we behave towards those around us in the community right now. And by community, really, the main ones I’m around are the mental health advocate and the indie author community.
First, get your own mask on
Regardless of what my friend believes, the rule about oxygen masks that’s oft quoted – get your own mask on before trying to help others is important. Possibly critical. I’ve spent the last few years struggling against that, but things aren’t getting easier for me. So, my first step is my ‘oxygen mask’. For that reason, and that reason alone, I’m ressurecting ‘SMSCDT’ or Social Media Self-Care downtime.
My second action is my silo – something I’ll be talking about in another blog post.
But I wanted to be clear on this – if you need to step back – whether this is something you’ve done over and over recently, or it’s the first time – though it’s hard, you have to follow your gut, or your heart. Be aware that some people won’t be happy – and that if you’re accused of letting them down, you can either stop and think as to whether they’re right, or if you’re being guilted (I’m pretty much in both camps. When I step back, if I’m working on stuff that needs sorted, I’ve got plans for that too.
Step back, or be ashes
As this all went down on my chat server, another two friends saw what was being said and put their opinions in – part of the opinion that was shared was that not only was I right to be stepping back, but it’s not my place to burn myself up to keep other people warm (there are a lot of these metaphors, huh?) and that if I didn’t step back soon, they wouldn’t be surprised if I was just a pile of ashes at the end of it. It was at that point the friend admitted that if I stepped back, long term, I wouldn’t be around for her stuff and that she was relying on me to get stuff done. Flattering as that is, it’s not changing that I’m on downtime.
But you take downtime regularly, don’t you?
Anyone that’s around on my social media knows that I take May off for my #Kaiatus, which often leads to a lot of work pulling showing up at the end of May. But, I’ve spent the last three years doing downtime and coming back whenever summoned. That’s not happening this time. And the next essay, which I’ve called ‘The Grain Silo’ (and is a part of the reason I finally went forward to write ‘And Miles to go Before I Sleep’) to explain why. But it’s about resting, not quitting, even if people feel like I’m deserting them. I don’t like that feeling, I’ll be honest, but I’m not sure what to do other than the path I’m on. WHen the road less travelled isn’t one I’ve ever been on, ever, it’s hard to know if it’s the right choice. But I guess I’m doing the best I can, and this is what it’ll take.
What’s your thought? Downtime, yay or nay? Should you consider community before self always? Are you going to be considering some time out, especially given the year we’ve all had?
The radical changes I need to make #Mondayblogs #Wedswriters
So, I was a bit quiet about it, but I went on holiday for two weeks in the middle of August. I spent the last two weeks battering around a pile of theme parks – Disney, Universal, Blizzard Beach (One of Disney’s waterparks), plus Nasa, Gatorland, the Florida Mall, Denny’s, IHOP… we did so much that I’m spending so much time just exploring my experiences and filing them away carefully. My memory being what it is, I’ve also got about a gazillion photos that we all took – me, David, his mom, his sister, the kids.
I’ll talk about that more in another post (because this blog is getting picked up again as my ‘personal’ place to talk stuff, aren’t y’all lucky), but I need to touch on something I realised while I was away. I am doing far too much. FAR too much. There’s no room for me to learn and explore my world, and there’s no room for writing, none at all.
So, you might say ‘but you knew this already Kai, this isn’t a surprise’. And you’re right. But between barely holding it together to grief, and to sleep deprivation (I sleep six hours a night, on my best night. Normal nights are closer to five hours clawed back, with melatonin and other meds), so my little brain needs to be taught the hard way.
And the hard way was basically taking me offline for most of two weeks. My phone doesn’t do roaming and I decided, early on, that I wouldn’t use the wi-fi, so I basically read, spent a lot of time hanging out with my kids (my son and I played pool a lot) and just enjoying *being*.
Now, my being is books and writing, so I spent a lot of time trying to work out what I should do with myself. I don’t read or write nearly enough, and just behind that, I’m not doing a day of learning that I promised myself. So there’s all that. Behind that, and not far behind that either, I have a business to run – hosting and apps as it happens, and a diary I designed to help with all of this stuff. I know it works because I hit the ground running when I came back.
