Bloodlust and Mating Rituals
The Paranormal Academy For Troubled Boys
$2.99
A spark of love might burn them all.
Dorian knows the score well. He’s been at the Academy for over two years now, his existence balancing between explosive, deadly power and numb depression. Strong emotions fuel magic, and Dorian is forced to isolate, striving to be as aloof and unfeeling as possible. Things he used to find important—hot guys, wealth, magical talent—none of it matters since the accident. No, Dorian has one goal in life: to keep his magic under control.
He thought he was safe. He thought he had found a quiet spot in the world to keep his magic in check. But when Wylie Doe comes crashing into the Academy, there is no ignoring the sexy dragon shifter or his possessive hisses. Wylie is everything Dorian’s been yearning for, and his magic can’t help but respond.
If only magic didn’t always lead to death.
84,900+ wrds, Published Feb 14, 2020.
Heat level: X
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT PATB Serial #2
By Kathryn M on February 14, 2020
This series is amazing and addictive. I was drawn into this fantastic universe and taken on a wild ride of the paranormal. There are steamy moments, funny moments, scenes with action and a feeling of tension throughout. The characters are interesting and really nake you need their stories. I can not wait to devour more.
By Eric Thornton on February 16, 2020
Another exciting powerful read. I am beyond hooked. I cannot wait for the next book. Bring on more excitement!!!
By Patricia Nelson on February 16, 2020
This was one hell of a fantastic, amazing, intense, grab-you-by-the-feels, intense, fast paced, fascinating, action packed, tension filled, exciting, emotionally charged, definitely different, dark, thrilling, more twists and turns than a roller coaster, totally awesome, wild, and crazy walk on the wild side. I can’t wait to see what happens next!
Shhhnk. Shhhnk. Daggers whizzed past Theodore in the dark. Crack!
Theodore hissed as he dodged blade after blade, the last dagger biting deep into the surface of a solar panel right next to his hip. His long crimson hair looked like a waterfall of blood as it floated down his back when he straightened from his roll. Theodore held himself still, his ears open for any telltale noise. His leather despoiler coat twisted in the wind rushing across the rooftop of the Redhem police station where he was standing. At the rustle of wings behind him, Theodore slashed, the blade of his sword slicing through the body of a raven before it could sweep close. Snarling in frustration when he saw it wasn’t his target, his sword lashed out into the dark around him, just catching a shining golden lock of hair before the sorceress escaped.
While Theodore’s diamond blade sword appeared clear in the unnatural blackness of the spell the rooftop was enchanted in, the sorceress he was battling was actually invisible. Well, the pieces of her that were attached. Theodore sneered down at the fine strands of hair the skinner had left behind as he listened for her approach. The sorceress was wearing the coat of a chameleon shifter. Not the coat the shifter might have worn when it was alive—no, that would have been too sane. The sorceress was wearing the skin of a dead chameleon shifter, the poor human hunted down and killed for its scaled flesh. They had turned its skin into a coat, and used the shifter’s power to hide the treacherous skinners who killed paranormals for sport and profit.
Fssssh! Something hissed through the darkness.
“Fuck!” Theodore gasped and jerked his head to the side, just missing a dagger to his throat. He whirled, his coat whipping up around his legs. He heard a burst of wicked laughter before she was gone, swallowed up by the darkness. A bird screamed under Theodore’s blade, its scattered feathers the only proof that the sorceress had been there at all.
She was fast—unnaturally fast. Whatever spell the sorceress was using, Theodore couldn’t trace it while she was wearing the chameleon coat. He had only his ears, nose, and the sensation of the air shifting every time the sorceress appeared close.
He had hoped his night vision would be an advantage against the skinner, but it had only leveled the playing field, making them both invisible to the other instead of Theodore blind to the sorceress. But while the skinner had the advantage of years of hunting shifters, Theodore was a born hunter. The beast inside him only grew larger, darkness flickering through his vision as his dragon, Sever, laughed at the game of chase he would eventually win.
‘She fears death… It will be her undoing…’
Theodore ducked down as a blade flew out of the darkness, refusing to comment. He shot his hand up, his sword slicing through a raven, the sound of its feathers adjusting on the breeze alerting him to its presence. For each familiar he destroyed, it felt like two more were waiting to replace it, hiding their sorceress mistress.
He first thought it was an illusion, the way the sorceress’s familiars were taking on her form, then reverting to birds the moment his sword slashed true. Now, Theodore wondered. With strike after strike, she had pushed him back, found his flesh or damn near close with blades, talons, and magic, and then popped away before he could retaliate. It wasn’t an illusion; the sorceress was every bird until she wasn’t.
“What the—!” The ground beneath Theodore’s feet shifted and trembled. He snarled and quickly leaped, landing on a platform next to an array of solar panels. The roof where he had just been standing cracked, deep fissures appearing in the concrete moments before it crumbled, dissolving into a cloud of dust. Theodore strained his ears, but there were no signs of injury from below. He could only hope the personnel left in the police station had evacuated and hadn’t already been slaughtered by the skinners, or whoever else might be down there hunting for a dragon shifter.
‘Above…!’
Theodore gritted his teeth at his beast’s warning, feeling the air pressure change. What was first a medium sized raven swooping above him disappeared from view as it morphed into an invisible, full-sized woman. He slashed his free hand up, hissing in pain as his injured shoulder protested the move. It was worth it, Theodore’s talons finding flesh moments before black feathers sprayed out of his hand.
“Do you bleed bird’s blood too, sorceress!” Theodore roared and slashed behind him, anticipating the attack before the telltale shifts of air could even give it away. There was a gasp, but the crimson that splattered onto the solar panel next to him and the dead body of the raven that fell to the rooftop were not the sorceress he was chasing.
‘We will kill them all… Then there will be no confusion…’ the dragon rumbled in Theodore’s head with a determined grunt.
“Fine enough, beast, if the fucking fluttery things weren’t multiplying,” Theodore gritted out. The darkness was thick with the ravens, their eyes and talons glinting with a cold intelligence connected to the predatory mind controlling them. When he swung his sword again, two birds fell at once, their angry screams cut off as they dived toward his face. A blade hissed through the air, and Theodore leaped sideways, rolling onto the rooftop between the obstacle course of solar panels and uneven platforms.
The game would have been less annoying if his energy wasn’t so low. More so if he didn’t have a teenage shifter to keep alive. Theodore reached for a fresh vial, popping the top and downing the contents. A dark, cold numbness replaced the hot throb in his shoulder, and he sighed in relief.
His eyes searched the ground, but his blood wasn’t spilling freely just yet. He could feel the wound was deep, muscle and tissue damaged from the hatchet to his shoulder, but as long as the gloo kept the blood in his body, he had more important things to worry about. Like the way the sorceress had focused on his damaged side, hitting blow after blow around his wounded shoulder in the hopes of wearing him down. And frustrating as it was, it was working.
‘We need blood… sex… I hunger…’
“We need energy, you horny imbecile, not your insatiable hungers.” Ignoring his dragon’s disgruntled huff, Theodore slunk low to the rooftop, following along the length of the solar panels, hoping to keep at a level where the ravens would not be able to easily reach and surprise him. Theodore’s sharp, violet eyes searched through the unnatural darkness he had summoned. His beast could see in the dark, something he was certain the skinners could not even with all their stolen shifter magic.
There were two in total, at least, two of the paranormal butchers who were willing to show themselves up on the roof. Likely because of the third Theodore had already killed. From the little he had heard the two skinners talk, the dead one was their brother and he was now on their kill list. Of course, if they knew what he really was, they wouldn’t just want to kill him. They’d butcher him like that chameleon shifter and wear his scales as a coat.
‘The pattern is wrong…’ Theodore’s inner dragon rumbled when a half dozen ravens swooped in and golden hair flashed under Theodore’s blade, sliced free of the woman who slipped away just as quickly. Ravens collapsed dead on the rooftop, their blood staining the concrete while Theodore seethed, his senses straining.
“What pattern?” Theodore demanded, snarling down at the broken bodies of the birds. No matter how hard he stared at their twisted limbs and scattered feathers, he couldn’t find what the beast was talking about.
‘Not the birds, but the sorceress… She’s not attacking to kill…’
Theodore’s eyes widened minutely, and he nodded once as it clicked. The sorceress wasn’t trying to kill him, not seriously, anyways. Theodore had assumed it was fear. The sorceress had correctly noticed that physical touch could give him power over her, his allure capable of breaking through her protective wards on contact. She had kept her distance, using blades and birds to try to overwhelm him. Now Theodore could see what his dragon did in her movements. She was attacking to distract, not to kill. Whatever the sorceress’s game was, right now she was buying time.
It was as if the moment he realized it, the sorceress readily gave it away. The magical signature of the male skinner trapped in Theodore’s snare suddenly snuffed out, erased from reality in an instant.
‘Chameleon…’ the beast warned, a low growl bubbling through its chest.
“Of course, the coat!” Theodore bared his teeth, the white planes now the sharpest of daggers. The sorceress was protecting the one in the snare. Theodore knew because the moment she took off her coat to hide her kin away, her own magical signature revealed, a glowing, easy target to his beast senses after she had thrown so much of her magic around.
“The sentimental fool,” Theodore muttered, readying his sword in the direction he sensed the sorceress. He would not hesitate, would not fail. He could not allow a legacy of skinners to hunt shifters down like they were nothing more than animals—!
His dragon snarled the same moment the wind shifted. Theodore whirled when the magical signature he was focused on blipped from the roof and appeared blocks away, somewhere among the suburban streets of Redhem. “Impossible! No one can build a portal that quickly!” There were anti-teleportation wards all over the station, including the roof. If she was flyckering, there was no signs, no shifts in the air to suggest it. The ether was completely intact as well—none of it made sense!
How the fuck was she moving so quickly?
‘It doesn’t matter… She’s after the hatchling…’ Sever rumbled darkly, his presence growing greater until he was a seething heat in Theodore’s core. ‘We must go after her before she kills him…’
Theodore scowled, partly from the grimness of the situation, partly from the term his dragon insisted on using for Wylie. “The kid’s eighteen. Hardly a fucking hatchling, even if he is ignorant as fuck.”
‘His dragon has barely emerged…’ Sever muttered back defiantly. ‘We must run if he is going to survive… Now…’
“No, I have a better idea,” Theodore drawled, and a deadly smile flickered across his lips. He sheathed his sword in a practiced move, and raised arms up at his sides, ignoring the stiffness in his shoulder. “The sorceress has given us all we need. She revealed her weakness: her heart.”
Theodore turned toward the collapsed part of the roof, knowing that on the other side of the hole was where his trinity snare had been sprung. The skinner who had stumbled into the trap might be under a chameleon coat now, but invisibility did not make him immortal.
“I don’t need to see you to kill you, skinner!” Theodore shouted as he raised his magic. The dragon’s power thrummed through him and shook the air until everything around him shuddered and began to bend down toward the ground. Metal screeched in protest as the angled solar panel array twisted and bent, glass shattering and shards flying in every direction as it crashed down. The edges of the broken roof cracked, fresh pieces of concrete slamming down into the police station below with a force far greater than gravity. There was a thudding sound, smack after smack of bricks clattering down to the concrete as they were wrenched loose from the structure that made up the rooftop door and stairwell to the lower floors of the station.
Theodore gritted his teeth, his fisted hands shaking from the strain of his spell. His energy was low, stolen by the blade that had sliced deep into his shoulder, but the threat was clear. His intended result was reached, and the skinner hidden by the chameleon coat cried out as he was smashed down to the rooftop.
“Is it worth it, legacy? Is this how you Briargraves operate?” Theodore taunted, his voice full of poison and accusation. “Do you leave your family behind to die while you go off to murder children?” He took sure steps around the hole in the roof, his senses focused on the whimpering voice coming from the other side of the stairwell. “What will it be, Briargrave: a life for a life? Does that seem a fair price to you? Did you lose kin when you slaughtered the chameleon whose flesh you’re hiding in now?”
Theodore’s steps were sure, deliberate, the polish of his blood red shoes still gleaming for all the fighting he had done. He concentrated his magic on his shadowy goal and was rewarded with a fresh scream of pain. “You’re chasing a dragon, after all. The price should be higher. Maybe all three of you should die just for the privilege of stealing one dragon’s life…”
“You’re… you’re insane.”
Theodore sneered and slashed his hand down. The stairwell shuddered where bricks threatened to topple from the force of his magic striking down only feet away. The skinner screamed, the panicked noise breaking off in a low whine.
‘We’re running out of time…’
Theodore pursed his lips. He was counting the seconds in his head, adding up each moment the sorceress had free rein to attack Wylie. Michael was there and would do his best, but Theodore had seen the skinner’s tricks, her speed, her deadly accuracy even when she couldn’t see her target. She would not be easily defeated.
‘He’s not breaking…’
“He will,” Theodore spat, glaring into the empty darkness where the invisible skinner was gasping heavily as he tried to breathe around the weight crushing down his lungs. The sorceress had protected this one because he was weak, one who needed protecting. Theodore knew his real leverage was here; he just had to find a way to use it.
Hands and shoes scraped desperately at the rooftop, the skinner trying to break free of the spell from only a few feet from where Theodore was standing. Theodore drew his sword, the distinct sound of the blade pulled from its sheath slicing the quiet of the dark rooftop. Even the skinner’s gasps grew hushed as he tried to hide his every noise from Theodore’s ears.
“Is your life worth the trophy of a dragon, skinner?” Theodore demanded. Fighting off a wave of dizziness, Theodore crested his power up again and used it to crash his magic down on the part of the roof the skinner was trapped. The concrete creaked from the great pressure, and Theodore’s eyes narrowed when he heard the telltale sound of a rib snapping.
“Wait!” The skinner shouted hoarsely. “Fuck, wait!”
“No.” Theodore’s eyes gleamed with cold rage, and he pointed his sword toward the cracking of bones, moving it as he sought flesh. “You have nothing I want. I will kill you as you are. No one will be able to find your body. No one will bury you. No one will morn you. It will be a fitting death, skinner, you bleeding out in the skin of the shifter your family murdered.”
