Sometimes It's The Only Thing There Is

Content warning: More stuff about depression.

Internet, I have been ill.

I started feeling sick about July 10th. I went to a job seminar thingy, and I was feeling iffy about it, but I had a good time going home, got into a great conversation with a nice person, which helped. I didn't think I was going to take the job offer. I didn't think it was a good idea financially. I came to that conclusion confidently.

I woke up the next morning struggling to breath. I had two panic attacks before lunch. That's pretty normal in the last few months. I breath my way through it and keep going. But then it just didn't stop. My Kobo died. Another panic attack. I can't afford another one right now because I don't have a job yet. One more panic attack. Had to go out and get groceries. One panic attack while waiting for the bus. I went back inside and didn't get groceries. And it kept going. I chalked it up to a bad day, and went to sleep. I slept through the night, and, having had panic attacks all day, I had no nightmares.

The next day I couldn't get out of bed. Not "I was scared to get out of bed." I wasn't having panic attacks at all. My whole body was drained of all energy. I slept the whole day, and assumed it was illness. Day three, I could get out of bed for an hour at a time, then panic and cry until I had to go back to sleep. Day four, I accidentally cut myself during a panic attack, and was too afraid to go to hospital because I was sure if they found out I had done this during four days of panic attacks they would hospitalize me, assuming it was intentional. Day five, I had the injury treated, and fought my way awake to get some writing and homework done, in increments. I could still only stay upright for an hour at a time.

By day ten, my chest hurt every time I sat up, my face was raw, and my eyes hurt because I'd been crying so often I was dehydrated. I kept waiting for it to break, like a fever. A person cannot withstand that sort of misery for any length of time. And yet, withstand it I did. For three straight weeks, my days were forcing finger food down my throat, struggling not to vomit it up, crying myself to sleep every hour on the hour, and calling crisis, my mother, and anyone else I could to be told they couldn't help me. And while I did that, I thought about dying.

About week two, I got tired of the struggle. I had been doing so well with writing, and so I took twenty minutes out of my incredibly short day, and wrote words. I tried writing what was in my head, but honestly, that just made my throat close up and my stomach heave. So for a while, I was writing current WiP. And then I would get stuck. And because it's the only thing I know for sure to keep the wolves back, I came up with new things.

When I was little, and I was afraid of the stuff inside me, before I had a diagnosis, and when I was left alone to deal with the fact that I was more something for other people to deal with than a person in my own right, I used to tell myself stories. A lot of the stuff I write about now is largely about dealing with the darkness that lives inside every person, the ugly person inside the person that you're trying to be, which is inside the person that you are. Between the depression and the constant battle between hating myself and hating the way I was seen by everyone else, I have a lot of that dark and ugly stuff. I started writing out one of those stories. And two paragraphs in, I realized how much more there was to write. And then, two pages after that, I realized there was even more. And then I kept going.

It's odd, because this time nothing much changed. Normally, I get an idea and it feels like something huge. Which happened. And then I run at the thing full-tilt and imagine that I can make this work, and I hurry myself along and I think it's amazing, and then I hate every second of writing the first draft, and if I make it to the second draft, then I'm happy again. It's a whole roller coaster, very involved. That didn't happen here.

There was the initial jolt. The awarness that I had been writing a story without knowing it for years, the knowledge that it was a good story, that in fact, it was the thing I'd always been trying to write. And after that- nothing. I was out of feelings. I got up, every day, same as I had been, and thought, "Do I still wish I was dead?" and the answer was always yes. And then I would jot out a page or two and go back to sleep. Until eventually, I was answering, "Yes. But I don't want people to only ever read the first draft of this."

It was a slow, uncomfortable trek. Four days ago I could leave the house without crying. Two days ago I laughed for the first time in three weeks. And all the while, I kept going.

I'm not going to jump the gun here. I don't know if it's ready for a first draft to be finished. There have been a lot of those moments in my journey. But I do feel that this, whatever it is, is important to me. And in the middle of the claustrophobic misery that has made up my life lately, it's nice to still have something that is mine.

Writers finish...and I don't.

Hannah is not going to get finished.

I feel sad. Really really sad, and embarrassed to have failed, yet again, but I just don't know what else to do. I do this thing where I set goals for myself, and if one of the goals go unmet, I can't do any of it. It's a personal issue I need to work on. But working on it with my writing is turning my writing into something I really don't enjoy, and quite frankly, these are still my favorite characters in my favorite story, and I don't want to think of them in the way that I have been. I enjoy the writing that I do, but every time I sit down, it's a reminder of how much I haven't done. It's just the words giving me trouble, and then I torture myself, hate everything I've ever written, hate myself for writing or not writing, or anything else I can.

