Taco Half-Moons, Like Pregnant Bellies

This is a little story I wrote for a specific publication (iykyk), which I feel is too specific to submit elsewhere. Even so, I like it, so I thought I would share it with the world through my blog! It's just a short read about what truths may be divined from a Crunchwrap Supreme.

The oven clock reads 12:01 – Jessica is right in time for lunch, which bodes well – but the house gloams in perpetual twilight, the curtains drawn and the air thick with incense and weed smoke. The shifting light of the muted TV is the main source of illumination, leaping across the shriveled potted plants, the bottles crowding the kitchen counters, the chipped Buddha statue staring serenely down at the ash-piled incense tray.

Most of all, wrappers clog every spare surface, spilling out of paper bags, and flocking across the floor, uncounted Baja-colored bells ringing in Jessica’s head. Twisted knots of sauce packets, the glimpse of an occasional corner label, a buzzing whisper of  “Taco Supreme. Chalupa. Doritos Locos Taco. Burrito.”

In short, Jessica has never been in a place like this. Even the frat houses in college weren’t this bad.

Jessica hesitates by the door. Two human figures shift on the couch, mired in the seafoam of wrappers. 

“What’d you bring?” The voice cracks out of the darkness. One figure sits forward, protruding into the embrace of the TV light. A woman, skinny and rigid, her teeth flashing with reflected light.

“What you asked for, Oracle,” says Jessica, bobbing her knees in something between a curtsy and a bow. “A Crunchwrap Supreme with potatoes and beans, three Doritos Locos Tacos, a large Baja Blast. I made sure they put in a lot of Diablo sauce.”

The Oracle’s hand flutters, gesturing her forwards. Jessica passes over the bag for the Oracle to examine, still holding the drink. The Oracle tears off the sticker and rustles through, assessing everything by feel.

“You understand the symbolism of this order, do you not?”

Jessica shakes her head, handing off the drink. The Oracle sets it on the coffee table, pushing aside wrappers, assorted crystals, and the tall tower of a bong.

“A Crunchwrap full almost to bursting. The round half-moons of tacos, like pregnant bellies, packed with flavor. Diablo sauce, full of fire, energetic as the quickening spark of life.”

Jessica’s breath sucks into her chest. She hadn’t mentioned her reason for visiting on the phone, yet the Oracle knew. “What about the Baja Blast?” she asks, but the Oracle has already unwrapped a taco and taken her first ferocious bite.

The second shape speaks up. “She just likes the Baja Blast. The drinks usually don’t mean anything.” He shifts and resettles on the couch, flicking on his smartphone. The screen’s light illuminates his prematurely lined face

“Oh,” says Jessica, and watches the Oracle eat, feeling that she is observing a beast in its cave. Entranced, it takes her a moment to remember the baggie burning a hole in her pocket.

“I uh…I brought you the extra offering.”

The Oracle is deep in her meal. The man leans forward to take the baggie of weed from her hand, reaching across the Oracle’s hunched form. He reaches for the bong, checking the bowl and emptying it into an overflowing ashtray.

“You said that would…help the accuracy of your reading?”

“Do not talk to the Oracle while she is eating,” snaps the man, making Jessica jump. Then he says, softer, “It’s best if you focus your intentions on what it is you want to know. That helps too.” He sets about packing a fresh bowl, apparently absorbed by the parade of ads on the silent TV.

The Oracle has finished her first taco and now takes her first sauce-doused bite of the Crunchwrap. Jessica tries to focus, struggling at first with anxious remembrances of all it took her to get here – awkwardly asking after rumors, the phone calls with the long silences, the friend of a friend who referred her to her husband’s weed dealer, the cop car that seemed like it was following her from the Taco Bell.

But no, she’s supposed to focus on the why, not the how. Her hands creeps unconsciously to her belly, to the empty womb that would not produce after years of trying and trying until the trying became a tiresome chore that scraped her like sandpaper.

The Oracle stops mid-Crunchwrap to take a deep pull from the bong. The fire illuminates a furrow in her brow, then flicks away. Moments later, she exhales an electrified billow of smoke.

Oh, that smell! Jessica’s insides twist her into the unwanted past: the smoking session before the drinking started, the way it felt like the joint was passed to her twice as often as everyone else. She got giddy and stupid, saying that all the memorabilia – pool cues and framed pictures of white men – made the frat house looked like a fucking Applebee’s. Then she got scared, and they told her a few beers would make it better.

That’s not why I’m here!

Or was it? On that night, stumbling home after her imprisonment, vomiting in the bushes, she’d slammed her fist into that filthy organ, and swore to herself in a drunken sob that if any child arose from this event she’d kill it herself.

Had she cursed herself for life in a moment of reactive unreason? She hadn’t known then how she would actually feel about children when she settled down.

The Oracle finishes the Crunchwrap and another taco. The wrappers join the pile bubbling from the crack in the couch. She takes a deep draw of her Baja Blast and, while she finishes the last taco, Jessica does her best to focus, asking the universe, fate, whatever god presided over this woman, what would become of her barrenness.

The Oracle finishes her lunch with a belch and a bong rip. Then she stands, her face pressing forward into the TV light. Jessica catches a glimpse of the high dome of her forehead, the thin lips pursing over those horse-like teeth, before she turns away and crosses the room to a dark doorway.

“Now what?” Jessica asks the man.

Without looking up from his phone, the man says, “She sleeps. She dreams. You wait. Sit, if you like.”

Jessica picks an armchair in the corner, her bottom sinking painfully into the deflated cushion. This, she thinks, does not bode well.

For hours she watches silent sitcoms, trying to guess at the drama unfolding between these lip-flapping characters. A blonde woman with plasticky make-up weeps through many close-ups. Was she troubled by an unplanned pregnancy? Why weep when she so easily had something Jessica might never have?

Meanwhile, the man puts in headphones and pats his knees while a haywire of breakbeats sputtered across the silence.

The oven clock reads 1, 2, 3. The gloom of the house deepens. Finally, at 3:43, movements from the darkness of the other room, and the Oracle returns, padding silently between discarded wrappers.

“I have dreamed,” she announces, her voice a brassy monotone. She looks not at Jessica, the man on the couch, or the TV, but towards a draped window, her eyes focused on some far distance.

Jessica twists towards her, heart pounding.

“Buy a Beefy Five Layer Burrito with extra sour cream. Return to your husband. This will break the spell of bad luck. The time is right. You will have as many as you like, in the end, but the first one will be the hardest.”

Jessica’s eyes sting with tears. “So what happened in college – it didn’t cause this?”

The Oracle turns her eyes upon her, but that gaze stares past her, through her. “No. There was no curse. It was mere coincidence. Go, now, before the time passes.”

Jessica’s knees hit the floor. She takes the Oracle’s hand – dry, smelling of smoke and salsa – and kisses it, thanking her through tears.

“You heard her,” cuts in the man’s voice, “Go on, now. Don’t waste it.”

Out the door, into the car, key twisting into the ignition. Back to the Taco Bell. She’s never been so hungry. She encounters no line, the order is out almost as soon as she reaches the window. Mouth thick with sour cream, one hand driving, one hand clutching the burrito like a lifeline.

She finds her husband still clocked in at his laptop. She casts it aside and fucks him right there on the couch. Crying out in animal pleasure, she thinks she hasn’t been this wet for months.

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The first pregnancy is hard, as predicted. The nausea for the first three months is so bad that her ribs start to show. Then the hunger returns, a ravenous desire for Crunchwrap after Crunchwrap. Her feet swell up in the last month, sticking her with needles all day and night.

The baby takes his time, on the inside and on his way out. But out he comes, sliding at last into waiting hands. Jessica weeps with joy as he is laid on her breast, his vernix caseosa thick and rich as sour cream.

A Brief Update

This is just a little post to prove that this blog isn't inactive, and my presence on the internet hasn't entirely disappeared. I have tried several times to draft something more cogent, but it either becomes too unhinged to share or I just wind up with a sketchy outline that I can't fill out.

