On Fibromyalgia

Am I even allowed to talk at length about my fibromyalgia? I honestly felt for a long time like I wasn't, like fibromyalgia's just a subject for offhand complaining or explaining why I can't have a job where I have to stand up for long periods. Any more than that seems uncouth, self-obsessed, whiny--any term that could connote internalized ableism.

I read an article recently (which I lost, of course) that was essentially just someone talking about what their fibromyalgia was like. It was weirdly heartening and validating, even though their experience of it was wildly different than mine. Since then, (though probably not just because of the article) I've been having a lot of thoughts about my fibromyalgia, and been wanting to write about them.

So, here I am, unnecessarily justifying myself for writing something self-indulgent and potentially a bit complain-y--which is, honestly, a quintessential part of my fibromyalgia experience, so I might as well retain this anxious justification. Here's a bunch of thoughts, in no order other than what felt intuitive, written over a week or so.

The below requires content warnings for self-harm, self-loathing, PTSD stuff, sexual trauma, as well as the more expected subjects of chronic illness and medical gaslighting. I'm sorry it's so heavy, but it's become inextricable to the subject.

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One of my early memories of childhood--I was probably under ten years old--is of watching the Disney film Atlantis, specifically a fraction of a scene or two where the doctor character (apparently called Dr. Joshua Strongbear) does a good chiropractic crack on Milo's neck. Longing filled me. Unaware of the cultural context, I asked my mother if she could do that for me, pressing when she said she couldn't until she told me she couldn't because she could hurt me.

I'm sure I sulked afterwards. My neck had that feeling, that tension, that pain, unrelenting and aggravating--I needed that relief so bad! It looked so easy in the movie, couldn't she just try?

In retrospect, there's a lot of memories like this from my childhood and teenage years. The time I couldn't sleep on my perfectly fine bed unless I piled pillows a certain way in the corner and slept on them like that. The frequent mentions of back, shoulder, and neck pain, that riddle my old chat logs. The time I went particularly hard during one of my trapeze classes and wound up so full of knots that I cried out when my boyfriend tried to give me a back rub. The teenage trips to the physio in Australia, who would knuckle my back to no avail.

Perhaps it all meant nothing, but in retrospect, knowing what I do now, it's hard not to think that it's always been there, that genetic latency that didn't fully manifest until I was in my twenties.

It's been long enough now that I can't imagine a life without pain. I can conceive of it, but those memories of pain are among the most accessible for me, when so many are blocked off and distant.

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Some nights, sleep is a task, and ordeal, which requires huge effort on my part. 

Okay, I wrote that line without thinking about how it's always a fucking task. Tim usually rolls into bed and falls asleep instantly, while I need my goddamn padding, my four pillows with specific purposes, my fucking heating pad which likes to unplug itself, my box fan, my humidifier, my ear plugs, my medication, my antacids, my lamp on with a scarf over it. Then, after elaborate bedtime rituals, including cracking my hips, I can get to sleep relatively well like 80% of the time. My stock joke is that "It takes a village to make me sleep."

Some nights, that's not enough. It's been my neck lately. I keep getting this red, glossy-feeling pain, knitting my neck down towards my shoulder. This can usually be helped by not using a pillow for a bit, but I rarely wake up feeling any better. I'm just trying to sleep here--what, is that supposed to put me in less pain? What an odd notion.

The other night, it was my arm too, probably from writing down character arc stuff late into the night. My elbow hurt, like it needed to crack (I thought of Dr. Joshua Strongbear), and this seemed to be related to the band of tense muscle running down my arm. I stretched and folded it, decided fuck it, time for my muscle relaxer. I laid futilely on my side, waiting for it to kick in, while pain flared through my whole body. My back was so tight it hurt my ribs, which was translating as a sort of nausea. My legs, my ass, fucking everything, why is it fucking everything right now? I felt tempted to cry, but breathing was painful, so what's the point?

The muscle relaxer kicked in finally, and my muscles creaked as they released some of their pressure. I flipped onto my other side, wondering if I'd forgotten to take my nightly medication. Tried to figure it out with high brain, decided it didn't matter--this was hitting fast, I was becoming soup, I was so tired and almost-comfortable. I'd figure it out when I woke up to pee.

I woke up and peed at 4 AM. My stomach hurt now, and I laid there non-commitally in bed as the pain subsided. Fell asleep until 4:50 AM, when I woke, neck hurting like crazy again. Set myself up with the heating pad under my neck. There it was again--that all over pain, my back, my ribs. Fuck it all.

When Tim got up, I took a shower, still high as fuck and slurring my words, but in so much pain regardless. I sat under the hot water (I can't stand--my circulation is poor, and my legs get red as lobsters and itch like crazy, something which started with my accumulation of huge amounts of self-harm scars), half-asleep, waiting for something to give. Afterwards, I had to get Tim to put lotion on my back (a post-shower necessity in Colorado), because I knew if I tried to do it myself I'd fuck up the delicate relief I'd found.

As I laid back down with my heating pad and the tail end of The Golden Compass, I felt like I was in Perth again. Was it the wind rushing outside? Was it dawn's slow coming reminding me of nights when I'd lie in bed and not sleep until the sun rose? Was it reading The Golden Compass for the first time since 2010? Was it my mind, sedated and exhausted, stirring subconsciously over something I can't even remember?

I fell asleep sometime after 6 AM, and slept like a rock until 11 AM.

This isn't even that bad, honestly. It's not good, either, just kind of average to below average. I have difficulties like this two to three times a week, I think. Depends on the week. I don't know what I'm going to do when I have a job again.

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What is fibromyalgia? That's a damn good question, because as far as I can tell, no one has a good answer. I'm not a doctor, but I can repeat what I understand of the science around it. No one knows for sure why it happens, though the classical hypothesis involves central sensitization, meaning one's nerves are extra sensitive to pain for whatever reason. It's associated, whether as a cause or an effect, with physical abnormalities and changes, such as reduction in total gray matter in the brain, sleep abnormalities, abnormalities in small nerve fibers, muscle fibers...and more! There's still no confirmed way to test for fibromyalgia (though a blood test is in the works, apparently), and there's plenty of doctors who think it's all made up, it doesn't exist because one can't see it.

The central sensitization theory irritates me, and it was a moment of validation for me when a study came out this year suggesting that fibromyalgia does have an autoimmune component. It was an exasperating read--of course it's not just central sensitization, like some sources say. If it is, why do people with fibromyalgia so frequently develop costochondritis, which is an inflammation of the sternum? Why are fibromyalgia and IBS often comorbid? Why are elimination diets recommended and often effective for fibromyalgia? Why have I seen so many people in my fibromyalgia groups talking about their lymph nodes swelling? Why are the apparent causes of fibromyalgia not just injury and trauma, but also Epstein-Barr and Lyme disease? Why do we have high counts of white blood cells and cytokines?

Even if central sensitization is the cause of all this, I don't think it's fair to insist that it's just the nervous system misinterpreting signals. It might be that pain changes the body, directly and/or indirectly, but after the point, it's not just the pain--it's the body too. It might be that the triggers associated with fibromyalgia cause more than just central sensitization.