I know it sounds like I’m happy with all of this, but I’m not. It’s one of the most important things in my world- the ability to get to the point where I am comfortable and happy and can work with what I’d like to do, and I’ve lost that.
I’ll get there, but I’m sure it’s going to be bumpy for the next few weeks. I’m happy to get with it, but there are things that are important to me, lost in the shuffle. And all it took was a two-week holiday to spot it.
My mental health is still deteriorating, but I think I know how to sort that out too – I just need a bit of space to do it. Space isn’t easy to come by though, so while I do, I need to make sure I’m holding up my end of other stuff too.
But there is a ray of hope. Writing and my books. While this is a personal blog, the pro stuff will appear here too. One thing I did learn while I was away was that while my heart is full helping others, my soul sings for words. And I have so many stories to tell. And I want to tell them.
And then she said….follow me :)
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!
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Uh….ooops?
Have 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?
The adorable, endless grind
I guess I’m going to get some funny looks for this post, but writing is an adorable, yet endless grind. I’ve been arguing with people today about it today, but we grow, and we learn. And writing is both pleasure and pain, or at least for me. And I’m still stretching my muscles and wearing them in again.
I set myself a goal of 100,000 words this year, and I’m already a fifth of the way there, just blogging, doing 750words.com and a tiny bit of fiction. I want the fiction to be much more of an element in it, but seriously, it’s easy to write 100,000 words, just by blogging and doing 750words.com. I may need a bigger goal!
In the interim though, I thought I’d introduce my new readers to a few things that they might have missed:
My main Facebook page.
My main G+ page.
My twitter
My writing Blog
My PR blog (which I share with Kriss Morton)
I’ll stop there – I’ve got pen names too, but y’know, it’d be great if you’re following the main stuff…it’ll cut down on your clutter too.
We (Kriss and I) are sorting out some other stuff to launch too – a horror blog and a couple of other things besides.
But yeah, that’s where we are right now. I’m back to looking for a job, which is really fun, and really tiring. We’ve temporarily stopped trying for a baby, while I settle into everything. We’re coming up with new and interesting ways to amuse the now not so kitten-sized kittens. Life is as it is.
He had a name…
It was 2001. November 2001, just after they’d decided that I’d damaged my pancreas with a few missed gallstones. I’d spent a month in and out of hospital, unable to eat, unable to deal with most of the pain that had consumed me. I dropped from a svelte mother of two who had been merrily breastfeeding and healthily curvy (12 stones or so) to 8 stones and skeletal. I went from breastfeeding to not and still producing milk, even though I wasn’t feeding. The doctors and nurses looking after me watched me sleep most of the day away, full of morphine and on drips, barely eating. At one point, they spoke of putting in a central line.
I got home and got pregnant again. It was stupid, but still a miracle. It was 2001 – my baby daughter was six months old, my son was just over two years old. By my birthday, after arguing and discussing and going through all of the options, we decided we could manage with a third child, as long as my body would let me. That was a question in and of itself – one that we finally got to the bottom of. I’d be ok, as long as I was careful.
And then, the worst happened. My blood tests showed that actually, I might not be ok. That my liver and my pancreas were struggling – and my relationship was breaking down and things just weren’t working. I’d been making plans by that point to go it alone with the three of my children, as their father was…not whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Our relationship had gone south long before I’d gotten pregnant again, but I thought I could cope.
I was then faced with the worst decision I could ever make. I could die carrying this child. And it’s something I don’t talk about much – there’s the more immediate ‘trying for this family’ always to deal with, but this was different. I really was on my own in many ways.
So, we went to talk about my options, and discovered the little boy I was carrying was dead.
By then, though, he had a name.
His name was Connor. He’d have been born around August 2002, and would be 11 now.
I have a godson, not much younger than my Connor would have been, and I left the father of my children a year after. We’d grown apart by then. And my life moved on. It always does. I don’t think the things that came after would have happened with three children as young as they were, and I know that losing him was the fork in the path that led me, perhaps, to where I am now. And logic suggests that we’ll never know – you can’t go back and change it. You can’t remove a scar – not easily. And there are some we just don’t want to remove.
