practicing words
2015, y'all. This has not really been my year. As I look back at the, what, four posts so far this year, I see all my January hopes, my late May broken foot low point (long story: turned out not to be broken after all, and my podiatrist is a moron, but we're way past that in medical tales), and one would hope I would have sprung back from all that, with the bright hopes promised in my new apartment, my new neighbor 
chaila, my new boss, and so forth. And it is true: the new apartment and neighborhood are fantastic, having a
chaila of my very own all the time is the best, and the new boss is wonderful and a dramatic improvement over the last one.
And yet.
It started in August, when this pain in my lower abdomen started to get a little worse and a little more consistent, and I started poking around and made the alarming discovery that there was a palpable thing on the left side of my lower abdomen. A round hardness. A mass. Cue googling and panic, and medical care that took rather longer than my scared impatient self wanted it to, and in the end, I do not have cancer or anything dreadful, but I do have a fibroid the size of a cantaloupe, which I'm having cut out, c-section-style, because that's the only way to remove a cantaloupe, apparently, in 12 days. Desperately looking forward to this, if not to the 6-week recovery.
And so my summer of waiting has turned into a fall of more waiting, with pain, and just a general not-right-ness that is possibly related to Oscar the jerkface fibroid and possibly related to...I don't know. It's always a problem of causality, isn't it. Does depression cause not-right-ness? Does not-right-ness cause depression? Are they both caused by something else, like hormones out of whack or chronic stress or intestinal bacteria or all of the above?
Whatever the cause, I'm not right. I read somewhere that people think of depression as sadness but it's really more the emotional equivalent of watching paint dry. This has been a fall of abdominal pain and watching paint dry. Of junk TV in reruns and the utter failure to engage intellectually in anything. Of a complete lack of focus, in which it's kind of a miracle I've been able to keep up with my job. And I have plans to deal with some of this after the current health crisis is over (deeply curious, for instance, to see whether simply having the surgery helps, or if it's actually going to take a big retooling of the brain drugs and so forth). But much of that is on hold because major surgery in 12 days.
In the meantime, work goes on, and work is asking me to write, as it does from time to time. And...I can't. I really can't. I'm so out of practice, and I stare at the screen and nothing comes, and I have this faint memory of being a person who wrote essays and articles and fic and meta and a goddamned dissertation, and I was good at it, and it's all just gone, and the cursor blinks and the paint dries, slowly.
So the thing I can do, for the next 12 days, in the days after that, once I'm out of the hospital and the painkiller haze and whatever else will happen afterwards, is practice words. Not the work words, at least not here, and not yet--the articles that I keep saying I want to write, to advance my career in the ways I keep saying I want to do, according to some remote part of my brain, divorced from the part of my brain that mostly just wants to watch CSI reruns and play Candy Crush all day--not those words yet, but some words. Hell, even just words about CSI reruns and Candy Crush would be a start. (CSI:NY: still ridiculous, but god, I love Stella Bonasera.)
Words. Habits. Brains doing brain things. Remembering to actually write stuff in this journal now and then. Baby steps.
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments. Comment here or there.
chaila, my new boss, and so forth. And it is true: the new apartment and neighborhood are fantastic, having a
chaila of my very own all the time is the best, and the new boss is wonderful and a dramatic improvement over the last one.
And yet.
It started in August, when this pain in my lower abdomen started to get a little worse and a little more consistent, and I started poking around and made the alarming discovery that there was a palpable thing on the left side of my lower abdomen. A round hardness. A mass. Cue googling and panic, and medical care that took rather longer than my scared impatient self wanted it to, and in the end, I do not have cancer or anything dreadful, but I do have a fibroid the size of a cantaloupe, which I'm having cut out, c-section-style, because that's the only way to remove a cantaloupe, apparently, in 12 days. Desperately looking forward to this, if not to the 6-week recovery.
And so my summer of waiting has turned into a fall of more waiting, with pain, and just a general not-right-ness that is possibly related to Oscar the jerkface fibroid and possibly related to...I don't know. It's always a problem of causality, isn't it. Does depression cause not-right-ness? Does not-right-ness cause depression? Are they both caused by something else, like hormones out of whack or chronic stress or intestinal bacteria or all of the above?
Whatever the cause, I'm not right. I read somewhere that people think of depression as sadness but it's really more the emotional equivalent of watching paint dry. This has been a fall of abdominal pain and watching paint dry. Of junk TV in reruns and the utter failure to engage intellectually in anything. Of a complete lack of focus, in which it's kind of a miracle I've been able to keep up with my job. And I have plans to deal with some of this after the current health crisis is over (deeply curious, for instance, to see whether simply having the surgery helps, or if it's actually going to take a big retooling of the brain drugs and so forth). But much of that is on hold because major surgery in 12 days.
In the meantime, work goes on, and work is asking me to write, as it does from time to time. And...I can't. I really can't. I'm so out of practice, and I stare at the screen and nothing comes, and I have this faint memory of being a person who wrote essays and articles and fic and meta and a goddamned dissertation, and I was good at it, and it's all just gone, and the cursor blinks and the paint dries, slowly.
So the thing I can do, for the next 12 days, in the days after that, once I'm out of the hospital and the painkiller haze and whatever else will happen afterwards, is practice words. Not the work words, at least not here, and not yet--the articles that I keep saying I want to write, to advance my career in the ways I keep saying I want to do, according to some remote part of my brain, divorced from the part of my brain that mostly just wants to watch CSI reruns and play Candy Crush all day--not those words yet, but some words. Hell, even just words about CSI reruns and Candy Crush would be a start. (CSI:NY: still ridiculous, but god, I love Stella Bonasera.)
Words. Habits. Brains doing brain things. Remembering to actually write stuff in this journal now and then. Baby steps.
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments. Comment here or there.