This is just idle speculation. I want to emphasize, strenuously, that I'm not a scientist or anything remotely similar, and I'm not here to promote any conspiracies. This is the kind of stuff I think about when I can't sleep. Part of it, for me, is that fibromyalgia is just not well understood, and not well studied; pain in general isn't well understood or studied, and neither are the effects of trauma and illnesses on the body.

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I know what fibromyalgia feels like to me. It feels like my body hates me, and is attacking me constantly. It feels like those days when I get tired two hours after waking up, trying to fix it with 95% dark chocolate and gingko tea, and finding myself alert, jittery, and heavy-headed with exhaustion. It involves pissing twenty times a day, and diarrhea that isn't quite bad enough for me to be worried about IBS. It entails long winters of being unable to stay warm,  the inherent cold of every object triggering allodynia, my feet sweating through my socks so they can be trapped in their own clammy coldness. It has the funny side effect of my body forcing me into almost complete teetotaling--from alcohol, which makes me anxious and gives me a headache, to caffeine, which will keep me up for 18+ hours; from cannabis, which puts me in more pain somehow, to all but the mildest prescription drugs.

It feels like it involves inflammation, even though it shouldn't. My muscles are full of piano wire and spitting, oozing knots. Though, maybe I have myofascial pain syndrome too, and that's why. It feels like a disease that doesn't allow me to function. My life is a dance between movement and non-movement, sitting and standing, because both sides hurt me, and I can never guess which days are moving days and which aren't. I just have to find out.

It feels frustrating and absurd that fibromyalgia isn't considered a worrying pre-existing condition in COVID-19 times. Don't you know I have so little left, that I could lose it all?

I know that sometimes, it feels like the fibromyalgia is my fault, like I could have chosen to be some other way.

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My brain is a weird soup when I'm trying to sleep. Who knows what might float up? I often wake up to pee thinking about whatever writing I'm working on, often coming up with an answer to some problem as I stand up. Lying in my bed of pain as the sun rose, I thought about this planned blog post and thought about the question: "Would I wish fibromyalgia on my worst enemy?"

Uh, fuck yeah I would. When Trump was in office, I imagined what if I had the superpower to temporarily inflict my fibromyalgia on others. Trump would suddenly feel as hit by a train as I have all day, and he'd deserve this, because part of the stress on my body is his goddamn fault.

I was thinking--what if I got to decide to give people fibromyalgia? I could halt someone's career. Because, let's be honest, and not worry about how palatable of a statement this is: I lost a lot of capability and functionality with fibromyalgia. I used to want to work only part-time so I'd be able to work on my writing. Now, it's a necessity that I don't work more than part-time because I can barely balance life working 30 hours a week. I can only imagine where my writing career would be if I hadn't spent two years trying to figure out what was wrong with me and what to do about it, and if my brain was more ready and able to sort through the complexities of worldbuilding and character arcs.

This is a nuanced point--it's not like people with chronic illness can't accomplish things in life, or have a successful career. Lady Gaga has fibromyalgia (this fact often surprises people), Laura Hillenbrand wrote Seabiscuit while bedridden from CFS.

I'm working hard. Still, it's thrown a huge roadblock in the dream I've had since childhood. Why do I get the roadblock while fascists don't? It's not fucking fair.

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So, you can't see fibromyalgia in the body. Can't you? I fling my arm out in a specific way and my shoulder emits a loud crack! I flex my shoulders, stretch my neck from side to side. I sit for extended times in weird, cramped positions, then stand up suddenly. My knees, my ankles, my feet, crunch as I walk down the hall.

I only wear loose-fitting clothes, I can't wear a bra any more, and I can feel make-up on my face, which makes my pain worse, so I mostly don't bother. I sweat more than I used to--my hair gets greasy faster because I so often sweat through the night. I stand with my legs far apart and dip my torso from side to side, each hip clicking audibly. "That sounded metallic," people have said, "It sounds like a ping pong ball. You're like a clock--tick tock!"

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As a teenager, I slept on floors, drank unreasonable amounts of coffee, sometimes didn't sleep at all. I was surprisingly resilient, even though I always paid for it with aches and anxieties. I miss when my nerves were coarser.

My family moved to Australia in early 2010, when I was 15 years old. I didn't receive the news well--the story I told was that I barely stopped crying for 24 hours after I heard. In the months between the news and the move, my little snowball of trauma (sexual and other) rolled down the hill, accruing mass. By the time we got to Australia, I really wasn't doing well. I wasn't equipped to handle this different society, where I didn't feel free to be myself, where I was bullied by teachers, where we had to read a bunch of books about rape for class.

I spent the first year relatively social, dating, but repressing certain parts of myself for public consumption--such as my legs, which were quickly acquiring the appearance of an old cutting board, such as what I was realizing had happened in my childhood bedroom on August 26, 2009.

I couldn't manage this the second year. There were circumstances--I don't want to moan too much--and I stopped trusting everyone around me. I spent seven or so months deepening my isolation, went so long without human touch I started hallucinating what it would be like for someone to hug me. My only friends were online, and I missed them so much it was a physical pain. Often, my body would give up, and I would paralyze in place, my disobedient hand heavy on the desk, my legs two slabs of useless meat.

I barely remember this period of time, and when I do, it's not real. My brain thinks it didn't actually happen. What I know of it is carefully reconstructed through reading my writing and messages from the time. That's how I found out that I was apparently dissociating for much of it ("My body is not my own./All these cells/are not connected to me.") This, with the attempts to forget it all as soon as I was out of that situation, probably explains why I don't remember much.

In lieu of any life outside my suffering, I curled in on myself like an ingrown hair. I attacked my own body with all the weapons I could find. I stopped eating lunch, perhaps in an attempt to deprive myself of verve so I wouldn't do anything anyone would notice. I wrote a set of rules for myself, the first of which was "YOU ARE SCUM." It seems I thought if I hated myself enough, I would tamp down the unruly weed of my personality and I would be acceptable again--to me, as well as everyone else. These were the tools I had. I didn't know how to self-love my way through it, I only knew how to apply my self-loathing with increasing intensity.

I can't let this story stand on its own, I always feel the need to qualify it with "others have it worse, even at this moment," because I've never trusted any of it was real enough to count for anything. It's probably not the therapeutically right thing to include this qualification, but I know I'll delete this post if I don't.

So I'll get to the point, which is that according to the documentation, this is when I started experiencing a lot of pain, e.g.:

"I'm just hauling around this sack-of-shit body, a collection of aches and pains, a bunch of disconnected limbs. This is a baby I no longer want to care for--these stone-heavy ribs, this spinning head. How can I think like this?"

Wow, that sounds familiar.

It's strange because, after I left Australia and went to college, I didn't feel like that all the time. I did have an unusual amount of back and neck pain. Going to a reading-focused school didn't exactly help with that. Still, I was surprisingly functional until the winter of 2016, when my sacroiliac joint started kicking its first fit. This reprieve from pain mirrors a lot of my college experience. I went there, forcibly forgot everything except for when my odd moods overcame me and I wandered around the dorm at 2AM, weeping.

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The science shows that PTSD could be a cause of chronic pain/chronic illnesses, though in the case of fibromyalgia, genetics/epigenetics may also play a role.