But around now, every year, I miss the little boy I didn’t really get to know. We talk about stillbirth and miscarriages in hushed tones, and though I know it’s not the same as losing him at 30 weeks, or earlier or later, he still had a name, and I had hopes for him. He has no grave, but he has a tree in the place I spent some of my teen years. There is no marker, nor other people to remember him, aside from the people that lived it with me, thousands of miles away. And those that got to know me after, while I was still dealing with all of it. But I was the only one that knew him really. I wish, more than anything else, that everything I’d hoped, and all thing things I couldn’t have predicted for him came true, and there was a smiling boy on this post instead of an empty space where his happy face should be.
New Year…sorta….
Yeah, I know, its six days into the New Year and I still haven’t done the promised blog here about how this coming year might look. And that’s because I’m still not sure. I was working out of the house between September and November (should have been December but I fell in work and gave myself the most impressive concussion I’ve ever had, therefore finished up a bit early). I’m now back out of work, and looking for a new job because it was only temp and I was good with that.
Plans for my writing
The New year didn’t make it any easier to make plans for what I wanted to do with my writing – to be fair, all I do right now is sleep (still very depressed and tired, even though I’m six weeks post-concussion), and do some work on 750words, but I do have a plan. It does mean I’m going to be secret-squireling for about six months, but that’s ok. It’s not as if it’ll take me away from writing already in the works/complete.
Writing plans are, as always, contingent on what happens with my work, because making an income for my family has to come top of the pile. Even for another year until we get out from under the pile of bills left with me after I finished freelancing and clients refused to pay. I estimate that’ll take until the summer, then we can start saving for our wedding etc. but y’know, hope springs eternal that I’ll find a (well-paid) job that lets me write too.
Plans for other stuff
I know I’ve talked on here about grief and miscarrying, and all of the other stuff that went with that. We’re still no further forward and after another ‘event’ over my birthday, David and I have decided, for now, to call time on the whole trying to get pregnant cycle. It probably doesn’t help that we’re both stressed to the eyeballs over what to do about the youngest, various sick members of both families, living so far away from everyone and basically having no real time to work out or grieve properly, but I really feel like there are parts of my life that need sorted out before I look to the future. It’s not even fixing the past – can’t be done, so I’m just going to get myself to a point where I’m at peace with it, it’s more…having a routine and working and doing stuff that’s good for me instead of what’s good for everyone else. I did it when I sat my degree, and I’m very proud of that, but there are other things I can do too. I just have to find my way out from under the grey clouds first for some of it. My brain isn’t dealing with happiness the way it should, and more than anything, that’s something I need to fix, and it’s all internal.
New books
When all’s said and done, there will be new books this year. I promise. I’m just not sure when. Given the secret squirrel project is taking away half of my time, it’s a bit difficult to say ‘this is what I’m going for’. It’d be nice to have five novels out by the end of the year, time permitting, but I’ll be satisfied if I just get three or four. Again, it’s all down to whether I get a nice job or if I can stay home and PR to cover the bills, and write for the rest of my time. Even shaving down our outgoings and what I pay for, I still need to work about 20 solid hours a week to make anywhere near what I’d need to cover bills, which is why anything extra goes straight to said bills
That said…there’s going to be a weekly ‘state of the writing’ on Author, Interrupted, with pretty pie charts and metrics and other fun stuff ;).
Blog schedule
And finally, the blog schedule. It’ll appear here before the 15th, so you know where I’m writing, when and what for.
#Cybercamp – the personal stuff and an overview
Right. First up. If you’re really not interested in ‘the feels’ of things (sorry, bad internet slangy thing), this post probably isn’t for you and I’m totally ok with you skipping it. This DOES NOT contain much about the actual cybercamp itself – more about the stuff I learned about me. It’s most likely not useful to anyone, other than me, but because people were asking me why I was sad, day two, I thought I better get this written up. I’m totally fine with you skipping this one and hitting Steampunkdragonfly (my new cyber/sec/policy blog – though, right this second it’s parked on another blog, just give it a few hours ;)) later today, when the less personal stuff goes up. That’s going to take a good few posts to cover actually – I’ve got screeds and screeds and screeds of notes to get through.
