A wacky fact about impostor syndrome and self-loathing is that sometimes external validation does help, I suppose because collecting rejection letters feels like a continual gaslighting/nobody likes your sort of experience. I know this is an unavoidable fact of the industry, but the emotional brain that went through what it went through doesn't always get that.
So, one measly acceptance letter, and I'm attacking the project of writing with more vigor than I have for years.
Somewhere along the way, I upped my daily word quota to 1,000 words, or an equivalent amount of editing (the latter is more based on gut instinct than anything). I've extruded a few flash fiction pieces, have started sending one around, gotta edit the others...Always a bit shocking to considering a flash fiction piece ready for submission after having spent over a year on the piece that got accepted for publication.
Have been diving hard into the editing of a specific short story. This one's an easy job -- it came in an inspired rush, I wasn't trying to cram sixteen different ideas into less than 10k words, and it deals with subjects I've done a lot of writing and thinking about over the past decade or so. I am mostly waiting for feedback from some people on it, then it might be time to start sending it out? Wack.
I made that list of problems with The Bad Manuscript from NaNoWriMo, and it's honestly too specific to share. The broad strokes were that I went in without much of a sense of plot structure, so the story drags a lot; I forgot a bunch of details and intentions due to a combination of brain fog and almost never looking at my plot outline; and I should include a bunch of themes I hadn't thought to include because I needed this dry run to figure them out.
So then I started making notes on my plot outline, which led me to realize that I should solidify some character arcs. Then I got really into plot structures and have completely lost myself to densely handwriting dissertations on each character's arcs through the theoretical series. I hope I can keep it up and not give up after a character or two. The big issue is writing by hand can legit hurt my shoulder and neck in a way that makes it hard for me to sleep, so I have to not destroy myself in the frenzy of hyperfocus.
I've started drinking gingko tea daily, which helps with my focus issues/induce hyperfocus, and sometimes even clears the brain fog a little. When I combine that with a tea containing ginseng, it's like my brain gets strapped to the task and will ride that task to the point of discomfort. It's weird, because it's the kind of focus that hurts, like I can physically feel my brain secreting ideas, but it works? So I'll take it.
Also, I got hit with a horrible list bug and decided to make a list of some of my influences, since I'd seen another writer do that on their blog. Literally, I was trying to sleep, then my brain started making lists aggressively, and I couldn't sleep until I'd done it.
Also, I stopped dragging my feet and started my writer's Twitter. Yay! The link will be somewhere on the homepage, if you want to follow me or whatever.
Oh and the reading stuff too
I finished the story portion of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I'm reading the Appendices now, because I said I would, and because I figure it's good to see what kind of worldbuilding Old Man Tolkein was laying. God is it hard to read, though I suppose it's more pleasant than Aristotle. I notice there's a lot of casual imperialism going on, and a lot of glorious wars against evil things (especially brown people) in the East, as well as a heavy focus on bloodlines. I know that Tolkein was consciously anti-racist, but damn, that unconscious racism comes through clear as day! Oh yeah, and the story itself is good, loved Sam & Frodo in Mordor, Gollum is a delight, etc. I just don't think I have anything smart to say it a prolific Goodreads reviewer hasn't already said.
I also finished N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. I'm so glad I read it and will be violently recommending the series to everyone forever. It's kind of weird, because I don't actually vibe with her writing style that much, but the content is very -chef's kiss- so I stan it.
I picked up The Golden Compass, first in the His Dark Materials series. Yep, the books about a gal named Lyra! (Though I came out before the books did, so Lyra Belacqua is named after me!) I grew up on these, of course, and last read them in 2010. I have vivid memories of reading the end of The Amber Spyglass in Lawley's bakery and cafe in Perth, caffeinated as hell and really feeling it. It's worth the revisit -- there's a lot of layers already.
