Author: pookiebear

research i: overwhelmed

Overwhelmed when starting to write a book

I’m panicking and procrastinating but mostly panicking.
This week or weeks coming soon hold a lot of finals for me: this was the last week for chiro/pt and my front end web dev class. Next week is my final week of unemployment. I’m selling my car next week or the week after. After months of studying and having some sort of purpose, my schedule is empty. My medicating shrink noted he was afraid I would get bored silly and I guffawed and pointed out I have been out of work for the last 2.5 years and if there is anything I can do is fill my time with meaningful things.
Except here I am with that time and I’m panicking.
The local job hunt remaining disappointingly unfruitful, TEH and I agreed (I was fairly pushy in the process) we are going to go to the family cabin on Memorial Day weekend and stay until Labor Day. Louisvillian summers are wretched — it’s not unusual for it to go weeks in the high 90sF with little or no rain. Spring isn’t much better. The dog, she of very little snout, starts to get woozy and pant-y around 75F. Spending the summer cooped up in Louisville is not in the cards. So I sold the idea I would find a part-time gig up north and in my downtime write a book. I accepted the challenge in December and then conveniently put the challenge away when more immediate things needed my attention.

#

Jesus fuck, I’ve touted I’ve been writing a book for years, surely I can be more than talk — I can totally do this.I’ve taken on larger projects and seen them to completion.  I can do this.

#

There is no more choice or shouldas or possibles, it has to happen. Now, finally, the gods have bestowed me a fairly clear mind, a place to live / fed / watered, support system emotionally and mentally, and time. Glorious and precious time.
I’m in a really good place.
Except.
Except.
I’m panicking and panicking hard. ( I keep saying this and yes, I know this means what I think it means.)
I decided today was going to be the day to begin. Pens were clicked and the book’s notebook first pages were smoothed down. A new folder was created in my bookmarks manager and I moved over URLs from the before (because there will always be a before) to the new folder. I dug through some previously read books with bibliographies and added those books to my own growing bibliography. I started to list  topics I needed to cover (general history, fashion, women actresses, women photographers) adding in broad search topics such as “belle epoque” (French version of Edwardian), “art nouveau,” “spiritualism,” “Edwardian postcards,” and “gibson girl.” I found myself on a Wikipedia rabbit hole bookmarking anything that looked remotely interesting while my chest got heavier and I clicked my pen open to close. Open to close.
An hour or two into this exercise, I got a bee in my bonnet I needed to have a Coke Slurpee which put TEH and me on a scavenger hunt around town (nearest 7-11 is 200 miles away so we settled for Speedway freezee). Then I read Facebook. Checked email. Bemoaned the state of interlibrary lending in the state of Kentucky and found a workaround which led to randomly checking to see what books could be available for me to get via ILL. Checked Facebook again. Wrote a few lines for this post. Contacted the local university (U of L) to see if they had some kind of visiting patron cards available rather than having to wait six weeks for materials to arrive at my local library. I ate Cool Ranch Dorritos, wiping finger crumbs on a damp cloth napkin, while I sucked down 44 oz of frozen, slushy Coke deliciousness. I took my hair out of the bun and shook it free, spending a few minutes combing it to let my hair “breathe.” I’ve come back and forth Facebook, rabbit hole now on non-related topics, writing here, eating something, kissing TEH.
I need to breathe, not just my hair.

#

The plethora of topics may be too much. An ageing London actress (look up “london stage edwardian,” “london theatres,” “london west end,” “edwardian fashion,” and “edwardian actresses”) who picks up photography (search for “women photographers,” “history of photography,” and “victorian cameras”), and add in spiritualism (look up “spiritualism victorian”) and may be pals with Arthur Conan Doyle (find “Arthur Conan Doyle AND spiritualism”) with a dash of mystery involved.

And the supernatural. Of course.

I panic because this book has to be written — it’s been rattling around my brain for the last five years. It may not get published but it needs to be written, then hugged, and gently put to bed and loved every once in a while. It may be terrible and overwrought but it will be mine and mine alone. I feel if I don’t write this book, all I will be doing is cranking out mediocre short fiction waiting, with downturned baited breath, for the eventual rejections to arrive.

