Monthly Archives: November 2021

Musings, Writing

There’s still time to write, #NaNoWriMo or not

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At the end of the month it’s easy to feel dejected, feel like you aren’t going to reach the goal of 50k, or whatever goal you set for yourself. So I’m here to remind you of something:

No matter how much you write in the next 8 days, if you write any words it’s more than no words.

You can keep writing even if you’re not going to reach the goals you set out for yourself. And that’s still a good thing all-in-all.

Last year a lot of people around me used the hashtag #NotSoWriMo, as a way to indicate that they were writing and joining in, but in a different way than the set goals of #NaNoWriMo.

I set up my own goal this month, which was to write every day if I could. And I’ve not been writing every day, but I’ve had the chance to learn what a good weekly writing schedule would look like for me. I also got the chance to figure out what works for me right now.

In 2010 I wrote a full 50k draft. No editing just writing writing writing. But since then I’ve not even touched that draft, even if it plays at the back of my mind occasionally. Mostly because it’s such a big draft that I didn’t try to write well. I was just trying to write it all.

I don’t necessarily think this was a bad thing for me, but I have started to learn that just trying to write a set amount of words in a set amount of time means I will spiral on meta writing or loop a lot. Instead of like when I’m writing by hand in the journal, contemplating what I’m writing and trying to craft good sentence, after good sentence. I guess it’s similar to the brick laying (Will Smith). I’ve found that for me, a well placed brick now means less work later. Imagine having to tear it all down to adjust it later. Phew.

Sorry, this went a bit off track. What I’m saying here is, there’s no one way of doing this writing thing. And I hope that you can find the encouragement and energy up keep writing.

Give yourself these last 8 days this writing month, and continue writing. Each day you write another sentence is more than you had before.

I believe in you.

Writing

Today we’re in mourning

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Today we’re in mourning. I don’t know who we’re mourning, but we are. And it’s strange, to not know who or why or how. Not that it’s the first time. And it’s strange that we ended up with this just a day after I published an old poem about grief. A poem I don’t remember when I wrote, just that I wrote it and was going to publish it later, or continue writing on it.

Not every poem has to be complete. Maybe the poem being incomplete adds to the poetry sometimes, especially when it’s about grief. An interruption, to ourselves, to our lives, to someone else’s life. Not just an interruption, but an abrupt ending. A goodbye without saying goodbye. A loss of a friend, and a future of what could’ve been. A future that will not be anymore.

We may grieve for ourselves, our relationship with them. We may grieve for them, their family and their loss. Grieve for the future with their children, family and relations that they don’t get to continue. We may grieve that we never got to tell them how much they meant to us.

There’s a story here, but that story isn’t mine to tell and it never will be unless I am given the honor of write that story.

Today we’re in mourning. I’m feeling it through-out my entire body, and I know that I’m joining this too. So I say we. Even though I don’t know them, and I don’t know their name.

Today we’re in mourning. We sit in solemn silence, and we are distracting ourselves the best we can, from the thoughts and the feelings. I am writing, but the act of writing is a way to refocus, to process, to mediate, on the life that was lost. Because someone died. It wasn’t my person who died, but it was one of his people, and he is my person, so when he grieves I grieve.

Today we’re in mourning, and that’s okay. It’s horrible to say that it’s okay. Because it’s not. It’s not okay that someone lost their life way too early, but we keep losing so many people before their time. When is it ever truly someone’s time?

Today we’re in mourning. And it’s not okay. We’re not okay. But we will be. For now, we grieve a loss of life.

Poetry

Poem: Grief begets grief

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Grieving for one
Brings grief for another
Memories of pain
Hurt
Tears
Rushing back
With hints of 
How it felt last
When they passed on

Today it's another
With the reminder
Of grief
Of grieving 
Of mourning

Filled with sorrow
For loved ones
For friends
For dearly departed
Bereft of life too soon

89 years old
still too soon
to leave this earth
Even with great-grandchildren
still too soon

Grief begets grief
Journey, Mental Health

Finding myself in the darkness

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This was written in the end of October, but I was unable to edit for quite a while. I didn’t publish this until today, because I wasn’t sure if it was going to stick, if I was going to find myself crying, wanting to run away, and die again. I think I wanted to future proof, before sharing this text that isn’t advice, especially since so much I talk about comes out as advice.

I keep having mental breakdowns. And it’s been getting increasingly harder to come out of them. I’ve felt a need to escape, to use all my remaining energy to just run away. From everyone and everything. All the while knowing that I don’t want to run away. So I stay and I suffer, unable to understand what’s going on with me.