“Evelyn… Ev, he’s killing me…” a voice whispered, nearly suffocated under the weight of Theodore’s magic. “Ev…”
“She doesn’t care about you, skinner,” Theodore snarled and raised his blade. “The only thing you monsters care about are yourselves.” Pinpointing on the frightened exhale, Theodore swung his sword down.
“Ev—Evelyn!” the skinner screamed out, his voice reverberating with magic.
Checking In
Just wanted to let you all know I’m still alive and up to creative mischief. The new meds are working, and I’m pretty much back to my old self (whoever that is @_@).
We got a surprise leak in our garbage disposal, water in the basement, and my reactions were… fine. Allergy fine, not mast cells over reacting and making my entire existence miserable. Although I got a big whiff of smoke yesterday evening, and that caused the other reaction, and it was pretty shit for a bit.
It’s such a contrast — one I had no idea was even possible. Because I guess for most people allergies are just, you know, a runny nose and feeling kind of sleepy, a little fuzzy. Not the insanity I’ve gone through all these years. There was a difference, but my ignorance shouldn’t have made those who treat allergies so ignorant, yeah? Like, I was really good at communicating my symptoms, but the medical world just didn’t understand what those symptoms fit into then.
Text based games
Anywho, I’m back to coding up the database, currently looking at the interactive novels and text based game side of things. Because my eyes are so much better, I think I could handle at least fighting with an AI art program for a bit to get art backgrounds for the text based games I want to make. I don’t think they’re sophisticated enough for character art — consistent character art that will look like the same character. But backgrounds? Sure. They’re easy enough to edit if things don’t look quite right.
The main thing is I’m looking for writing that doesn’t ask me to edit extensively the way my current writing does. A script is visually easier for me to handle because of how it’s naturally broken up, as well as far less focused on certain elements of a story, such as building an atmosphere. The imagery can take some of the burden — the whole “a picture says a 1000 words” thing. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy building atmosphere and such, so much as, editing is shit on my eyes still. Editing this is shit on my eyes. Reading glasses might change that, but it’s not happening soon, and that’s okay. I’m looking at options instead of passively waiting.
Coming to terms with my ever changing limits has really pushed me to find smarter solutions to things. Affording reading glasses with prism lenses is a long way off after years of being ill, so I need to get back into this writing thing, accepting these limits and looking for ways to navigate as I am, instead of how I used to be. There’s also just so much life I’m trying to get back to. A decade of illness interrupting — actually, far longer. It’s been since a teen living in my adoptive family’s moldy basement, wondering why it felt like my brain was on fire.
There is very little “stable” that I’ve experienced that I know to get back to. When I look back, it’s PTSD from a traumatic home life, followed by years of foster families, and then recovering when adopted… then becoming ill from this condition and watching my adoptive parents both die, my mom right after I graduated high school, and my dad a handful of years later, most of those years me taking care of him while he had dementia. All those years after that were panic, homeless, working to survive without a degree because I couldn’t take care of a parent and finish college, and there was no safety net once they were gone. Not when this condition was 100% active with no one knowing what it was or how to deal with it (but very good at gaslighting a young person who was doing everything to try and get healthy and stable.)
A new pace to life
My relationship with time has to change. It already has with space — I’m doing well getting the years of exhaustion out of my house, cleaning up the piles that have been waiting to be addressed.
I actually took down the backroom cleanroom this week. I plan on painting it next month — getting a big 5 gallons of paint and tackling the hallway and 2 walls of the kitchen as well. I had done some nice decorating of half the kitchen last year after I had built my art storage cupboards, but the old dingy blue paint on the other walls has been here through a lot of renters. It’s the same paint in some of the closets, revealing it was some version of original before other people came in and painted.
That back room will likely never be my bedroom again, not with the way the air flows in this house, but it can at least be a great space for art storage and painting large canvases. I want to make some tables for the kitchen the way I did for my bedroom, just a simple desk/counter thing that forms an L on one of the corners of the room. It’s such a small space, but the design would give more surface area as well as more walking space compared to the big table we have in there now that takes over everything (even though it’s too small to actually eat in the kitchen.)
Sawdust is absolutely one of the triggers that sets of this condition, the same way smoke is, and ammonia, heat — the summer weather turns me rosy cheeked and straining to breathe. Oh, and I discovered the scent of cedar is a trigger. Fuck well-made furniture for storing clothes, because it is all cedar and kills me. It means getting these supposedly simple projects done isn’t actually that simple. Even if cut to size, I need to sand and seal anything wood that comes into the house, and that means sawdust. And if the sealer is shit, or worn down from cleaning, I have to go through the process again cuz the raw wood does come through and the scent triggers the condition (learned this firsthand with my desk).
But… my reactions are better. They stop now, instead of going on for weeks to months of misery. The meds work, and as long as I don’t become allergic to the meds (something unfortunately very common with MCAS) it should be good. I can’t wait for things to maybe go bad again. This is the time I have now, and there is so much I want to do.
Making time for arting
It’s kinda weird to talk about art on this site. It used to be my thing before the illness knocked me down and I started writing to cope. I went to school for art and music. College was to help me recover from my adoptive mother passing and trying to figure out what I was going to do after spending so much time thinking of her health and aligning everything I did around it. But… there was a lot of mold in the college classrooms. The calculus room and history, in particular, I remember always getting sick…
But yeah, art held a lot of healing for me, especially therapeutically in regards to PTSD. The same with writing — there are a few ways to hack into the subconscious of the mind without needing to be dreaming, and writing and making art can put you into that trance like state. Something happens in the nervous system while there, and then when you come out of it, not only do you get those benefits, but you have something to show for your efforts that can be shared. A bit of the hero’s journey as you delve into the dark, deep woods of the psyche.
I’ve been playing with UV resin and mixing my own watercolor paints. I always wanted to make my own watercolors, but just never did… Chronic illness makes everything so much harder than it needs to be. It makes you need to do things immediately, or know it will likely never happen, which makes the pace of life even more difficult. Rushing, bursting the little energy you can all at once before the inevitable breaking and crash. It’s a destructive pattern, but it’s required when it’s all you can do. So I’m enjoying relearning what it means to rest instead of being broken, to pace and remember what time actually is, how to experience it, how to experience being in a body not suffering all the damn time.
They’re mostly pearlescent colors. Metallics, and some that have little bits of glitter. It’s kind of a big deal for me, not only because I’m finally making the watercolors (and doing it in a far cheaper way than buying them), but I’m making shiny, sparkly things that just a month ago would have been impossible on my eyes.
I saved a lot of things out of stubbornness. I didn’t think I was going to actually get to this place of getting better, but I refused to give up… And, if I’m being brutally honest, it takes a lot of energy to throw away your dreams when you’re already tired all the time. Most of the art stuff I have stored in the back room is expired, especially paint mediums and such. I’m going to be throwing out a lot still, but now it feels okay because it’s to make room for new. It’s not about holding on, stagnant, but growing into the person I get to finally become after all this.
At some point, my life is just going to be about living it. I won’t be focused on the past because all I had was the past when ill in the moment. I had given up on the future completely, and was doing everything to escape the now of being in an pained, exhausted body. Now there’s room for something else when I look forward.
I don’t know what I’m going to want to write as I grow into who I’m becoming. There are some stories that I need to finish telling. I just don’t know if I want to live in such unhappy moments just to create contrast to the happy ones in some of these stories. Because my writing is so connected to exploring trauma, there’s a bit of a war happening inside me about what’s allowed to change, what needs to be honored, etc. So I’m glad for this pause, for this chance to really look at what I want out of writing now that it’s less about surviving the misery of the past or of chronic illness, and more about creating something new to think about.
It’s time to have fun again with writing. Editing isn’t fun — although developmental draft editing is probably the most fun. You ever stumble across a story someone else has made, or a show, etc, and just want to tweak it into something so much better? That’s developmental draft editing, but it’s with your own work. Where you make a rough draft and poke and prod and tear it to pieces and move things around until you’ve developed the potential instead of what was there.
It’s a great creative process my brain adores. And I think that’s why I like the idea of text based games with multiple paths; you get to lean into that process and reward yourself and the reader/player with all these different, interesting stories born from one set inspiration.
I think that’s probably enough of my rambling for now. How funny to think I didn’t have anything to say, yet here are all the words claiming otherwise.
Gaining Fresh Perspective
I was planning on checking in some days back. Had written the whole thing out, only to end up with another anaphylactic reaction and back to the ER. By the time I was out and looking at the submit button, the moment had passed.
So much keeps changing. The hardest thing to find is perspective right now, because of how this condition works. Anaphylactic reaction is your body basically killing itself to fight off whatever set off the reaction. It means that during those moments, the chemical cascade rushing through is defining everything.
Survival to the point of self destruction. It’s everything I know about living with PTSD since small, so maybe this was the illness that my brain is most willing to rationalize, possibly even set off because of such a difficult psyche. MCAS can be triggered through trauma, through other chronic illnesses too. There’s plenty to choose from.
Things keep changing so rapidly as I start to treat this condition in a way that’s actually working. The changes are so extreme on my body. I’ve regained circulation in my arms. My fingertips, which have been giving off electric shocks since the ER, now suddenly calmed. I regained circulation in my skin. The scratches and patches of scaly skin suddenly have color to them, like washes of sepia.
My executive functioning has changed completely — I can task switch with ease all of a sudden. I’m painting detailed work because my eyes aren’t bothering me anymore. My eyes aren’t bothering me anymore. The underlying condition is there, but it’s not being set off.
I’m not obsessing over anything — I just stop, now. It’s the most bizarre thing in the world to have found the kill switch that just wasn’t there for years.
And then I’ll eat the wrong thing, or smell the wrong scent, and it all unravels…
It’s life or death heart racing, throat swelling, mouth and stomach burning, chemical cascade of doom as all my lymph nodes swell up and my skin turns pale and papery and loses sensation.
It feels like zero to near death, just like that, except it’s not. I have no proper perspective on this illness because I have been in that stage I just describe practically 24-7, for years now, and it’s not near death. It was only near death when my tongue started swelling a little bit more and my chest didn’t want to open enough to breathe. (I mean, if you want to get technical and add in the adrenal insufficiency, it was already death…)
And that new stage where I’m not an anxiety riddled, neurotic, inflamed mess? I don’t know if that’s “zero”. I don’t know if that’s my default just forever out of reach. Or if it’s the stage where things are a little better than my previous default, and there’s something even better waiting.
I have no clue where I am in this process of healing, only that I’ve managed to get out of that previous default. And that my body is also now capable of experiencing that rushing toward not breathing stage. Two extremes that, with enough perspective, might actually be dots on top of each other on a chart for how much they are alike. I don’t know.
Remembering Me
What I do know is, as the inflammation lowers, and the chemicals that impact my neurology start to fade with fewer reactions, I am slowly coming back to me. I’ve found that a lot of the neurosis, anxiety, and inflexibility in living is coming from the immune response. In so many ways. There are levels to this.
Just the other night I was defining myself by the state I was in, remembering that version from before the really bad decade of illness, who would be manic every night, hyper-focused on a project to deal with the excess of agony being felt at an emotional level over absolutely nothing. Every night since I was a teenager living in a moldy basement, that’s the level of pain I had to endure, and I was suddenly feeling it all over again.
And then I realized, oh, mast cells are more active at night, which is why the meds are taken at bedtime. They have a circadian rhythm, which is probably why not only do I naturally fall asleep around dawn, but that habit of sleep came from following those disturbing, long nights of chemical distress. My bedtime is dawn; I need to take the meds at nightfall.
I cut out eating at night, to give the mast cells in the gut nothing to react to. And I make sure to avoid anything emotional or too energetic at night so the response can’t be triggered through stress. Sure enough, no mania, no physical/emotional agony over nothing. The problematic chemicals didn’t flow because the mast cells weren’t being triggered.
My mental distress is a response to physical illness, and good fucking luck trying to go through a pysch doctor to ever get to the solution for an immune disorder.
Self care has to come from a place of understanding the self. You can’t care for what you don’t understand. What this illness did to me removed me from my sense of self, and from my sense of being in my body. I have been burning my hands for weeks — possibly longer — and not knowing it. I only started noticing once I had gotten my inflammation down long enough for sensation to return to my hands. I thought I was “over” sensitive because everything was hurting. First the nerve pain and now suddenly I could see the rash on my hands and fingers, and everything felt like pain.
Because I was in pain.
The water temperature of our facet gets too hot, and I didn’t notice when rinsing the dishes and washing the cat plates multiple times a day. Every day. I had others test the temperature to confirm it wasn’t just a lack of perspective on my part — because that’s the thing: my perspective is warped by this illness. For so long.
Perspective is something always being built, adjusted by every change, big and small. It’s never final, never stagnant… except when our minds become small and shortsighted.
It’s like washes of paint, forever transforming something into clarity or revealing a lack of it, obscuring and removing, transforming and unveiling. And in there, somewhere, is the truth, but it will always be limited by the eyes looking and the mind perceiving. It just is.
This is the texture study I couldn’t start because of the neurosis. I was able to start working on it this week, around the time of the second anaphylactic emergency. How it started looks nothing like how it is now, and this moment — this snapshot — will be nothing of what its final form will be.
My eyes have been fucked for years, and I just started to come to terms with that, only to learn, hey, the eyes have mast cells in them too. The chemical cascade of the immune response was adding inflammation and strain, exhausting my eyes until the underlying Exotropia flared. But if that immune response isn’t happening, I don’t have a migraine 24-7 anymore. This week I finally remembered what a boring old headache feels like.
Writing what you know
Part of not getting back to writing is my acknowledgment that I can’t write people when I don’t feel like a person. I have been so out of touch with living for so long now, and after the last time the mold hit and I built the cleanroom, my brain changed drastically. So completely. I still haven’t recovered. I gained enough perspective this last week to remember more of what it was like to be whole, and to see how I am far from it.
My emotions are waking back up the same way the sensation in my hands did. I’m regaining memories — while also becoming aware that I keep forgetting what month it is, what I did yesterday, if I’m near the beginning or end of the month, etc. I can’t plot a timeline of what I’ve been through, and it’s scary to become so aware of a deficit I can’t even be sure isn’t new.