Writing is hard. Making time to write is hard, having the discipline to write is hard. Knowing your limits is hard, giving up is hard, knowing when to put it down 'for now' is hard, knowing how long 'for now' is, is hard too. I'm not a novelist, I haven't been for years, everything I've ever written in the years since Hannah is screenplay, and I don't want to give her up, and I want to write, and I do think that self-publishing is the answer. But I am torturing myself about writing to the extent where I don't have time to read. And if I don't have time to read, how do I write?

Coming back from vacation, I realized a few things. The first is the same thing I always realize when I go home from a trip: I am capable of pretty damn amazing things. It's hard to be anything but humble while you're looking the Mona Lisa in the eye, or eating pasta under the shadow of the Roman Coliseum or feeling how it's like my feet finally touch bottom in a deep pool every time I leave Heathrow airport to go into the city. It's tough to be anything besides grateful when you're on top of the Eiffel Tower and realize that the woman next to you is eighty years old, and has waited her whole life to stand next to you, here, and millions who will keep waiting, while your own life hasn't even really begun yet. But when it's over, and I can look back, remember getting lost in Paris and finding my way back on my own, remember climbing the huge Coliseum steps with my friends, instead of taking the lift, like I should have done, not because I was embarrassed, but because I didn't want to miss a second, and, without thinking, ordering food in a fancy restaurant, and eating it without asking for help or worrying about who might be staring... That's me. Mine to have, mine to keep, mine to value, as I will. I think about my family and people I have known, the ones who asked me, not how, but why the first time, and the second time both. How the world was created and filled with beautiful things, but there are people who live their whole lives thinking it's easier to not see them, and I am not one of those, and that's enough to make me feel powerful.

I am capable. But I also grew up in disability culture, and one of the problems I have is common to, well, probably a lot of us, since a lot of people I know have a similar problem: I do not know my own capabilities. It's either too much to handle, or not enough to motivate me. I started this project easily because I knew that I would do that to myself, and then, from day one, I've been doing that to myself anyway (I still blame Day One on Amanda Palmer, but, whatever.) So... Hannah will get done. And I will publish a book before the year is out. But I'm not sure, if those things will be related.

Vacation resets me. I want a reset. Not a do-over. The nasty, negative, "You didn't do what you said you would" voices in my head have effectively silenced the voice in my head that tells me where the stories are, but there are a couple little imps still left over from spring and a couple late bloomers. There are other voices, and that's been part of the problem. Hannah has changed from something I want to experience and enjoy and remember, into something I want to get through, to get to other things. And seeing as how I plan to write it in three novels, it's so much more daunting that way.

So, I'll keep working on it. In quiet, in private, in bits and pieces. And focus the rest of my energy... somewhere else. Don't know where else yet. Like I said, a couple things are clamouring for my attention, but this is not what I want to be writing right now, and if I don't write it, I feel guilty, so I don't write anything else, and I continue to torture myself (seriously, nobody told me writers were this neurotic! haha) So. Regroup. I'll wait a week. Maybe two. One of the many little imps in my head will come forward with gnashing teeth (no, not that one,) my family drama will settle down, and start again. I do mean to make something of myself, and do it in this way, but I may have overestimated myself (again), and not quite grasped what would be the best vessel for that.

It's upsetting, and it feels like failure, but that's me being neurotic. I write better in the fall, anyway. (This is actual fact, not an excuse. Spring for ideas, Summer for obsessive creative spurts, Fall for grit-your-teeth, down-and-dirty writing, and Winter for hacking the crap out of all the stuff I was previously too warm-and-fuzzy about to be objective towards. It's always been that way, it just seems too obsessive-compulsive to not at least try to change habits. I am foolish, it seems.) I'll find something else. There are a lot of something elses. When the ideas have hold of me, they drown out the negative voices so that I can be perfectly happy writing crap. Hannah's not doing that for me right now, but something else will. Meanwhile, I'll keep plugging away and picking it apart, and it'll come out, eventually.

And I'll keep writing this blog. I like having somewhere to talk shop, and people who'll talk back. Writing this blog is easier than writing stories, which I never even thought possible, and it helps with that need to sift through stuff, to find the balance between who they are, and who I am, and who is more important.

I took tons of pics and videos from my vacation, and I'm going to cut them together in a massive doc-style video, if I can manage it. For now, for everyone out there who has to wait, or doesn't think it's possible for them, or just because the world is beautiful and I like being able to share it, here's some shots.


See you next week for round two?