Other than the glaringly obvious, that my meds is doing shit with my brain. I need to figure out what exactly. I know bits and pieces of it, it’s my new meds which are supposed to change things with my brain chemistry, there’s a reason I’m on legal speed. *laughs in ADHD* but also it seems to interact with my hormones and I don’t know how much of that is what. Then I have my anti-depressants on top and I don’t know if I need to adjust them down or up. If I had a choice I’d prefer to adjust them down to find out where I am without them but on the ADHD-meds. But that also feels increasingly dangerous as I’m currently in my worst depressive episode in very many years.

As you can tell, there’s a lot going on, and as you can tell by recent posts of mine, my mental health is not doing too well. But I’m alive, which is an achievement all on its own.

I’m slowly putting all the pieces together. Constantly referring to my life and my experiences as pieces of a puzzle. It’s tricky, and nearly impossible to figure out all of it in one go. On some days I’m living for the challenge and finding joy in pulling the threads—all balled together—apart, while on others it’s driving me mad.

I’ve always been an over-sharer, who a lot of people have looked at and laughed while I’ve been sharing my weird stories and experiences. I’ve been encouraged to get drunk and tell my tall tales, while everyone else in the room was nearly sober. And my friends giggled at me as I was having trouble getting from point A to point B. I would always go from A to D, maybe via F back to H, the C, I , and completely forget about B. This was my ADHD. My brain doesn’t work like everyone elses, and I just didn’t know until three months ago.

So yes, I’m going through the worst depression of my life, but it’s different this time, even if it’s just as painful. I have so many more tools in my tool box, at the ready. Unfortunately, I also have ADHD, so I don’t always remember what’s in that tool box, or where I put the toolbox, or I forgot to put the tools in there at all. Even though this is a metaphorical box, I have created a physical one, where I write down things on little cue cards, and they are neatly organized in a box. It took me 7 years to even start writing them since the idea came to me, a while before I even met my current partner. I have had the box since we started dating, I have had some of the cards since before then.

You see, I’m extremely self-aware, and sometimes I get completely lost, within myself, trying to fix things, trying to fix myself and people around me. If I’m trying to save someone else I don’t have to worry about myself, you see.

But sometimes, I get so lost that I have completely forgotten that I know how to swim, and that I know how to love. I’ve been threading water for so long, for so many years, that when the water is shallow enough for me to stand in, I forget. I don’t know. I’m that screaming child, because the water is too deep, and my parents are letting me go, and then I realize that I am able to stand in the water. That screaming, aches in me when I see it. I identify with it on such a deep level, because I keep getting so lost, unable to see the lighthouse at the shore line because I’m only looking straight up into the sky, and the sky is dark with clouds. And I’m freezing in the water. Ready to let go, and stop threading water.

I’m mixing metaphors, as we do, but I think you can understand how easy it is to just not be able to identify your situation. Over the past few months, I have been quite sure that I was going to die, not because of Covid-19, not directly, but because of my, what feels like a, very broken mind. I did not feel like I could see any way out of the darkness.

I didn’t hear my partner, asking me if I was okay. I’d always just respond with “yeah, whatever” or just not be able to say anything useful. A lot of “I don’t know”. Just saying I don’t know, is… usually an indication that we’re not okay, but we may not possess all the words yet.

I knew I wasn’t able to talk with my partner about how I was feeling inside, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t understand why. I thought this would be the end of me, or at the very least us.

I kept crying, but I didn’t want to cry. Crying is annoying, it bothers others, and I didn’t want to be a burden anymore. I am tired of being sick, and sick of being tired. I struggle to take care of myself on a good day, and I have so so many bad days.

What did I do to find my way back? I… I don’t know how it happened, I just know that it happened. I was cuddling with my partner, talking about my last bout of leaving the house and sitting on a bench, out in the cold night, not the rain this time. We had not been cuddling much in a very long time, for reasons. In the week prior I had began braiding his hair, giving us a few minutes of intimacy before he’d go to work every night. That ounce of intimacy reminded me, how good oxytocin can be. Yet, I had a complete breakdown that very same weekend. Again. So I was seeking comfort, before I could formulate what was going on. Saying that I was not okay.

As he was drifting off to sleep on his day off of work that week, with me right next to him I said, that I felt like I was invading his space, if he was falling asleep, and I should probably leave. He said to me, something that helped me find my way back again out of this darkness:

I’m falling asleep because I’m comfortable, I wouldn’t fall asleep with you here if I wasn’t feeling comfortable with you here.

