Rereading these entries feels like talking to a stranger. That articulate, passionate person has all but burned away, it feels like. These last four years have taken their toll.
I won't get into the litany of diagnoses I now live with but the most debilitating of them are bipolar disorder and fibromyalgia, the latter of which has prevented me from continuing school, playing cello, or pursuing any regular work. School and work require you to be able to show up and perform regularly, despite whatever flare ups you may be having. And with cello, there are many days when muscle fatigue is so considerable that I have trouble playing for longer than twenty minutes. Hell ,some days I have trouble of bed. Regardless, twenty minutes a day is not nearly enough to keep up with a music performance degree, let alone a career.
There have been a few personal life troubles, falling-outs with family and friends that rocked me to my core, since I am apparently an oversensitive turd. I faceplanted out of school, once again, except this time my health was gone. I was now disabled. I don't know if you've grown up the way I have, where good enough is never good enough, where only the best is worth anything. With it comes this understanding -- if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything.
Well, guess fucking what. Being disabled takes that away from you. It doesn't matter how hard you work, how hard you beat at that solid wall, you have a physical limitation that you have to work with now, and no amount of effort will ever overcome it. It'll be five times harder for you to accomplish half as much. THAT'S your life now. Can you handle it?
And for a few months, the answer was no. I was at rock bottom. I don't even really remember that time. There was a half-hearted, doomed to fail OD-attempt, more self-harm than anything with a destination in mind. When everything you'v ever worked for in your life is taken away from you in an instant, no matter how hard you try, it's devastating. If it's something you built your identity on, it's nearly impossible to heal. Who are you, now that you're not a real musician?
And it didn't help that most of the musician family was eager to discard me. There are more promising cousins to lavish who aren't washed up disabled failures. They're more fun to brag to the donors about.
I was doing pretty badly for a long time. And then one day I just got ... sick of myself. I don't how to explain it but it was like I felt a spark alive in the pile of ash, not one of hope or optimism but of spite. No, it doesn't end like this. This doesn't defeat me.
I say when.
So, bit by whiny bit, I'm picking myself out of this dump of failure and self-hatred. I still have some fight left in me. I can't study or go to work, sure, but I have constant time to work on my writing projects. I can research nonstop, I can sit for an entire day hyperfocused on an outline, until it is ironclad. And little by little, I'm increasing how many words I can write in a day. I'm learning to stop criticizing myself into a standstill, and allowing something imperfect and potentially even charming to exist.
I even found a concentration of original stuff I want to work on, and it blossomed out of another passion: history. I decided that in addition to speculative fiction and fantasy, I'm going to write historical fiction based on the Civil War and Reconstruction -- there are so many fascinating untold stories from that time and they deserve to be known, I firmly believe that it would help the abysmal political situation in this country if we just had some accurate historical education, for fuck's sake. We'd be able to see the patterns, and know when disaster is coming.
Well, anyway. I've decided things are looking up, lil bloggie. I'm writing my original stories (a secret for now) and a little fanfic on the side to keep me limber, and to keep from taking myself too seriously. I'm working hard, and that's just about all you can do. Good things ahead.