I want to believe the memory issues are a side effect of the bigger anaphylactic response, but I can’t know for sure. Not without more time.
I am returning to my body, and it is jolting. Remembering and navigating all these sensations and emotions is difficult, disorienting. And then adding all that intensity into the flares of the illness is, well, extra. Because it was bad enough being in this body when it couldn’t fully feel what was happening. Now it can feel more, and it’s something I need to learn to cope with.
Everything has changed
I am not driven to do anything but heal right now. I am not driven to prove I am alive by doing things, and that’s really the raw truth of what has been pushing me to get back to living while bombarded by the constant chemical cocktail of the anaphylactic immune response. I measured being alive by being able to get back to what I was doing, because I felt chronic illness was taking me away from that. Illness had interrupted my life, something that was holding me from doing what I love… and that was all I could define it as.
I didn’t measure it through feeling, because I wasn’t feeling much of anything. So there was never a rush to feel better physically once the nerve pain in the face stopped. I ignored my pain and discomfort; that is the fucking default to disability. Every moment is about enduring until you just stop looking at it, stop acknowledging it. And it’s shitty, and I can’t claim it’s the “wrong” way to go through chronic illness, because fuck, it got me through and it was all I could literally do when my nervous system couldn’t do anymore.
I wasn’t rushing to feel better emotionally, because it was the same damn thing. What was the point of having emotions over something completely beyond my ability to control? Emotions were better invested elsewhere, except mine had numbed so much, there was little to invest.
I don’t know if my nervous system was responding to the chronic chemicals, or trying to adapt to make things less painful. Either way, it resulted in my brain — the sharp teeth — deciding everything, driving everything. And when the logic part of the brain is coping, it’s with patterns, curiosity for distractions, games that become neurosis. Every thought is essential, and it won’t stop shouting those thoughts… to help me not feel what I was going through.
Boundaries with expectation
There is no point in having expectations when your perspective is a sliver wide. I have adapted down to this illness for the majority of my life — certainly since my teens — and I don’t know what being healthy is going to look like. I don’t know what I’m going to be able to handle to control this illness and prevent it from flaring up, while also living a full life. I just know that I’m not there yet. This silence I’ve been feeling lately is both full of so much possibility, and absolutely nothing at all, and I will not know who I can become until I am them.
For now, I need to take care of myself. Which means letting go of what I’ve already let go of this week when I wasn’t paying attention. I have no expectations of results on anything in regards to writing, coding — being. I have things I must do in regards to researching this illness and navigating diet changes and supplements, and everything else is just… being. Feeling. Remembering what it is like to be a living, breathing, empathetic being that feels.
I’m looking forward to it. Looking forward to remembering what it is I was writing that I couldn’t get back to because I had forgotten this part of existing. And that’s the thing; you can’t separate a creator from their experiences and expect them to be able to write something whole.
I was fighting this, knowing that I wasn’t ready to write because I couldn’t connect with the part of me that feels my writing. So the logical brain came in and said “fuck it, do it anyways.” Because that’s what the rational does. It talks about measurements of gains and loses. Money. It talks about no one being able to see through the facade. How there is value in going through the motions in the hopes of jump starting what isn’t flowing. There are so many reasons to just “do the thing” that I completely agree with. But creativity is a whole person experience. It requires the psyche to be there, adding important context. And mine just wasn’t showing up.
Be it physical malady or psychological side effect, I couldn’t connect and get into the state to understand what I was trying to write at the level it needed to be understood. Hence I couldn’t figure out how to edit it, because I didn’t know what exactly I was trying to say in the first place. So the neurosis stepped in, hoping to find a logical answer to the wrong problem.
Faking it doesn’t work, but it feels like doing something…
I wanted to be okay. And to prove I was okay, I wanted to do all the things I couldn’t do because illness kept getting in the way. So I wrapped everything about my ideals of getting better into getting back to writing, even as I promised myself I would be gentle with myself. But I wasn’t, because I couldn’t feel the pain I was inflicting to begin with.
I just wanted to be better so desperately, that I was forever looking at the goal I needed to reach to prove it. Never at myself. Never at the hurt, the illness, the pain of being left behind in life. The goal was far less painful to focus on.
Perspective frames everything
I can only understand this because the chemicals that were bombarding my body are doing it less now. There’s no point in me beating myself up over doing the only thing my brain chemistry would allow. And now that it’s shifted, it’s still the same lesson. There’s no point getting upset that I can’t hold onto the motivation to get back to writing to the point of self destruction. I’m not that person any longer (until another flare, I suppose.)
Things will happen in the time they take to happen, and it’s exactly enough. I feel so much pity for that other version of me who was desperately trying to prove everything was okay by neurotically going through the motions, unable to get out of the trap. Unable to feel how nothing was okay, and that trying harder at what wasn’t working wasn’t ever going to solve it.
Everything has shifted drastically, from health to perspective these last weeks, and I don’t know where it’s going to balance out. But I remember myself more, am more in this form, in this life, and I am better for it. The suffocating feeling that has been following me for so long… to realize that was real, that the anxiety and feelings of dread — like death was going to slam down at any moment — was part of the chemical cascade that goes along with your mast cells over reacting all the time… There’s peace in understanding that. More so once I was able to pull the reactions back more through eliminating histamines. Even as I observe the smallest things setting off the biggest reactions in this body, I still have that feeling of peace from this fresh perspective.
I have lost a lot of time to this illness. I’m probably going to continue to lose time to this illness. But trying to solve that by breaking myself — doing more and getting nowhere — doesn’t feel like a viable option anymore. I can feel things again; I want to enjoy the experience of living. I want this change to sink in and continue softening these straining muscles and anxious, rigid expectations until it all dissolves into soft foam. I’m tired of the only thing I feel being pain and anxiety and the forever hovering exhaustion. It’s time to experience more.
It’s been an interesting week. I was focused on the OCD, examining all the things I do, and trying to see what was working and why — like putting my thoughts through the language section of my brain to not reread the last post I did a million times seemed to have worked. It’s not just becoming aware of it; I need to either verbalize or write it down to really cement it in my head. Good.
I was also working with art — I’m arting! <3 The goal being to find a way to compromise with my neurotic, perfectionist default to create something. And yes, I did, I made a pretty I just adore. Used lots of paint splatters, acrylic ink, and acrylic paint pens, all on watercolor paper so I could really play around without destroying anything. It was a good time making something that I had no idea what it was going to be. It’s like a micro-scape of random, and I love it.
But I made this in response to the piece I couldn’t touch. I had sketched out a very fine detailed, lovely little bit of texture I want to bring to life, but I saw the trap once I was looking at my watercolors. Everything I own is too… refined. Too neat. They were like markers instead of watercolors, and I knew that once my brain saw the path to photorealism, that’s where it was going to force me to go. And I didn’t want that level of neurosis. I don’t want to be trapped, hating what I’m making because it’s not fitting some ideal my distressful brain has defined out of nowhere. Instead of just, I dunno, discovering something new and different and freeing on the page.
I still don’t know how to compromise with it. It’s avoidance. I see the trap is there, and I don’t know how to walk a safe path with it yet. But I’m going to have to try, all while acknowledging all the dangers. And eventually, it’s going to happen. It’s going to become normal.
Allergy attack
Right before I finished this little painting, I ended up in the ER. It’s a testament to me being completely unaware of my body when I’m hyperfocused on something, and also just how I’ve normalized my allergic reactions. I’m used to my pulse racing — it’s been happening constantly for over a week now. I ate something I shouldn’t have, wasn’t sure and blamed it on environmental stuff, and the day before last, I had a big helping of the thing.
When I took liquid benadryl that night and my face immediately broke out into scaly patches, I thought I was reacting to the dye free, everything free medicine, not the thing I had eaten that day. And the next day, when my hands were shaking at my allergists, and my brain was so damn slow, and I was so tired I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the drive home, I blamed it on the lack of sleep for nights on end because my cat’s blood glucose had been dropping into dangerous lows. Blamed it on the Benadryl — maybe I’m just one of those people who get bad reactions to everything.
Blamed it on forgetting my ADHD meds that usually wake me up shortly after — and they did, they woke me up when I got home and went back to painting. But my hands were still shaking, and my pulse was hovering in the mid 120’s and, although annoying, the tremor was a cool effect with the paint pens, so whatever. I’ve had a racing pulse before. At least I’m not in screaming pain.
When everything becomes compared to the intensity of that face nerve pain, do I even know what a reasonable perspective to pain is anymore? My tongue has been burning after eating for years now, and as long as it’s not screaming face pain, it doesn’t need my attention.
It wasn’t until my partner got home and pulled me away from arting, that I caught my reflection and paused. Something was off. I checked my tongue and it was the biggest it had ever been — and granted, it’s already too big. A year ago it swelled up and never went back down, and I assumed, I dunno, the pituitary cysts had fucked with the growth hormone or something for a second, then never reverted.
Last night it wasn’t just swollen, but oddly smooth. And I started to notice that my throat felt tight. And not much later, my chest started heaving at random intervals like I had forgotten to breathe — but I was breathing. It was like I needed a deep breath because my normal breaths weren’t doing anything.
My EpiPen was expired. I got a set in 2018, and had felt ridiculous at the time. A bee had stung me and it had welted up, and the welt remained for months until finally fading. But it wasn’t life or death — I’ve had allergies for decades now; it has never been life or death. Why would it change now?
Still, I made myself go to the ER, having to convince my partner that no, it’s actually a good reason, stop asking google over me (my fuck, I wish I was joking). By the time we got there, my chest felt tight, not wanting to open to let air in. But not deathly tight, not panic inducing tight. Just a promise in there that shit was going to go sideways pretty soon.
It was interesting, partially cuz through the whole thing I was still wondering if I was actually having an allergic reaction. Wasn’t this supposed to be the worst thing ever? This was slow, confusing, and certainly no pain. More numb than pain. Maybe I was just overreacting. Nope, I was under reacting. I have normalized too much with these allergies to know what’s going to kill me.
First time getting a shot of epinephrine — that felt like something. Thought I was going to shake away from shivers, teeth rattling — I have no clue why everything got so cold from it, but then suddenly heat roared in and I could feel my arms again, which had gone numb when they were looking for veins. And then it was fine. Like it didn’t happen. My pulse was flying, but not as bad as when I didn’t have the epinephrine, and I was toasty warm, alert, and ready to leave. After being politely reprimanded for not renewing my EpiPen prescription and using it.
5 years I didn’t need the damn thing. I honestly never thought it would be needed.
A Rambling Theory
So… why now? Why big? I’ve been taking more anti-histamines, not less. I’ve been having less allergic reactions as I solved the biggest environmental problem: ammonia from the litter box. Why would I have such a big reaction now?
At first, I would have said my immune system must be feeling stronger from having a rest, and therefore reacting with more power. After today, I have another theory to go with that — and it’s just a theory. I’m not in medicine, not a scientist. Just like to ponder.
So I have adrenal insufficiency, which means when my body goes through stress, it can’t produce cortisol to protect me as part of a healthy stress response. But if cortisol gets too low, you can die, so the body has another stress chemical to help keep the heart pumping when cortisol is low: adrenaline.
Now cortisol is eaten up by stress — stress ranging from chronic low grade stuff, colds, physical injury, emotional reactions, and yes, allergic reactions. So if you’re someone like me, whose cortisol isn’t going to increase no matter how much adrenaline is rushing through the veins — I need to take meds to get cortisol — that adrenaline is going to keep flowing, making the heart pound, desperately trying to get the body to stay alive. But I’m on a schedule of cortisol, and there isn’t much room in that schedule for chronic allergic reactions, so I tend to ignore it and take my meds when I’m supposed to. Because my doctor gets pissed if I take too much. It can lower immunity (there’s some sort of irony in here…)
Anyways, the big point to all this is, another name for adrenaline is EPINEPHRINE.
Yup, every time my heart was pounding over the mere scent of ammonia, my body was being flooded with the anti-anaphylactic chemical they inject straight out of an EpiPen. It was daily, over years. I can’t remember a time not having cats where their litterbox didn’t make me ill. And now, suddenly the last couple weeks, it stops because we finally found a system that works to keep the scent contained. I was no longer being flooded with adrenaline on a daily basis.
When this latest allergic response hit, yeah, my pulse was speeding, my adrenaline was flowing, but it wasn’t enough. It was a week of eating something my body was reacting to that had cleared my system, and I just reintroduced it with nothing to contain it. My pulse got better about an hour after eating — it wasn’t doing a constant reaction even though ingested. No, my pulse only does that for environmental stuff.
The pulse only started up again with the Benadryl, a sometimes side effect of Benadryl being rapid pulse. It was like the Benadryl had woken up the reaction (or I really am allergic to it. I’m not touching it until I know for sure. I’ve cut off any possible suspect for now.) My immune system had had time to heal, and I had eaten something very stupid, and no longer had the daily flood of adrenaline to help combat it the way it did before.
At least, that’s my theory. It sounds like a good story, but who really knows. Maybe the adrenaline the body produces really can’t compete with the injectable stuff, and it’s all flawed from the start.
New med
They put me on Singular for now to try to stabalize the mast cell response, and it seems to be going well. My pulse finally calmed (until I forgot my hydrocortisone and started thinking about the adrenaline connection.) But taking the HC calmed it down again… then the fever showed up. My biggest concern is that, as good as Singular can be for this problem, the most dangerous side effect is psychosis. So, you know, I might have somebody check anything before I post for a while, just in case I’m losing my shit.
Adrenal insufficiency has dangers of psychosis, but the little I felt of that is, I’m fairly certain, nothing comparable to a drug induced psychosis. So here’s hoping I’m not the always gets the worst side effects person I usually am on this particular one.
As frustrating as needing to go to the ER was (I suppose, the frustration of my allergies hitting a going to kill me level), it was also, weirdly, validating. Because I’ve been to how many doctors? How many ERs? Mostly for my pulse flying while exposed to an allergen, and then being perfectly normal once in the wonderfully sterile, perfectly filtered air of the hospital. Same with my brain just checking out with inflammation, body slowing down to a crawl, losing so much of my life, and then hey, better environment, no more inflammation, you’re fine and full of shit. Where the face pain was written off as tooth pain, and me treated like someone looking for pain meds instead of looking for the screaming pain to stop. Medical gaslighting sucks, but hey, all that cured by me being so oblivious, I missed I was having a serious allergic reaction to the most delicious, keto friendly chocolate hazelnut butter spread ever.
