Falling at the trauma hurdle

I didn’t meet my goals last month.

Read a Book: Done.

Post here: Not done until right now, and I think it’s crossed the line where this one has to count for November and not a late October.

Novel progress: Wrote a little on WIP (maybe 1000 words, don’t want to over sell it) and submitted a pitch for the completed novel to a couple of publishers.

Write a Short Story: Got half way through.

I started strong. Began the short story early, kept thinking and letting it brew and adding little bits. But then I went off the rails.

I had a Trauma Reaction.

That’s what I call it. I have PTSD following multiple miscarriages. There’s probably an official name for what I am referring to, possibly triggered. To me, a Trauma Reaction is when something sets off (triggers, I guess) the trauma bits lodged in my brain, and I feel indefinably crappy for … however long.

It’s ‘indefinably crappy’ because for ages I could not define it beyond ‘idk, crappy?’ Before I had my PTSD diagnosis I assumed I must be having some variant on my usual bouts of depression and anxiety, even though it didn’t quite match. I would feel wired, kind of like anxiety, but without the Immediate Threat of Body Combustion panic factor. And it lasted way too long, sometimes days or weeks. It brought negative self-talk with it, but didn’t seem to hinge on it, and it never felt dark enough to be a depression spiral. It was more like I would get emotionally stuck somewhere else, my body and brain in the right scene but my emotions reading from another script.

Panic is acid yellow. Depression is flat grey. This was dull red.

As I didn’t know what it was, I would try to deal with it the way I would deal with anxiety or depression. Which didn’t work.

When I was told I had PTSD, it made sense. It didn’t feel like depression or anxiety because it wasn’t. It wasn’t responding to the things that worked for them because it was different.

It’s been easier to deal with since figuring that out, but I’m still learning the ropes.

Which brings us to this last month I went to a book-launch/author-talk thing with a friend from my writer’s group and had a Trauma Reaction.

To be clear, the author-talk was really good. I am not at all mad about anything that was discussed. She was great. My reaction was my own baggage I brought and is my own business to deal with.

It was with Holly Ringland, who was very insightful, on the subject of creativity. What hit me was when she talked about the difference between procrastination due to fear and procrastination due to trauma. She described facing trauma through her work, particularly how it made it hard to sit down and write, and how that felt different to the more garden variety procrastination urge from fear of failure. And my entire body went

The world narrowed to red. It wasn’t just a Trauma Reaction, it was more like a Trauma-Reaction-Ception, because what I really had was a Trauma Reaction about realising I keep having Trauma Reactions whenever I try to write.

Right up until that moment, I had no clue there was anything sinister behind me having such a hard time getting words down.

I’ve spent a few of week trying to figure out why I’ve been having Trauma Reactions about writing. I mean, my trauma is around pregnancy, pregnancy loss, fertility, health and medicine. I write commercial fantasy in which (at least so far) I have not included a pregnant or trying character or anything overtly to do with my issues.

Why would writing set off a Trauma Reaction?

My best guess is because I wrote through the time when it all happened. I was in this haze for years while I went through loss after loss, test after test. I had so many ultrasounds I lost count. (For real, recently me and my doctor were trying to find the official report on one of them and we couldn’t because there were so many other ultrasound records for it to hide amongst in her records system). I had nothing else, so I wrote. I wrote and I wrote. Right up until the day I gave birth to my daughter.

And then … I didn’t.

I had just done a childbirth and had a newborn to look after. I didn’t even think about writing for months. And while those months passed, my world turned. It became something full of happiness and love and snuggles (and screaming and sleeplessness and mastitis but, you know, overall). Everything became golden. The red world from before faded to a ghost.

And it took writing with it, as I had accidentally stitched them together.

Just realising all this has helped. After, I managed to submit pitches to two different publishers for my finished novel, which is something I’ve been avoiding for a long time now. So something has shaken loose. But I haven’t written a word of fiction (even this took weeks to face).

So.

My job now is to bring writing back into the present.

Quite frankly, I’m not sure how I do that.

All I’ve come up with so far is to keep at my one-short-story-a-month idea (since I didn’t write them before and the quick turn around should keep everything fresh and moving) even though it hasn’t worked yet, and to try write in locations around the house I didn’t write in back then. My therapist suggested to also start to wear a writing hat and maybe put a plant in my new writing location. Which, honestly, I don’t hate. Any excuse for new hats and plants.

Any tips? Have you experienced something like this?

Can we kill the tortured artist please

When I was a child I told an adult that I wanted to be an author, and in response they told me that only people who had suffered before they turned ten could write good books.

This worried me.

See, I was about eleven or twelve at the time, and I hadn’t done much suffering. Not only were both my parents still alive, they weren’t even divorced. In fact, they weren’t just together, they were good together. They role-modelled a healthy, functional relationship founded on mutual respect. To this day, I have never heard them speak to each other in a hurtful way. And although my siblings and I sometimes annoyed each other in the way siblings do, I knew it would be a reach to claim they caused me suffering.

So I hoped desperately that the bullying I experienced at school and the complete social failure that followed would be enough and that the universe would not begrudge my career choice simply because this had started a few months after my tenth birthday rather than before it.

It was a silly thing to worry about, but it felt very real at the time.

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The reason I struggled to launch this blog and to write an announcement post on Silence Killed the Dinosaurs was that every time I tried to tell my story of writing, I would find myself getting caught up in my miscarriages. And now when I try and write a blog post—just a normal, standard blog post—I’m still tangled. So let’s get it out of the way, and then maybe I will have brain space for other things.

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Over the last four years I have had four miscarriages. It was traumatic, both physically and emotionally. It is still traumatic. It has sent me to hospital five times: three times for day-surgery, one time for medicine-based treatment, once to the ER for gushing blood and fist-sized clots. The last time I was in hospital, I started sobbing as they put me under. I felt so silly for it, but I just couldn’t stop. They moment I woke up, I was crying again. The nurses called my husband and got him to come into recovery and sit with me because they didn’t know how else to help.

I think, by anyone’s standards, this counts as suffering.

Before all this drama began, I had just started writing my novel seriously. In many ways, having something to write, having another world for my mind to inhabit, has helped me survive this trauma. But the trauma has not helped me write.

For me, writing has always been a game. It is fun. It is somewhere I can let my brain run like a dog off the leash (so long as I am willing to go around after it and scoop up its poop). It is also hard and frustrating and never perfect the first time or maybe ever dammit, but even then, it still comes from playfulness. The more of that I have, the more ideas I have, the more expression I have, the more I can write.

Conversely, the less of that I have, the fewer ideas I have, the less expression I have, the less I can write. And suffering does not make me feel playful. It makes me doubt myself, makes me waste time forcing myself to get started, makes me stare emptily at the wall. Having miscarriages has slowed down every aspect of my life, but especially writing.

And I feel guilty about that.

Here I am, all this juicy suffering handed to me on a platter, just waiting for me to turn it into something wonderful. After all, that’s what writers and artists do, right? That’s what I’ve always been told.

If someone tried to sell me the Tortured Artist Myth now, I would not buy it, would not even take it for free. But it’s too late. I accepted it a long time ago and held it tight for too many years. It’s a hard thing to let go, but I want it gone.

Because here’s the thing.

Even if there was an alternate version of me who was spurred on by horrible things, who could spin sadness into hilarity and pain into beauty, I don’t think that would make it worth it. I think that version of me would still wish all the blood-soaked heartbreak undone, even if I had to give back the creative mastery along with it.

My happiness is worth something to me. I am more than what I can produce. And so are you.