I'll stop dancing around the obvious point: it's clear that my fibromyalgia probably had something to do with all this. It's a complex dance between nature and nurture, of course, and I'll never know what my quality of life might be right now if things had been different.

There's a deeper feeling I have about it all, though, this little twist in my chest, like a wry smile. I hated myself so much in 2011 I can't even express it. Self-loathing and associated activities were my primary preoccupation. I would literally lie in bed and hate myself. I wanted to destroy myself in a fundamental way, depriving myself and mutilating myself until the marks would be on me forever. That 16-17 year-old Lyra--well, she succeeded, didn't she?

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Haha, well that was fun. I don't usually talk about this stuff without finding some way to joke about it. Imagine this with more finger guns and jokes about my proficiency in Self-Loathing Sciences. That's how I keep myself from feeling the way I do now, namely worn out, scared, my nerves buzzing with that specific ambient pain.

Here's another fun fact: about a month or two after getting of that Perth Extended Misery Experience TM, I got mono. The day I was diagnosed, I posted a bunch on Facebook about the unpleasantness I was expecting. I got that, sure--my mouth dried out while I was sleeping, I could barely swallow, blah blah, but I otherwise had a lot of fun. I read Marcel Pagnol's L'eau des Collines, watched There Will Be Blood in a haze, and wrote a lot for the roleplaying forum I'd just joined. It was a romantic time, weirdly, and the worst of it was over in a week.

Took me a while to recover though--I was weak and tired for some time. I took milk thistle supplement, on the speculation it would help my liver recover. In this time period, I exchanged a funny little message with a friend:

LMAO.

What does it matter where it came from? I'm in it now, nothing to do but deal with it.

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Uhh, shit, is this useful to anyone? Is it relevant? Does it have a purpose in this world? Maybe there's an off-chance an able-bodied writer will read this and get some insight on how to write a character with fibromyalgia--rather than assuming that it's all malingering and manipulation and Munchausen's.

The stereotype is real, and frightening. Here's a cute thread I found while Googling things related to this. Here's another great one. A lot of these opinions hit me like a punch. I feel a bit shaky looking at them. I hope, after reading all that, you get how it might feel.

My takeaway is that there's a big problem where people who have no earthly idea what it's like to be in pain 24/7 aren't considering what's cause, what's effect, and how some things can be loops. It's like Aristotle looking a slave twisted up by hard labor and deducing they're physically inferior.

In the latter thread, there's a lot of people suggesting that fibromyalgia is somaticized depression. I mean, I just wrote a bunch up there suggesting that this is so, and yeah, it might be the case. Still, the correlation doesn't slide in as easy as some people think, as plenty of commenters reveal. Mental illness isn't the only suspected cause of fibromyalgia. Again, genetics and diseases have also been linked to fibromyalgia.

In my experience, I can be in a good mood on my worst pain days, and be in a terrible mood on days where my pain is negligible (always nice, because it's hard to think about your feelings when you can't lie down for more than five minutes). And--wouldja look at that! I continue to get deeper into therapy, and my pain remains about the same. 

Also, fibromyalgia is a depressing circumstance, and depression is part of the effect. You mean this is it? The rest of my life? I'm going to be in pain and forgetting how to make pasta for the rest of my fucking life?

Same goes for accusations of malingering and manipulation. I had a doctor's appointment yesterday, with a new pain doctor because my usual one left the practice. I put a lot of thought into the outfit I wore (Should my scars be showing or not? How put together should I look?), mentally prepared myself for like a week, came with questions to tick off on my fingers. You get used to being gaslit and disbelieved. Is it manipulative to come in prepared for that? How much of this supposed malingering is just someone trying to get treatment from an unsympathetic doctor?

I see talk about weight a lot--a common story in the fibro group I'm in is "The doctor told me to lose weight? Will this actually help?" My mother, my sister, and I, are all skinny, and have been our entire lives. Our bodies also all self-destructed in our mid-twenties. I don't get shit about my weight because I don't have any to lose, and there's plenty of people who lose weight and find no difference. It's not the fucking weight that's tearing up your nerves. Besides, it's hard to lose weight when you can only do low-impact exercise; namely, your choices are walking (not even doable for some), expensive and bulky exercise equipment, or swimming (also expensive).

Understanding fibromyalgia is going to be hand-in-hand with understanding that mental harm is physical harm. Someone can be suffering because of something in their mind, and that's valid and not a reason to pitch blame on someone. I don't think it's as easy to choose what's happening in your mind as some people would have you believe.

Not that this mental illness is necessarily related to all cases of fibromyalgia, and that's the other part of the matter. If we want to understand fibromyalgia, it's going to be about understanding that bodies are fickle, and being abled is tenuous, even temporary. I wonder how much of the resistance to the idea that someone can be suffering from pain for no obvious reason is because people would have to realize it can happen to them too.

Another part of it is a lot of this will get better if we realize the value in supporting to people to just live, not withholding the necessities of life as a reward for hard work. For one, there's an inherent horror in wage slavery that just can't be good for the human body. (In fact, poverty is a predictor for all sorts of physical malfunction). But also, if we stop seeing work as the only valuable thing in the world, we'll stop seeing disabled people as lazy and maybe start seeing them as people again.

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Last night as I was thinking about this, I laid down with Tim and thought about people moving and not moving their bodies with ease, all the people I know who aren't secretly roiling with kaleidoscopic pain, whose nerves aren't feeling AGGRESSIVELY. ALL THE TIME. I said to Tim, "I wish people were more appreciative of not being in pain all the time."

It's not that I want you to sit around and be glad you're not me. Just...appreciate your body I suppose, and remember that ability is not a default state, it's just what you get for a while if you're lucky. Don't fear disability, which is likely to come with age if nothing else, just be conscious that it happens, and life continues afterwards.

And to my fellow disabled folk--appreciate yourselves if you can, and do something nice for yourself today. You're all valid.

I wish I could say something wiser, but I'm dissociating too hard at this point. Time to log off and spend some time with the rats.

 

Working and Eating

Lets get the writing stuff out of the way first, huh?

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.

Neat Little Bows

Ideally, my goal is to post here once a month. For once, instead of being late about it due to a lack of anything interesting to report, I actually got  pulled into a loop of "Oh, well, I'll post after I'm done this other big momentous thing, oh and after this other big thing." So, for once, I actually have a LOT to talk about! Most importantly:

I AM GETTING A SHORT STORY PUBLISHED!

I still can't believe it either! It's my short story, "To Crave an Empty Chest," which I'd been working on for a bit over a year. I wrote it, edited it like twenty times, created an alternate ending, a 6,000 word version, but the version I love the most got accepted for publication by Night Terror Novels for their horror fiction anthology Ceci n’est pas une histoire d’horreur. I'm excited to be a part of what looks to be an interesting anthology.

The publication isn't due to happen until Fall of this year, at which point I will begin a campaign of harassment letting people know when it will be available and how to acquire it.

In the meantime, I'm sure there's some question about the story's contents. Well, it's about gangs on flying motorcycles, trauma, hallucinogenic hellscapes, and the hostility of the universe/divinity. Oh, and why one might desire to not have any organs any more. It's based mostly off one dream I had, then a little bit of another dream, then a little bit of ?????? to make it all come together.

