My Manifesto for the New Year: Also happy year of the Horse everybody!
Okay so one of the things I decided to work on this year, was being a little more forth-coming about who I am. Obviously sharing RL stuff in fandom space is purely optional, and I'm creating a tag for anybody who doesn't want to deal with RL on their dashboard.
I understand. Fandom is a safe space for a lot of people who have significant health and societal issues that don't need other people's problems dumped on them. If you are somebody who knows enough about themselves to know not to take on other people's problems, then I solute you and you are awesome. Keep doing what you need to do to keep yourself safe and stable.
# # #
So a basic intro to me. I've got a chronic pain problem. It's not life-threatening or anything, but it does put a crimp in my life. On bad weeks I'm barely on the computer at all, much less in a productive/communicative capacity. So that's something anybody who's reading this page or dealing with me on a long-term basis is going to have to understand. It's not that I'm trying to slight you or anything, I've just learned that there are some points where pushing myself hard is the worst thing I can do. Which leads me to the other thing I'm trying to work on this year. Here is my motto for the year:
"Accept your weaknesses, and learn to take advantage of your strengths."
So now to explain my basic issue. Not going into too many details, but as a basic primer for things I might say in later posts.
There is something called your atlas vertebra. It's one of the vertebra that keeps your skull in place. Mine was damaged almost 11 years ago. It's twisted so that it is cutting off blood flow to the left hemisphere of my brain. I was finally diagnosed in March of last year, after ten years of unexplained, debilitating headaches. Now that its been diagnosed I can get it re positioned by a doctor. After ten years of being twisted the ligaments and muscles that keep the bone in place no longer do their job, so it will periodically become twisted again. Causing the return of my debilitating headaches. There are dozens of things that can knock it out of place, including tension, moving the wrong way, sleeping the wrong way, sitting the wrong way, general inflammation, and who knows how many things.
Which means I can be feeling great for a day or sometimes even a week or two at a time, and then wake up feeling like there is a giant clawed thing digging into the side of my neck and head, trying to boar its way through my skull and turning the left half of my brain into mush. My left eye stops working with my right, and all the information coming from that eye feels like its seconds out of sink with my right eye. This feeling can last for a day or two, until I can get to the doctor. Or during a bad spell it can last for weeks even after I've seen the doctor. The longest I've ever had it last without a break was 10 days. I take medication for it but they basically just take the edge off. Meaning that I can still feel where the pain is, still feel my eyes being out of sink and a clawing pain throughout the left side of my neck and skull. There are days when even looking at a screen and trying to parse the words out leaves me feeling like I'm trying to translate a different language.
So why am I telling you all of this? It's not required, a lot of people don't talk about their problems in detail on the web, and the people that do are all to often branded as trying to get sympathy or support they don't deserve. So this is me trying to make it clear that I'm not asking for you to feel bad for me or give me a break on deadlines or whatever.
This is me explaining my weakness to you, and accepting it in myself. This year if my body says no to something I'm not going to try to mind over matter it. I'm going to do my best to take the world on, during the days I'm functional and forgive myself for the days I'm not. Because quiet frankly I never want to have another year like 2013. After I got diagnosed I thought I could just move on and force my symptoms away because I was finally getting treatment and everything was supposed to be better.
I had the worst, least productive year I've had in five years. I didn't manage to finish one long form story that I tried to write, and I barely kept my head above water with my reccing duties. My modding attempts were laughable when it came to posting when I said I would. It took me six months to write and revise a story I would have previously been able to knock out in a couple weeks.
My number of bad days decreased from 4-6 a week to 2-4. I thought I should be on top of the world. But I learned something valuable that I hope to be able to use to my advantage this year. Four bad days a week is still four bad days a week and maybe I get two to four more good days a week then I got before. But if I push to hard on those days, it increases the likelihood of my upping my bad days.
So moving forward, I'm going to try and be reckless, loud, and brazen. I'm going to try and use my good-days effectively instead of plotting to the point that I get nothing done before I hit a string of bad days. So from here on out I'm resolving to write free and dirty, without thinking and rethinking every word I write. I resolve to accept that I have a chronic issue that isn't going to miraculously disappear. And biggest of all, I resolve to work around and with my weaknesses instead of trying to push through and ignore them.