Basically, for months now, I have been doing poorly, physically but mostly mentally. I have a new diagnosis that explains a lot of this, but I have been mulling over how much I should share about that. Suffice to say that winters have always been bad for me, and this year it hit particularly hard.

I have not written in any real sense since the end of October. I worked hard on worldbuilding for a NaNoWriMo project, coming up with over 25k words of worldbuilding, and then realized I no longer had it in me to actually do NaNoWriMo. A few days after that decision, my brain imploded.

It would be simple -- too simple -- to say that it's merely an issue of overwork, that writing 6 days a week for most of two years was too much for me. But, honestly, I do not find that pace too hard to keep up with if I have a steady sugar drip of external validation for my dark little soul, and if the bottom doesn't drop out of my mental health. I could've withstood a lack of validation, but too much other stuff happened, so here I am.

I had to leave Twitter something like two or three weeks ago. The introduction of the view count was the last straw for me. I wanted to write a long post about how bad Twitter has been for me and why I don't think the publishing industry should be so reliant on it, but I haven't been able to wring it out of myself. The long and short of it is that Twitter is designed to foster drama and comparison with others, and the view count insidiously plays into that.

Seeing the depressing stats on my posts was enough. I have a sliver of self-preservation in me still. I had to leave. If having a writing career requires me to be constantly torpedoing my mental health with social media and scratching my brain for pithy Twitterisms, maybe it's not worth it. It wasn't getting me anywhere to be on Twitter anyways, so maybe I can do without it.

So, what have I been doing? Well, telling myself I should just go for a walk when I can barely get off the floor some days. But also, coping by absorbing myself in various fixations. I've realized that this has always been a way to cope with these bouts. In middle school I wrote my little stories on notebook paper, in high school I dove headlong into ancient Greek history and botany (especially of carnivorous plants), in college I obsessed over Bach and forum roleplaying.

Fantasyland has been blockaded. I cannot reach it. So I am obsessing over fragrance. I have a binder full of entries for each fragrance, complete with cute little title cards that I've drawn. I must have at least a hundred fragrances in my drawers, between full bottles and minis that used to belong to dead people, and samples that I've gotten for free by hustling on Facebook. I get myself through the dark hours of night by thinking of what I shall wear tomorrow.

Hell, here's my Fragrantica profile, since perfume reviews the only writing I've been producing lately. Look at all the little balloons on my reviews -- that means people liked what I wrote!

A selection of my cute little perfume title cards. I could've scanned them, but I'm also a pile of soup, so you're getting photos. :)

I've been reading more too. Chugged my way through the first Warriors series -- a nostalgic pursuit for me. Now I've started Narnia, which I've never read all the way through before. I'm also working on The Last of the Wine, the tatty old copy that my high school ancient history teacher gave me as a gift when I graduated. I love how Renault's writing is thoroughly immersed in the time period. The vivid descriptions of the temples, the streets, the gymnasia, Athenian fleet setting out for Sicily, the walls of the city. Maybe I was never able to understand the fuss over Madeline Miller because I was so pampered by Mary Renault.

Since early this year, I've been working on The Tale of Genji. It's been slow going, partly because the Tyler translation is accurate to the point of being difficult to comprehend, partly because the book is so huge (~1,100 pages!) that I have to be careful to not pull my shoulder when reading it. I still love the hell out of it though. Genji is a horrible man, I love to see what fresh drama he is getting himself into. But also, all the beautiful imagery, the conversations through standing curtains, the long hair, the colorful robes, the women renouncing the world to become nuns...I can't recommend it highly enough, even though no one will ever take me up on it.

Well, that's the basic summary of my life. I am still alive, even if I have all the dynamism of crusty clam on the seafloor. It will pass at some point, and then we'll see what I am.

On Self-Loathing

CW: frank & extended discussion of mental illness, trauma, self-loathing & self-harm; bullying & social exclusion; SA; dissociation; recovery & therapy; mentions of addiction, EDs, & medication

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DISCLAIMER:

In addition to the content warnings, I think it is important to make several explicit exhortations.

First is that, despite the many different ways I talk about it, I want to make clear that in my right mind, I know that self-loathing and self-harm are not a healthy way to live life. Self-loathing is, of course complicated, but my goal in writing this is, in part, to describe why I need to recover from it and, in writing about it, help my own recovery. Self-harm is, of course, an extremely dangerous coping mechanism, and if you can stop, or not start in the first place, you should.

Second: this might be difficult to read for people who care about me. It describes some concerning and distressing behavior I've displayed through the years, the kind of stuff I don't often talk about openly. I try not to be too graphic, but there are points where it's upsetting anyways, and points where it's necessary (and, apparently, there may be points where I'm not aware of how intense some of the content is because I'm so desensitized). This warning may apply if you know someone going through something similar as well, so tread with caution.

Last, but perhaps most importantly, if you deal with self-loathing and self-harm this might not be an advisable read if you're not in a good place with that stuff. I don't want to trigger anyone, so I've done my best to avoid specifics, but I know that the subjects themselves can be triggering if you're in a certain state of mind. So, please, be careful, and only read this if you're doing okay, have support, and/or if you truly think it will help. There's no shame in not reading it.

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5/3/22

Something has irritated the scars on my upper right arm, turning them purple. When I notice this in the shower, I experience a fleeting moment of absurd hope, thinking it is possible to turn back time, for my scars to be lurid and fresh once more.

I'm dissatisfied with them lately, the way they've all gone silver, the way the ones on my legs have smoothed and flattened. They used to be dark, sometimes almost black when I came out of the shower, and the ones on my calves used to be raised like guitar frets, so firm they made a sound if I ran my fingers down them hard enough.

It's not the same now. My legs used to be a horror show. If you inspect them, you'll see the extent of what I did to myself, but it's not the shock it used to be.

Why do not want them to fade? One could come up with all sorts of unsavory conjectures, all of which would be at least half true. I'm trapped in time, obsessed with my teenage years because I feel disconnected from my past. I am uncomfortable with getting older. I'm attention-seeking, attempting to prove to the world and myself that I have suffered. I am a wannabe, participating in the self-harm suffering Olympics, trying to show that I had it worse than others.

The one on my mind lately is that I miss self-harm, I crave it. The other night I was so riddled with self-harm impulses I could hardly figure out what to eat. I was in the kitchen and the knife block was right there and I kept thinking but what if, could barely string together two thoughts in between the images and sensation of what I wanted to do myself. Creative new things I hadn't thought of as a teenager, or had been to afraid to try.

I got to bed without hurting myself, laid there trying to read War of the Worlds while the urges flashed through me like tics and twitches. My arms, my legs, my chest, all craving mutilation in little jolts. If I thought of myself, anytime I have ever been seen or heard to speak, the next thought would be -- oh, I shouldn't say. You're not supposed give people ideas.

I reached down the the scars on my outer thighs, so broad and hard, the gnarly crosshatch I barely remember inflicting. There's some small relief in that, knowing that it has happened. Old scars are like a ghost of what I crave, satisfying enough to get me to sleep at last.

Me and my scars in 2011 -- one of my favorite pictures I've ever taken of myself

6/10/22

Months ago, I had an idea for a post: an exploration of my self-loathing, because I've never seen anyone do it and I'm tired of the isolation and stigma that still surrounds the subject.

I have tried to write this post many times. Each time I wouldn't know what I was doing. My insecurity would crush me, convincing me that I'm just complaining aimlessly into the void. People will read my self-pity (That's what it is, right? There's nothing else here, right?) and hate me.

Maybe it'll work better now that the burden of self-loathing has lifted a little. I know it's temporary, brought on by certain happy events and the weather finally warming. I still battled shame over getting 5/6 on my Wordle this morning. Point is, nothing external can fix this. No matter how much success, how much affection, how much good weather, the self-loathing is still there. Dormant, perhaps, or weak, but always waiting to strike.