When I came across a problem with my front end web dev class, I would step away for an hour or two or the night or whatever and when I came back to the project, the answer was always crystal clear. Always. It became a pattern if I could not figure it out on my own, leaving it to simmer for a while brought forth the answer.
It never failed.
Tonight, I will post this, walk my dog, do my yoga, and watch TV for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow I will begin again, taking considertion into the previous days work. Nothing will be for naught or regretted. This book will be done and along with every other momentus challenge in my life, I will survive.

eff rejection

on, well, getting rejected.

(Hrm. I can’t seem to get the image to straighten. You get the drift.)
Saturday the paper proof for The Lisa Chronicles Vol 1 showed up and having a solid form of my book in my hand feels awesome.(I borrowed the design heavily from an existing traditional publisher as I liked the simplicity of the style.) There are some minor corrections that need to be done.Even the low resolution pictures (times were different back in the late ’90s) were not as grainy as I would have thought. Overall, I am pretty pleased with how the book turned out.
I’ve got a post brewing on freeing the content but the short version is I’m providing .pdf and .mobi versions of my work for free on this website as well as putting the ebook and print copies for sale at fine retailers such as Amazon and Kobo.
Speaking of books, I sent the manuscript for my first chapbook to my editor and the return wasn’t as bad as I thought. While I’m gungho on doing the printing and such myself, I’m wavering on having it professionally published mainly because of the marketing angle. I can boast on freeing the content and getting my work into as many hands as possible,all I want but I do want to get some kind of token payment for my work.
Publications brings me to rejections.

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Ray Bradbury is credited with the “write one, submit one” methodology. It’s self-explanatory: You write one piece and you submit a piece every week. (I’ve also seen write one submit one daily but that is some crazy shit.) The more you write, the better you get, and even if you make one sale, it’s enough to keep you going as soon you’ll have two sales and so forth and so on.
Mr. Bradbury goes into more detail below.
https://youtu.be/YlYAhSffEDM
Right now I’m ahead of the game: I wrote and submitted ten pieces in February, had one acceptance and three rejections. Even if the other six reject me, I’m still coming out a winner.
But the rejection still hurts. The sting was intensified when two of the rejections came in one day. WHY WON’T THEY UNDERSTAND MY PROWESS WITH WORDS??
Mr. Bradbury continues he went through a similar thing, we all go through a similar thing. You look back at your earlier work and see how terrible it is because it is terrible. You’re a beginner at this game and no one is going to excel coming out of the gate. But you don’t know until you submit and get rejected.
I found this sentiment to be particularly true of a piece, Palmistry for Beginners, I wrote a couple of years ago. A speculative piece, I posited the question of what if we could change our life if we changed the major lines on our palms. If you’re not familiar with palmistry, the idea is the lines on your palms represent different aspects of your life (love, health, wealth, life, etc) and they can also predict the future. I’m not sure if I buy into this wholly BUT I once went to a palm reader who predicted a breakup with a major boyfriend which happened two days later; I would have no kids, and I would get married twice. So far she’s at 90% and as Mr. Lisa and I have talked about getting married again, she’d be 100% correct. Coincidence? Sure, but sometimes there could be bigger things at stake.
I’m asiding here. Back to my short story.
I sent the piece to a speculative fiction site and it got rejected. I revised the story a year later and it too got rejected. I still couldn’t understand why. A year after that, I re-read the piece and it was terrible. Tenses were all over the place, the plot dropped and came back and dropped again. I would reject me.
I started revising again and found the original story needed to be double the length to get the plot fully fleshed out and coherent. This is a story I’m going to have to diagram / comment / note take / and whatever implement I need to use to get it into shape.
This will be the hardest story I’ve written at this point.
In this process, I learned a couple of things about myself:

  • I cannot use my bipolar mania, which I am horribly guilty of doing,  to conflate everything I write as a Pulitzer piece
  • I need to figure out a writing style and stick to it. It’s okay to change direction but that direction depends on the type of work. I’m enamoured of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Bukowski but I write, for now, like some James Joycian and Virginia Woolf bastard step-child. I like clean and succinct writing styles. Getting a sure footing on my voice will make a huge difference instead of changing to ten different voices in the span of a single piece.
  • As some of my work is not a linear introduction, conflict, resolution style, this is not a bad thing. Finding a market for it may be difficult but I need to get into the groove of what makes me feel good as I write. “Write what I want to read” is hammered all over writing blogs.
  • All ideas are good ideas. Even if they seem ridiculous, an idea is better than no idea. Some of my ideas are terrible but that’s okay. I have ideas.
  • Revise. Send it to my editor. Revise again. Rinse, lather, repeat.

A year ago I would have given but rejection gives me hope and forces me to be a better writer and in the end, isn’t what is most important of all?
 
 

chapbooks

I’ve been thinking a lot about putting together a chapbook of my work. As expected with the internet, paper chapbooks are not quite as popular as they once were, so, why do one?

I’ve been thinking a lot about putting together a chapbook, a short anthology of poems/fiction/whatever that is usually up to 40 or so pages long though the number is not a hard number. Chapbooks, mainly poetry and constructed in various forms, have been around since roughly the 16th century. As expected with the internet, paper chapbooks are not quite as popular as they once were, tho’ like vinyl they are making a comeback, so, why do one?
The non-blog works of lisarabey.com are, I suppose, chapbooks in their own right if you organise them into groupings which I’ve sorta done. But the online aesthetic isn’t what I’m shooting for as I recently joked to TEH I wanted to have a shelf of my printed work and printed chapbooks would be an excellent way to start to make that happen.
But how and where to publish them? (I’ll get more into the “what” later on.)
I’ve got a couple of options that are open to me: I can find a chapbook publisher and handle it through them or I can do it myself. With the chapbook publishing route, I can get the pieces professionally edited, the book designed, built-in distribution, and some basic publicity being handled. If I go down the route myself, I can either edit the work or hire an editor (thankfully, I know one and she is cheapish), do the design, distribution, and publicity myself.
After doing some research on chapbook publishers, I decided to go down the myself route. I’ve got basic ebook design and publishing down to a science now but I could always learn more and I like the DIY activity of it. In name, at least, I do have my own publishing house, so I can publish under that imprint. The distribution markets will be a tough nut to crack. I can sell them via etsy and check local bookstores and gift shops that could sell my work. Publicity, with prose at least, I’ll find reviewers, do social media, the whole nine yards.
But really, truly honesty between us pals? No one reads archives anymore and there is so much good in those words that not being seen by more eyes is a shame.
I’ve got two projects in mind for the chapbook route. The first is combining downpour on my soul and downpour revisited into a single work. Related pieces, downpour on my soul was published in 1996 and downpour revisited in 1997. The first one an online prose piece in response to dating on the internet in 1995 – 96. It was 47 pages handwritten and clocks in around 6000 words. It is an intense no holds barred look at my love life happening online and off. The piece was written in a manic phase that lasted two days. It was, for a very long time, one of the first pieces that received some minor notoriety. While no personal details are given, I have had men referenced in the piece threaten me with libel. (Obviously, none of it came to pass.) It’s also the piece most people seem to resonate with.
The second piece, downpour revisited, was written in 1997 as a follow-up / response to its predecessor. That one is as intense yet it’s formatted differently. As it was not written during a manic phase, the voice is less rushed, less obnoxious. It does, however, feel a bit forced at times but that could be I re-read the damn thing 90000 times in the last six months.
The second project is collating my pieces from Fucked Up College Kids, the ‘zine I wrote for in 1997 – 98. There are 12 pieces (located here — scroll down and on your right) where I rage, admonish, rant, and piss people off. I was 25 and did not know any better.  While the copyright has reverted back to me years ago, I’ve been in touch with the editor to see if I can use the name when I put that chapbook together. I haven’t heard from him yet.
From there I’d like to start writing chapbook only work and start releasing that as well. I’m pretty excited about this whole endeavour.
I’ll be offering all of my work. chapbooks and books, to download for free in pdf, .mobi, and .epub and you can also buy them as ebooks and print copies for reasonable costs. My reasoning here is I’d rather have more people read my work and be engaged rather than make a few bucks. (Because literally, that is all I would make and in the negatives after you add in the cost of work.)
But more on that later.

new piece in lit.cat

My piece, first grade crush, is now over on lit.cat! You should go read it.