This event has certainly fired up my desire to keep on writing. Not that I was ever going to stop, but now it's more like I actually want to do it, instead of forcing myself to sit down and meet my writing quotas while operating under the solipsistic assumption that nothing will ever come of this but I still need to do it because I get all squirrely if I don't write. Not that I'll never be back in that headspace -- I know that things will continue to be a struggle, and I'll get loads more rejection letters -- but I'll ride the wave while I can. I'll be editing up some short and flash fiction for submission soon, but for a moment there I was preoccupied with another thing, namely:

I finished that godawful NaNoWriMo manuscript???

Sometimes people try to tell me "Oh, I'm sure it's actually good! You're too hard on yourself!" Trust me, I'm getting a more and more realistic sense of my abilities by the day (despite a history of/tendency towards self-loathing), and this is absolutely not my best work. There's so many things I straight up forgot to write in, worldbuilding just kind of drops out of the sky sometimes, the battle scenes are nonsense and hard to follow, the opening is ungainly, the whole thing is ungainly and too long (132k words!! Yikes!), there's more navelgazing and crappy teen drama than action, the plot structure is all messed up, there's times where I was just writing like "this is bad and I know it, but I need to just do this," and so on.

I plan to work on a comprehensive list of everything I did wrong with this draft -- maybe I'll even post some version of it on here. After all, the point was not to create a workable, editable manuscript. Rather, the point was to do a dry run of the book and find what the pitfalls were, what I would need to know for the worldbuilding, what kinds of themes might arise, etc. Because, guess what! I haven't written a novel since 2009! And it's not like I knew how to write novels in 2009!

So obviously I have a long ways to go at that particular skill. But I'm determined to improve. I'm reminded of when I hit about 5+ years straight of forum roleplaying as a relative adult and realized, "Wow, I'm actually good at this medium. I'm having all these ideas about how to challenge and manipulate the medium because I know how it works really well." The fact that I reached that kind of competency with anything at all comforts me when I get stuck in the morass of "I have no idea what I'm doing." Especially since I worked on the medium of short stories for like...3 years I think? and have received an acceptance letter.

Speaking of the general idea of competency, here's another dang thing:

I finished my Certified Gardener course

So I started this online course with CSU back in January and I'm finally done with it. The whole process was more than a little annoying, but I learned a lot: how to prune raspberry bushes, how to diagnose a sick plant, how to prune trees, how much I loathe lawns...

The last one is a whole subject. It's not just because the lawn care course was particularly arduous and poorly organized. My issue came from the course starting with a sentiment of, "lawns have a bad reputation as being a source of pollution, but that's only because people are applying fertilizer wrong!" and then going on for literal days' worth of work about how to properly care for a lawn. Like, heck, maybe lawns are a specialty subject, actually, and it shouldn't be the expectation for your average person to own and care for a lawn, given that it's expensive, time-consuming, involves specific knowledge, and requires a lot of water, gasoline, and fertilizer, along with like five different single-use tools.

There's a way in which lawns are one of the biggest examples of some people thinking their hobby should be everyone's hobby, and making it a chore for everyone. (You can imagine me pointing at my neighbors, who get weird and passive aggressive about us not having a lawn, essentially). Then again, looking at it more broadly, lawns are tendril of the settler colonialist classist oppressor state, as well as a branch of capitalism that is vigorously doing everything it can to not die.

Even so, the course has been really valuable. I will probably be doing one on landscaping (the more applicable trade), I'm just waiting for some information on when. And hey, if I get a job that necessitates me working on lawns, I will know how to do it.

I have set up the pattern of doing little segues which is really awkward because this one is sad! Yay!

Eulogy for Pilea

Our oldest rat, Pilea, had to be put down yesterday, and I would be remiss if I didn't talk about her. We got her in January of 2019, making her something like two and a half years old -- not bad for a rat. She was one of the most hyper babies we've ever had, and would repeatedly scale our entire bodies while we were standing. She was also one of the cuddliest babies ever, and early on fell asleep in Tim's lap, resulting in this picture.

In her prime, she was a bully when meeting new rats, and as tender as could be once she got to know them. She enjoyed popping air-filled packaging with her teeth and letting it woosh on her face. In her old age, she loved to sleep in small boxes, but could also still jump up on the sofa and shoot across the house until the last months of her life.

She had kidney degeneration, which caused her to lose use of her hind limbs and become thin. Her last days were spent sleeping, often in my lap, while we waited for our appointment at the vet's. We fed her her favorite foods -- coconut milk, avocado, chocolate (not toxic to rats!), quinoa, Yogies...

When we took her to the vet, multiple people told us that she was a favorite among the staff, that everyone was sad to see her go. The vet had pictures of her exploring the clinic on her phone. Pilea charmed everyone she met, it seems.

It's an odd little dance with grief over a rat's death. After a few times, you get used to the idea that they don't live very long, that it will never feel like long enough, but that nonetheless a rat has had a full and interesting life and they must be allowed to go when they need to, not necessarily when you're ready. The simple sadness of it becomes laced with the beauty of being able to see a creature from its youth into its old age, and getting to have this window to give them the best life possible. It doesn't bring me down too much any more, to be honest. I tend to wind up feeling grateful to have had the opportunity to meet the rat -- they're all so unique, and have such big personalities.

It's strange to have so many things wrap up and change at the same time. I no longer have to work on that short story, editing it between every rejection letter. I am in the emptiness between the drafts of Book 1 and Book 2. I am in between online courses. And Pilea is no longer here in body, as if her death were the end of an era.

Every time a rat is dying, I fear the brink, as if life without them were an unknown -- as if I didn't live once before them. But afterwards, I see the sparrows chasing the crows, someone waving their arm out of the car to catch the breeze, the trees rustling, the moths crawling on the walls, and the rats I still have dashing around the house on their secret tasks. Life goes on. It might be cheesy to talk about what I've learned from owning rats, but I will anyways. They are experts at living their lives vigorously, even after change, and I hope I can emulate that.

Thoughts on Brood X

This post is mostly about my anxieties over the death and discomfort of insects. It's probably a bit pathetic, but I put a lot of time into writing it, so here it is.

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The cicadas fall silent when it rains and I wonder how they are doing up in the trees as they wait it out. I have seen them on the bushes, clinging in place, water beaded on their bodies. I wonder if the rain bothers them, if feeling bothered is something they experience.

I wasn't sure that the sound I was hearing in the woods across the street was the cicadas until I heard it again in D.C. -- an echoing whirling sort of sound, like a UFO spinning in the distance. I spent several days anxious that I wouldn't be able to hear the song before I left, but then I realized I had been hearing them - sometimes the eerie "whee-whoa" of Magicicada septendecim, sometimes just the accumulated sound of thousands of cicadas singing all at once. It sounded like a communication from another planet. I began hearing the raspier calls too, when driving through the neighborhood with the windows down. I grinned to hear it. I heard this back in 2004, and not since. If my memories were clear, I'm sure it would be just as I remembered it.