I’m pissed that most healthy things are high histamine. Like, weight management is tough enough when you have immune issues, without adding on that the healthy stuff is going to kill me a little faster, somehow. I have to be so damn perfect with what goes into or around my body as a result of these allergies, and it only gets more limiting. It’s given me multiple eating disorders.
Fasting is so easy — and feels so safe — compared to having overwhelming decision fatigue, guilt and possibly horrible consequences by eating. And when everything you eat slows you down anyways, makes you dumb, digestion refuses to work, it just reinforces it. I can call it intermittent fasting to sound trendy and smart, but it’s just keeping the difficulty of digestion to a short amount of hours, and totally not getting enough calories (cuz people bullshit about eating enough while intermittent fasting. It takes time to eat that many calories, especially with “healthy” food.)
Anyways, I’m actually quite happy about things. It’s nice to art, nice to see a way through with this illness. Cuz hey, the ER doctor understood immediately; my mast cells are unstable and over reacting. I didn’t once bring it up. So if a visibly anaphylactic attack was what it was going to take to be noticed as actually having allergies when I don’t get a drippy nose or hives, but instead get zombie skin, racing pulse, low fever (writing this with a low fever right now) neurological issues, gut issues, and low blood pressure, then glad it finally happened so I can get the understanding and tools to prevent it happening again.
I really hope it doesn’t happen again. I had a bunch of different anti-histamine meds in me yesterday, yet still blew up. Maybe histamines really aren’t the issue for me (the rare hives thing.) Maybe allergies act in different ways and I’ve been unknowingly focused on the wrong way for me. No clue.
I’m tired of having to know so many things and rarely having it be useful to my situation. But maybe it’ll help someone else, so there’s that.
If you have allergies that don’t act like normal allergies, it could be MCAS, which is a blood disorder (so I’m told), and therefore will have the look of allergies as your immune system is the thing disordered, but won’t behave or be solved the same way. It’s not curable, but it is treatable, and that treatment can be everything.
I have hope because I was able to put my Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis into remission, and the meds work to supplement the damage done. Allergy shots worked and I’m no longer allergic to cats, even though dust mites and mold are currently still a nightmare. The immune system can be retrained, redirected, repaired. It’s just identifying where the problems really are happening to give yourself the best chance.
When you’re someone who would start a long ass game over if they realized they missed something they could only get earlier on, it can be hard to accept so many imperfections in living a life. I want things to follow logic, but that’s not the way life works. Life is chaos, and we have these stupid logic brains in our head insisting we can organize it, that it has to fit, has to make sense. But that’s just the unique madness of being human, and even in that, people really struggle to see the disconnect.
We build imperfect solutions to an imperfect existence, because it’s the best we got as self-aware beings that are destined to die. It’s not all curable. The right thing isn’t always the right answer. Repeating something over and over again does not, actually, make it true, no matter how persistent and willful. It just means some people need the lie to keep going, for whatever reason, because hey, imperfect AF and completely unaware of it.
I’m alive because I take my cortisol every day. I’m aging and wearing down because that’s what happens when you’re not dead yet; you age — not necessarily mature, but aging definitely happens. And there’s only so much one can do about it. I do my best to be healthy to contain my allergies, and that food is destructive to my immune system. So I guess it’s time to enjoy some junk food without the guilt?
Guilt, the true spice of life…
This fever is not budging, and this is going full ramble. I swear, if I’ve become allergic to the fever reducers at this point… >_>
It’s probably going to at least be a week to get through the full effects of this attack. It was ingested, and my body is not interested in eating to help expel it, and I’m sure it’s causing havoc on my gut. And there’s only so many meds I can take… cuz I don’t know if those meds that I were on the same time as I ate the thing, might actually be the culprit or contributing to the problem. There’s a worry that my system will over target, as it does, and knock out all my immune helpers. Dunno. Can’t predict, only overthink…
A lot of writing about not writing…
I don’t talk about my OCD a lot, but I think anyone who has read either my books or my blogs have seen it come up, either in real time, or mentioned in ways that don’t quite come out and say OCD, but is recognizable as such. I got in the habit of not talking about my OCD just before my teens when it really started showing up, partially because I was already a wary young person, and I knew what fucking crazy looked like. I knew what happened to undesirable children after being through the foster system. And although I didn’t have a full grasp of what paranoia was, I also had a lot of that showing up as my OCD did.
Mental illness is both the most natural thing in the world, and also the thing you feel like you can’t share when you need to fit into a society to survive. Everyone else is so “normal”, because no one talks about it. No one mentions the hardships, the failures, the inability to keep up with the Jones while everyone looks like they’re keeping up with the Jones. Until you start to realize: it’s not the failures that are so shameful to society, but the feelings around them. The admittance of it all. The people that hold the source.
As a kid, I picked up on it — how can you not, when you need to be perfect to prevent ending up in the worst situation, depending on total strangers for your very survival? You have to adapt to everything as it comes, because battling reality in those moments could leave you without support, adrift, and soon dead. So I adapted to mental illness, and took care of my adoptive mother as her cancer resurfaced, and tried to ignore just what was happening in my head while living in a moldy basement, with untreated PTSD, untreated OCD, untreated depression, untreated anxiety, untreated allergies… trying to be perfect for others in the hopes it would better my life.
It did not. My parents passed away (as many do) and I was left with a lot of untreateds and no life skills in how to:
1) look at these issues
2) seek out help
3) have bodily autonomy when negotiating with mental health professionals.
Because young people — especially traumatized ones — are trained that an adult will always make the decisions, and they will always be followed even when they are not the right decision. Because mental health was not a topic of conversation in my family, the final rights to one’s body, one’s safety, and one’s mind when asking for help also wasn’t explained, and that was a disservice, one that is perpetuated in many households every day.
Mental illness is not an excuse for someone to take away your rights, or to make you feel like you’re undeserving of participating in your care, no matter how it’s stigmatized and disliked. That people hide their struggles with mental illness isn’t just from the social isolation that comes when society decides you’re not “of use”, but because there is a long history of dehumanizing those who have mental illness. Of rationalizing the physical removal and all levels of abuse on human beings because of mental illness. Because of emotionality in general, which is how an entire sex was punished when they might dare to seek financial and bodily autonomy — how many generations did we refuse females money so that men would have wives? But I digress…
When I write about the characters in the Paranormal Academy for Troubled Boys, and their problems seem so strange and unrelatable with the fantasy elements and such, I’m really writing a place where it’s okay to have mental illness and still be free to be oneself. Even when not free. Finding a balance in a good place that doesn’t ask you to hate the parts of yourself you’re battling, instead of the world trying to either shut you off — the good and the bad — to make you controllable and acceptable by their standards, or to just throw you away in exile. These were the only options I saw available to me as a traumatized youth. Conform or be exiled from the tribe.
A pattern of thought
I like to think of my OCD as having triggers, where I can say “If I can just get over my fears of ***, it won’t show up.” But OCD is a force under it all, a process deep in the nervous system even under those subconscious triggers, and it’s always there. It is my base wiring that will twist as it surfaces, such as in my editing, or any place where I’m suddenly focused in making something “correct”.
If I’m feeling fanciful, I describe OCD as a pattern inside me that I need to see repeated on my environment, and in all the things I do. All life has a pattern — life is a pattern of the inorganic into the organic. My version of life wants to change the external to suit my personal pattern, and when I do that, it makes me feels good and secure in the world. I see me, something familiar when before it was unfamiliar.
This pattern isn’t as distinct as something truly obvious — my counting games are mostly done these days — but it’s still the balance of objects, the balance of color and tone, balance of words and formatting, textures and flow. You see, anything and everything can hold this pattern, because hey, I adapt. This process of seeing something and wanting to craft my pattern to it is forever both a sense of satisfaction and contentment in the world, and a sense of dis-ease and misery. Because you can’t gain a completion of the pattern without the thing driving the compulsion — the horrendous underlying feeling that not having the pattern means you can’t be safe and happy in the world.
I like words. I like the concepts we place into words. I like codes — I read a book on making and breaking codes in my teens and it was such a fabulous time waster, so much more interesting than making mazes because of the nested levels of meaning that could be placed into symbols. The games that occupied my mind as I tried to distract from trauma and the difficulties of my brain… They were wonderful, because they helped me run away. But lately, now that I’ve gotten more of a handle on this immune thing, and am trying to build a life, these games aren’t a service to me, but a hindrance. The thing that I am, these aspects of myself, are preventing change at the moment, asking me to run away, to always be away from living my life.
It’s enjoyable, when not all consuming. Writing is one of these things, by the way. It’s not that OCD is only preventing me from writing by offering fun new things to learn or thinking of making interactive novels with a million endings, etc. OCD is also there when I’m writing, driving me to get these internal patterns out, translated, transformed, and understood so that a piece of my inner pattern has changed my external world in a satisfying way. Art is the same way — there isn’t a thing I do where it’s not there. I can’t load the dishwasher without some adherence or refusal to adhere to a pattern. This is a part of my makeup at every level.
It’s exhausting
I don’t actually know much about OCD. I have never sought a diagnosis, because in my paranoia, I knew the significance of what was wrong with me. I see patterns, including the patterns I put out into the world by interacting with it. Most people can’t figure out a simple puzzle, never mind know what they’re doing in ten minutes, and certainly don’t think down long roads of how their actions impact things. They’re not thinking at all, and what perfect bliss that must truly be. Because this thing in my head isn’t required for life; it’s just there anyways, observing, turning everything into the eye test from hell as it compares, measures, questions and twists every concept on end, trying to understand and inject meaning into things that are meaningless.
I see it as a step in human evolution, one very useful at times, but it’s poorly refined, hardly designer in nature. It’s the way my sharped-tooth brain works, hungry for data, for distraction, for conclusions to things that are chaos and don’t need organizing. It’s a pattern that demands a pattern be created in everything… so it can feel satisfied for the moment. Safe. Secure in a chaotic, unpredictable world.
But it doesn’t do it to feel safe. It does it because that is how I’m wired, and those good feelings are just that, chemical reinforcement to give in to the neurosis. Not actually a change of the world into something less chaotic and safe. Just a way my brain validates its behavior to be allowed to be exactly what it is: ravenous and with sharp teeth.
These teeth cut me more than they cut anyone else. Because PTSD is a part of my formation, human behavior became something my brain tears into to understand and then “solve” the pattern. And I would love to blame it all on trauma, some idea that a cure could be at hand, and this isn’t who I am cursed to be… but that’s a lie not worth telling myself. Because I’ve had to live with my brain my entire life, and I have to live with it going forward, and such lies don’t help anything.
I know it doesn’t always look like this…
My partner has OCD, was treated as a young teen. His brain is something he has to wrangle with as well, and even then, even with him, it still took me far too long — long past my trauma therapy — for me to really face OCD and start talking about it. Because the pattern was obvious at this point between the two of us. It was just in how we were able to deal with our patterns that was different. He externalized the chaos of his mind when suffering, while I formed a pattern to contain mine inside.
I couldn’t understand for the longest time why his was less controllable, less manageable — I thought a failure of the self, of character, whatever cruelty my trauma formed psyche would think when being unkind to feel better in my own struggle. But the reality was, he was able to stop his patterns while I wasn’t seeing the output as the problem. I thought I was coping by giving in with creative, beautiful products, while he had stopped the cycle and was facing it (or was too overwhelmed to even give in, depending.)
Trauma taught me to internalize, to avoid allowing people to see my pain to help, because a part of me saw that as pure vulnerability, and at my most vulnerable was when I was harmed. He had a better time of things, and was able to externalize and ask for help, allowing him to function in the world as a result, even if the world is still so imperfect and requires all the energy for a little bit of assistance.
It’s not a creativity aid, though
Writing with OCD, for me, is writing patterns, while being aware you’re writing patterns… and judging yourself for those patterns, and fighting those patterns, and trying to find a compromise with those patterns. Where everything has to mean something. Where you have to hold it all in your head to ensure you get it all correct and do it the ideal way. There is no ease when writing like this, but instead deliberation. The fun is in solving the problems you made for yourself by insisting everything needs to fit a certain way. Solving the structure that makes it suspenseful or emotional or sexy. A pattern is being built, and either you see it once a bunch of ideas are thrown on the page and you get to organize the chaos and bring deliberateness to it. Or it’s built from the beginning, and you’re just fighting with yourself to keep the shape, the form, fit the structure, and make it amazing.
I spend too much mental energy and fuel in doing things that don’t require all of that from me. And maybe that’s partly why I’m tired all the time, because I’m battling a brain that needs to build and climb a mountain — and stress test it a few times in different ways to make sure it works — before writing the next paragraph. None of this means my writing is any good, by the way. Just that it fits the pattern in my head, and believe me, that is absolutely the only measurement I have for if I’ve achieved something with the things I make or not. There is no room in here for external validation — or questions of validation. I have enough with one pattern, and adding in all these potential patterns that I’m not familiar with, asking my brain to reform around multiple ones, is too chaotic and overwhelming. I have enough false points of view in here; it is madness to intentionally add more.
But I do at times, because something convinces me when I write, usually when I edit, that the pattern I’m following needs to be refined to someone else’s standards, and that will then be magnified to an extreme that I cannot handle, even as my brain is the one building the structure.
When my illness reached the stage of cognitive loss after building the cleanroom, as difficult a way to live as that was, my executive functioning flatlining one after the other, there was peace there. The pattern was still there, but the demand wasn’t. There was no point in attempting to follow a pattern my brain had grown too inept to follow. What could the world truly demand of me that I honestly thought I could even respond to, when most of my days were spent trying to remember there was a hallway outside my door, or that one needed to eat, and dress, and take care of the house?