I also got my hands on African Kingdoms: An Encyclopedia of Empires and Civilizations, with the help of my sister and her Jstor access. It has entries for different civilizations organized alphabetically, looks really good so far. The introduction is promising: talks right off the bat about how imperialism has skewed historical perception of Africa, and how Africa was the site of many incredible civilizations (which can't be measured by Western means, if they should be "measured" at all). So, exactly what I'm looking for. Looks like a good place to get an overview on subjects I hope to dive into deeper.
Now, apropos of nothing, some thoughts on elimination diets
(CW: mention of disordered eating, EDs, and self-destructive tendencies)
In July, I started coming off an elimination diet that, if you include the reintroduction phase, lasted 2 months. I've been having a lot of thoughts about all this. The results were inconclusive for me, and I know I'm not the only one. But there's a culture around this I want to explore.
For those not in the know, an elimination diet is a diet constructed to remove certain potential trigger foods from your life, then reintroduce them to see if they are, in fact, trigger foods. There's a lot of reasons for people to do this. For me, it was to see if certain foods made my pain, my brain fog, and my acid reflux, worse.
This was actually my second time at the rodeo -- I did an elimination diet several years ago. I can't remember clearly what year, but I remember having to figure out how to survive my shifts at work and mostly eating oatmeal, walnuts, and raisins. I did it for a month, reintroduced the foods I'd eliminated...no difference, so far as I could tell.
Well, case closed, right?
You'd think, but as the years passed, the anxiety that The Fibromyalgia is My Fault grew in me. Maybe I hadn't done the last elimination diet hard enough. I wasn't graphing my pain at that point, so maybe the results were too subjective. Maybe I hadn't done it long enough. I planned, before the pandemic, to do a two month elimination diet. Then the pandemic hit and I was like "fuck that" for a while, then I had things to do, then finally it was the right time.
I wasn't having these anxieties in a vacuum. I'm in a fibromyalgia support group, where people mostly post "Does anyone else get [pain in specific areas]?" and everyone says "Yes." Often, however, they also say, without prompting, "Try cutting out gluten and sugar. Helped me." If you ask about medications, you will have people suggesting removing foods. If you ask about symptoms, sleep, whatever, someone is likely to give this advice. And, if you ask about removing foods, then looooots of people will say gluten and sugar are the enemy.
There is some science to back this up; fibromyalgia can be affected by food (which, in my opinion, provides evidence against it being solely a CNS issue, but that's a conversation for a different day). It's nonetheless frightening to me that people will, in this context, give unsolicited advice about diet to strangers. I feel this for a lot of the reasons unsolicited advice is always scary -- you don't know if I've already tried that, you don't know if it's dangerous for me to try that, stop guilting me into doing random stuff that worked for you personally but doesn't work for everyone, etc.
A friend helped me see another level of it, though, when I was first planning out this second elimination diet and teetering on the edge of only being able to eat leaves for two months. Yes, that is actually how much I was considering eliminating. My friend said, in essence (as someone who has struggled with this themself), "be careful, this is verging on orthorexia." Orthorexia being "an unhealthy focus on eating in a healthy way."
Boy, has that opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. Hippies will post memes online about how "if you can control what you eat, you can control anything" (meanwhile, my ADHD ass can not eat chocolate for two months without issue, but sitting down to write is often a 1-2 hour process of convincing and bribing myself, and answering a simple email is even worse), memes about how not eating or eating certain things brings you to a higher vibration. I've seen public figures in the ADHD world promote the idea that avoiding processed foods will improve your ADHD (based upon a studies on children, looking at the correlation for specific symptoms). It's in all sorts of communities, and it's always this uncreative "eat the right thing for unparalleled results" shit that ultimately stems, in my opinion, from Puritan ideals of not enjoying anything on this earth.
I don't think it's any different in the fibromyalgia community. You get people who insist they mostly eat veggies, they don't eat xyz, they feel so much better...I don't doubt this is the case for plenty of people. It's the preaching that gets me, but also the fact that you can damage yourself be eliminating whole food groups. I certainly can't afford a dietitian to help me craft an elimination diet that suits my needs while also not sacrificing complete nutrition, and I highly doubt your average chronic pain sufferer can either.