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Documentation says Brood X began emerging in Maryland on May 11, 2004. Perhaps this was the day when, before going to school, I spent a long time with a cicada that was molting on the red maple in our front yard. I don't know if I found it of my own accord or if my parents saw it and showed me. I just remember the white body emerging from the crispy brown shell, how I stood there in the early morning cool and watched with anxiety then, at some point, decided to intervene. I didn't comprehend that most cicadas manage this process without difficulty.

I tried to tug it out with tiny fingers, trying to speed up a process which is meant to be slow. When the creature came out with twisted wings, I believe we kept it in a Tupperware with some twigs and leaves. It didn't occur to me that I might have been the cause of its damaged wings. I wrote of it, and the other "help" I performed, with regret in a journal from 2009, saying with brusque darkness, "I twisted wings and legs."

I loved the cicadas from that first day. In another memory, I walked home from school and picked up every single one I found on the sidewalks, gathering them on my hands until their hooked feet caused me pain. I'd carry them to safety, usually by the stream down the street from my house.

The boys at school said that if you pulled on some part of a cicada (wings or legs? I don't know) the head would pop off. These horrible snots liked to torment them at recess, so of course I had to intervene and tell them off. I was a little cicada protector, fighting off misinformation and cruelty and carelessness wherever I saw it.

In retrospect, these memories have an aura of revelation, of religious fervor and suffering. I remember walking home one day through blistering heat, coming up the street from the stream. The chorusing of the cicadas was so loud that sound and heat became indistinguishable. The air wove and waved sinuously around me; I was in it like a fluid, barely pushing through it, entranced and sick. I thought I would pass out, but I made it into the house, into the AC and quiet, relieved. This experience was so unpleasant, but like a pilgrimage. No amount of discomfort could change my mind; I loved the cicadas and already thought of when I'd see them again.

I did the math -- I was 11 at the time, so 17 years from then would be when I was 28 -- an incomprehensible age. I told myself: come hell or high water, I would see the children of the cicadas I had saved and adored. (And boy, did hell and high water come!)

When the cicadas died, they did so in such masses that the air stunk for days. I don't remember how long their remains hung around, but there was one that had, at some point, gotten squished in our back door -- the side with the hinges, where the door slams into place against the door frame. It remained there, perfectly flattened and symmetrical, its color never fading, until the door was replaced in 2008.

Afterwards, I cherished the emergence holes that stayed in compacted earth for years after. I wrote into my middle school books a fantasy race of people with orange-veined cicada wings. I mentally marked the 2004 Brood X emergence as an important event in my life, fell into reveries at the sound of any cicada song. I kept exuviae and corpses of Neotibicen in a small box with other curiosities. One of my favorite bits of Plato is the origin story of cicadas in Phaedrus. In it, the first people who discovered music sang without interruption until they died. The muses turned them into cicadas -- creatures that could sing without need for sustenance.

And, of course, I got vaccinated and came to the East Coast to see them again. Come hell or high water.

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The nymphs came out in droves on the night of the 18th. First I found one scrabbling around in the dirt, then another, then discovered them clinging to the leaves of bushes by the driveway. I sat in the driveway, talking to Tim on the phone, and they started to climb up my back, appearing to my senses when they scraped their claws against the nape of my neck, seeking purchase. I greeted them, flustered, and delighted, "Hello! Oh my god! Hello little one!"

I tried to put them on the bush, but they tended to fall off, a little plop in the mulch, where they'd writhe about on their backs, trying to get back up. I settled for just putting them on the mulch, facing the bush. Everywhere I looked, they crossed the driveway, wandering with dogged persistence, searching for a spot to transform.

Then I felt one crunch under my foot. I decided to stay still, then noticed another I had accidentally crushed in the mulch. Its insides had squirted out, gooey pale yellow-green. Too many. Time to get out of there. I turned on the flashlight on my phone and picked my way through the flood of cicada nymphs back to the house, where I couldn't accidentally kill anything. I stayed off the driveway at night for the next few days.

The next day I went to my hometown and, while I didn't see cicadas everywhere, there were areas where they were everywhere you looked. First I saw their corpses squashed into the sidewalk, then I saw a stump covered in living cicadas. Many were well-formed, their flat wings meeting in a peak beyond their abdomens, but many others had twisted wings, shriveled wings, wings sticking out at absurd angles. They'd never be able to fly. Did it really matter that, in this same neighborhood, I had pulled cicadas out of their shells? Had I really twisted their wings, or was that always going to happen?

I began to notice cicadas that hadn't made it out of their shells, often with their backs arching out of the split, already turned black. Later, I sat by the stream I grew up exploring, in the cold breath of a storm drain, trying to dry off my sweat-soaked shirt. I took a moment to Google this phenomenon of cicadas getting stuck in their shells and found this article on the subject. With detached sympathy, it describes how cicadas can tear themselves apart in their struggle to escape the shell, how they can bleed into it and cement their doom, how they can sometimes make it out, but with too much damage to fly or, presumably, be successful in mating.

The only reasonable thing to do, I deduced, was to crush any that were stuck. Not carelessly, of course -- give them time, see if they can make it out. After becoming acquainted with the ecdysis process, I've learned it's easy to tell when something's going wrong.

The next day I found what an example of what I've started calling "molting failure" (since whipping out the word "ecdysis" in daily conversation surely alienates people): a cicada still trying to struggle its way out of a shell blackened with blood, its thorax still pulsating. It couldn't be smashed. The blood had formed a sort of hard, unbreakable cask. I left it under a car tire.

Last night I found one, still white, trying to drag itself out of its shell with its legs -- which normally don't firm up until after the cicada is mostly out of the shell. I tried to help, but it was stuck by both of its wings, which were starting to turn dark with hemolyph. I had Tim kill it, because I had already killed two that morning.

I killed another two this morning. Both crunched easily under my shoe. One of them I had noticed as a nymph the night prior, doing the wiggle dance that signals the beginning of ecdysis. I had a bad feeling about it for some reason. I suppose I was right, for I found it in the morning, its shell barely split, its thorax already the black of hardened exoskeleton. A hopeless situation. Crunsch.

Even as I heard them chorusing in D.C., I found death everywhere. Cicadas in all stages littered the sidewalks under trees, crushed by careless pedestrians, many of them presumably molting failures. A stream of tar seeped down a utility pole, puddling on the sidewalk. Somehow, some cicadas had managed to molt here without an issue. Not a majority -- a mess of dead nymphs and fully formed cicadas tangled in the tar like some nightmarish prehistoric scene, a precursor to fossilization. "Rough life out here," I remarked to the dead cicadas. Their luckier brethren shrieked in the trees.

I wasn't surprised to find all this horror, just to find it in such detail. Headless cicadas still trying to walk, nymphs lying baking on the ground, cicadas dead for no reason all over the driveway. So many of my memories of the 2004 emergence are tinged with discomfort and distress. Still, I loved them, and still I love them now. What good is a quasi-religious experience if it's not laced with horror?

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I find myself bumping up against an idea so obvious and yet so huge and deeply felt. It feels trite to just say it when I have felt it so deep in my gut, but here we are:

Nature is horrifying.

I find myself bouncing back and forth here about whether it's worth it to make a distinction between this construct of "the natural world" and human activity, I find myself wanting to say generally that "Life is horrifying," but then my thoughts become diluted.