I submitted my piece, first grade crush, this past Sunday morning and received notification that evening it was accepted for the next publication which came out yesterday.
Fastest notice ever.
(Followed up when I applied for a gig a few years ago at Harvard in the evening and received the rejection the following morning. I was crushed it was not sent on parchment via owl.)
The story is based on the fact I named my brother after my first grade crush, which is all true.
Anyway, you should go read it.
(I’m also going to plug and say you should read lit.cat even if they didn’t publish my piece. Their issues are set up for a total of 30 minute reads and they publish twice a month. I’ve been impressed with the quality of writing over there.)

frothing

A complex story about SSDI, Medicaid, and being crazy in America. (And a poem.)

It shouldn’t any big surprise I’ve applied for Social Security Disability (SSDI) and I’m finally not in a spot of shame to admit this is happening. The first batch of paperwork, on functioning in society, has arrived and I spent the morning getting the packet completed. Eight legal paper sized pages with questions ranging from why I left my last place of work (they fired me for not doing my job) to if I’m getting dressed (I’m in my jim-jams unless I have to go out) and bathing (every other day and on days I go out) and to how well do I do interacting with others and can I handle authority. Can’t I just give them a link to my blog? (Probably not going to happen.)

A second packet has also arrived on my work history. That is getting filled out on another day.

I was to go visit a mosque today to show my solidarity but filling out the paperwork was stressful and I found my focus and concentration waning with each flip of the page. I forced myself to plow through and the payment for this is a head buzzing with racing thoughts and looking at an afternoon of nothingness. That’s not entirely true — I’ll find myself working on homework for my front end web dev class and doing more writing. However, I just cannot go out into the world right now.

I am trying to hard to articulate this feeling of being locked inside your head so much you cannot interact with society. It is stressful but a much needed conversation.

You cannot see the fits and starts of me writing this but it is happening.

I’m also finally accepting I’ll be on Medicaid for awhile. The locations of the services are in areas of town that haven’t seen love in decades. We have found here if you’re white, you don’t go past 9th St, which then becomes the west end. This is where all the “undesirables” (aka brown, black, and Trump supporters) live and it is so obvious the city gives no fucks as there are burnt out warehouses, increased homeless population, and it is the poorest zip code in the county. (Ours is the second poorest but the area is gentrifying so yay?)
I attach a lot of white privilege and shame when I go to the doctor’s offices. I drive a swish car, carry a swish bag, wear swish clothes, and live in a swish condo. The shame comes from I have so many gratitudes for TEH for taking me in and I am so, so, so lucky I’m not out on the street which many do not have these things. Why is she here?, I believe they think when they see me. I’m just another white girl taking advantage of the system when there are people much more deserving than I am. I believe they are right – I shouldn’t be here. I am very privileged and I acknowledge that privilege every day I wake up in a warm place, with food in my belly, and clothes on my back. I rejected the social services available to me when I first moved here because I believed I didn’t deserve it. I shouldn’t take it even though my brain is on fire and I can barely get up to dress and take care of myself.
Once TEH finally convinced I had paid into the system for over 20 years, this is why it’s here for occasions like this. One day at the beginning of a crisis mode, I called the local mental health line looking for help and they sent me to the community mental health center. This was better, I thought, than hospitalization because that cost money and being seen at the clinic did not. I arrived the following day at open to get someone to see me. At best, I had some hope of relief and worst — I didn’t want to think about it.
The homeless, drug addicts, mentally ill, some people all three, where there when the doors open for drugs, counseling, sometimes just a snack and warmth. Even in the midst of my crisis, I felt too functioning to be there. I was told on the phone they would take walk-ins so I registered as soon as I got to the reception desk, sat down after giving my information, and read all day waiting for someone to call my name. Never happened. I go and ask what is my status and they tell me they stopped talking walk-ins a half-an-hour before I asked. I went home, took my clothes off, put on my jimjams and crawled on the couch and waited for the crisis to past. Other than sleeping, occasionally eating, and using the bathroom, I remained nearly immobile for two days.
My pride is deteriorating my health so I now use those services I was once too ashamed to take. I am getting PT for my ankle of doom, chiropractic care for my back. I have a primary physician and an OB/GYN. I have a talking therapist and a medicating therapist who monitors my drugs.
I remain lucky I was saved out of the cracks before I fell much farther down.
So I’m covered and I’ll remain covered until it’s taken away from me if the republicans have their way. Being bipolar is a pre-existing condition and if Medicaid goes away, I am marrying TEH again to get health insurance. This has already been agreed upon.