A dear friend recently told me he'd tried to read my blog but couldn't stand it because it was too intense, made him worry about me. My heart broke a little. I went and retrieved the therapy book I keep forgetting to work through (The ACT Workbook for Depression & Shame).

I don't want to worry anyone. I can't say I never did because I did have my manipulative moments, and sometimes, in high school, I was genuinely desperate for help. But there was a reason I used to hide the wounds and scars. I suppose there's a reason to show them too.

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5/3/22

I had an idea to make this post primarily about self-loathing, without talking too much about the self-harm, but I've given up. They're inextricable. I've been hurting myself since before I hated myself. My earliest recollections of self-harm start from around first grade, whereas the beginnings of my self-loathing are more uncertain.

It's not like I was born hating myself, or like my earliest memories are specifically marked with it. I remember being bullied in elementary school and my response being contradictory: either I would hate myself, falling in line with what I imagined to be my tormentor's viewpoint, or I would spend hours in focused, silent retaliation, asserting to myself why I was better. I don't know that the "or" even makes sense here, because these responses were often the same thing, e.g. me fantasizing about telling a bully that "maybe I should go suck on a tailpipe and die" as a way of showing both how she made me feel and how ridiculous her opinion of me surely was.

(In the end, it's all about the same thing: me either being worse or better than the people hurting me, or somehow both at once. It's not that I ditched one path for the other. I still lean on both for consolation at times, even though it's unhelpful and unhealthy to over-elevate or crush one's self-image.)

Meanwhile, I self-harmed by throwing myself on the floor, trying to hit my head; prodding at my skin harmlessly with pencils; twisting lanyards around my hand until it hurt. The first time I cut myself was in 6th grade, when I thought a friend was avoiding me. She wasn't, of course, but the fear gripped me so tightly I went down to the stream and scratched my knee with a piece of broken glass. (The first of many instances where I'm grateful and amazed I didn't contract tetanus). I hadn't gotten the idea from anyone else, I hadn't read any panicky articles about this new "self-mutilation" craze sweeping teens. I knew instinctively what I wanted.

The year was 2004. I hardly knew what I was getting into. As I continued the practice with new implements, I didn't realize I was hardwiring myself for deepening obsession, and that for whatever reason, the balance of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing would tip dangerously towards the latter.

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6/10/22

Just kidding, I know exactly what caused that tip. It feels so clear to me that it happened in 8th grade, when, for reasons I don't feel comfortable talking about, I cut off all my hair with a pair of scissors. Curls falling to the floor, where I left them for months as a reminder of my shame. Rumors spread about me in school. Strangers made jokes about my gender and sexuality (In the end they were kinda right -- now I'm agender and bi. Funny). I wanted to die, but I settled for giving myself nosebleeds in the shower and watching the blood pour down the drain. A secret, clean method. No one knew.

By 9th grade I'd formed a superstition that if I hurt myself, I would get my way. I had to pay in blood for anything to go well because otherwise I didn't deserve it. At the time, I was primarily concerned with romance, bleeding into the sink in exchange for a message on Myspace.

In 10th grade I tried to stop because a boyfriend asked me to. I became obsessed with the idea of someone I loved pinning me down and cutting tallies on my ribs. We weren't talking at the time and I fantasized about this contact, obviously the only kind I deserved. Being in a relationship meant being pressured into sexual activity long before I was ready. I'd dissociate afterwards, then go home, listen to MSI, and imagine this person, who I loved so sexlessly, punishing me like a revenging angel.

In the summer after 10th grade, the superstitions I'd developed got their narrative pay-off. In August, a month after I'd learned my family was moving to Australia, I went through a rough break-up and experienced an extravagance of manic behavior, formulating some elaborate time-based system of self-harm based around the number 21. If I did it just right, if I didn't eat or drink, he would take me back.

Then, that same week, a friend raped me. I tried to stop him from pulling up my shirt, but he tugged it out of my hands. He patronizingly kissed the mess of cuts on my stomach and kept going. Afterwards, I kissed him goodbye at the door, begged him not to tell anyone, and went upstairs to the bed covered in his semen to pay my penance on my skin.

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Did I choose this? I was a teenager -- thirteen to sixteen years old. If you had asked me what I wanted in life, I would've said I wanted to write and then sat on the fear that I wasn't good enough. If you had asked me what I thought I deserved in life, I don't know what I would have said.

My brain had this dark, dramatic predisposition to self-blame or self-aggrandizement. My attachment style was a nightmare. I thought lovability and worthiness must be externally earned, and would do anything, even things I didn't like, to gain that. I only tried to stop self-harming when boyfriends would say, "Please stop, for me." Otherwise, love was paid for in blood.

What tools did I have to counter my own mindset? How could I realize you can't stop hating or hurting yourself for anyone but yourself? How could I guess how far it would go, or how it would affect my biology as an adult?

I was seeing a therapist but I couldn't talk about my self-harm because I was afraid she'd tell my parents. I could never tell her the full truth.

When I told her that my family was moving to Australia, I spent the entire session curled up in a ball on the chair. "I'm looking at you curled up there," she said, "and I'm seeing what I'm worried will happen to you when you move, that you will curl up into yourself."

I didn't know at the time that she was right.

There was a time when I blamed myself for what happened when we moved to Australia, thinking, if only I had been more sociable, if only I'd tried a little harder with the friends I've since learned I can trust. Then I wouldn't have this trauma, these scars, this social anxiety.

But, looking back at the documentary evidence, I've discovered the truth that's honestly harder to swallow: I didn't have the tools, the abilities, the help. My trust in other people got severely burned. I snapped my hand away and curled around the wound. I sank deeper.

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2011

"#54
The realization:
'He didn't even use me as a person
I was just an
object, a trophy.
But he is still happy.
I am not.'
Blood, blood, blood
smeared over things so symbolic
of ruin and shame, of
don't let anybody in because
this lack of wisdom protects no emotions
so protect with
how much it would hurt to have
someone fucking between those torn thighs.
Punishment. Atonement.
The word 'FILTH' carved into pale flesh.
'He is happy, they are all
happy, having stepped on me.
And I am not.'
Red hand prints like all the
fiery, grasping claws of these men who can now brag:
            She was a bit of a
            bitch really.
            Asked too much
            wanted too much but
            at least her tits were nice
            at least I got to lay my hands
            here
            and here.
This terrible realization:
'I am not to be loved.
I am to be used so
they are happy.
I am not."

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6/13/22

Most of my scars are from after I moved to Australia. There was an abusive teacher, a persecutory school administration, homesickness, rumor-mongering, people who told me not to complain because people with cancer have it worse, the realization that what had happened in my bedroom on that summer day had been rape, the fallout of that which involved few people believing or supporting me or caring much at all. In my last year of school, I isolated myself so thoroughly that I didn't talk at all some days.

My apologies for exposing you to my old poetry, but I chose the poem above because of the contradiction in my thinking it illustrates. In the wasteland of rape trauma and social trauma, I struggled with how to view myself: was I a victim, clawed at by men, or was I somehow to blame, my inherent self an evil that warranted assault and dehumanization?

I mostly leaned towards the latter. How else was I to explain the way the world seemed intent on beating me as soon as I raised my head, striking me whenever I reached out a hand for comfort? How could so many people hate and mistreat and ignore me if it was unjust? I had to be evil, because then at least the world was right.

I often encounter rhetoric -- often from cis white men -- about not having a victim mindset, about how much better it is to view everything as a result of your own actions. It's not a horrible idea in moderation, but I used an anti-victimhood mindset to hate myself, but the truth was that there was no way for me to be in control.

How could I stop a friend from pulling out his penis when I said "no" already, when I was alone in the house with no one to stop him? How could I keep people from taking his side? How could I stop a teacher from bullying me when she got angry at me for looking in the wrong direction, holding a scrap of paper, crying from fear? How could I get my peers to like me and listen to me and believe me?

With the assumption that it must somehow be my fault even in situations where I had no agency, my reasoning became amorphous. The problem was me. I had to stop talking. I had to stop being myself. I had to cut the word "FILTH" into my thighs as a barrier to letting anyone else in ever again.