I'm thinking of the feeling when I stood in the water before a deep spot in the stream by my old house, disrupting the current. Dead nymphs swirled up from the depths and began to flow downstream. Rolling through the water with all those waterlogged corpses was a tiny bird egg. Plucking it out, I found it was cracked open. I pulled off one end, smelled the slight stink of rot, saw the gray flesh, the pins that would've been feathers, the small point of what might have been a beak.

I wish I had something more meaningful and insightful to say, but all I can do is try to convey how powerfully I felt it during this trip, how it was one of the few strong emotions I had the entire time

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It's been several days since I've left now -- I've been so busy since I got home. But I'll do my best to describe what felt like the climax of the cicada experience, which occurred on my last day there, just a few hours before we left.

When talking to Tim's brother about the likely moral necessity of killing stuck cicadas (for, even if they don't feel pain the way we do, they certainly must feel suffering), they mentioned a tree they and their girlfriend had seen when walking in the woods. It was in a park and covered in "mercy killing situations" or something like that. I said I wanted to see it.

This was the first day the cicadas sang in earnest -- the first day the atmospheric UFO hum from the forest was met with a robust shrieking from the trees by the house. We plunged into the woods, into the sound, found cicadas congregating on broad leaved plants, found the 1950s car rotting in the woods, found honeysuckles and ferns, etc. The calls got louder as we approached the park, and peaked when we entered the clearing. Why that is I'm not sure, especially considering what I saw after.

The carnage was spread across two trees. On the first tree I found a molting failure so violent that the shell, which hadn't even split, was glued to the bark with a puddle of dried black hemolyph. Entombed in its own blood. Meanwhile, just inches away, newly emerged cicadas hung onto their shells, their unfolded wings white and perfect.

The "Tree of Death" as I came to call it had no such singularly dramatic scenes, but it made up for it with sheer quantity. At the base of the tree was a welter discarded shells, failed molts, dead cicadas, and living ones. Any nymph that wished to molt on that tree would have to climb through this mess of the living, the dead, and the successes. The trunk was covered not only with failed molts but with a showcase of unfortunate deformities: cicadas with shriveled wings, twisted bodies, too-small abdomens. Mixed in and outnumbered were those who had molted without incident.

Even so, this was one of the loudest places I encountered. Evidently, there were enough healthy cicadas to produce this enormous, unearthly howl.

Considering that the damaged cicadas probably couldn't get far from where they molted, it looks like there's an issue with that tree or with the area. My guess is the application of pesticides -- perhaps they affect growth, as well as interfere with the doubtless complicated minutiae of ecdysis. The article I shared above poses the possibility of trees disease and death (resulting in cicada malnutrition) as a cause as well -- so maybe both trees were sick, though I didn't notice any obvious illness about them.

There were too many molting failures for me to kill. Given that trying to crush one on the ground could result in collateral damage to one of the many cicadas crawling in the grass, it was time to let the task go and simply observe.

Despite our caution, we accidentally killed at least two or three cicadas on our way out. Some survived the first blow, crawled about frantically with their insides oozing out. They wouldn't survive. Best to kill them quick. Crunsch.

Now, a few days later, I'm just getting out of the habit of panicking whenever I step on something small and unfamiliar, such as a dropped piece of dry pasta.

What conclusion did I draw from the Tree of Death? Humans only make nature more horrifying.

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I love them so much. I sometimes feel like I'll lose my mind thinking about what I'm missing out on -- from the chorusing to the sight of cicadas mating ass-to-ass (a sight which disturbed me as a sex-repulsed 5th grader) to their death in piles under trees and the smell of their rot. I just have such affection for them, "my sweet babies," as I'd croon, and such awe at the whole process. I'll be 45 for the next Brood X emergence -- another unimaginable age. I hope I get to see some other emergence sooner -- a 13-year cicada emergence would be cool.

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After all this horror, let's remember something important: the cicadas are still a successful species. Their sheer numbers have, so far, always won the day. Most of the ecdyses I watched went just fine. Here's my favorite thing in the world at the moment: what it looks like when a cicada molts successfully.

When I would go out into the front yard at night, there were so many nymphs clumsily crawling around you could hear them: a general ambiance of scratching and fumbling. They reach out with their front claws first, and sometimes get tumbled over clinging to a piece of mulch or someone else's abandoned shell, or else fell repeatedly from walls and bushes and leaves. I liked to help them get on their feet again. Their bodies are smooth, dense, and delightfully cool to the touch from seventeen years under the earth.

They rarely stop moving until it's time for ecdysis begin. I think that time just happens when it does, whether or not the cicada's in a good spot. I've seen them halt on the edge of the sidewalk and molt there, but I've also seen one at the top of a bush, trying to climb higher, not ready to settle.

After they stop, they do a little dance -- at least the ones molting on a horizontal surface did. I never caught one starting a molt on a vertical surface. So, they wiggle in place, as if they're trying to make a pair of jeans more comfortable. It's unbelievably adorable. I wonder if it's getting the right fluids flowing or something.

After doing this for a few minutes, they fall utterly still and, shortly thereafter, the back of the shell, right over the thorax, splits. The difference between shell and soft body is indistinct at first -- the shell is brown, and that mantle-like part of the thorax that first thrusts its way out is a pinky-gray color, reminiscent of a brain.

The back arches out, the face parts from the mask of the shell, the legs slowly extrude, one pair at a time. All the while, one can observe the thorax pulsing arrhythmically. If the cicada is on a vertical perch, it will start to hang out of the shell, arching out like a strange white flower, held in place just by its abdomen. If it's on the ground, the cicada just extrudes straight out, like sausage meat of a casing, holding its soft little legs off the ground.

It was during this process that I sometimes had to intervene. Well, I didn't have to -- the species will always survive. But still, if I'm there to help, I might as well. This time, I think the helping worked -- all of these cicadas wound up with perfect wings.

Anyways, those that molt on the ground often didn't get a good enough grip and the shell would fall over, taking the molting cicada with it. I got into the habit of making a little hollow in the mulch and propping them up with little twigs and wood pieces so they wouldn't have to emerge on their sides.

It seems like the cicadas have to wait for their legs to firm up a little before they can do anything else. When the legs are ready, the vertical cicadas do an intense sit up and get a grip on the shell. They pull themselves out and hang there until their wings dry. The ones that molt on the ground have a bit more of a complicated time. They sometimes find it hard to get the very end of their abdomens out if the shell isn't gripping the ground -- I found it easy to gently pull the shell off.

The genitals are extremely prominent at this point, so the moment the shell comes off is like a "it's a [x]!" moment. It's easy to tell the difference: the females have a pointed end, the males have a flower-like structure. When they're all pale and new, one can see the delicate intricacy of these genitals, alien loops and folds.

In both I observed this moment when, having fully emerged, their entire bodies pulsed and wriggled. They'd pause to experience it. Surely there's some pragmatism to this movement, but I can't help but wonder if pleasure is involved. If there's an impulse to get out of the shell, then surely there's some sensation that follows the success.