If I sound contradictory, all over the place, and sounding like an asshole – I probably am. This is a complicated and complex issue. I have swallowed my pride and I use the services available to me because I need them and they are there for me. I am rejecting all the shame because that is exactly why they exist and what I’ve paid into for nearly 30 years. (I started working at 14 with my first job at an ice cream parlor. I’m now 44.)
(It goes without saying if you have voted for Trump, I hope you die in a rotting fiery death of hell with your genitals torn off and shoved down your throat.)

This is not where I planned to go today but the frustration of writing down my life in pen about the status of my mental health, wondering if I sound too functioning when there are times every week I can barely function, to get some help is maddening. The more I talk about it, the more people are willing to share their stories and the feeling of kinship gives me hope.

Finding out my status on SSDI could take as long up to three months. If rejected, I’ll just apply again, and keep applying until I get something to help financially.  I have some unemployment money coming in and that pays my bills but TEH covers my living costs. I’m selling my car soon, which will help pay off my debt and lighten the financial load considerably. I’ve applied for roughly 50 or so jobs since I’ve been back here and nothing has or is panning out. I have no hope of working but I keep trying thinking one day soon I’ll snap back into old Lisa mode and can function into society but I know, realistically, recovery takes a long time, sometimes years. According to the officials, I am way better off than I was even six months ago, and I recognize that, but it’s frustrating. Frustrating has become my word of choice lately and it peppers everything I do.

I don’t want to leave this on a sour note so here is a bit of happy news: Last week I wrote on my writing blog I’m writing and submitting my work more than ever. In the last two weeks, six pieces have been submitted to various magazines and I’m hoping some good news will be coming my way soon-ish. I’ve got a few other pieces in progress and I’m taking an online writing course to tighten up what I have. I feel hopeful here. (Tho’ return on submission is slow — some are saying up to four to six months and no simultaneous submissions.)
Here is a 15 syllable fixed heiku poem that I submitted to tinywords:
lips cherry red     body sags
hollow breath     she is then released

and you get a submission, and you get a submission

Because instead of making an actual big production about it, I sat down and actually wrote some shit and submitted said shit.

I am a BEAST.
Last week Friday, I cranked out a 15 syllable poem for submission to tinywords, a 2K word blog post, and a 3K creative non-fiction essay  I submitted to BuzzFeed. If I still smoked, there would have been a cigarette at the end of the day.

The poem that I submitted to tinywords:
lips cherry red     body sags
hollow breath      she is then released
A 15 syllable poem is a fixed haiku and the layout is as above: two lines, 15 syllables, and double spacing between the breaths.
That shit was hard. You’d think, “Oh, a 15 syllable poem! I can knock that out of the park in a few minutes.” Oh, no no no. There were over half a dozen attempts and about two hours of work into that sucker. (The formatting of the submission page wouldn’t allow for the double spacing between the breaths so each breath is on its own line.)
I’m pretty sure lips cherry red could probably be further tightened, but it is what it is.
See, what else? I submitted another poem, they (we) say, with the theme of “Meditation, Mindfulness, Silence, Stillness, or Solitude”  to a poetry contest. A micro-fiction (50 word) piece was submitted to Fifty Word Stories.
Right now I’m working on a prose/poetry thing, swallowing consonants, and a short story, winter has been cancelled.
Not really part of the submission or writing process, but I updated my 50 word bio to include I don’t fucking live in Brooklyn because I’m really tired of every other writer being from Brooklyn.