But yeah, I still did the elimination diet. I loosened it a little from the just-eating-leaves model I initially considered. I eliminated gluten, sugar, dairy, nightshade plants, and "processed foods"/"chemicals." Shellfish and red meat were effectively already eliminated because we almost never eat those anyways. A note on the "processed foods" thing -- the broad rule that "if a 5th grader can't pronounce it, don't eat it," is silly. I took to Googling ingredients because, as I found, certain scary sounding things, such as tocopherols, are found everywhere. Tocopherols are found in eggs. It's Vitamin E. But sodium benzoate was on my list of things to avoid.
It wasn't too hard for me to just not eat the things I wasn't supposed to. I wanted to -- I even craved hot dogs, which I normally hate -- but food has never had a specific hold over me. My will towards restraint is pretty strong, probably unheathily so, given the amount of glee I get from depriving myself of things I want. That made not eating cheese easy. Besides, after about two weeks, I knew that a cheat day wouldn't be worth it because I'd have to start over.
It wasn't too hard, but there were a couple fucked things about it all. One is that, with the amount that I was eliminating, I'd cornered myself into eating a lot of almonds. Almond milk in cereal and cooking, almonds as a snack for protein hunger pangs, almonds in a little bag with me everywhere I went. Surely there's something wrong with that? Almonds could even theoretically be a trigger food, but if I didn't have almonds, then I had...? What protein? Raw chickpeas? Large amounts of pre-cooked chicken? Eggs, constantly? The constant almonds would just give way to some other constant thing. What milk substitute? Pea milk at $5 a bottle?
That's another thing -- shit's expensive. And time-consuming. Had to get liquid aminos because soy sauce has sodium benzoate in it. If I wanted anything bread-like, so I wasn't eating rice cakes all the time, I had to spend $7 on a like quarter loaf of gluten-free bread that had only minimal sugar added (which also wasn't available through grocery pick up, and I walked all over the store to find this damn thing, until someone directed me to this out of the way corner hidden next to the donuts). Snacks are an Ordeal if you ever get tired of rice cakes and almonds, and sometimes I found it was just easier to not eat.
I was eating the cleanest I ever had in my life. The pain didn't shift. I still had brain fog and fatigue. I would still have multiples days above 4-5 on my pain scale because I lifted a heavy AC unit or because I had to sit in a car for hours, or because EMDR hit me wrong. It wasn't even showing promising results, but I still had this feeling sometimes, when walking past people lining up for snow cones or eating pizza outside a restaurant. I'd feel light, I'd feel clean, I'd feel disciplined, I'd feel...uh oh....superior.
This was the kneejerk feeling. It was easy to chase off. I knew it was dangerous to feel this way, I knew it was fallacious. People shouldn't have to eat some way to be worthy of respect. It was silly to feel this way about a diet that had been a relative breeze for me, and which wasn't sustainable longterm. I told my friend about it, and they said, "I used to need that feeling."
I'm lucky I'm not predisposed to that particular form of self destruction. I played around with disordered eating in high school, went through that whole thing where I didn't eat lunch unless I "deserved" it, and otherwise sat in a classroom and cried during lunch time. Thankfully, I think my relationship with food as a concept wasn't difficult enough for this to become an addiction -- I was more drawn to other tendencies.
What could become of someone who has a complicated relationship with food? What could've become of me if I was in a worse place and needed that feeling more? Despite my relative luck, the thought sometimes enters my head that I should be eating "healthier", somehow it must be my fault for not eating a certain way, if I just deprive myself then...It's hard to follow these thoughts, and inadvisable to recount their details.
So yeah, dangerous stuff.
Don't be an ass: don't recommend dietary changes to strangers who didn't ask for your input.