The cicadas that have molted on the ground still have a journey ahead of them -- they have to find somewhere to hang up to dry. They begin to walk absurdly on their new legs, reaching out too far in all directions, their movements exaggerated. They move in fits and starts. I think at this point they can see a lot better than when they were nymphs -- while the nymphs wandered in no particular direction, falling off bushes and then accidentally walking away from them, we observed one of these "freshies" walking towards whoever stood nearest, adjusting its course whenever its target moved.

At first we just tried to guide them in the right direction. Eventually, I figured out I could just offer my finger and they'd climb on. They felt so much lighter than the nymphs, probably because they were far less dense -- often, after emerging, they'd be almost twice the length of the shell. The bushes provided the best spots for them to hang out, so I'd take them there, coax them onto the bush. They'd climb until they found a good grip, and then finally be still.

As the night wore on and I attended to other cicadas, I'd check in on the ones that had already molted. I always felt such joy to see the wings unfurling perfectly, like lace made of moonlight. This is what happened most of the time. The deformities I witnessed directly almost all came from when a cicada wandered too long in search of somewhere to hang. Their wings would unfurl, dragging like a bride's train, and be stuck in that shape forever.

Slowly, their white bodies would turn gray, then black. Sometimes you'd find them hanging in the same place in the morning, no longer ethereal but sturdy and hard, with orange-veined wings. Before long, they go off into the world, into the indistinguishable masses, to sing and fuck and produce the next generation.

↜↝

Tim's parents are in a Facebook group for their neighborhood. A week or two before the emergence began, someone posted something to the effect of, "Just learned about the cicadas! How bad is it?! How long will I have to stay inside?!"

We all laughed about it -- this person seemed to think a plague of locusts had come to eat people alive. Of course not! Cicadas are so docile, helpless even. But also, so amazing, with such a beautiful song. I wish I could have told them not to stay inside, but to go outside and see it all, and love every second of it.

Pavement Pizza and Other Puddles

(CW for vomit and other gross nonsense.)

Often, when I'm lying in the bath waiting for the pain to recede, or in bed waiting to fall asleep, I sift through my brain in an attempt to discover new short fiction ideas, even though my document listing unfinished and unstarted short fiction ideas is already huge. Well, I was in the bath one night, and a subject crossed my mind that instantly filled me with overwhelming sentiment, nostalgia and amusement. I wondered if I could make a story out of it somehow, especially one with a speculative fiction bent. No, it's too weird and plotless, even for my most experimental fantasies.

I did think it would make for a good blog post, so fuck it. If I do ever figure out how to slot this into a story, I'll surely have to delete this, but until then, enjoy.

During my senior year of college at St. John's, and most of the time I spent living in Annapolis after graduation, I worked at a chain of souvenir stores. There were three of them scattered across Main Street, masquerading as different stores while all selling almost exactly the same t-shirts and hoodies adorned with Navy logos and crabs.

Annapolis is a lovely town. I miss it. The houses are old and ornate, many of them with plaques from Historic Annapolis denoting their historical importance and the date of their construction. The sidewalks and roads are mostly brick. The tourist section perches by the harbor. Though the water is murky, it's populated by ducks. Boutique-y storefronts and restaurants crowd every available space, and in the warm months a lot of businesses would grow flowers and trailing plants in big pots, put out flags and displays. In the warm months, the air would breathe up pleasant and humid from the water. In winter and fall, the wind would cut right through you.

The souvenir stores I worked at weren't long walk from the college, but when we moved to Eastport after graduation, it was a painful thirty-minute journey, during which I clung to distraction to keep me going. I also often had to travel between the stores -- just a few minutes' walk -- to fill in my time card or fetch someone a t-shirt in the size they requested.

Frequenting these streets more than I used to, I noticed that if you take a Swiftian view, looking closely at the bricks and stonework, Annapolis is not so lovely. Strange smells rise from murky puddles and cloudy drains. Mysterious stains and old gum cake the bricks. An unwrapped but unused condom sits on the street by the Capitol Building. Dozens of green bagels litter Church Circle after a St. Patrick's Day parade. A large, flattened fish head sits on the sidewalk in front of one of the fancy houses on King George Street. Nearby, random chunks of birdflesh, with red feathers still clinging to blackened skin, lie scattered across the sidewalk.

Wreathing the weeds straggling out from between the bricks, ringing the parking meters and lampposts, lining the walls, are mats of what a friend and I termed "sidewalk hair." This discovery mystified me, though I realized eventually that the thick streams of tourists, Johnnies, Middies, townies, and dogs, must shed a lot, and all that hair has to go somewhere.

I mailed a Ziploc bag of sidewalk hair to the friend who helped me name it. I didn't want to be noticed, so I made a brief stop on the way to work one morning, crouching by a parking meter and grabbing a handful while watching for passersby. I hadn't expected so much resistance. I had to tear the bundle away, snapping many of the strands that wouldn't come loose. I still remember the feeling of it, and the way it came up with tiny, uprooted weeds. I stuffed the grayish mess in the bag and mailed it off to my friend, who still has it. They even brought it with them when they moved to a new house.

I love the sidewalk hair, but the thought that incited this blog post was the sidewalk vomit, which was what conjured all those rose-tinted memories of fun times in Annapolis.

The joke runs that Annapolis is a drinking town with a boating problem, and St. John's is a drinking school with a reading problem. Between the masculine bravado of the Middies from the Naval Academy, the mountains of baggage of the students at the Navel-Gazing Academy, the trapped loopings of townies, and whatever troubles the tourists brought to town, there was a lot of vomit in downtown Annapolis. Your average drunk human will choose a corner to vomit in, so a lot of it went unnoticed, never to be cleaned.

I'm an emetophobe -- any interaction with vomit used to give me panic attacks. However, this disembodied mystery vomit triggered more of my morbid curiosity than my phobia, and I came to enjoy checking in on my favorite vomit spots as I trotted about town on my business. I gravitated towards anything that might look like vomit, feeling a mirthful excitement when I found a good new puke that I could keep tabs on.

I know it sounds weird, but let's not forget I was the child who was obsessed with the Grim Reaper and the bubonic plague in 5th grade and who was allowed unfettered access to the internet in middle and high school, graduating from GaiaOnline's General Chat to the problematic horrors of Enyclopedia Dramatica to rotten.com. I wrote my senior essay on all the bodily functions in Gulliver's Travels because, of all the things The Program had to offer me, that's what fascinated me the most.

Here are some of the most memorable pukes and similar sidewalk messes, arranged in a hopefully intuitive list for your perusal:

-The alley by Chick & Ruth's Delly was always a good place to check. Chick & Ruth's is a restaurant that famously offers a milkshake challenge, which often results in predictable consequences. Once, a cheery white guy came into the souvenir store shirtless after the milkshake challenge, for obvious reasons, and bought a t-shirt. I hope he still has the shirt and that it indicates a cherished memory. But as for this alley -- it let in the rain, so whatever pukes could be found there were often washed away, only to be replaced before long. I checked whenever I passed by.

-There was in this awkwardly shaped little area of no purpose right before the bridge towards Eastport. I passed it to and from work. Whoever was responsible had obviously eaten shortly beforehand, perhaps to quell their stomach, because this watery ejecta was scattered with large, not easily bite-sized chunks of chicken meat. These dried into jerky-like scraps gathered in the boundaries of a vague stain. After a while, it wasn't immediately obvious that someone had vomited here.