Why is this flurry of activity different or more succinctly, why should you believe me now that I’m actually working?
Because instead of making an actual big production about writing shit, I sat down and actually wrote some shit and submitted said shit. (And I am nervous about the submissions, because obviously.)
(Let’s take a look at my submission record: Flurry of submissions in August 2015, one each in August and October 2016 then the flurry of submissions beginning of February 2017.)
So, now you’re going to ask, “But how is this time different?”
Two things: I started writing shit down by hand in a notebook and I started to read literary magazines and blogs with actual interest, not just skimming them over to see what they were looking for.

Back in September, I wrote a piece on using a spreadsheet to manage submissions, using Duotrope and my google alerts to grab submission openings and contests across the internets. I sat down and looked at the themes and then I started reading the actual sites and what inspired me was that I saw so many different pieces of writing being published. It wasn’t straight plot / character / linear pieces. There were prose poems, experimental pieces, and short fragments of micro-flash fiction. And I thought, “I can do this. I can write this.”
they (we) say came about by writing shit down, transferring it to Scivener, and then making the parts connect. The handwritten parts at first glance looked like two separate poems but after transcribing them to digital, I saw the connections and I worked those connections until the pieces fit seamlessly.
lips cherry red was a burst of phrases that I worked and reworked on paper, counting syllables, until it felt just right.
swallowed consonants is coming about from free form writing; winter has been cancelled from the idea of, “Well. What if winter had been cancelled? What would the floral and fauna do?”
I have other pieces that were half written or notes were taken and I now look at them and think, “Okay. I can make you work. Where is my pen and notebook.”
(I’m finding working in pencil has been helpful and easier than my usual erasable pen. Go figure.)
And the final third part: Writing has become that drug I need again and does not feel like work.
Thank fucking god.

pithy statements (or what happens next when you have a nervous breakdown.)

What happens next when you have a nervous breakdown.

Dear Internet,
What you’re about to read was written damned near a year ago, never finished, and languished in my drafts box waiting to get some love. It seems appropriate, with my incessant working on self-care to update the mother-fucker and then post it in a more timely manner and by that I mean today, February 10th, 2017.
Let’s re-cap, shall we? I have a nervous breakdown in October 2015 (you can watch this in real time by reading anything from July 2014 until April – May 2016.) I am back in Louisville at that time with TheExHusband and he persuades me to start seeing a talking and medicating therapist, which I do, as I cannot afford, financially, to be hospitalized. My melt-downs are happening less but I’m still very fragile state of mind. I put together coursework, and started collecting inspirational quotes (pithy statements). (click here to jump down to the content after the quotes).
Here are 70 of them:

  • Sleep doesn’t help if it’s your soul that’s tired
  • Everything falls apart when you forget who you are and everything comes back together when you remember
  • Life isn’t about waiting for the storms to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain
  • Be good to people. Even the shitty ones. Let the assholes be assholes. You’ll sleep better
  • You’ll never have to force anything that is truly meant to be
  • Stay away from people who make you feel like you’re hard to love
  • Don’t believe the things you tell yourself when you’re sad and alone
  • Some trite inspirational quote about overcoming some things or some shit. I don’t know. Fuck off
  • Goddess of courage
  • Admire someone else’s beauty without questioning your own
  • Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful
  • You are never too old to to set another or dream a new dream – C.S. Lewis
  • Maybe life isn’t about avoiding the bruises. Maybe it’s about collecting the scars to prove we showed up for it
  • I am not normal. I don’t want to be. I don’t pretend to be. I am me
  • You are bad ass. You can do this
  • FEAR = Forgetting Everything is All Right
  • You are writing your own life
  • Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes that reason is you’re stupid and make bad choices
  • If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today? – Steve Jobs
  • You have to let people see what you wrote. It’ll never be perfect but perfect is overrated – Tina Fey
  • Half the failures in life arise from pulling in the horse as he is leaping – August William Hare / Julius Charles Hare
  • Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new – Albert Einstein
  • If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you – not much – Jim Rohn