Before I pick up my blog where I left off, HI. Hi to all my new followers and all of my older followers and sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. I think the last post explains my mindset sufficiently, still, but I still wish I’d picked my blog back up sooner.
Secondly. If you’re based in the UK, go check out these guys:
The Cyber Security Challenge is one of the brilliant initiatives that I’m betting will lead the charge in plugging the gap between the experts we have and the expertise we need in Cyber Security. And I do want to emphasize that it’s not just ‘techies’ that’ll get a lot out of this. I’m a bit techie (though, not as much as the people I encountered at camp) but where I really apparently shone was policy. So if you’re interested, in the slightest in showcasing or upping your cyber security skills, and networking with like-minded people, get your butts over to the site. They’ve earned a permanent link from all of my blogs, and I’ll explain why in a second. And in all seriousness, thank you. I thought my life was quite nice before I went to the camp – and that I was doing the stuff I really wanted to. That PR was just as good as policy, if you removed the tech, and that it was ok to feel like there was a little missing. Thank you for showing me that, and being patient and kind and making sure I was ok, and paying attention to the little things. Thank you for it being perfect, start to finish. Thank you for bringing us all together. Thank you to the sponsors. Thank you to the staff. Thank you, a million times.
And Third
I’ve been looking for a use for one of the new blogs I was going to start – two actually, but the main one I was struggling with was ‘Steampunkdragonfly’. Originally it was going to be my amalgamation site, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really should just be doing that on Dkaiwilsonviola.
And then this Wednesday hit and my world got shoved sidewards off a cliff, flipped upside down and well…from there…I dunno. I’m still trying to process.
Let me explain….
Wednesday, I went to the Cyber Security Challenge at Shrivenham from Wednesday evening until Sunday. And I’ll be honest, I thought I’d be a bit of a spare part there – I’d learn some stuff but that no one would even notice me. Got that one wrong!
I arrived, got my stuff dumped and was pretty much approached straight away by four lads, who wanted to know *everything* about me. I had waited until they’d talked and then told them a tiny bit about myself. I was gobsmacked at how interested everyone was in me. Met two of the girls, confessed to being out of my depth (and in a freaking dress….I mean, that alone is like weddings only) and grabbed a drink. We all went for food and then the ‘getting to know you’ session started.
It was hilarious. I’ll be doing a proper write-up on the bits I can, and the stuff I personally got from it on said new blog, but I have to say something about the personal stuff that went on while I was there.
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that I struggle with the ‘social’ aspect of the world outside. I understand *everything* out there in theory, but in practice, I’m about three seconds away from bolting when I do something new. And when you’re planning your escape in the next ten seconds, constantly, there really isn’t much room for anything else. And it makes me very tense, and quite excitable, because that ‘bleeds’ through into my voice and then I say something stupid and everything just….yeah.
I’m not so much an introvert as someone that should live inside the space an introvert takes up when they’re really scared and need time to themselves. you know, that tiny cupboard? That’d be a good place for me. I’m an introvert’s introvert. Mostly because I have severe anxiety.
And it makes me *incredibly* lonely. Which is the weird part. Introverts aren’t meant to get lonely, right? But I do. I’m intensely lonely, to the point of making an idiot of myself cause I’m excited someone other than my other half or my very small circle of friends are talking to me in person/online.
Cybercamp – a bit like the best environment I could have designed….
What happens when you take 20 reasonably young people (*with a few notable exceptions, myself included), mix in a heaping spoonful of a really neat scenario (which was made public, so I can talk about that bit) where some tankers have struck something and they’re not sure of why etc. and it could be security related or coincidence. And that’s where we were chucked in.
FOUR DAYS of intense, hands on fun later and I’m dizzy. I learned about SQL injections, I learned about changing stuff browser side. I learned why hidden HTML fields are going to get you reamed, if you’re not careful.
