Peculiar Monster

Viciously Alive

It has been seven years since I got sick. I’ve talked about this a lot, on here and on BlueSky and in person, so I don’t want to belabor my various ailments because I’m starting to find it really tedious and this was written on the last day of Readercon (which seems fitting, as I had my first serious symptoms at Readercon) so I’ve been talking about it a lot.

I will say that I am doing so much better. Taking the time for a low-key job gave me the space to grieve my prior job and to heal physically. As I’ve recently posted, it didn’t work out, but that’s okay—not everything is forever.

I’m stronger and am able to take on full time project/budget management work, which is where my heart truly lies work-wise.

I find that I do have to be more careful about time management—I live and die by timers to keep me focused and wake me up in the morning; I’ve the really irritating old school BEEP BEEP BEEP clock radio alarm for waking up and it works where other apps haven’t. And it costs me nothing, it’s built into the clock app on my Boox Palma (more about that in a future post!).

I’ve only been hospitalized once in the last year, for a long weekend while I was housesitting. I woke up with a mystery fever that spiked at 103° and since I have a history of sepsis, that’s something that requires a trip to the ER.

And since I was housesitting, I ended up at a different hospital and holy shit it was night and day compared to my regular hospital. But they weren’t able to figure out what was causing the fever and all that happened was that I got yelled at by an endocrinologist multiple times for mixing insulin with a GLP-1 inhibitor. Even though my endo and GI docs are okay with it.

Things have been steadily improving. And since I am much less focused on day-to day survival, I’ve been able to look at the other ways that my illness and subsequent disability have affected me.

I have so much more clarity about what is important in my life. People are important. My chosen family is important. Making things with my hands is important. Finding a way through the mental maze I made for myself—to protect myself—around writing has been especially important. I’m still finding my way out of the maze, but I think I can see the end of it.

I’ve spent too much time over the last five years thinking about what people will say. The dogpiling and blockading that happened on Twitter and other places in 2020 and 2021 left a mark.

However, I don’t want to seek out arguments in my chosen community. I want to celebrate that which is worth celebrating and that which brings me joy. And right now, that’s been a lot of books. And, of course, the Murderbot television show. And a game called Moonstone Island, which is teaching me the basics of how card based games can work and how to build a deck and it is so low-stakes that it's wonderful (it’s available on Steam for all platforms).

I also want to write more personally than I have over the last fifteen years; my public and private writing from 1999 through 2010 was much more personal, with the exception being the reviews I wrote for RT Book Reviews. This desire requires me to get out of my head so much, for instance—

These are all things that run through my mind and which I have to vanquish in order to be a public writer. I shouldn’t give a fuck, but I do. I always have.

I was a sensitive and often clueless child and I was kept in a little box by my mother. And every year I got older, the box became smaller and not just because I was growing. But because she wanted me to limit myself; I know she did this unconsciously in reaction to how she’d been brought up, but it’s hard to forgive or forget.

And I want to write about those experiences, the things that made me who I am. And it’s terrifying to contemplate, but it’s getting to the point where there’s more need than want in the writing. I have journals, but that’s too much inside my head a lot of the time. And that’s the last thing I need.

I want to have as good a time as I can over however many years I have left (which will not be enough). I want to believe in myself. I want to be alive, viciously.