The other side of my old dichotomy was present too, of course. I demeaned the people of Perth, writing insulting (and bad) poetry about their supposed shallowness, narrow-mindedness, milquetoast and uncreative aesthetics. I had to be better them, since I couldn't be accepted them. If I wasn't better than them, I was worse.

Sometimes, the realization that I was a victim would break through. In moments of clarity, I would write rants against the teachers, the school administration, and the ones who had sexually exploited me. It's heartbreaking now to read those moments of balance, when I could see that I wasn't perfect but I wasn't evil either, that I was a full human and I didn't deserve this treatment. An afternoon here and there, then back to the usual.

I blamed myself as an adult too, posting apologies on Facebook for not being better when I was in Australia, flying into rages with myself for "causing my own trauma." Only in the past few years did I confront the idea that I was a victim. It was a horrifying realization, one that left me shaking and dissociating in the bath, at work, behind the wheel.

I never hear anyone talking about how difficult it is to accept that in some cases, you are a victim. You got run over in someone's path, it was unfair, and there's no justice or recourse. You were vulnerable, the world was unkind, and you were harmed, sometimes for no good reason.

I think anti-victimhood rhetoric is such an appealing illusion because, if you were never the victim, then surely you can take actions to prevent this ever happening again. It was all your doing, right? You're in control. It's also a viewpoint that's easily co-opted by capitalism and oppressive mindsets: if everything's your fault, then how can systemic forces be to blame? If you're suffering, poor, traumatized, you just should've done better.

In short, it's a mindset that benefits abusers and oppressors. Recognizing when you're a victim is empowering too. Finally, I can accept that I didn't deserve any of that mistreatment, and I should never accept it again.

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2011

"#48

RULES TO LIVE BY:

1. YOU ARE SCUM. Never forget what you are, never believe you are any good.

2. Always remember that NO ONE WANTS YOU. Your presence is a taint. Don't enter into a conversation unless addressed. No one wants to know.

3. DON'T ASK FOR THINGS. You don't deserve them.

4. DON'T HOPE. It's better this way. You can't be disappointed.

5. PAY THE PRICE. Sacrifices must be made. Blood is the price for good things in life.

6. NOTHING YOU DO IS EVER GOOD ENOUGH. You always need to try harder. You are always a failure.

The rules apply only to me: I am scum, I am the lowest."

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It hurt to rediscover that entry. I had forgotten just how bad it was back then.

I have a new perspective on it now, one that allows for forgiveness and acceptance for what I did to myself and others.

Read the rules to carefully, even if it's horrible. What am I trying to prevent with all this superstition and restriction? What was I trying to gain?

I wanted to be accepted by someone, anyone, to any degree. I wanted bad things to stop happening. I wanted to prevent the cruelty of others by anticipating what they'd see in me. I wanted good things to happen, so I resorted to magical thinking to foster them.

I was trying to take care of myself.

Self-hatred was self-love twisted on itself, molded and distorted by the treatment of others. Straightforward self-love felt (and still does) too dangerous. Setting boundaries, standing up for myself, voicing my opinions, crying for help, etc. had resulted too many times in my self and my needs and my voice being disregarded anyways. It felt like punishment. So, the solution? Stop doing that and life will get better.

It didn't of course. As I silenced and isolated myself, I became obsessed with Kurtz's gasping words from The Heart of Darkness: "Live rightly, die, die." Whatever it meant in the book, it meant to me that I was trying my hardest and still dying, that living "rightly" was killing me. The loneliness and self-loathing hurt so much the pain became physical, eating at my chest and skin. I thought I'd never live see the end.

Though the emphasis is slightly difference, ACT calls these confused acts of self-care "Defectiveness Coping Behaviors," pointing out that "You wouldn't have used these DCBs early on if they weren't effective." ACT also points out that these behaviors, while they temporarily relieve pain, are self-perpetuating. For example, my isolation increased my shame and fear of others, and it was only by breaking out of that (reaching out, dating, accepting friendships) that I improved my life at all.

And now, of course, these DCBs aren't helpful at all. They're a hindrance. So I need to learn to not act on them, even when they feel so tempting, so comforting, like an old blanket.

Still, it did work for a while. To this day I get dreamy for the memories of lonely trips to the city, dancing around to Public Image Limited while cottony seeds floated through the afternoon sunlight, watching my carnivorous plants grow and open when I couldn't. I wasn't happy, but it was beautiful, sometimes.

Doodled in class, 2011

6/14/22

I was in a good mood today, put on a cute outfit and Etat Libre d'Orange's perfume, The Ghost in the Shell. Smelling like a flowery android fresh off the production line, I drove around on errands blasting Ho99o9 and feeling like a cool and interesting person.

Too much positive feeling, I've realized, is overstimulating. Before long I just want it to stop because I want my normal life to resume. Within hours my brain feels like a peeled mandarin drying in the sun and my joy teeters towards anxiety.

In the quiet hours of the night I question myself, whether I was too annoying today, too loud or too quiet, too demanding. I see myself from the outside, sitting in the drivers' seat and radiating joy and wondering if all that excitement was unwise. The fan I bought to cool my study wasn't very good. I didn't hold my own in conversation. I don't know what I am any more, whether I exist. The day was too long.

I've had the comedown go worse than this. One moment I'm on top of the world, then the next my fist flashes out from the corner of my sight and catches me in the face. It can happen so fast I don't catch it, even though it's my own body. A trained reaction, punishing me for hubris as quickly as a dog salivates for the bell.

It's easier, less frightening, less dangerous, to between average and slightly sad, to keep myself below happiness, it not outright miserable.

Such unexpected self-harm is one of the many signs that I've teetered over the edge of my self-control. Something happens at the wrong time, I make a mistake on a day when I'm on edge, I'm too happy with too hard of a comedown, and I fall over the edge.

No one can reason with me and I can't reason myself, can't stop myself from doing and saying the most horrible things. I insult myself to anyone who will listen, I fight praise because it wells up waves of anger. I tell people they are crazy for loving me, that they should beat me, rape me, kill me, that they'd be better off without me. I hate myself so much it feels like I could just die with it. I know I'm making everyone miserable, but I don't know how to stop.

All the while, I know what will calm down my emotions, make me able to live with myself again. My mind stretches to every item in the room that could be used as a weapon. I feel them all around the house, arrayed, waiting. Knives, razors, heavy books, lighters, anything. Several times I've lunged for the knife block or started striking my head, and I've needed to be physically restrained.

In that moment, the self-loathing is completely true. I never feel anything else in life with such certainty as I feel, during these episodes, that I am scum of the earth, unlovable, that I caused my own trauma because I was too pathetic to accept that I deserved everything I got.

One time, after I'd recovered, Tim told me that the look in the eyes was the same was when I took too much LSD and didn't know my own name or birthday. I wasn't there. I was somewhere else.

Self-loathing isn't always like this. Most of the time, however, I don't entirely disagree with the self-loathing worldview, even when I'm in my right mind. Today, miraculously, I don't agree, which I think is a big step in the right direction.

Most of the time, self-loathing is subtle, the sub-conscious leading my actions. Last summer, I bumped a parked car while trying to pull out of a parking lot because I thought it would be cringe for me to have to add another point to an already messy turn. I wasn't conscious of it in the moment, and I only realized this by analyzing it later. This is the case with so many things: my fear of voicing what I want, my anxiety after the guests leave and I'm alone, the way I choose what to eat and when.

Often, I just get this feeling that I'm evil. Anxiety at everything I do, terror at the signs of my own existence. The trees in autumn become unreal, night falls heavy on my chest. I become unreal. At least, if I'm evil, I don't exist.

How do you counter this? I hit a roadblock with ACT because so much of it was based off addressing, naming, mocking, etc. the self-loathing part of your internal monologue. I don't have an internal monologue, which makes it tricky. Sometimes I can make a joke of it -- "I want to take a bath. Does that make me evil?" -- and that can help. But sometimes I don't feel like laughing.