Getting my brain back has reminded me of how sharp its teeth are, and I am still left with few skills to deal with it. Because my saving grace was a broken brain. Complete avoidance of the things that trigger it. As long as I couldn’t make art, I would never be constantly comparing form to lines to colors to conceptual meaning, trying to inject something into marks on a screen. As long as I couldn’t hold thoughts in my head from poor working memory, I didn’t need to go through a dozen variations of words, sentences, concepts, reforming for impact, for emotion, for readability, for clarity of thought. As long as I didn’t work on my business, I didn’t have to conceptualize me, broken and flawed, in the middle of something that had built expectations in others for time, for productivity, for ability and satisfaction.
I was free when I was broken. Now, I’m tied back into the pattern with a brain getting the dopamine fuel it had been starved of for all these years, and it has energy to be so much more vicious.
Nothing is new
I am remembering how to live with this beast, a more dangerous version that has lost so much idealism and optimism. Its demands are greater the more I shirk away from the patterns it wants, and it leaves me frozen, not externalizing in a helpful way, but internalizing the battle before the pattern. And if my creativity was me giving into the pattern to “cope” with it, then creativity is now me losing to the pattern, or having built a cage so structured and refined, I feel safe enough to step inside to create.
This is harder than before.
I want to avoid it because I want to avoid the pain my brain inflicts on me as it magnifies every stray thought into something that needs all of me. I don’t know if this database is going to work, because I see that part of its creation was me giving into the pattern in a safe way, one not connected to the psyche in the same way as my writing and art is. It is an escape from the thing waiting for me, asking me to have to battle with my brain in ways I’m not sure I can win.
Because before the cleanroom and my “brain breaking”, I wasn’t doing those things I started doing every day. I wasn’t getting dressed or eating or taking care of the house. I was writing. I was so sick I could barely move, and I put everything into writing because that’s what my brain demanded of me.
There is no mercy in it. Negotiating is an expenditure of energy before the required war of battling the brain while doing the task, and then the war of pulling it away from the task. And I suppose it doesn’t need saying, but I do not trust my brain to let it do whatever it wants. Not because of how it won’t fit with societal norms, but because of all it has learned. If its sharp teeth can hurt me so, what defenses do other people have to it?
Am I justifying an obsessive pattern of difficult behavior because I’m terrified of my own brain? It certainly seems on point for OCD. Certainly on point for trauma.
None of this is new, just different levels of intensity. The break from it all, that was new. That was… both bliss and suffering to not be myself. I’m not worried that I won’t be able to write. I’m worried I won’t be able to live a life and write. Also not new.
I’m worried the battles I feel compelled to fight will tire me out the way the illness did, and bring me back into that half dead state… and unfortunately, that’s not an unfounded fear.
My emotions have had a huge impact on my immune system responses. Stress has a huge impact on my immune system. Lack of sleep, mood swings… all the things that happen when I’m not caring for myself because I’m caught up in a neurotic hyper-focus of work leads to my immune system being more self destructive than protective.
And this new level of health all feels still so unsafe. So… fragile.
MCAS
MCAS is the next rabbit hole my doctors and I are going down. Mast cell activation syndrome. It had fit before, and was one of the things that had looked exactly right when I was deep in it, but my blood test was negative so I dismissed it quickly to focus on more useful potentials. It wasn’t until recently that I was informed that there are different versions, and that the blood tests only find one variation — and not necessarily on the first try. So this is the next direction.
I’m tired of all the energy I dedicate into getting better — I know, so fucking selfish after being allowed to get better — but it’s true. I’m exhausted every time I think about doing another thing for “my health.” Resilience isn’t a choice, isn’t a rallying of will to persevere. It’s just another pattern of my ravenous brain that won’t let me rest and focus on living the life I do have.
I don’t know if MCAS is the answer, but truly, it has so many promising fits as it understands poor modulation of the immune system. It can respond to anti-histamines, as well as show the link to dopamine and histamines — something I stumbled upon when experimenting with L-Tyrosine and mucuna. It’s also hope with the neurosis because of how histamine and compulsion are connected, how histamine and dopamine are connected — my ADHD brain has be running off of the chemical cascade my allergies and overactive immune system have been causing, which is why it’s been so chaotic, so confusing to have a stimulation and a bettering of health, followed by the crash as the consequences wore on in the body.
I’m allergic to eggs. Knowing this, I would eat an egg every morning at the time I wanted to switch my sleep cycle to (instead of my default of sleeping through the morning and waking after noon) because that immune response wakes me the fuck up and won’t let me sleep. This has been my battle for a lifetime, the way I become alive only when everything is going to shit, and how it all crashes when I reach “okay.” The cleanroom worked; I stopped having histamine responses every moment of my life. And then my executive functioning crashed and stayed crashed until I got an ADHD treatment.
MCAS also links to the vagus nerve therapy that had been so transformative when my house was overrun with mold. It was as simple as a tens machine with ear clips on the tragus, that I used to stimulate the vagus nerve. After enough time, it healed so much of my system so that I could digest again, and finally calmed my racing pulse. There also seems to be a connection — I haven’t read enough to truly know if it’s true or not — with upper spinal pain harming the vagus nerve, and it’s left me wondering about the formation of the small hump on the back of my neck and if it’s having a poor impact on the vagus nerve and immune modulation as a result.
MCAS doesn’t require protein to stimulate an immune response, which could be why so many chemicals/scents set me off — but also means allergy shots won’t solve it. It’s not uncommon to have the burning mouth syndrome and nerve pain in the face thing I had with MCAS either, so another connection. Same with the years of gut issues and oversensitivity (currently been feeling vommity cuz I recently added something I thought was healthy to my diet, but is histamine high.) And that stress and emotionality has such a huge impact on my health makes it a good candidate for the source of all these issues.
There’s a danger in only looking for one thing when faced with so many problems. Maybe I prefer it to collecting a bunch of diagnosis… But it’s satisfying to have one neatly placed label on top of it all, so my brain keeps looking for the way to organize the chaos of being alive.
I want an answer. I want some sense of predictability in all of this. Maybe then it won’t feel so fragile, these good days. I won’t have to think down a million different what ifs to find the most likely issues and test, and then do it again when that doesn’t work, over and over until reaching a balance again. Fuck, maybe I’ll gain a ritual of health out of it that actually works, instead of doing things that either feel like superstitions to try to keep pain and illness away, or me running and self destructing as I cope.
I want the answer and everything that comes with it…
But for now, I’m facing my OCD, the neurosis that is both protective and destructive on my journey. Writing isn’t hard — writing this proves that I can write still. But the things that get in my way are currently in my way, and that’s hard. The more energy my brain gets, the more this fight can either be the hardest one yet, or so fucking simple, depending on if I can let my brain get out of my way. Addressing the problem helps. Talking about it helps… so I’m trying.
Using Story Arcs to Develop Characters with Plot
So, because I’m working on fine tuning this element in my database, seeing what I need to get the most out of it, I thought it would be a good time to talk about story arcs. I’ll let you do the work of looking up story arcs, because I am not a dictionary, but I will say plenty about what they are to me in the writing process.
Story arcs are the ebb and flow of plot, motivation, driving forces, and impacts in your book or short story. They are the reason the characters are here, and they are the reason your reader is here. If nothing is happening in the story, nobody is showing up. This makes story arcs essential to story telling, but for some reason people don’t seem to think much about them.
Usually stories are described by plot, usually only one plot. Sometimes they’ll be a B plot, like you see with sitcoms or cartoons or most anything on television where you have a main plot and a B plot to fill time. But story arcs aren’t limited to two things happening at once in the story; that’s just the formula of writing that’s been normalized and then memed, as people do. Story arcs can actually be quite complex and quite simple at the same time, in the same story, and they span more than just plot points. They are basically everything in a story from the blood pumping through the characters veins, to the events on a timeline, to the music swelling in the background. And when that’s truly understood, and you learn how to organize these concepts for yourself in a way that works for you, your stories can reach an entirely new level.
Breaking it down
This is how I’m currently organizing story arcs, and I want to start off by saying, I’m organizing it this way because it works for me. It might not be the same for you and you want to search for that. You want to develop your own tools that suit you for the best results.
For me, at the moment, story arcs are comprised of character traits, character motivation, environmental forces — and not just the environment, but the setting, the culture, the world that is driving events that can’t be pinned on a character. And, of course, impact.
Impact gets its own little note for every single piece of a story arc. Internal and external impact. Consequences and sacrifices. Motivation is essential for character driven story arcs, but isn’t necessarily present for environmental ones. But impact will always be there.
Sometimes all you have is an impact you know you want to hit, and you need to figure out what you’re going to write to drive to that point. It is the most important aspect of a story arc to measure, because it turns the internal into the external, pushing events through character reaction instead of just through environmental factors.
For the erotica and erotic romance I write, story arcs also include sexual tension, relationship arcs, suspense and tension in general. You can have setting arcs to mark the passage of impact on a space, or building, or city. A story arc could be an emotional arc, which is something I would tie to character arc. But depending on your character, it could look more like a stress arc, or mental illness arc, or a character power development arc, etc. You can have a relationship sacrifice arc, with an understanding that there has to be a sacrifice to reach certain goals between characters, even in the simplest of stories, and you might not know that sacrifice yet, but you know you need to plan for one to be there. Maybe you want a pain arc, because that’s how you measure drama.
Every story might have something unique you need to keep tabs on to ensure it’s going right, and you can call that plot, or character development, or tension, but I find it’s important to classify them all under one topic: story arcs. Because they’re not different, or something to be tracked separate from plot. They are the plot. This is everything required to understand what breathes life into a story, when plotting a series of events isn’t enough. You need to think of pulses, drum beats, a theme song a character is living and imbuing into the story in that moment that changes as they change. Or whatever works for you.
Why story arc?
For me, to put it simply, these are the things I need to keep track of in a story because I can’t just hope to remember it all. The process of identifying and developing story arcs is basically the organization of what already happens naturally in a story for me. You’re trying to find the pulse and make sure the rhythm matches the events. Usually, that pulse is happening already for a writer, and it’s just a matter of maintaining it by paying attention.
But sometimes you miss things, or the first draft opened up an idea into something else that needs exploring. Sometimes you’re so new to something, you don’t even know what you don’t know, which I think is basically everyone. We need to explore a topic and develop it to understand it better. And that’s what making story arcs is about. Developing aspects of a story that go beyond basic plot to craft a better story. Designing a plot to be character driven for the greatest impact, instead of just hoping it will figure itself out once you write “the end.”
The moment you decide something is a story arc, you have made a choice of what you’re valuing in your story, and that will have an impact on everything going forward. So better to make it a conscious decision than to realize nothing is there at all.
Formless
If you did bother to look up story arcs, you might have seen a bunch of writing systems telling you they can only present in certain ways to be “successful.” But writing systems are where creativity goes to die, so don’t take it to heart. Instead, explore what these arcs are to you and what feels natural as you’re writing, and if that natural impulse is having a strong impact on the story or fizzling out.
There are plenty of pulses in a story that don’t require a form or a resolution, but instead flare up when needed to push the story along or give it greater impact. Motivational arcs can be as essential as a heartbeat drumming through every scene, or they can flare up once in a while like anxiety, increasing intensity without needing to resolve. Behavioral arcs can take problematic character traits and drop huge plot points as an impact, or they can just be quirky reminders of who your character is and how they act out in the world. And if you find you think you need to change something so integral to a character because someone told you everything about character development is change, think about how impossible it is for most human beings to change, and why it feels so unrealistic when characters do it at the flip of a plot point.
Story arcs aren’t about one purpose, one form, one result. These are tools to control impact, to control reaction and hold tension and suspense. They’re the pieces of a story most people don’t bother to look at, but instead, again, hope just manifest by the end. They’re supposed to be adaptable to the story, not force a story to adapt to them, even as they craft the story. There is no final, proper form to reach for, but instead about understanding why something is going wrong, feeling flat or lacking impact. They’re the place one looks to problem solve a bad or boring book, a diagnostic tool, not a predetermined shape.
It’s essential to recognize these aspects and understand the orchestra you are trying to control, the music you’re trying to create. Each piece is going to ask for something different, is going to get its solo or contribute to the background ambiance. A wind instrument shouldn’t be treated like a string instrument; it’s not one thing. You’re not looking for a formulaic shape, but what that piece needs to be for the story exactly in that moment.
Creating impact out of plot
Story arcs allow for in-depth thinking and then plotting of elements of the story that can otherwise be missed and not developed to their best ability. And it’s in the complexity of that, or the simplicity that one breaks such complexity down into, that really gives power to story arcs. Stories aren’t just about things that happen, but instead about how people are impacted by things that happen. Places are changed. We want to feel an impact in the world as a result of events in a story, otherwise, how does one truly measure an event?
How does one measure the impact of something that is supposed to feel valuable to a character or monumental to a world, without reflecting it somewhere in the story, be it through their behavior or motivations changing? It can’t just be reflected in the plot, an A + B to C to hopefully = to D sort of thing. It has to be reflected in the environment of characters and settings. Even in emotional atmospheres. Story arcs can help you plot and measure the impact an idea has on the story, and I think that’s truly their power.
Brainstorming as part of the process
So how? How does one turn ideas for story into arcs that can be used to help progress and develop a story from start to finish? Honestly, the process of looking for story arcs in your ideas and fleshing them out is the best form of creative brainstorming one can do for story, especially when you’re looking in a way to ensure that these concepts are seen and felt by the reader and in the story.
For myself, organization is essential. Story arcs aren’t necessarily clear ideas that distinguish themselves from each other, and as a result you can lose track of them and fail to show them and resolve them in the story. Something that started out so important could suddenly be erased by a key plot point, or the moving of a scene and fall flat. Suddenly loose ends are forever loose, not just unraveling plot points, but making characters look two-dimensional and uncaring, making plot lines look completely unrealistic because they don’t have an impact. Where something that was built up to be impossible or enormous in impact is suddenly so easily overcome…
Yes, you can claim that was a character having character development of something to overcome a problem, but if you lose track of showing these points and making them feel believable, the reader has no reason to believe what you’re presenting to them. And if you miss out in fleshing a character to their full potential, the reader might not care about anything happening at all because there’s no representation on the page of these events having an impact on another living being.
Don’t assume reading comprehension is the same as mind reading. You have to write the story.