And I realized, that I had locked myself into my head, I had created a distance by withdrawing because I thought that was what he wanted and needed. He had never told me to leave him alone all the time, but I thought that him being in his room meant he wanted space to be alone. So I left him alone, as it was the least I could do given that he works and keeps us safe and alive when I can’t work enough to pay my own bills let alone ours or any food on top of that.

No, I had decided that he was withdrawn, so I kept withdrawing. I didn’t ask to watch something together, I didn’t ask to sit together, I didn’t ask to cuddle anymore.

When he said those words I realized that I wasn’t alone. We’ve been together for 7.5 years now. We’ve been through some of the worst things in my life, but we’re still here. And we’re still building our home together.

I thought I wanted to edit this last bit out, because it was way too private, but as I read it again, I realize that I need to leave it in because it was important. Important in order to understand how easy it is to get obsessively lost within yourself, not seeing a way out.

I think it’s valuable to reach out to your friends. Whether you see them struggling or not, whether you’re struggling or not. Remind them and yourself that you are not alone, and maybe even help direct each other to the shore. The answer isn’t always “you’re not being treated right”, but it’s also not necessarily “you’re crazy”, it can be somewhere in between, or way out of orbit. This post isn’t a recommendation, or a solution for anyone else, this was my solution, for me, and it may not stick, but I did feel like it was a proper breakthrough in the most positive ways.

If you enjoyed this piece of writing, and would like me to be able to write them more, feel free to head over to my Ko-fi or my Liberapay and throw me a little coin.
Alternatively, check out my support page for more info.

Health, Musings, Writing

To Follow your own advice

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I know, it sucks. Like a lot. Coaches don’t play, you may want to yell at me, and that’s a very fair point. Yet, recognizing when you give advice you should follow yourself, it could actually help you do it. Let me explain.

Yesterday, a friend was sharing some of their struggles with their workload with their studies, and having to pretty much just put their head down and keep studying as much as possible to get through it. Which reminded me of when I had my worst crunch periods, but I was also very sick, so I had to balance everything I was doing on a knife’s edge to not completely crash. So I gave him advice based on how I took care of myself during such periods.

When I needed to crunch studies, the most important thing to me was to eat regularly and take a walk every day. At least one walk. This would depend on the level of my health, and at one point I had to just opt for much shorter walks, but more frequently both for mental and physical health reasons. I’ve gotten through the worst times, health wise, of my life while studying full time, and it’s been strange, but you pick up some interesting coping mechanisms, and one was take good care of yourself while studying.

So there I was, yesterday, unable to really go out the house and unable to take very well care of myself, and handle my physical and mental anxiety enough to get writing done as I wanted, and get resting done as I wanted. And it hit me, I wasn’t following my own advice. I knew in theory that I would be better off, if I wanted to write, if I took a walk every day. When I took a walk every day for like 14 days, I wrote two good articles in that time.

I have the proof that putting in this effort makes a difference. I got the experience, to give me the knowledge what I can do to create a better better environment for myself. And since my goal for the coming 2 years is to write, if not daily at least a majority of the week’s days, establishing a pattern and habit of treating my self as well as I’d treat my friends would be a stable foundation to start on.

So here I am, again, sharing my advice, but advice that I want to follow myself. I want to write more, and in order to be able to write, I need to take a walk at least every other day. And to not feel icky, I need to shower, and I need to remember to feed myself because my brain is doing a lot of work. I need to remember to take breaks and go up and just do something else. I need to allow myself restful sleep, even on days I haven’t written anything.

I can work on figuring out what habits work better for me. But still keep treating myself with compassion, and care. Even on high anxiety days, I can help myself through because I know that 30min walk is very likely to make me feel better, and even if it doesn’t, that would’ve been 30minutes where I didn’t have to sit and just tense up, it was 30minutes I moved my body, and 30minutes I got to breathe fresh air, and 30minutes I got to listen to a book as I took my walk. It was 30minutes that I was able to meet cute dogs, or just see the colours of the leaves change in the park. It was 30minutes that I took a little bit better care of myself instead of just wallowing in my anxiety.

And even if it doesn’t work, I can always take a nap after my walk, and try again tomorrow.

If you enjoyed this piece of writing, and would like me to be able to write them more, feel free to head over to my Ko-fi or my Liberapay and throw me a little coin.
Alternatively, check out my support page for more info.