It's a long road and I don't have all the answers. My point here is that it's not that I can just stop hating myself. This is how my brain works, deep down, in subtle ways I don't yet understand. It's been this way for so long that it's impossible to pin down how or why it started -- even all my explanations above are just theories.

To commit to improving this is to commit to countering yourself on a deep level, constantly. And it gets harder when you don't feel like you deserve to be saved.

↜↝

10/9/11

Back in 2011, after the worst of it was over, a friend who, the prior night, had seen my scars for the first time, asked me why I self-harmed. It turns out that the answer I gave was like 90% on the money. I'd summarize it as such:

1. I was giving and outlet to emotional pain in a way that I'd found to be effective, if horrific.
2. I did it out of self-loathing and self-destructive desires.
3. Self-harming out of a desire for self-punishment (I will teach myself never to do [x] again).
4. I took pride in my self-harm as something I was good at and something that made my life experience unique.
5. I sometimes self-harmed because I was seeking help without being able to ask.
6. Superstition and magical thinking -- blood in exchange for positive results in life.

There is one piece missing from this explanation, whether I was conscious of it at the time or not:
7. I was (and am) an addict.

↜↝

6/20/22

There's some debate, apparently, as to whether self-harm can be called an addiction. Speaking for myself only, I found it to be addictive, and find myself racked with cravings to this day.

I've been listening to the podcast Dopey ("The podcast about drugs, addiction, and dumb shit."), starting at the beginning. I'm still in the episodes from when Chris was alive, and at times I've been struck by his description of intravenous cocaine cravings: he doesn't crave the drug so much as the needle, the image of the needle puncturing his skin, the blood pulling into the barrel. He'd talk about how euphoric recall colored his memories of using, making the moment before the needle's plunge seem deliriously desirable, even when he knew that the following high was unpleasant and never worth it.

What is it that I crave? The feeling of something dangerous in my hand. A whole lot of visual stuff people hate for me to describe. The shock of mutilation, knowing I've gone too far and I can't take it back and I'll be suffering for this for days. My feelings flattening to blankness, the warmth and sleepiness that washes in as the blood drains out. The hard-gotten self-care of patching myself up, cleaning up the blood, watching the wound heal through its slow torments.

I don't remember so well the feelings of shame and panic that tend to follow the self-harm. Euphoric recall makes it hard for me to remember, even if those are essential parts of the experience.

It's not just negative feelings that cause these cravings. If I sit here and think about it too much, desire rolls over me like a wave. My skin itches and aches, my hands wring and my nails twist into my cheek. I can't sharpen knives, or even be near someone sharpening a knife, because it's too visceral, fills me with sensually intrusive thoughts. Sometimes I find myself in dark corners of Twitter, looking at images of self-harm with slavering obsession. Oh, wouldn't it be nice? Don't you miss it, Lyra?

There is, potentially, an explicable mechanism for self-harm addiction. In response to the wound, your system floods with endorphins. Half the time, I wouldn't even feel pain at what I was doing to myself. Riding my feelings, I'd go until the calmness of endorphins seeped in. I'd become exhausted, heavy, a feeling like being wrapped in a blanket. It would be hard to get myself cleaned up and easier to sleep. Sometimes, in the years of insomnia in Australia, it was the only thing to help me to sleep, when melatonin and dipenhydramine and Zopiclone couldn't.

Nowadays, when the madness sets in, when I shift into that negative world where my own worthlessness feels like the only truth, I get so frustrated that there is nothing I can do about it. Normal coping mechanisms don't do much. I can be hamstrung for the rest of the day, trying to wait it out. Lying in bed, waiting to see if I can sleep it off. In college, it would go on for a week at a stretch, the slow, grating hours scraping into days.

I am not supposed to self-harm. Everyone gets upset when I do it (a reason I usually find more compelling than "But it's dangerous and you should love yourself"). I know it works, that it's the only thing that flicks the switch and shuts me down, and in those moments I can argue extremely eloquently as to why I should be allowed to do it. In lieu of doing whatever I want, I wish sometimes that I had done more damage to myself as a teen, so I'd have more scars and horror stories.

I also relate heavily with Of Herbs and Altar's wise words on the subject of missing your Eating Disorder. The parts that stuck out to me was how he talks about calorie-counting can be so all-consuming that it leaves little room for other emotions, and how life becomes so simple when your focus is so narrow.

Self-harm was much the same for me. I've come to miss those times when I had no thoughts for the future because I didn't think I'd be alive, when my sole focus was doing as much damage to myself, engaging in as much of this addictive, self-destructive behavior as I could humanly manage, with little regard to the long term consequences. It was a life without nuance: I was evil, and I needed to be punished, and I was good at punishing myself. I had a skill, and in my self-centered concept of the universe, it was a useful one.

In contrast: adulthood, with its responsibilities to others, financial considerations, conversations of where we will be in a few years, the struggle of accepting yourself as an imperfect human being with flaws that you must either confront or accept, the realization that you are not even uniquely evil. No, you're just a person.

If I were to give in, pursue the path of self-destruction again, I wouldn't have to worry about all that any more. I know all the tricks of self-harm. I'm proficient and don't have to fumble through the basics. If I wanted to, I could show people the resulting damage, and they would scramble to make me better.

My life is no longer built for that. I can't self-harm in desperate isolation. There's people around me now, and I hate frightening them. I resent it sometimes, but they're helping to keep me safe without even knowing it.

↜↝

I saw this comic bouncing around on Tumblr for a while, but of course haven't seen it since I decided to write this. In it, Person 1 makes a self-deprecating remark, "Haha I'm so stupid," or something. Person 2, frowning in my recollection, nails a board with a positive affirmation on it over Person 1's speech bubble with.

On Tumblr I think it came with an assertion that "no, you do not get to keep your unhealthy coping mechanism," and maybe some talk of how self-deprecation -> self-hatred and harshly-worded, even disdainful insistence you need to work on yourself if you ever want to get better (and, supposedly, removing negative self-talk is the way to do it).

There's an aggression/tough love approach to these depictions and conversations that makes me wildly uncomfortable. I get that self-deprecating humor is uncomfortable and annoying for others, but this reads to me as an effort to link irritation with a moral exhortation to Do Better. Stop feeling this way, or at least expressing it, because it's bothering the people around you.

It reminds me of when my Self-Loathing Containment System TM experienced an unexpected breach and a friend responded angrily, saying, "No, you don't get to say that about my friend!" I spiraled for days. What was the point of friends if they didn't want to know what was going on inside me, what it was like to actually be me?

It reminds me of people telling me I needed to shut up because there were others out there who had it worse. It reminds me of people who let me fall by the wayside when my emotions became too much for anyone to handle. It reminds me of people who found my expressions of unhappiness annoying, and so cast me to the side rather than helping. But hey, maybe that's the trauma talking.

I see the good intent here. You want your loved ones to love themselves, and for that to be evident. But if the end result is, effectively, silencing someone, I don't see what good that's doing. If someone is already angry with themself, is you being angry at them going to help?

Season 2 of Euphoria was a (very fun) mess, but the scene where a bunch of influencers scream at Kat to "LOVE YOURSELF!" was so on point that it had me sitting there with my mouth hanging open saying, "Finally, someone said it!"

This intense pressure to love yourself can become just another stick to beat yourself with. It's framed as a choice -- just do it! It's easy! Just drop that self-loathing and love yourself! So, when I'm in those borderline psychotic states of self-loathing, I find myself blaming myself for not making the simple choice of loving myself. If I loved myself, this wouldn't be happening! I wouldn't be taking up so much of someone else's attention! I wouldn't be such a nuisance!

"Love yourself!"

The fist comes flying out of the corner of my vision. Bam!

"You're a good person!"

Bam!

"Why can't you just be a good person!"

Bam!

"No one cares if you feel this way! No one wants to hear it! You'll pretend like you're happy and no one will ever need to know!"