It can be easy to understand that writers need to convey details and visuals for readers when describing foreign worlds, futuristic technology, or magic, etc., but writers can forget that readers need that same guide when it comes to emotions. There is no reason to believe that your reader is anything like the character you’re writing, and if they’re not, if they can’t relate, you need to find a different way for them to relate to the character that isn’t the characters traits, behaviors, and situation you just assume are universal. You have to find a way to humanize a character to people that won’t understand that character, and that’s the importance of character arcs. Not just growth and development, plot points laid out in a row that you’re ticking one after the other as one progresses, but humanization of the character so that the reader can care about the events, can care about the character’s emotions as they’re going through plot points.
You can usually tell the difference when someone is going through a writing system, following an instruction manual to write compared to someone who has learned who their character is and is putting them in the story. It’s the difference of writing a story and building a story that challenges characters to grow. There’s more heart to the second type, engagement, where everything feels important because it’s coming back to character arcs and measurable growth. Instead of plot points which are just the choreography, pushing the character through the motions so the story can happen.
This is why I combine story arcs to include those character arcs, and include character arcs with plotting a book. In understanding that character growth and humanization makes a story impactful for readers, you change the way you look at stories in general. You’re suddenly not there about a series of events viewed through the eyes of a soulless narrator, but instead about characters you care about as you check in to see how they’re coping with the series of events.
Fucking how already, yeah?
So I explained the importance, and showed how focusing on story arcs can change someone’s writing in really intense ways. So how does one do it? Well, it’s really up to you.
How do you organize your ideas on the page? Sometimes it doesn’t start on the page. Sometimes it can be post-its, or note cards on a wall. Scribbles on a whiteboard in color-coded markers. I enjoy surrounding myself with stories and ideas, transforming my environments into a part of my brain. But because of my new visual limitations and how chaotic my plotting process can be, I’ve had to create tools on my laptop to mimic what I would do in real life.
There are already tools out there, digital ones, that might work perfectly fine for people. I personally love Scrivner, of which I’m dictating this post into, because of its design to nest and organize text, but it’s not great for this particular thing for me. I’m also a big fan of Scapple which can color code and create visual blocks of ordered text and images in a web/brain storm shape instead of a linear shape — but I don’t really enjoy all the fiddling involved. There’s also plotting tools that will plot your points on a line to create the illusion of time as an aspect of plotting. Those ones in particular don’t really work for me, but for some people really need a very time focused organizational style for plotting. It’s really about finding what works for you and experimenting.
For right now, I’m mimicking my Post-it style of multicolored post-its with notes written on them. My notes get to be far more extensive because I’m doing it on the computer and have created the element to give me the things I need, instead of limiting me to the constraints of an actual Post-it. Depending on the order I set, my story arcs will graph onto a model based on time, or based on the character and time, or whatever I really want at the moment, because what a writer needs when it comes to plotting a story changes in the moment.
Random tangent to rant
I’m sure it’s clear at this point, but I’m not a fan of writing systems. I’m not a fan of someone following an instruction guide thinking that’s the way to write, because rarely is creativity or any kind of development allowed within a writing system. It’s a reverse engineered plan focused on hitting points, metrics, as the essence of the story and turned into a pattern of plot that needs to be resolved. Nothing else. And when you’re focused on hitting those points, it’s very easy to lose sight of what makes the story actually interesting, what makes a reader show up, what makes you show up. If you’re showing up to follow a formula for some other goal at the end, you’re not showing up to write a story and figure out what the purpose is for it all.
That’s not to say that all formulaic writing is shit. It’s just to say that when new writers are following a formula, they’re not learning to write. There learning a formula. It would be like comparing it to solving something with a math formula. When you’re handed the formula, you’re not taught how to problem solve to reach that formula. You’re not taught to understand the ins and outs of how to get to that endpoint. You’re just handed the shortcut without the experience, when it’s the experience that allows the shortcut to make sense.
It’s not a system. It’s a process…?
Anyways… There’s nothing special about writing story arcs. It can be done on post-its and note cards or paper or laptop. It’s as basic as brainstorming your story, and then breaking down those ideas and plotting them into little bite sized points that you then organize in a way that works for you when you think about your story. It’s making a spot for impact, for motivation, and connecting plot to characters and their motivations as events of impact instead of “things just happening.”
I don’t even think of story arcs as having a beginning, middle, and end, because there comes a time when you need to define what the hell beginning, middle, and end even mean in regards to the transformation of character and plot. (how many pieces does one replace of a boat until it’s a different boat…?) That kind of nonsense is not helpful in plotting. It’s not helpful in brainstorming to demand any rigid structure. Story arcs are a theme to explore through a piece, a way to connect characters to the events of a plot. Organized well enough so that you’re not missing important stuff while in the weeds of writing.
The nice thing about writing stories is you get to say a problem is resolved, instead of out in the real world where most problems hang there, being coped with, no definitive beginning, middle, and end. It usually satisfying for readers for problems to be solved, and cathartic for the writer. But that doesn’t mean that’s how you have to write a story. Your readers might hate you, but many people don’t write for their readers, but for themselves.
At least knowing the story you’re developing, and presenting to the world will be far more clear and done better if you bother to build story arcs and take the time to break it down and organize and ensure that each part is felt.
Right. How.
Because I do look at story arcs as plotting not really in time, but measured in impact, that’s how I write my notes for them. There will be a title or label to express the gist of the story arc, and then a note of information about the brainstorming process for that story arc. Why it’s there, what you want from it, possibly what you’re hoping to resolve or what sacrifice must be made.
Story arcs don’t always come with a solution, but instead they’re just full of the drama of a moment for a character. You have a very cool idea that you want to develop further, and ensure that it ends up in your story, even if you don’t necessarily know how to do that part yet? Make a note, call it a story arc, and develop it into something that works.
So once you have that story arc, for myself, I create editions so that everything to do with that story arc is connected, and I can’t lose track of anything. I need strong visual organization for my brain to thrive when it comes to writing conceptual text. So I color code, and make sure that main idea holds all those smaller ideas that fit into it. Then it’s about breaking down the story arc, brainstorming where these pieces are going to come up and how it’s going to reveal an impact on the characters, on the environment, on the events. Which scenes these pieces of the arcs are going to hit, and why.
It’s just notes. It’s just brainstorming. There’s no magic to it. Even how I organize is just whatever is easiest for me. It’s not a magic spell or special ritual where if you follow all the steps, you’re guaranteed a perfect story. It’s just essential design work as you take the time to develop a story, and it doesn’t need anything special.
No end form to reach for, no bs you must do it this way. You just have to work on developing the story in a way that you can track and ensure the impact is connected to the characters and their actions.
Character driven means acceptance of chaos.
If you fail to do this for plot, you risk building an intricate, exciting maze with plot twists and daring car chases, only to drop a dead cricket in, hoping something exciting will happen. (I don’t know why the cricket is dead, but it happened in the most boring way possible, promise.)
If you’re plotting out your character arc next to that story arc, or better yet, you just create plot arcs that are character driven, you don’t have to worry about being the kind of writer who makes their character jump through hoops for no apparent reason, and the character obeys because they’re boring and have no motivation beyond that the author has put them there to react.
Even with a little life in them, you don’t want your character to just be a mouse in a maze of your creation, simply hunting for cheese. Domesticated. Knowing everything is going to be fine if they follow the rules. You want them to be fully fleshed out, fighting the maze, fighting being there, fighting the unknown author who would dare drop them there in the first place, having emotional reactions that translate to behaviors that have them doing things like burning the maze down — something an author would never have designed — as the character goes and makes a better story.
Your characters need to be more impulsive than you, more motivated than you, and have no care about what you want in this process for them to drive a story, otherwise it’s just redundant and gone to plan, another heist movie where they tell you what they’re going to do, and then they do it, and maybe they kill a throwaway character, and everything’s okay.
You can’t have something new when you’re not allowing it to happen. Rigid structures of book writing preventing change, prevent adaptability. Something wild can only happen if you feel daring enough to let it. When you have an adaptable structure to maintain in regards to story arcs, allowing you to keep tabs on motivations, behaviors, impacts, tension, etc, you’re more willing to let the story become something better, something outside of the formula you find all those other stories living in, because you can see that it’s not pure chaos. The characters can still work in this change, and impacts can still look realistic and genuine to the moment.
—
I have so much to say about this topic, but I don’t feel like killing my eyes editing anymore today. So yeah, that’s that for now. Enjoy my enthusiastic lecture from a writer who can’t get their shit together enough to get back to writing beyond talking about writing. I’m sure it’s totally motivational.
I’m truly passionate about this topic — it’s everything about writing to me, the problem solving, the orchestration of trying to create an impact in a reader. And it’s fun. Loving what you do is damn fun, and more people should find what they love in what they do.
Refocused
So I spent this morning on my drive to get allergy shots thinking about caving, about changing Breeding his Nephew to add a paranormal element so it would be allowed on Smashwords (Amazon would ban the fuck out of it, but Smashwords allows certain kink if there’s an obvious sentient brain involved — although it’s been a while and I should really recheck all the terms of service on this shit to make sure…)
Anyways, I was considering caving, only to realize it was coming from a broken place. It’s fear. I’m looking to add multiple characters and story arcs to what was supposed to be a basic fuck fic reminiscent of the whole pittbulls and parolees thing, all because a part of me is afraid I’m not going to be able to get back into writing. That the sickness will grab me once again, and I’ll lose so much time and cognition that I’ll never be able to get back to my life.
And that’s a dumb fuck reason to do anything.
It’s wrong. I already know it’s wrong. I’m absolutely better than I’ve been in years, and I know exactly the things that set me off and how to deal with them. It’s never going to be a loss of years again with my brain dribbling out of my head while I’m left staring at a wall trying to remember what a person does every day. I understand the airflow issues that push every allergen in the house into my room, the litter box as the source of everything pain/destroying to my health, and there’s no reason to be afraid it’s ever going to be as bad as before. I don’t have to make choices from that place — bad story choices, btw.
Like, seriously, what a waste of time it would be to add in multiple minds to this thing — and there is absolutely no way you can add a touch of magic/paranormal to a contemporary story without demanding a completely different change of plot. Everything becomes about the magic in the normal world, instead of the kink. No.
So, I’m refocused. Added the note taking linking element to my scene editor to be able to link and auto-populate descriptive text into the database without filling out a bunch of forms each time. Good. My eyes hurt, which is shit, but whatever. Allergies be allergies.
The Writing Process: A Rant
Today sucks
Today, I want to talk about the writing process and why it’s actually important. And I mainly want to talk about this because I am super frustrated. I feel like everything I’m doing is about trying to get back to writing, instead of just writing, and honestly, I’m not wrong. That’s the majority of what I’m doing right now. I am building a system instead of writing a story.
After years between now and publishing my last book, I just want to be at the end of this process where there’s a book to publish and I don’t feel like I’m fighting everything, including my very difficult brain and all my executive dysfunctions. But I’m not at the end of this process. I don’t have a book to publish. In some ways, even as I polish off the last of this current short story, I still feel like I haven’t started this process — mostly because I don’t see the story I’m writing as viable for publishing.
There’s a reason for that; it was to take a lot of pressure off of me as I get back into this writing journey. It was so I didn’t have to make a cover with my fucked-up eyes in pain all the time and having to face that aspect of what I’ve lost in such a short amount of time on top of getting back to writing. But because I’ve taken the “easy” way out, I’ve put a lot of work into something that’s going to be locked on my website (unless I add a fantasy element to it, and I don’t want to. It’s all fantasy, but somehow pretending it’s supernatural makes people who read understand words aren’t real? Like, dumb fuckery.) I don’t feel like I’ve succeeded in anything, and I think a part of me needs a win right now.
So, the writing process. The importance of doing all the busy work I’m doing now. A refresher to remind me why the fuck I’m here.
I can’t claim that a writing system is solely a good idea because of executive dysfunction. I think someone would need to have an amazing memory to write a series or serial without some sort of process in place. Even if it’s as basic as writing an outline, I genuinely don’t believe that writing a complex series can be done — done well — without a structure to keep focus and to juggle all the plot points and character arcs and background information that needs to be juggled.
I am a poor mental visualizer, which is why it’s essential for me to have reference for what I’m writing about. I need background images, and blocks of text describing setting and characters and clothing and items if I’m going to be capable of conveying visual information to readers.
Because I’m such a poor mental visualizer, this is obviously something important to me. It’s a void in my brain that I’m trying to fill for myself, not just the reader, and that can get difficult when addressing such a deficit. My neurosis can pop up, and I can put greater value on it than it needs to be, or I can feel frozen in my writing because I don’t have that image to convey. Having the database where I store the description of that image can help my brain disengage from the obsessive need to ensure that I’m conveying something that I’m struggling to visualize. In that regard, doing this background work is one of those steps that might look like busy work, but it’s actually allowing me to move forward instead of being stuck as a result of my very difficult personality.
But it’s boring.
Last night, after finally stealing enough time to get the manuscript into the editor I had created last week, I started the editing process. And I found myself hating it. Partially because I was exhausted; partially because I was holding a ton of expectations that were overwhelming my curiosity; partially because I’m still struggling with allergies and what they do to my cognition. And today I just feel frustrated. My brain is conceptualizing everything I’ve gone through, everything I’ve created to get me to this point, and all I’m seeing is the struggle without reward.
Somehow I thought creating the support tools would make this editing process easier. But there is only so much I can do that will actually get results at the end that are measurable. Everything else is just trying to create a little more ease, a little more convenience, but nothing of impact. Nothing is going to fill out this database for me — although I have made a way to link text into my reference forms so that it will auto populate, and I’m probably going to expand on that because it does seem the path of least resistance. But I still have to input the manuscript, and separate the text out and link it to the correct data file. I still have to battle with my many executive dysfunctions in regards to reading and focusing to get that done.
To make my life easier. But it doesn’t feel easy. I have to do all this very difficult — feeling near impossible — work, in the hopes that it’s going to make things easier in the future.
It sucks. I’m bored as fuck. Writing is fucking boring.