But I learned that actually, I’m quite level headed and can keep most of my anxiety under control. I learned it’s ok to go off and have a cry, because I’m just not keeping up, but I didn’t need to make a fuss about it. I learned it’s ok to be afraid because a lot of the others there too were too. What’s not ok was letting it win, cause I’d have been the one losing out. And I can get up in front of people and do a presentation without having a panic attack afterwards. I got top three on day three and I learned that I did that way out of my own expectations and I did it because the teams I was on – throughout the whole challenge (and we swapped teams throughout the stay) – were absolutely amazing. I mean, top notch. So it wasn’t really me that did it all – it was all of us.
And I made friends. Lots of em. Heaps of em.
Hi guys 😉
One of the things I did say that caused a bit of worry though was how disheartened I was after one of the challenges. I’m going to specifically explain that one in a seperate post – but it was disheartened at how easily I fell into tunnel vision and looked only at tech rather than the hollistic whole. And everything they flagged had been something I’d thought of and we’d missed it because I was so intent on ‘keeping up’ with the boys – not because it was a competition, but because I didn’t want to be their single point of failure. In fact, I should have been the ‘failure’ there, so i could then drop into the bigger picture stuff. That was my own fault for not communicating effectively and not taking the time to do the ‘personal’ bit that I ususally do. I’m USUALLY the loon in most games that explores everything before moviung on – not because I’m indecisive but because RTFM or ‘TTFP’ (talk to fucking people!) is about the rule of thumb I have – I don’t go all on interrogate, but I didn’t pay attention to that and I disappointed myself. But, I learned from that and we did stellarly in day 3.
Oh yeah, and I clearly have NO situational awareness. I wasn’t aware that we were in a tent in the middle of the desert on an island for one challenge, though it was emphasized. I just saw the back wall as a partition and darted around it, not considering what it actually meant. For someone who’s supposed to be hyper aware of her surroundings, that was a bit of a fail – but on the other hand, it really highlighted how safe and how comfortable I was in the environment, and how much I trusted, not just the team members (who at one point had me sandwiched between them while messing with a server box (one on each side, really close quarters)) and though I was a bit aware and kept having to calmly say ‘please don’t touch me’ it was all good. That’s something I need to work on – one lad that went to pull me over so I was closer and up on a chair next to him (tight skirt, very tired, not getting the hang of hopping up onto the barstool) looked genuinely offended when I said ‘don’t touch me’, and I very nearly dashed out of the room because I’d hurt his feelings.
My next blog post, coming in about two hours (A bit of housekeeping) is to answer some of the questions I’ve been asked lately about ‘where do you write, where are your books, how do I follow you). Skip that one too if you want.
Otherwise, Day (x) blow by blow will appear on Steampunkdragonfly in the next 24 hours or so, starting with Day 0.
I keep saying… Tomorrow will be different
First up. the rumors of my demise are greatly overstated. I had a bit of a hospital adventure, which I’ll explain later in the post, but I’m not too bad. Photo proof too, aren’t you lucky 😉
I’ve been getting really good at procrastinating.
Oh, I’ll tell myself it’s because there’s only so much I can do in a day, and I do achieve something…but.
Normally, but works in my favor It’s what I say to justify falling behind on my own work. It’s what I say to comfort myself when there’s nothing else to say. But…
I mean – client work is getting done. Edits are flowing in and out. I’m doing PR and my articles. But sometimes, the articles don’t get posted. A week passes and i loom at stuff and think ‘i should have done that, how in the heck did I miss my OWN deadline?’ Sometimes, I forget to stop at 9 and keep working through, and frequently I have to do twitter from my phone between other jobs.
I haven’t knitted since the middle of last month. I’m devouring books in the wee hours of the morning cause there’s no other time to read. Let alone write.
My sleep sucks. My blogs are neglected (I had articles for d-z, but I didn’t post them. I will though), and I’m sad, lonely and just not coping.
And through it all, I keep telling myself, ‘tomorrow will be different’. Tomorrow.
Not today.
Today is full of knowing my womb is empty, and not dealing with miscarrying. Today is studiously avoiding having too long to think, because then the litany of self-loathing in my head gets to be too much to bear. Today is waking up and checking my phone to see what’s happened this time and is full of missed things, and dropped responsibilities – agreeing to stuff when I should say no. Laundry that seems endless, even though we bought a new machine. Moderating because people just don’t ‘get’ it. Millions and millions of screams and sobs, suppressed because if I start, I’ll never stop.