Bam!

And so on. I've literally hurt myself while my brain seethes with affirmations. Whatever works for others, it doesn't do it for me. CBT and similar feel too much like gaslighting to me.

My therapist has given me the more achievable goal of self-neutrality, to be pursued with ACT, which to me is more about accepting that you're going to feel like shit sometimes and not letting that get in the way of my day-to-day life as much as possible, and accepting when it does. She has agreed with my suspicion that likely I'll never be entirely rid of my self-loathing, but perhaps it'll be more manageable, and the dips into madness will happen less often and I'll be better at handling them when they do.

I think self-love is so popular nowadays because it's marketable, because it makes good content for viral posts, because wouldn't be nice if all the discomfort and trauma just disappeared? I've seen it work for some, but it seems too far to reach for me. At least for now, I'm afraid I'll overextend.

I feel safer when someone lets me feel the way I feel, provides a soft (yet maybe slightly resistant) surface for my sharp words. That's a lot to ask of someone: that they not get upset or angry, that they tell me that they understand my feelings and disagree as gently as possible, even if my self-loathing batters against everything they believe. I'm a lot to deal with, I know.

I wish for people to be kind, to understand that I didn't adopt this viewpoint willingly, and certainly not to annoy and upset people. It was all quite logical at the time. There was a time when it was all that got me through. Undoing these patterns will, perhaps, take the rest of my life. It can't be countered with pithiness.

↜↝

Oh, I could talk about it all day. If it were acceptable, if there weren't concerns about triggering people or giving them dangerous knowledge, I'd spend all day writing down everything I've done, whispering it like a spell. Thinking about it, my skin is alight. I can feel old sensations lining my skin. I want it back, I want it all back.

But you can't dwell on it forever, can you? After a while it gets boring. After a while, I just want to drink tea, read a book, and go to bed. I want to life to continue.

↜↝

Today, I blew a tire while driving. This is the third one. I was so upset with myself, so disgusted with my sweat and my inability to loosen the bolts on the wheel, that I thought I'd rather die than ask for help. Help came anyways and I returned home aching for the sharp little knife in the knife block. I told Tim exactly what I thought myself, how it was time I gave up driving even if I enjoyed it because I'm a menace and cost us too much money.

I couldn't let it go. If I forgave myself then -- then -- then what? The universe would round on me and punish me because I didn't do it enough myself. Tim would hate me. Everyone would hate me. My sense of self would collapse. The horror of what laid beyond just forgiving myself nearly stopped me.

But, slowly, I relented. Tim asked me for a hug. Face buried in his shoulder, I allowed myself to ask him what I had been wanting:

"Do you want to order pizza tonight?"

"Sure, I'll exploit your bad feelings to feed my desires for trash."

"So long as you're exploiting me," I joked.

We laughed about it and tears squeezed out of my eyes. Already it was passing. I took a bath and used one of my precious bath bombs to treat myself. We had pizza and watched two episodes of Breaking Bad back-to-back. Despite my paranoia that I need to be working basically all the time, I've written close to 3,000 words tonight.

I think, for now, I'm doing a little better.

Word (and Squirrels) on the Street + Darling Tedda

Important Writing News First

I should've updated my blog a lot sooner, so this news is slightly belated, but, as of February 18th, my little flash fiction "Small Spirits and Squirrel Leather" is available on Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight! The story was inspired by a flattened-to-the-point-of-being-unrecognizable I found on the sidewalk in Eastport, Annapolis, in 2016. I think about that squirrel all the time, even before I got this piece published.

I also am excited to announce that I recently got an acceptance letter on another flash fiction, this one in the horror genre. But for the moment, I will have to keep mum on the exact details.

I should also mention officially on my blog, not just on Twitter, that I am no longer just working on the WIP about depressed teenagers who can turn into dragons, but I'm also slowly putting the pieces together for a simpler, hopefully more publishable WIP.

This one's about a teenaged (I am me, after all) faery girl who is just trying to steal some shoes when she accidentally discovers a dark secret beneath the city, a secret which could result in the city's collapse. Chased across continents and into the sea, she must decide the fate of this city, whether it should survive or sink into the sands. Here's the (preliminary) moodboard I made for it:

I don't have many concrete names yet, and I'm not 100% decided on which details should be in such an early stages pitch, but there's the basic premise. I do know that the world involves scattered small continents, a fae realm, merfolk, and a prehistoric-esque sea full of massive crinoids (I haven't picked a specific geologic period yet -- Carboniferous? Cambrian? Ordovician??). And I know that this will be a standalone novel with series potential...very widespread series potential that could branch out into like four more POVs...because I am me.

But Yeah, Been a While...

I obviously haven't updated the blog in several months. Honestly, I haven't been doing too great. This winter hit hard, society at large has given up on doing anything about Covid which only drives me deeper into my isolation because I have so little health to risk, bad news and stressful situations wind up in my lap...

I was planning on my next blog post being about the subject of self-loathing. I have written a fair bit of it, but it is lacking in structure to a painful degree, intensely meandering and morose. It's a hard subject to write about, especially when I'm so nuts deep in it. Without any public wallowing, I'll simply say that I'm not right with myself lately, and since it's not so simple as just deciding to be fine with myself, I'm a little stuck.

I've more or less abandoned the formal writing quotas that have dominated the past year. Too often I sit down to do some editing or writing and my brain won't touch it, or I'll spiral, or both. So, I've "given up," for the time being, and am just doing what I can -- reading, typing up old notes into digital documents, taking notes on the book I wrote in 2009 (it's bad), stuff like that.

It's telling that I can only give myself a break if I consider it "giving up," a last ditch effort when all other possibilities are depleted. It's almost like I attach my self-worth to my writing or something.

So the self-loathing post will probably come eventually, and other than that who knows? Maybe I will have interesting news in the future, maybe I won't.

Tedda

One of the recent events is that our dear Tedda died this past weekend. She had several mammary tumors which we didn't anticipate causing real problems for a while yet, but she suddenly started showing neurological symptoms on Saturday and we had to take her to an emergency vet to be put to sleep. It was unexpected to say the least, but a least we kept her from suffering long. That's an essential part at getting good at rat ownership -- knowing when it's time.

Tedda and her sister, Fee, have been some of the sweetest rats we've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Fee is still around, but she has her own crop of mammary tumors (that's rat genetics for you) so she probably won't be around for long. For the moment, it's strange to think of them separated after having been together since conception, but somebody had to go first.

Tedda liked to chew on things in the recycling, and she would wiggle her tail vigorously when feeling happy, when she was trying to decide if she wanted to jump off the couch, or when she was considering getting into a fight. In the last six months or so of her life, she developed a mania for nesting, and gathered every bit of paper she could find (sometimes trying to steal my plot outlines) to tear up and sleep in. She wasn't always interested in being petted, but nonetheless she would come up to us and grab our hands to give them a good grooming, chewing gently at the nails and licking all over. An affectionate creature with a broad, soft tummy.

I feel strange making announcements about rat deaths for several reasons, the simplest one being that it happens so often. They only live about two years, and since we try to keep about 3-5 rats in the mischief, the result is about two deaths a year. The first time, it was a life-altering incident, and I posted on Facebook about it and cried a lot to Julianna Barwick's Florine. Getting sympathy from people made sense.

Now, with rat number seven, I can only imagine people wondering what's new about this, and getting tired of hearing about this so often. And, in any case, sympathy feels less necessary, because I'm more used to it.

When you tell people this grim fact about rat ownership, how frequently you have to deal with death and digging graves in the backyard and how you know exactly what you want from a euthanasia (down to what chemicals should be used), people always say they couldn't handle it. But, on the other hand, you could own a cat or dog and have one big death every 10-20 years or so, which doesn't sound much better to me.

So, yes, you do get used to it. We have rituals -- the clay paw print, the Nick Cave albums, the reminiscence, bundling the rat with her favorite foods, taking pictures, the deep hole by my writing shed, repainting all the rat grave stones and adding a new one, and so on. When the anxiety for the rat's suffering relents into relief and sadness, I feel like I am practicing for when a person in my life dies.

