This isn’t about the US election

The last four-ish years have left me exhausted. It all stacked up. Being chronically ill, my four miscarriages, everything going wrong in the world. And 2020 itself has been a rough year for everyone. In the same ways. In different ways.

I haven’t got much (any) editing done lately. I meant to. I meant to have finished months ago. I meant to be querying by now. I meant to also be almost through a first draft of something new (currently stalled at about 50k words). I meant to draw more comics, write more stories for Silence Killed the Dinosaurs. I meant to have so much to talk about here.

It hasn’t worked out like that. The world doesn’t work out like that.

I haven’t even read many books this year. It’s nearly December and my current count for new-to-me books is a bit over 50. Which, I don’t know, maybe that sounds like a lot to you. It isn’t for me. It’s about half what I’ve read in previous years. I tend to get or at least approach 100 new reads. And I’m trying to be a Proper Writer^TM, so it is important.

I’m tired.

Over the last year, I had my fourth miscarriage in a row. A bushfire tore through my community. I bled so much I ended up in the ER and later had surgery (and I’m still not entirely sure why that happened. Probably to do with the miscarriages is anyone’s best guess). A pandemic began. My partner and I spent two weeks in quarantine. The state border between myself and my sister closed. The smoke from the fires set off my asthma and I couldn’t leave the house at all for a full month until my new preventor medication kicked in because every time I did the shock of the winter air made my lungs try to suffocate me.

When the pandemic started, I actually had a pretty good idea what it would be like for people. I became chronically ill in 2014, and for the first year and a half I was so sick I could barely leave the house. My whole life changed. I could still see close friends and family, at least, but I didn’t have much tolerance for it. I couldn’t handle more than a very occasional, short, quiet visit while propped up with pillows. I lost touch with so many people I’d always caught up with in groups because I simply couldn’t do those kinds of social gatherings anymore. I watched my life trickle away, wasted. It was lonely and frustrating.

That’s not exactly the same as a pandemic, especially because inside-time during a pandemic isn’t wasting your life—it’s saving people. I wish I could say something like that about my useless 2014/15. But, still, it was similar enough that I had an inkling of how lockdown would feel. So I bunkered down to draw light-hearted comics, hoping to save the smallest part of someone’s day. I didn’t know what else I could do.

But I’m tired.

I’ve become so used to bad news—in my personal life, in the world—that it’s hard to believe there’s any other kind out there. Hard to let it in when it happens.

It is happening, though.

I’m lucky to live in a place like Australia, where officials moved quickly and sensibly when the pandemic took off. Hardly anyone I know has had covid, and no one I know has died of it. My state had a little hiccup over the last couple of weeks and we went into lockdown … for three days before they realised the outbreak wasn’t as bad as they’d feared and let us out again. There are still extra restrictions in place and officials are watching the situation, but it’s starting to look like they managed to trace and contain all the cases in a matter of days. And Melbourne has been back on top of things for ages now.

There will be a vaccine. It may be a little way off, especially factoring in distribution. We may need boosters every year or so. But more and more candidates are finishing stage three trials successfully. Something is going to help. This won’t be forever.

The US yeeted Trump. (Well, maybe just a little bit about the US election, then). Honestly, I wasn’t sure it would happen. I’d completely given up on sensible decisions from people as a group. But his presidency is finally in its (very pathetic) death throws. We won’t see him on TV mocking people with disabilities or inciting violence against minority communities for much longer, at least not with any authority, and my friends in America should have a better shot at navigating the rest of the pandemic safely.

And maybe some other things are looking up too, although I can’t talk about it (I know, unfair of me).

I’m still tired.

I don’t really believe any of it yet, not deep down where it soaks into your bones and affects the way you think. But … maybe … things are going to heal. Not in a never-been-broken way, but at least in a better-than-it’s-been-lately way.

So I’m going to try not to be too hard on myself for collapsing. I’m just going to get up and get going again, between naps, at whatever snail speed suits my worn-out body and bruised psyche.

And.

One morning I woke up happy. I was happy before I even opened my eyes. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. Almost four years, I think.

I like writing in cafes

Definitely a cliche.

But it’s like having an office. Not a home office, but a proper office. Proper offices have noisy people moving about and stuff going on and people interrupting occasionally to try and get you do something. Only it’s much nicer to be interrupted by a sales pitch for another cup of coffee than by a plea for help unjamming the printer.

This probably sounds like a weird thing to appreciate, since a universal human experience seems to be hating offices, but I don’t have a real workplace. I don’t have a day job. I would like a day job. No, I would love a day job. It would take the pressure off making this writing thing work out, allow me to demonstrate my competency to myself and boost my self-esteem and, you know, give me a bit of cheeky spending money for those fun, luxury items such as bills and food.