  • Don’t let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can do –  John Wooden
  • You are the author of your own life story. You can start a new chapter anytime you choose
  • Live your dreams – they are worth it
  • You are a steward of pleasure – Lisa Rabey
  • Do not forget your humanity –  Lisa Rabey
  • You are not alone
  • Find the goddess inside yourself instead of looking for the god in someone else – Francesca Lia Block
  • Seduction is something that lies within us, it’s not an external appearance  – Kitty Cavalier
  • You always have choices
  • You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection – Buddha
  • Body is a state of mind, not a state of body –  Gala Darling
  • When we focus on other’s happiness, we forget our own
  • It’s not about others – it’s about you
  • I cannot change what has already happened
  • Fighting the past only bends me to my present
  • The present is the only moment I have control over
  • This moment is the result of a million other decisions
  • This moment is exactly as it should be, given what’s happened before it
  • The present moment is perfect, even if I don’t like what’s happening
  • We are not our thoughts
  • The best apology is changed behaviour
  • The greatest prison people live in is the fear of what other people think
  • Your story isn’t over yet

  • Die trying
  • Have hope
  • Don’t ever give up
  • Dream big. Dream bigger
  • Life is short – be happy
  • It’s one thing to be grateful, it’s another to let that dictate your choice
  • Never give up, never be lost
  • Love takes all and be’s all
  • Only you can take care of you
  • Love yourself and live the amazing life which is waiting for you – Gala Darling
  • We are all born naked, the rest is drag  – Rupaul
  • My goal is to always come from a place of love … but sometimes you just have to break it down for a motherfucker – Rupaul
  • You are beautiful purely because you are hear, you exist, and you are doing the best you can – Gala Darling
  • Only you can save yourself
  • Believe in yourself. Have faith in your abilities. Without a humble but a reasonable confidence in your own powers, you cannot be successful or happy – Norman Vincent Peale
  • If you decide to not dream, you’re not only injuring yourself but taking away the amazing beauty from everyone else who would enjoy your dream more. It’s your responsibility to put these great things out there
  • Fall down seven times, stand up on eight
  • You are more capable than you think you are
  • There are no limits to dreams
  • Feelings are not facts – they are simply feelings and cannot harm you
  • Feeling stuck boils down to feeling fear – Gala Darling
  • Radical self-love is knowing when to get out of your own way – Gala Darling
  • Only you are responsible for your own happiness
  • Instead of asking yourself why this is happening to you, ask why this is happening for you. – Christine Hassler