That's the other big reason I don't talk about this much publicly: it's so personal and thoughtful, almost transcendental. I love each rat so much, even the ones that are standoffish (looking at you, Dorothea). When they die I feel the depth of my unique relationship with each one.

Every six months or so, the subject of death is opened up wide. I think about how she was here one day and tomorrow gone, how she is under the earth and I will never get to look at her or touch her again, how part of the point of fostering such a creature was giving her a good life for as long as possible, how I despise the idea of an afterlife except if I get to see them all again. And so on, into so many corners I can hardly remember it all once I've exited Rat Death Mode.

I get anxious that people will think "It's just a rat." Indeed I sometimes feel ridiculous getting so deep in my feelings over a rodent. But they live so much life in those two years they have, in those tiny bodies, and each one is so distinct that I write several thousand words about each one's life when she dies, full of stories and mannerisms and our peculiar little methods of communication.

Death is death, also. It will always be a deep subject. It bothers me now when rodent deaths are played for laughs in television. Their deaths are as big to them as they will be to us. I see the mirror of my future death in each rat. So no, it is never just a rat. Each rat is so much more than that.

It will never be easy, but it's getting less difficult.

Belated

The Obligatory NaNo Update

Alright, I'll just say it right off the bat: I "won" NaNoWriMo without any issues, wrote 1,667+ words a day, blah blah.

The biggest hitch directly involved in the NaNo process was I forgot to put my word count into the NaNo website, so I couldn't get basically any of the badges. That's one of my complaints about the website. You mean I'm supposed to remember? Before midnight? Go away.

So I made my own little sticker calendar to keep track and have something to show off, plus to do something fun with my excess of stickers.

It's not too hard for me to do something like this, at least when I'm not working a job. I can be stubbornly persistent if I set a structured and specific goal for myself that feeds into my vanity or whatever. So, stuff was going wrong all month, but I did it anyways, even though I hated it sometimes.

As seen in my last blog post, I made a huge amount of plot and arc outline-y stuff and suspected it might make the writing easier. And it did! I mostly remembered to check my index cards, charts, etc., only had to shuffle a few things around, and was generally better able to stay on task. Some specifics of certain scenes surprised me, but not so much I got steered off course.

Even so, there's a lot of work to be done. The worldbuilding details are still fuzzy, there's some hard-to-explain fundamental issues I need to chew over, I keep forgetting to be explicit about a specific characteristic one of my chracters' has, and the whole thing is too slow and long with too much floaty feelings and not enough action. The latter has a lot to do with a historical truth, which is that in places where it snows in the winter, war happens in the warm months. So that's what I'm dealing with: finding ways for there to be tension and action when the war season isn't happening, while having that tension and action not be fluff.

The one unexpected outcome was me mentally reopening the subject of: this story is likely not a suitable debut story. For so many reasons. Such as it needs to be a series, which aren't a guarantee these days. It has four to five main characters to start (depending on how you think of it), then at least eight to nine as it progresses, with other characters undergoing arcs in the background. I'm finding that difficult to orchestrate; my skills are still developing. But also, the market is, from what I can tell, geared towards single MC stories, or at least less Byzantine set-ups.

It's not the end of the world. Personally, there's plenty of reasons to save this story for later. Not least of them being that it's going to be a gargantuan effort to do it the way I want, so if I'm waiting on myself to finish this, I might be waiting a whiiiiile. And it's important to me to do it right; it's been in my head since I was a kid.

So, what now?

I'm not entirely sure. I need to turn some of my processing power to something else, I think, namely something that could be a single novel with series potential and one MC. I have a good idea for one, involving repurposing an old beloved character and a story I've already tried to tell. I'd be starting mostly from scratch, whatever idea I follow, and that's intimidating.

And Now I'm Tired!

(CW: this segment briefly discusses self-loathing)

So here's a peak behind the curtain! I wrote that first section in early December, then couldn't bear to touch it for I don't know how long. I took nine days off writing at the beginning of December and it still wasn't enough. I dragged myself back to writing unwillingly and haven't gotten much done, except in drafting a particularly dark piece of short fiction.

Is this the dreaded burnout? I've been dancing on the edge of burnout for months now, wondering how long I could keep my balance, and maybe NaNoWriMo tipped the scales.

Or maybe it's the continual horrible news about the pandemic, and the fact that my husband has to go into the office anyways. Or the way winter treats me. I'm always cold, even though this winter had been warm. I'm lethargic and just want to lie in the sunbeam that comes through the living room window. At night, no matter how many lights are on, I feel like I'm squinting through the darkness of a cave.

Or maybe it's some short fiction submission stuff that's been happening that's making me spiral. And don't forget the new pains my body has discovered. For a few days, I've been having little flashes of nerve pain in my diaphragm and then randomly throughout my body. Not high on the pain scale, but so exhausting. Costochondritis acting up. Was in a flare for like a week earlier this month, now my period's coming so another one is starting. Would like to take a break from having a body.

I don't treat myself well enough, probably. At the beginning of the year, I set myself the task of writing six days a week. It didn't matter what I wrote, so long as I did. Then this developed into a 1,000 word quota six days a week, but with no stipulations on content. Then it occurred to me the importance of working as hard as I can towards my "career." That's around when the burnout dance started, I think.

It's probably just because I hate myself, but the discourse around taking breaks and rest is a crucial part of creativity irritates me. I justify this to myself by thinking that my health is a limited resource, namely I can only expect it to get worse with age, and any moment it could get a whole hell of a lot worse, perhaps ruining my limited capabilities.

Already I write through a haze, trying to remember what words are, how plot structures work, what idea I had recently and where I wrote it down. There's a part of it that's hard to describe...like I'm blinded by the sun, always, or like everything is soup, always, and I can't remember how words and ideas used to fit together. The result is that writing rarely turns out the way it was in my head, even though I used to be able to get it to do that.

I have so much work ahead of me, and not infinite time. The constant pain signals will eat at my capabilities. I will only get more tired. What is so hard now might be impossible later.

But also, I hate myself. So who knows how sound any of my reasoning is? As my husband pointed out, if I push myself too hard, then that isn't good for my long term health either.

I struggle to accept that I might be a "slow" writer. As if adhering to those goals I set for myself, as if "winning" NaNoWriMo is "slow." (Not that there's a problem with being a slow writer, but there's more of a problem when it's a race against your own probable deterioration). I'm just not fast enough to satisfy myself.

I push myself to identify those moments when I'm not doing anything and turn them into doing something. Lately, I get stuck in executive dysfunction. I do not want to get up and write, I want to remain here feeling terror, partially because my feet are currently warm, which I would lose if I got up. This always happens in the winter.

But also, if I don't write, I don't have a right to exist!

This may seem dark to some, but this is me being frank. I am planning a blog post on the subject of self-hatred, with my own take on the recent discourse on the subject, but the relevant part for this moment is that I'm tired of pretending I don't hate myself. Other than pain, it's the single most ruling condition of my life, and no one will know me if they don't understand that.

So, bleh, I'm not sure what I will do. Try to get through the winter, do what I can in the meantime, celebrate the solstice and the fact that soon, the days will start getting longer. Oh, and continue going to therapy. So stop worrying.

I Guess I'll Talk About Books Now

So, I finished the His Dark Materials trilogy and yay, it was fun. I honestly liked The Amber Spyglass less than I remembered, though not for the reasons other people seem to dislike it. I find the whole anti-religion thing to be fairly on the nose, I don't find it as bitter and ridiculous as I used to. I LOVE the mulefa and no one can convince me otherwise. I think they're crucial to the themes, actually, as a foil to the Church: a people who accept Dust and the beauty of growing into adulthood. The mulefa and the world they inhabit are also so creative, and I so badly want to hug a mulefa.