I just want to get to the end of this already. I want to get to the end, not because I’m avoiding hard work, but because my brain is not certain that I’m ever going to enjoy getting to the end of this process. I want something to prove that all these doubts and frustrations aren’t grounded in anything real. I want concrete proof that the work I’m putting in will guarantee results.
And maybe that’s just unrealistic. Maybe that’s a level of dumb fuck expectation that no one really has a right to put on themself. We cannot know the future. The whole point of experimentation is the understanding that failure is a part of that process.
But I don’t want to be understanding about the process right now; I want a fucking win.
Have I written multiple novels without this new process, without this structure I’m putting into place? Yes. And I would really love to default to that. It’s a place where I’m doing, completely ignoring the deficits, getting the writing done and over with. But it is always going to end with me back in this spot, where I see a new mountain I need to structure before I can climb if I want to move forward as a writer. I am at this place right now because I am well the fuck aware that there is no going forward if I don’t commit to some sort of structuring and reference with my writing.
My brain is not getting better — actually, that’s not right. My brain is not changing. This new system of support tools is designed to acknowledge the very real deficits my brain has in regards to working memory, long-term memory, visual conceptualization, and attention. But it’s not designed to make me feel good about this process, to help me cope with the frustrations I’m feeling as I have to force my brain to work with its very real deficits. That’s something I need to provide in a different context, and I’m doing a shit job of it today.
It has to become part of the process. Every time a block comes up, stopping, assessing, and naming has to be part of the process of getting back to writing. And not just getting back, but the process of writing. Because that distinction needs to become part of the definition of writing. What feels like busy work, be it research, building these structures and support tools, looking at the market that I’m creating the product for — in this case the book for — has to all be part of the process of self-publishing.
Every step taken is a step closer to the end result. And it can be difficult to conceptualize that when all I want to do is be at that end result.
I’m very funny with my conceptualizations. I have a brain that can conceptualize extremely complex structures, but not in a complex visual way. I have to create simple visuals to box a concept — and for some reason my brain needs that visual language when it comes to learning and expressing what it’s trying to say. It’s already doing the work in the background, but it needs a different language.
The structure I’ve created in regards to the outlines and the scene editor all utilize that visual language of mine. The notes I made as I was designing these elements also utilize the visual language in shorthand. It would look nonsensical to most people, just symbols on a page, mostly squares and rectangles much like a brainstorming cloud. But that’s all I need to see to create something complex in my head and then translate it into a project. I do these very basic notes when it comes to coding, understanding the nesting and order of operations of elements I learn how to use by seeing how they break. But if I didn’t take that step, if I didn’t know that about myself, I would not be able to move forward. I have to be honest with my weaknesses to be able to gain anything, and that has to be part of the process.
Blunt Honesty
So, today, my writing process is acknowledging how fucking shit it is to do all this difficult work only to feel like no product has been made. To know that I am going to push my brain to limits that it has in regards to editing. To overwhelm it. To make it ask what is the fucking point of any of this as I go through the decision fatigue of “What’s the best way to convey this concept to a reader that is both clear and also engaging, and why is every fucking choice wrong?” For every single sentence. For nearly every single word in that sentence. All while knowing this book isn’t publishable.
I’m going to commit time and energy into something because it’s important only because I say it’s important, even as it takes me away from putting that time and energy into a product that will make me money by the end — a product that will prove to myself that everything I’m doing is actually getting results, and not just me fucking around learning new things because doing the shit that requires me to focus is boring.
This is so fucking boring
That’s really it, at the end of the day. There are so many things my brain is good at — strike that. There are so many things that reward my brain with dopamine because my brain is actually quite bad at it in the right ways, and the challenge is addictive. But right now, writing is not that. I haven’t done the mental work to turn this project into that. I haven’t set the stakes. I haven’t built the game that will give my brain the dopamine to keep going as I do the arduous work it is normally willing to do when it feels rewarded.
Also, decision fatigue sucks
Decision fatigue doesn’t feel like a reward. My brain likes there to be one answer, the one answer it solves, just like a math problem or a script of code. There isn’t one answer with writing; if anything, writing is all the answers being whittled down into the path you end up on. And that path isn’t the right path, it’s just the one you ended up on. It’s a lot like life, and there is very little satisfaction to life. I’m never choosing the right words when writing; I’m just choosing words until my brain is tired enough to go, “Okay, fuck it, none of this matters, every options is shit; it’s good enough.”
There’s no dopamine reward in that, just letting go, and that is one of my greatest deficits. I don’t have a stop switch easily accessible. Once my brain has taken all the pieces in, turned sentences and concepts into a story to tell, and built the structure of thought — holding it all in my head — it needs to ensure that it’s translated properly. Well. Even as I see that there isn’t one solution, and that none of the solutions are wrong, my brain is still doing math, trying to solve the problem with one answer. And once it’s dedicated all that time into building that complex conceptualization, it doesn’t want to let go until the problem is solved.
The problem that doesn’t exist because none of it really actually fucking matters.
The real problem is my brain
You know that very wise advice of not trying to solve people? My brain doesn’t understand that. It takes complex data about a person, conceptualizes, and then tries to solve — even as it’s aware that isn’t how things work. Most social interactions are about disengaging my brain exactly for this reason. There’s a pattern of thought that comes naturally to this organic computer in my skull, and it is completely useless for the majority of things in life. It’s literally why I choose to write, choose to create anything, ever.
I need to make the game for my brain to solve, or there is no satisfaction or happiness in my life.
I am not writing a novel or series when I sit down to write. I am creating the data (all the shit I make up) and adding in the structure (the rules of writing, as well as the end goal of plot and character arcs) and giving my brain a problem to solve so that it will be happy in a way it cannot be happy any other time.
[data] + [structure] = [customized problem to solve (aka: game)]
I’m the kind of person who is looking for broken things to fix to find satisfaction in life. I fixed a trashcan the other day, solving the plastic mechanism to the lid that had broken years ago and no one had gotten around to dealing with it — and that brought me more satisfaction than the entire room I had also cleaned that day. It’s madness.
So this is also why I need the writing process. Because before, the structure I was building — the game I was creating so that I could then solve with writing — was too simple. It was designed for my brain when it was inflamed. Now the game needs to be more complex, or I can’t find a reason to come back to it. Because I’m not here to write a book. That would be too easy. My brain doesn’t get dopamine from that. I’m here to make such a complex problem for myself that I will feel satisfied once I solve it.
Self destructive by design? Maybe.
It’s not a choice. It’s my base chemical makeup. It’s a pattern of thought that I’ve had since small. It’s why books were so compelling to me as a kid, because I realized that everyone is searching for circumstances where they feel there talents are actually useful, and that’s what good books provided for the main characters. There was no point in having a character that was supposedly smart or talented or had some crazy magical power or difficult flaw, without having a challenge for them to overcome as a result. The strengths and weaknesses of the character would define the main plot points to come.
Books were wonderful like that, because unlike life, they always had a damn point. Someone was always trying to say something in a book, while with life it’s just chaos that we hope to organize in a way to cope with the complete lack of logic.
What I can control is in choice
The choice is that I keep coming back when my novelty seeking brain has decided there’s nothing left in the task of writing.
I don’t want to be a good writer. There’s nothing I want to master. I want to learn something. I want to be effective in what I do. I want to add data to my perceptions of the world and existence on a whole, and if the task I’m doing isn’t providing that, my brain checks the fuck out.
Really, how many times can you do the same damn task, sitting in a chair staring at the screen, hoping something different will happen? The choice is that I show up even though I know nothing different will happen. And then the next choice is to try and find a way to make it interesting enough so that it feels like something different is happening.
Why write?
I don’t really have a story to tell. When I first started writing, I was in the middle of PTSD therapy. I was trying to understand all the many things I needed to understand about the human animal and coping. That’s what drove me. The motivation isn’t there anymore. I understand enough. Now what.
[game] ?= [satisfaction]
Okay. So, it’s like, I’m here to make a game. I’m here to make something spectacular with all I’ve learned, so I’ll be engaged in the process. But how many times can you set up the dominoes and watch them tumble in glorious ways, until you become disinterested? When you know there’s only so many outcomes, none of them lasting; what drives you to create another pattern of the same?
People think it’s to move from pain, that the goal of money and getting out of a difficult situation is enough. But you know what you find in difficult situations that just so happens to fuel dopamine? Challenges that matter. In every direction. And isn’t that just so interesting for a brain that likes to problem solve?
One could contemplate, design, and make something absolutely unique and perfect for the space they’re in… Or they could buy something instead. When you don’t have money, you’re forced to dedicate the time and thought into a project, and my brain likes that. It wants an excuse to be creative in a way that matters, where there’s no guilt for ignoring the silly game it’s building for itself that makes an income.
That’s why building the game is far more interesting than playing the game I built. Building those support tools has value to me, measurable cause-and-effect to help me improve my existence in the world. Using the support tools to fuck around in a world of my own creation…?
Does it even matter? Does anything I do as a writer actually matter? And if it does, is it enough for my dopamine driven brain to grab on and keep going?
I think if I had the answer to this, I would already be writing (or I wouldn’t be trying to come back anymore.) And that’s the whole fucking problem. I know it doesn’t matter. And I know even if it did matter, my brain can’t conceptualize it as actually important enough right now to switch on and show up. Everything I do as a creative is an exercise in self indulgence, and my brain is bored by it.
Do other people deal with this?
There’s no way to really know myself without my deficits in executive function. When my brain was so inflamed from allergies that my OCD was everything, keeping me focused and driven, I thought that was my personality. It’s the same with ADHD; I don’t know if not having this fucked up dopamine system would mean I experience the world differently and wouldn’t be so driven by the novelty of learning to the point that everything that sparkles so quickly fades. I don’t know if having a different brain chemistry means I could be satisfied with doing the same thing again and again, and never once question — instead of always questioning — the path I find myself on.
This is my brain as I know it to be, with all its many flaws and difficulties within the current, severely flawed structure of the modern world. It is forever sharp teeth tearing into new concepts, slashing and dissecting, and then dismissing for the next meal. Never full, never satisfied. There is no plateau to rest, just the challenge of being trapped, fighting to get higher. And there’s not much I can do about it beyond live with my brain and pretend that with enough time these teeth might somehow soften, that it will eventually find whatever the fuck it’s looking for and be content.
Self destructive by design…?
This is not good content. This is not sellable as a product on a website. This is not a concept anyone seeking self-improvement wants to hear: desires in life are nothing more than chemistry and self indulgence, and we’re all puppets to our chemistry with no control in making the shit we do every day make sense or have actual value.
It’s certainly not information someone interested in growing a following as a writer for a consistent income would want to share with their readers. To know that the creative work one creates is boring to the creator? No one wants to know that. New writers don’t want to know that the creative process doesn’t fit into the mold of the capitalistic system that demands one create a product of similarity again and again and again, just so they be allowed to live on the income that’s returned. No, the reader is too caught up in the consumption. Because as my brain seeks novelty that it only feels capable of having exist if it designs it personally, their brains are seeking novelty without needing that frustrating step in between.
I miss those days of being a reader where shit was actually satisfying…
Does anyone really want to know that in the same way I create problems for my characters to solve to make an engaging story, I have to create challenges for me to solve so that I want to even show up to this gig? There’s nothing inspiring in the reality of this. But I’m not here to put a spin on it to make it inspiring. I’m here to cope with the shit-realities of it all.
Because I’m here, ready to write. And I’m so fucking bored. I’m so bored, I’m writing about why I’m bored, hoping that it will solve the problem of my boredom by pushing me further and further away from the actual writing/editing I’m supposed to do. And yeah, being self aware of it doesn’t solve shit. It’s part of the process.
Because part of the process of writing is not writing!
…See what I did there?
No, it’s not actually meaningful. It’s a fucking cop-out. But it’s the best I’ve got today as I hate on the hard truth that my brain is seeking something it is never going to have. Never. Yet it can’t fucking stop.
It’s an addict by nature. There’s no purpose in it, just coping. If I didn’t need my brain to write, shit would be so much simpler. But it can’t be simple. That’s boring to it. So here I am, ranting about shit I can’t change, before I go and do the boring shit I won’t have an excuse to avoid once I’m done writing this.
Fucking words.
How to take on a project when you don’t know if you can complete the project
As I reach the end of the creation process of my story reference database — finally — I thought it might be nice to talk about how I got here. To the end. The same end as one might find at the end of a book, or the end of a trilogy, or of a series. The end of a project that was too large to fully conceptualize, now actually completed.
This is a project I didn’t know how to do on all levels. I knew a little HTML from running the website, but that was it. I didn’t know the language. I didn’t know the syntax or what form anything was going to be within these foreign computer languages to give me the results I wanted. I didn’t know the limits of what I was asking for, and therefore didn’t know the right questions to ask. I didn’t know the path to start on, to branch to, or if I needed multiple paths to get to my destination.
The only thing I knew was that if I was ever going to write again, I needed to take this journey, because my brain was too broken to be able to write without the correct support system.
That might seem huge, unrelatable, but it’s not. This is where I come from when it comes to tackling an impossible task — you have to believe it’s impossible for whatever reason. It’s for everything I haven’t done before, and therefore I don’t know if I can do. I don’t know how to do something until I do it, and I certainly don’t know how to do it well until I mess it up enough times. This is how things that feel impossible get done — by doing.
When I decided to make this database, it was when facing the largest psychological hurdle I had ever faced. I was very aware that my brain was the most broken it had ever been, and that I couldn’t write anymore (among other things.) In that reality was not only the impossible goal I wanted to reach, but during a time when my brain was struggling the most. It should have been impossible.
Why wasn’t it?
In some ways, I truly don’t know. Because it was impossible. How could I have gotten here when I couldn’t remember the names of my characters anymore? Where I had no visual concept of what they looked like in the scene, or what the scene looked like… But the thing is, these weren’t new problems. My brain had always struggled with visualizing what I was writing, it was just worse now. Yeah, I couldn’t remember my plot arcs, or how to stay focused to form proper ideas out of my rambling sentences… but again, not new problems. They were just presenting in new, more difficult to overcome ways. And I could see that without some foundation of support — without a brain outside my flawed brain — I was far too overwhelmed to be able to juggle all these aspects to move forward.