This is one part manifesto, and one part warning. Because starting this year I'm going to be working on becoming the best spoon-theory using, speed writing, chronic headache having, crazy person I can be.
I understand. Fandom is a safe space for a lot of people who have significant health and societal issues that don't need other people's problems dumped on them. If you are somebody who knows enough about themselves to know not to take on other people's problems, then I solute you and you are awesome. Keep doing what you need to do to keep yourself safe and stable.
# # #
So a basic intro to me. I've got a chronic pain problem. It's not life-threatening or anything, but it does put a crimp in my life. On bad weeks I'm barely on the computer at all, much less in a productive/communicative capacity. So that's something anybody who's reading this page or dealing with me on a long-term basis is going to have to understand. It's not that I'm trying to slight you or anything, I've just learned that there are some points where pushing myself hard is the worst thing I can do. Which leads me to the other thing I'm trying to work on this year. Here is my motto for the year:
"Accept your weaknesses, and learn to take advantage of your strengths."
So now to explain my basic issue. Not going into too many details, but as a basic primer for things I might say in later posts.
There is something called your atlas vertebra. It's one of the vertebra that keeps your skull in place. Mine was damaged almost 11 years ago. It's twisted so that it is cutting off blood flow to the left hemisphere of my brain. I was finally diagnosed in March of last year, after ten years of unexplained, debilitating headaches. Now that its been diagnosed I can get it re positioned by a doctor. After ten years of being twisted the ligaments and muscles that keep the bone in place no longer do their job, so it will periodically become twisted again. Causing the return of my debilitating headaches. There are dozens of things that can knock it out of place, including tension, moving the wrong way, sleeping the wrong way, sitting the wrong way, general inflammation, and who knows how many things.
Which means I can be feeling great for a day or sometimes even a week or two at a time, and then wake up feeling like there is a giant clawed thing digging into the side of my neck and head, trying to boar its way through my skull and turning the left half of my brain into mush. My left eye stops working with my right, and all the information coming from that eye feels like its seconds out of sink with my right eye. This feeling can last for a day or two, until I can get to the doctor. Or during a bad spell it can last for weeks even after I've seen the doctor. The longest I've ever had it last without a break was 10 days. I take medication for it but they basically just take the edge off. Meaning that I can still feel where the pain is, still feel my eyes being out of sink and a clawing pain throughout the left side of my neck and skull. There are days when even looking at a screen and trying to parse the words out leaves me feeling like I'm trying to translate a different language.
So why am I telling you all of this? It's not required, a lot of people don't talk about their problems in detail on the web, and the people that do are all to often branded as trying to get sympathy or support they don't deserve. So this is me trying to make it clear that I'm not asking for you to feel bad for me or give me a break on deadlines or whatever.
This is me explaining my weakness to you, and accepting it in myself. This year if my body says no to something I'm not going to try to mind over matter it. I'm going to do my best to take the world on, during the days I'm functional and forgive myself for the days I'm not. Because quiet frankly I never want to have another year like 2013. After I got diagnosed I thought I could just move on and force my symptoms away because I was finally getting treatment and everything was supposed to be better.
I had the worst, least productive year I've had in five years. I didn't manage to finish one long form story that I tried to write, and I barely kept my head above water with my reccing duties. My modding attempts were laughable when it came to posting when I said I would. It took me six months to write and revise a story I would have previously been able to knock out in a couple weeks.
My number of bad days decreased from 4-6 a week to 2-4. I thought I should be on top of the world. But I learned something valuable that I hope to be able to use to my advantage this year. Four bad days a week is still four bad days a week and maybe I get two to four more good days a week then I got before. But if I push to hard on those days, it increases the likelihood of my upping my bad days.
So moving forward, I'm going to try and be reckless, loud, and brazen. I'm going to try and use my good-days effectively instead of plotting to the point that I get nothing done before I hit a string of bad days. So from here on out I'm resolving to write free and dirty, without thinking and rethinking every word I write. I resolve to accept that I have a chronic issue that isn't going to miraculously disappear. And biggest of all, I resolve to work around and with my weaknesses instead of trying to push through and ignore them.
This is one part manifesto, and one part warning. Because starting this year I'm going to be working on becoming the best spoon-theory using, speed writing, chronic headache having, crazy person I can be.