My issue was more with the logic and suspension of disbelief stuff. Like since The Subtle Knife I was getting irked at how Lord Asriel found his way into another world for the first time at the end of The Golden Compass and then so quickly set up a massive fortress and started fraternizing with rebel angels and built a multi-world army? Then the Church's original goal of trying to keep children from experiencing "original sin" through metaphorical castration so quickly adapted to the idea of multiple worlds and they navigated that with aplomb? It's like Pullman had a realization of what the series was ACTUALLY going to be about between The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife and just plunged forth without considering how some of this reads like retconning.

But also, it's a beloved story, and I don't care that much about all this at the end of the day.

I read Serpentine in one night, and that was cute, and started La Belle Sauvage last night. I'm hoping Pullman can actually make me interested in this prequel-esque story about Malcolm and baby Lyra. I'm honestly way more interested in adult Lyra and her relationship with Pantalaimon in the sequel (esp. as I have heard that it has to do with self-hatred or something? I was wondering how that worked with dæmons!)

I'm still reading Medieval Military Technology. Learning about late medieval castles right now. I'm not sure where the other two packets of the African Civilizations print out went so I'm kind of stuck there, because surely the moment I print out more is the moment the lost packets reappear. I'm theoretically reading The Silmarillion but it's so boring (sorry).

Last but not least, I read the anthology I was featured in, This Is Not a Horror Story AKA Ceci n'est pas une histoire d'horreur. I didn't want to leave a review on Goodreads because that seems...against etiquette? Because I'm in it? But I can genuinely heap praise on this anthology, and not because I'm in it (because I hate myself, remember?).

One of my dirty secrets is that I'm extremely picky when it comes to short fiction. Somehow, though, so many of the stories in the anthology hit the spot for me. The stories that are particularly memorable for me are "Back Home for a Bit," "The Puppy Farm," "Replete After Death," "Mara and the Volkhv," "Studies After the Human Figure," "Katu Latu Kulu," and "Fade to Black." That's a lot of the stories in the book. It's a good anthology. You should buy it, and not because I'm in it.

Alright, I'm going to go eat cheese or whatever and run laps with my anxiety for a while and stare at my pet rats. If I can muster it, my next post will be about self-loathing and why I'm tired of pretending it isn't there. Bye!

Before the Plunge

 It's the night before NaNoWriMo, and I figure now is a good time for a little update on what's going on in my writing and reading world.

My Debut Short Story is Out!!

Yes indeed, my story, "To Crave an Empty Chest," is available in Night Terror Novels anthology, Ceci n'est pas une histoire d'horreur. Now I can say in my cover letters not that I have a short story upcoming, but that it appears in this anthology! Plus, people are gonna lay eyes on it, which is ??????!?!??!??!?!? Plus, a lot of the authors and stories in it look really good (I haven't started a proper read yet), and I feel so flattered to be included alongside them.

I guess I hadn't realized how weird it is to have a this psychedelic horror story set not on Earth, with an elemental magic system and flying motorcycles etc. I just wrote what was in my head? So I'm grateful Night Terror Novels took a chance on me. Now I have a Goodreads Author page! Holy crap!

Here's the list of various links:

Ceci n'est pas une histoire d'horreur Launch Page

Foreward and Trigger Warnings

Amazon Listing

Goodreads Page

Other Exploits in Short Fiction

I've been persistently submitting short fiction to places since "To Crave an Empty Chest" got accepted. At the moment I have three flash fiction pieces out for submission (one is horror, two are ????), and a fantasy short story out for submission.

The process has been nerve-wracking, as there's been some places that have been slower than expected in getting back to me. Not that it's a problem of course--they should be able to take their time. It's just hard to know what to think, or more accurately, to not think anything of it. I had a week or so there where my heart was racing constantly and painfully for most of the day, every day. I have seasonal anxiety, which doesn't help. I've calmed down a little, but sometimes the jags of anxiety still hit me. What with the seasonal anxiety, which often fills me with an inchoate, animal fear after sunset, I've been having some rough spots.

It had been my goal to brush up another short fiction piece before NaNoWriMo started, but I didn't get around to it. I instead did some heavy edits on the one I already had (with the help of my husband and a Twitter friend!) and sent it to somewhere that will probably keep it for about a month, meaning I don't have to worry about it for a while.

NaNoWriMo

Last year, I didn't prepare specifically for NaNoWriMo. That didn't stop me from producing my 50k words, and more, but I did forget my plot points a lot (because I forgot my plot outline existed, then stopped caring about it), and I had no clear direction for a good half of the characters.

Without any real conscious thought, I've opted to take a different approach this time, namely I wound up doing 3+ months of prep without really planning for it. I decided as early as midsummer that I would just use NaNoWriMo to see what happens if I try a dry run of book 2, since I obviously have a lot to still work at.

This started with me flipping through the resulting manuscript from last years effort and noting down what I need to improve, think about, and remember to do next time I try to write it. I started making notes on my printed out plot outline, and got like 3/4ths of the way through before I was like "I don't fucking know what I'm getting at with any of these characters? I should write in my notebook about it."

Then, like 2 1/2 months and many colorful gel pen pages later, I had 11 character arcs laid out. Then I made a big chart to help me keep everyone's arcs and lessons straight. By big, I mean it's longer than my torso.

Then I took the plot outline I had before I did all this work, and turned it into some elaborate index cards that help indicate what each plot point means for each character's arc. And the picture below is the sum total of what I've been working so hard at for three months.

I probably seem wacky for all this--it seems excessive even for a plotter, maybe? I used to be more of a pantser when I was younger, but the brain drain of fibromyalgia has changed me, I think. I'm wondering if this is going to be one of those paper-and-colorful-pen-based work-arounds for my pain-addled brain.

Well, come December, I'll post about how this experiment went!

Books I've Been Reading

I'm still working my way through the His Dark Materials trilogy. It's mostly been my bedtime reading, since it's a bit easier than all the heavy stuff I've taken on. I'm on The Amber Spyglass, which has been mixed so far. Some parts aren't as good as I remember, but then the mulefa sections are even better than I remember. I always loved them, contrary to popular opinion on that arc, but the part where gets Mary introduced to the mulefa just made me like...I so badly want to hug some mulefa. We'll see how it all goes as I read further. Afterwards, I plan on starting on the Belle Epoque books, which I've never read!

I'm still working on the African Kingdoms book. It's dry reading, a lot of broad strokes crammed into small spaces. Even so, I've found it valuable reading. I enjoy going to Google Earth whenever I start a new entry and looking around the area I'm reading about. Other than that, though, I've seen so many interesting and diverse types of governments presented. It reminds me that feudalism isn't the only option, but also that feudalism isn't necessarily tied only to whiteness. I've been getting a lot more out of it, but I'll wait to say more until after I've finished it (probably forever from now).

I finished The Lord of the Rings, and am trying to get myself into The Silmarillion. Sometimes it's surprisingly enthralling, sometimes it's tiresome. There's something about it that feels like it's even more revealing of who Tolkien was, like what he idealized and vilified. I'm not sure. We'll see as I progress through it.

The big reason I've been slow in reading this two books is I've been entranced with Medieval Military Technology. A friend lent it to me, along with another book, a big one with pictures titled Medieval Warfare, before going to Edinburgh for a year. Right before he left, we had a conversation about our favorite historical battles, and were like "why didn't we realize we both liked this??" So he kindly left me with this books and the instruction to read them over the next year.

Non-fiction goes down so easy when it's about something you're obsessed with. Last night I read about trebuchets while having my nighttime tea and got so excited about how cool they are. Like the Crusaders capturing Lisbon with the help of two traction trebuchets, which, with continuous operation, launched about 5,000 stones in 10 hours. And the discovery of probable counterweight trebuchet balls weighing 230 kilograms. Holy heck! I could read about trebuchets all day.

Well, that's about it for now. I'm not going to edit this because I was supposed to have the time off from writing today, and I shan't have the time tomorrow. So don't judge me too hard! Though, tbf, I imagine my NaNo draft will be a similar sort of mess!