-Speaking of things not clearly or obviously vomit -- far away from downtown, in front of my beloved Paca House and Gardens, I once found a dense pile of food-like material, potentially some sort of cheesy rice or chicken salad or something in that vein. It looked like it had been overturned out of a Tupperware, perhaps someone's spilled lunch. It wouldn't be remarkable or in the same list as sidewalk vomit if it weren't for the stink, which was especially sour. The birds loved it, however, flocking around to peck at this unfathomable substance, twittering joyfully. I wrote a little poem about it somewhere, though I don't know where, which ended with the line "I abhor what nature does not."

-Treading further down the path of diversion: I remember walking down from one souvenir store to the other. It was summer, and tourists thronged the sidewalk, but in between them I noticed these patches of white material, as if someone had spilled curdled milk on the sidewalk every ten feet or so. Arriving at my destination, I mentioned it to my co-worker, who told me that this was actually dog diarrhea. He'd witnessed the event himself when going to get snacks from the CVS: a woman had her dog on the leash and the dog had uncontrollable diarrhea. My co-worker approached her in his sassy way, saying something like, "Miss? Miss? You need to take your dog to the vet. Get it together." I felt so sad for the dog, and I hope it felt better, but I couldn't stop laughing, wondering what on earth causes dog shit to turn white.

-It reminded of some vomit from my sophomore year of college: multiple spots forming a trail either to or away from the dorm building I was living in at the time. It involved shreds of a white, potentially bready material. It had rained that night, so the substance was dispersed in puddles of water, and didn't last through the next day.

-I had to work on July 4th, in the morning. It's supposed to be a big day for business, because there's a parade, so I was delighted when I entered town on foot and found a fresh vomit in front of the hat store. It contained chunks that looked like fruit, and the birds flocked around, eating the chunks happily. I have no doubt that these chunks were infused with alcohol and the birds were getting drunk off their meal -- they were twittering quite loudly. Unfortunately for the birds, someone hosed the sidewalk off before the parade, and then it rained anyways.

-Finally, the king of all vomits: the CVS vomit. It appeared one day and never quite left because it was under the awning of the CVS. Someone had vomited, largely and impressively, on the stonework right in front of the window, to the left of the door, and no one had done anything about it. I don't remember its original color, but I do remember that it slowly developed into a black, drippy stain, that never quite blended in with the rest of the filth there. When I visited Annapolis years later, in 2018, it was still there! What an legendary puke! It did blend in to the passive observer, apparently, because I remember some tourists perching there, on it or right next to it, completely oblivious to this amazing piece of history.

I'll finish this with a little anecdote.

How the giant growler with the spongy bacterial mat floating in it came to be in the kitchen is a complicated story. The most important thing is that it lingered for at least a month, a passive science experiment lurking next to the stove.

The house we lived in at the time had been a party house before we graduated, and in the time that Tim and the other hippies held the lease, at least ten people had lived there for varying lengths of time, each one leaving something behind. The growler was just another oddity, in amongst the art pinned to the walls at skewed angles, the plastic bag full of craft feathers and dust, the inexplicable locked safe that sat on a table in the second living room.

As the bacterial mat -- the color of a deathly pallor -- appeared and thickened, we observed with detached interested and wondered how to dispose of this organism.

A friend and I came up with the most absurd possible solution: someone should take it to Main St. on a hot, busy summer day, carrying a sledgehammer or something comparable. Put it on the ground, and, as tourists pass by, smash that thing open and run. Running being necessary both because of the wave of mystery substance, the smell, and the possibility of being accosted or arrested for disturbing the peace.

Thing is, as I review all my memories of mystery puddles and smells around Annapolis, I'm sure that, after the initial shock, that mess would blend right in.

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I wrote most of this a week ago, then didn't know how to continue it. I tried to pull it together into some theme, relate it back to the ever present subject of writing, but to no avail.

Why did I write it? It excited me. These memories are vivid and strangely sentimental. It was easy to write; the words flowed out of me. The same night, I wrote some flash fiction about a dead squirrel I found in Annapolis. I stayed up too late, tried to go to bed, but my brain was too agitated for sleep.

My brain does this excited dance when I'm faced with upsetting and disgusting things. Not that there isn't a limit -- I still can't stand to watch people vomit in real life, even if Funhouse is my favorite episode of The Sopranos. The end of Akira, the turtle shell with the eggs in it, the desperate anxiety that fills me whenever I watch Climax -- these things fill me with a feverish fascination, enough to interfere with sleep, to send me into a spiral of fixated horror. I like this, for whatever fucked up reason, because it's inspiring or challenging or life-affirming.

I imagine it's not that unusual -- horror films exist for a reason.

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Well, Lyra, how's it going in the writing world?

In therapy I'm doing something called ACT -- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I forgot about it for a while, then remembered I should be doing that and returned to it. I'm at the point where it's probably time to start trying to use that to claw through the dense tangle of self-hatred that surrounds most writing activities. There will always be pressure and doubt in trying to have a writing career; I can't hide from it forever.

So that's how it's going. Been feeling highly averse to editing and writing new short story content, moderately averse to working on my NaNo manuscript (which is at around 107k words right now, ugh). I did set myself a daily word count to achieve (basically -- it's complicated). At first it was 1,667 words like it was NaNo times, but I'm supposed to be doing this online gardening course. I gotta leave time for that too, so I reduced it to 800 words.

I have easy things that I can work on whenever I'm not feeling up to the hard writing, but I feel like that more days than not at this point...so obviously I'm just being avoidant.

I've had some turnover in books -- I finished The Roots of Strategy and Havasupai Habitat. I decided I should probably not just add in more non-fiction because I was getting tired, so I started N.K. Jemisen's Fifth Season, which is intriguing so far, though I'm not sure what to make of it. Read a ton of it while waiting for a long time in a doctor's office today. I have the other books in the series -- just bought them as a bundle. I'm sure I'll wind up liking the first book, but even if I don't, I fully intend to read the others -- N.K. Jemisen is too important to pass up.

I also started another non-fiction book -- Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men, and Ancestral Wives: Female same-sex practices in Africa. I expected it to deal more with the history of same-sex practices in Africa, but it's mostly a survey of attitudes towards and experiences of lesbians, tommy boys, etc. in various African countries in the early 2000s. It's nonetheless a fascinating read -- lots about the experience of being closeted in repressive societies and this continuing trend of oppressive governments insisting that homosexuality is a Western import -- when it's not, of course, but the homophobia is. There are some problems with the book -- but I don't want to judge so much when I'm only on Chapter 4 (Namibia), so I shan't talk about them now.

Well, dang, I meant to finish this AND edit a short story tonight...and I might not have time before bed. OH WELL. There's always tomorrow.

Edit 5/1/21: Since I was late in posting this on any social media, here's another update. As of today, I am fully vaccinated! It's been about 9 hours and I have yet to have any serious side effects from the second shot. I'm in a little pain, but I'm just so used to that it's insubstantial.

Anyways, have a dang drawing. It's not the best proportions-wise, but it's also just a doodle in my notebook. I've been playing with crayons lately.