ADHD and Executive Dysfunction
I’ve always had ADHD, but I first truly understood it to impact my life in high school. I had been an obsessive reader, reading a book a day, then something had changed in my brain and I couldn’t focus on reading anymore. I changed my values at the same time, told myself that if I wanted to be effective and change my life, I needed to be present for it. But that was how I coped with having the thing that I did — my identity as a reader — stolen for me so completely. I adapted and pivoted so well, I could pretend I hadn’t lost a piece of me.
ADHD defined me after that point, the executive dysfunctions and cognitive fog becoming my identity when I wasn’t lost to impulse and novelty. It wasn’t until the end of my 30s that I even had an inkling that I had ADHD. When I started this database, I didn’t know of my ADHD and autism, and the many executive dysfunctions that go hand in hand with the way my brain works. I learned as part of the journey of building this database and getting back to writing. It helped me understand how my brain works, why what was happening was happening. And this knowledge gave me a much more useful perspective on my path going forward.
A Lifetime of Impossible Tasks
None of it was new. I had been adapting around my executive dysfunction since my teens. The most prevalent was my poor working memory, and difficulty in storing short term memory into longterm. I was blessed with a level of intelligence that allowed me to deduce in the moment answers that others could memorize. If I studied the hours before, I could hold answers that would be long gone a week later. I passed complex math classes that way, only to realize I had no memory of formulas later. And it got worse when my immune system was flaring from living in black mold, my cognition dropping. But in those moments I was blessed with a superhuman level of neurosis that I substituted for my broken motivational system.
Even as I say blessed for both these supposed “positives” that got me through, I understand they were also completely self destructive. Neurosis is such a painful mental illness — no one asked if I had OCD back then; no one noticed that the thing I was relying on to get through what everyone else seemed to do with ease was so damn destructive. And intelligence — there is no harder prison to escape from than from an intelligent mind. Especially when mental illness comes rearing from the chemical imbalance of a raging immune system.
I needed self awareness to break out of these two gifts turned curses — and to be fair, I would say self-awareness is the sharpest double-edged sword out there. But I did gain it in my 30’s, at the same time my body failed along with my brain.
Self-Awareness: The Prison Breaker
Self awareness allowed me to see that what I thought was me failing impossible tasks up until that point, was me looking from the wrong vantage. And when my body failed and my brain was inflamed, and I was the sickest I had ever been, I took on the first impossible task that I knew was impossible, and I decided to become a writer.
And I did it. Sick as fuck, barely able to lift my arms for hours upon hours every day as I was struck by weird, mysterious glitches. Having maybe 4 hours a day of mental clarity, of my body suddenly moving like nothing had happened at all. During this time — when broken and well — I wrote stories I didn’t know how to write. And I kept writing, and self publishing, and at some point it wasn’t about me becoming a writer. I was a writer.
I had done the impossible. And then the impossible decided to double down in my late 30’s. Something in my brain broke differently, bigger than ever before, and I found myself staring at the walls most days, unable to get my brain to focus long enough to collect a thought, never mind do a thing. I couldn’t write. My executive functioning had failed so greatly that I couldn’t remember to do most anything. I was completely defined by the walls around me because my object permanence was gone, and I couldn’t remember there were rooms on the other side of doors.
So I did it again. The impossible task to become “functioning” was met and conquered.
I didn’t magically overcome the impossible, but instead built an executive functioning board along half of a wall, using words and symbols on dry erase notecards to spark my memory. Putting items in a To-Do and Done column so that I could stay on track. And as long as I could remember to look at that board before and after each task, I could do things again.
Eventually, I was able to combine those tasks into routines, my brain growing back, reconnecting. And when it glitched, the board was there, waiting to help.
And then I didn’t need the board at all… but I was still broken. My brain couldn’t adapt to my limits like it did before. I still couldn’t write.
Looking at the Impossible from a Fresh Vantage
Pinpointing my mental deficits and learning the term executive functioning were the pieces to the puzzle I needed to eventually realize I had ADHD and find a doctor to help. It led me to understand the role hormones play in ADHD as we age. And when they finally noticed my adrenals weren’t producing enough cortisol and that I had adrenal insufficiency, I learned how the adrenals play a role in hormone production.
I’d say it took at least a year with the appropriate cortisol supplementation for me to fully heal from the severe cognitive decline I had been living in from the untreated adrenal insufficiency. I’ve gotten a lot of my brain back, and the ADHD treatment has given me much more executive functionality than I’ve ever had before. Now, when I look back to when I started writing, and when I started making this database, I am truly left in wonder and absolute awe as to how the fuck I actually got here.
Because I can see from this perspective just how broken I was. When before, while living in such a struggling brain and body, all I could see was the tunnel vision of task after task, goal after goal, step after step. In that place I never allowed myself to believe I couldn’t do something. My only question was how?
Self Doubt Cannot Exist When Doing Impossible Things
You can cry. You can rail at the universe for what it has done to you for making shit so unfair. You can fight reality all you like. But if you want to do what feels like the impossible, you can never doubt yourself. It cannot be part of your identity. You can never doubt that you are going to reach the goal you’re reaching for.
The reality is, you could drop dead tomorrow having never reached your goal. But that’s not how living beings get things done. We need to be oblivious to reality when it comes to these tasks that seem so impossible. We need to be blind to the time it takes, to sacrifices made, and to our emotions when something inside of us screams ‘I’m done and I don’t want to do this anymore.’
When it comes to impossible tasks, we do not start out being the person who can complete the task. We start out being the person who will be changed by the process of trying to complete the task. And even though this is everything in life, not many are aware of how this is just the way things are.
The Motivation Has To Be Bigger Than The Goal
When I decided to become a writer, it wasn’t any easier for me to read. I had stopped reading for years, and had only come back to it because I had gotten so sick that my body would freeze and refuse to move for hours on end. Chronic fatigue isn’t sleeping all the time. It’s being in a body that refuses to move, bored out of your mind, demanding an escape. All you have left is your imagination to see you through, to remind you what living is, and that impossible task to start a business when I could barely lift my arms didn’t actually feel impossible. It just felt like the only thing to do to get through the moment.
Making this database was the only thing that I could do to be able to be a writer again. I did not write during the time I was making this database, because I couldn’t write. Making this database didn’t actually give me back the part of my brain I needed to be able to be a writer again. But what it did do was keep me focused on my goal — my impossible goal — of being able to write again while my brain was broken. It gave me hope when I saw that I could learn a new skill, a new language. And even when my cognition would drop and I would lose it all, it reminded me that I could get it back again when it came back and the code would work.
It gave me something to measure my achievements, small as they might be, while going through the process of my brain healing. While distancing me enough from my written works that I wouldn’t put my failures on to them. Because that was something that I was seeing as well. I was so focused thinking I couldn’t write, that I was going to ruin what I already created, instead of seeing that my brain was broken. It was easily promising to become a complex, and I knew that was detrimental to being able to go forward as a writer if it was allowed to sink in and take root. I didn’t want something else growing to trap me in this prison of a brain.
Taking the impossible journey was as simple as breathing. It promised something more when there was nothing. Taking on these tasks has to mean everything, otherwise why would anyone take on the impossible?
Preserving You During The Impossible Failures
Self awareness showed me where I was self destructing once again. I had learned by now, could see clearer each failure.
I transferred my end goal of being able to write, into the goal of being able to create a support system to write. The goal was the same, but when failure inevitably would strike, it was about the failure to create the needed support system instead of a failure to write.
Dealing with my vision disorder, and having my insurance provide the worst coating on what was supposed to be vision support screen glasses, was a failure of the support to help me see, not a failure of my vision. It was a failure of capitalism, of a society that thought any sort of glasses wasn’t automatically a vision aid, not on my failing sight.
It might sound so small, these little distinctions. These little transferences of where to place the pain and blame when things don’t go the way we need them to go. But it’s essential on this journey. It maintains mental well-being and self-esteem. In science, no one ever says your vision failed because you can’t see a virus with your bare eye; it’s that you failed to use or obtain the correct tools, and therefore couldn’t see what was there.
It’s a shifting of expectation and pressure that one places on oneself when we try to be accountable for everything we can’t control. It removes the question of if one is good enough, and again brings you to the how does one do something no matter abilities or talents. We’re brought to how to achieve the goal, instead of asking why all these parts of you aren’t good enough to let you reach that goal.
It’s not about owning the limitations, but about owning the solutions.
The Journey is the Goal, Not the Goal
I learned a new language and pattern of thought when my cognition was at its weakest. I held onto motivation when I literally had a failure of motivation as a result of ADHD. I was able to create the support tool I needed when my brain was at its weakest. And if I’m brutally honest, even with this support tool, at that point of my health I don’t know that I would have been able to write. I would have, because the tunnel vision would have allowed it, but without a healthier vantage, I’m not sure I would have been able to get past my perfectionist neurosis. But it would’ve given me hope and sent me looking for the answers that would help. And that is everything about taking on the impossible.
You need hope that it’s not truly impossible.
Our experiences don’t always change us into the person we need to be for the goal we’re chasing after. Sometimes they reveal that we want to be someone else. That the goal isn’t right. And that’s okay. Self-actualization is not an A+ B always = C formula. What we put in might define or shape the results, but that doesn’t mean we understand why our results are so unique and different to what we imagined.
Just like we can’t know the book we’re going to write until it’s written, wanting to be a form, a career, a completed task, an achieved goal doesn’t mean we know who we are going to be on that journey. So we have to be kind and forgiving, instead of trying to be that goal. Because if we are cruel and unaccepting of reality, fighting ourselves, filled with dissatisfaction and hate on the journey, that is the form we’re left in. The goal won’t define us; we define the goal.
So not only can you not doubt that you can do the impossible task, but you have to realize it’s not about the task at all, it’s not about the goal. It’s about you on the journey, because that’s what’s going to fuel and sustain as you do the impossible. It’s going to be why you show up. It’s going to be why you decided to take on the impossible in the first place when you have never done anything like it before. And it’s going to show you that you’re not as smart as you think you are when you look at something that seems impossible.
What we think is impossible is just our limits of imagination and experience. We haven’t become the people yet who know that it’s not impossible. It’s only in taking on the journey of the impossible that we ever get to discover the truth: impossible is just a concept, one we create. Our belief isn’t truth, isn’t fact, but just another limit we place to hold us back from meeting reality.
We’re a collection of scattered atoms with consciousness defining something we haven’t even attempted as impossible. It’s pretty nonsense the longer one even thinks of it. We have no idea what is actually impossible or not.
Migraines and Possible Vision Solutions
Well, apparently I’ve been overdue for a good migraine. It’s going on day 3 — started the middle of Tuesday after a weird bout of crying, and when it hit it didn’t feel like a headache. It felt like I had gone full right back into an episode of fatigue, brain fog, and loss of motor skills, just hunching over in front of the computer, my brain glitching out unable to do basic shit again. Seriously thought it was a thing — like an ER thing — but nope, guess that’s just the opening act of this current migraine, one that has hit with fun bouts of euphoria, less fun anxiety, and really fascinating skewed visual distortions. The pain has set in this morning, hitting in waves, and gonna be real, it’s fucking boring being sick.
I have been able to get some work done these last days — seriously, what am I really supposed to do with my time, sick or not? Stare blankly at a television screen? *snort* I’ve added some useful bits to my database code that allows me to copy templates and alter, making the multiple sheets in the character form creation a faster process. I’ve made some basic forms that I’m adapting for Demon Bonded at the moment — that’s where I wanted to go when I finished the last PATB book. I wanted to jump into Demon Bonded, get another episode out, and then write another PATB, but my executive functioning just couldn’t support that by the time the mold was cleaned up.
I’m probably going to continue coding as much as I can through the pain — creativity just isn’t sparking from this place. My brain is going through weird distortions, and I don’t want to end up writing a bunch of nonsense on the current work only to need to edit it all later. (If I’m real, I shouldn’t be coding cuz if I fuck that up, it’s so much reading to find the problem. But I can’t just sit here all day being sick. Fuck that. Let’s make a mess.)
I’m noticing something interesting of the last few days. Exciting, even. My vision issues are different with the migraine.
So, I’m not sure if it’s the fluid build up/inflammation changes happening in the head, or something to do with pain receptors not reading when the euphoria hits (leaning toward this one) but my eyes haven’t hurt much at all the last few days, even though I have absolutely been coding. I’m still photosensitive, but not in the same way I’ve been on a daily level. My eyes are still fucked, don’t get me wrong, but this eye condition has always been here since I was a kid. It’s only been recently that it’s been preventing me from doing the things I love.
After my insurance provided me with the most painful, useless support glasses to help me read the screen but instead gave me eye pain for days, I had kinda given up a lot on finding a better perspective on this shit. I hadn’t realized I had adapted down into the daily baseline pain of this condition, and that it might be better with a different intervention. The pain shutting off during the early days of the migraine reminded me that it doesn’t have to be this way. That if I can find a better solution, I might be able to claw back more of my life and functionality.
And maybe that’s just a lie I’m telling myself out of desperation and hope. But fuck, I can live off of lies if it gets me pushing toward a better tomorrow, you know? I think that’s part of the human condition, otherwise we’re just staring at the inevitability of death every day until the end. (what, that never crossed your mind as an activity you can start today? Oh, darling, existential dread is just a thought away.)
So I talked to my PCP about migraine prevention, and we’re going to try something different to the neurophthalmologist’s protocol. They can’t really be mixed because of how aspirin can interact with the new med. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll be seeking out a migraine specialist to see what they can do. What I’m looking at will take weeks to work, if it does work, and given my questionable brain chemistry, it might not be a viable option because of how it impacts the serotonin system. Aka, I might go manic and have to stop, leading to more lost days of work. But if it does work, it won’t just be preventing migraine pain; it’ll be helping with all pain. Like the eye pain and the strain of the muscles as they struggle to not default to their resting, skewed position when in use.
So as shitty as this migraine has been, I’m quite happy to tear out a silver lining and sew it into a couture garb to wear for the next months as I see how this new treatment goes. (Because yes, I’m also watching Netflix’s as I code, and I found a new season of Next in Fashion.)