But my chronic illness makes a traditional job unfeasible, and (since I have a partner who has a decent enough job to keep a roof over our heads) I sit at home all day doing the best I can between crashes with pens and a keyboard.

Pre-pandemic, my workplace was me and my cat. But there’s a really, really good cafe just over the hill, so about once I week (if I was feeling up to the walk) I would take my laptop over there.

Sometimes I would go to the cafe to change scenery. I find that really helpful for thinking. Just changing what’s around me can jostle things loose.

Sometimes I would go because I was struggling to focus, to trap myself in a place where I had nothing to do but write and drink coffee.

Sometimes I would go to get away from my cat. Don’t get me wrong, I love my cat, but he’s an entitled stage five clinger who will fight my laptop (And my arms. And my legs) to get my undivided attention. When he’s having a particularly dick-ish day, it’s good to be somewhere else.

Sometimes I would go because I needed to be around people. Not because I was lonely, per say. It wasn’t to have D&Ms with the baristas. It was just to see and hear people. To have their noise around me. To smile and say ‘hi, how are you?’ and say ‘yeah, good’ when someone asked it back even if it was a massive lie.

Before the pandemic, I don’t think many people would have understood why I needed that. Maybe you do now.

I really missed it this year.

Fortunately, things are looking good where I live. My state has had no community transmission for at least a month, and the few cases it has had have all come from overseas or interstate and been in quarantine the whole time. Our measures seem to be working. Because of my chronic illness (plus asthma, because I have that too), I’m still extra cautious. But the situation has remained steady long enough that I trust the measures to hold. Or, if they don’t, that they’ll give enough of a heads up for me to hide before covid gets absolutely everywhere.

So I’ve started (occasionally and while slathered in hand-sanitizer) to work in the cafe again.

‘Hi, how are you today?’

‘Yeah, good.’

Massive lie.

Bliss.

Wakey, wakey

You know that nightmare where there’s a bad thing and it’s coming for you, but you can’t move fast enough? Your joints rust up, the air turns to syrup, you can’t even open your mouth to scream?

That’s what my last week has been like.

My body has been dragging me down, pulling me into naps and tying me to the couch or even my bed. My head has been stuffed with clouds that swamp my thoughts, decisions, feelings. My partner had to mute the TV any time he said anything because I couldn’t follow two things at once, and even when he did he still had to repeat himself often, give me a second chance to follow his words without them falling out my head before I could process their meaning.

This happens sometimes. I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), sometimes also referred to as Myalgic Encephalomyealitis (ME). I’ll never be healthy. I’ll always have crashes like this, always have bad days (weeks, months) where I can do nothing but give my body a chance to recover.

It’s frustrating.

Which is a horrendous understatement. There isn’t a big enough word for how it feels to be held down and forced to watch time tick by, life trickle through the hourglass, everyone else rushing around, getting things done, making progress with their lives.

When I first got sick back in 2014 it was so bad I could barely move myself around the house. Study was impossible. A regular job was impossible. Preparing my own food was impossible. I desperately wanted to throw myself into writing, but that was only a hair away from impossible too. I tried anyway. Through trial and error I felt out that hair of wiggle room. If it was a good day, if I half-lay on the couch or in bed propped up with pillows, if I did nothing else, then I could write for about 45 minutes before my brain was squished in the vice of a week-long migraine.

45 minutes, non-negotiable. 45 minutes and STOP no matter how I was feeling in the moment because it would catch up in a few hours. 45 minutes, only on good days, or I’d lose a whole week or more.

I will never say CFS was worth it, but it sure did wonders for my time management.

Last week’s crash lifted over the weekend, downgrading from sick-tired to normal-tired. The kind of tired a healthy person might feel if they’d been busy and slept poorly. The kind of tired that is manageable, so long as I respect it.

Every time I crash, it feels permanent. It feels like it will never end, that huge chunks of me are lost forever.

But I’m back.

I’m back.

I’m back.

It should be a glorious awakening, like a butterfly emerging in kaleidoscopic colours or a necromancer rising from the dead, laughing manically amid a storm of power. But this is reality, so it’s just regular old me with extra dark circles oozing out of bed and dragging myself across the floor while zombie-moaning ‘halp, coffee, pls.’*

But whatever it looks like, I am back. I can think. And I would like—please, please, desperately please—my 45 minutes so I can put as much distance as possible between me and the bad thing, scream as loud as I want, and make a mark on my life. (And I’m really hoping ’45 minutes’ is a metaphor for functional time between crashes and not literally only 45 minutes because I just used all that time and more writing this and I kind of hoped I’d get more done today).

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* which doesn’t do anything for this kind of fatigue, but does forestall the inevitably caffeine-withdrawal headache by another day. Plus, I just like coffee.