Waking up and my first thought being ‘I wonder what fresh hell today holds’. Except, it’s not a fresh hell – it’s stale, moldy leftover hell. It’s one where I tell myself how worthless I am. Because I am.
It’s trying to be brave, because its been a bad week/month/year. It’s two new kittens, but constantly worrying – if they don’t eat, cry when walking, blink or sneeze, we panic. Its missing Kush like crazy, but having two cuties who make me smile, but I feel so guilty. It’s having friends, but being too scared to talk to them because, really, what right do I have to tell then about my life when I’m (mostly) healthy, I’m not in a position where I’m destitute. I’m loved and/or respected by people (though I will never understand why). I’m not dealing with organ failure, or health insurance, or sick husbands, or anything else. It’s wanting just one day where I don’t have to be strong.
And it’s a similar refrain, but trying to have a baby for nearly two years and being met with nothing but later and later, heavier cycles, failing to manage the one thing I should be able to do, and doesn’t depend on money, or work, or writing or even anyone other than me and him hurts. It hurts that we can’t get pregnant. It hurts that infertility is something else on our list of things. It hurts that, instead of a new baby at home, all I have is emptiness. And it’s hard, cause I feel as if there’s no-one to talk to. Even though I have a few really good friends that have told me to talk to them about anything.
I always said that I couldn’t make this sort of thing public – then, on Thursday I landed in hospital. For one reason and another, it had been a horrible week, and after talking to my other half, we went out for food.
On the way, my shoulder started hurting. Soon after eating, I started to feel horribly sick. And was violently and repeatedly sick. When I came home and posted my ‘woe is me’ on Facebook, mentioning the pain in my jaw, neck and shoulder, I was urged to call a doctor, who called a paramedic, who radioed for an ambulance.
They took me to the ER, where the commentary was basically ‘this could have been a cardiac event. We need bloods, to make you comfy, and you’ll stay.’ So I did.
And I read. I read like I’d never read in a LONG time – mostly because I’d forgotten my bipolar meds and the worst side effect of them is skipping a dose = only capable of dozing. And I read. And I had a think.
One of the things I thought through was why I put off my own writing in favor of *anything else*. I think that’s a whole post unto itself to be honest. Then I thought about what I am. Again, another post because I mostly define myself by what I can’t do/haven’t achieved. I thought about something very specific someone said in public then threw in my face in private, and what the fallout from that was. On that, I came to the conclusion that I can’t do anything. Not yet anyway.
I read. The whole of the second book of The Hunger Games (Catching Fire) and talked to nurses about books and indies and life.
I was in hospital a total of around 13 hours. I slept for 1. So I got home, was fed, and slept. And I thought some more.
I have no solution to the empty feeling inside me right now. I have no immediate solution to one of the things thrown in my face either, though on that, the person was wrong. But tomorrow is going to be here soon, and I don’t want to keep looking to it to find the better things. I want to find more of them now – it’s better for me that way.
Oh, that photo? That’s me, tonight, in bed, smiling cause I get told off if I don’t. It’s not a common expression right now, but I’m sure that if I turn tomorrow to today, it’ll find me again. I hope.
C is for….
I bet everyone can tell what this post is going to be about.
Yep.
Cats!
I love my cats. We recently lost my adorable girl, so after we got everything cleaned (she had a permanent URI) and grieved, we adopted the girls.
The grey girl in the photos is Haley, the little mountaineer, Eiryss.
Both are nine months old – Haley’s fairly placid, Eiryss quite skittish, but they’re settling in really well.
How things play out – aka, why it’s taken nearly 11 years to publish Glass Block
I’m inches from publishing my first full-length novel under my own name, and I was going to kinda let it pass without comment, and then I thought ‘I think I wanna talk about this’.
The following is a bit maudlin, a bit ‘ow, crossed legs’ for writers, a bit dumb luck and a bit scary really. So if you wanna skip it, I understand.
But this is the story of Glass Block.