Some of these quotes came from books, others were saved from the constant roll of inspirational quotes on my news feed on Facebook, and yet others I’ve randomly come across while I scour the internets for whatever.
You’ll notice some are nearly identical to the other. You’ll also notice most of them do not have citations. You’ll notice a lot of them presume everything is about a matter of choice. It doesn’t take into effect mental illnesses or issues where these mantras could do more harm then god.  I was just thinking of someone who is suicidal reading a number of these as and taking their own life because these quotes seemed impossible to believe. Other times I get angry and I want to punch people in the throat because we never read discussions about the pain to get from a to z. “Only you can save yourself” sounds great in theory but in practice is too vague — too condesending — too much of a copout. To save myself is requiring lots of drug therapy and a talking therapist not a pithy statement found on a t-shirt or bumper sticker.
Some days, not so much as I did last year, I feel as if I’m one step away from hospitalization. My melt-downs are less but they still happen. The other night I woke up to pee and found myself in a state of panic so bad one hour of meditation didn’t work so I took a Klonopin and tried meditating again for another 30 or so minutes. When neither that or the Klonopin worked, I took a second pill. At some point, heart still racing, I fell asleep and slept for 10 or so hours. That following day was shot. I moved around like a zombie and the only work I could concentrate on was stuff that was not taxing to the brain. I didn’t shower but I cleaned up by putting on fresh underwear and tshirt. I washed my face. Later I brushed my teeth. Anything more than that would have been too exhausting.
I told TEH that presenting as “normal” exhausts me. Keeping it together to function outside of my safe space takes a lot of effort and control. I cannot do more than one thing a day outside of home. I had a chiro appointment and a hair appointment scheduled yesterday  back to back and I called in and rescheduled both as even five hours worth of presenting was too much and it was, among other things, why I had the panic attack the night before because even the idea was too much.
TEH says, well, you’re not like this with me. Of course not. With you I can be my version of normal without the facade – there is no judgement just concern. I can sit around working on something (writing, knitting, watching a movie) without worrying of having to present myself to you as someone else. I noticed, he said, when we were out with $gameplaying couple (the woman I met at a Jane Austen society meeting), you seemed on edge and terse. Yes, I said. That’s exactly it. Finally, he understood. (They still wanted to see us after that so maybe I didn’t come off as terrible as I felt that I did.)
But sometimes you cannot articulate those feelings — I know I’ve been struggling to say here, this is what being “exhausting” means to me because on the outside, the invisible disability is just that, invisible and when you meet me, and knew nothing about this, you would think I was a charming fellow. A bit obnoxious, sure, but charming all the same and on the inside, I would be screaming.
I don’t want to be here — this place after what all has happened. Who does? My life is crippled and on hold and I bitterly laugh to myself that at 44, soon to be 45!, all the things I wanted to be and do by now seemed impossible. Not because I am not passionate enough for them but because emotionally, mentally, and yes, yes financially, they are out of reach. But, I console myself, this is all temporary. I know this is temporary. I can survive anything and by accepting this state is temporary gives me some breathing room and relief. I have no plans on killing myself, let us be clear on that, but I am in a much better state than I was a year ago and a year from now, I will be even better.
So we wonder, I wonder, what it’s like when your brain breaks and you’re picking up the pieces but we don’t talk about it. Friends don’t ask me because maybe — I don’t know, they just don’t. So, I think, it’s time for this disease to not control me, having me lying sobbing on the couch or bed, and it is time I can summon up the strength to control it.
Because fuck it, I’ve got this.

This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2016, 2004, 2001

to him who is fear, everything rustles

This is the picture we’ve forged: We have a fear (mostly irrational), which keeps us tied to not doing that thing and if we attempt to do it, we get trapped in that (seemingly) never ending cyclone of anxiety. I

(Originally written in 2016 and not published for god know’s what reason until 2017.)
Dear Internet,
I’ve been keeping up with everything I’ve laid out in coursework I laid out a few weeks ago. I know it’s not much, but it feels good to know I can set something to task and follow through with it, such as quitting smoking (29 days as today) and keeping a regular exercise program going (3-5 times a week since mid-November) are proof I can do it.  But like any grand plan laid out, there is always adjustments.
In my daily todo, I’ve got a space marked out for keeping up with DBT/Radical Self-Love (first is scientific, the later pulls on those ideas and wraps them in a glittery pink bow) and I think I originally wanted to knock out a chapter a day? Not sure what my thinking process was but it’s pretty clear I’m not going to learn and retain anything if I knock out a chapter a day so I’m thinking knocking out a chapter every few weeks and using the daily stuff to work on what I learned.
(Some of the work will be stuff I need to do regularly every day while other stuff will be for retention only.)
And I also thought it would be a good idea to continue writing about it publicly to not only help me vocalize it to myself but to also help others who may be going through the same thing; to know they are not alone.
(Add on I need to keep my 44 Feedly readers entertained in the life of Lisa. You can say anything you want about me, but you can definitely say I’m not boring.)

I’ve started discussing the agony of taking a compliment and where parts of my self-loathing comes from, so today I’m going to open the can of worms that is fear.
Fear comes in all shapes and sizes and is often co-morbid with other issues. My fear of everyone hating me is tied into my deep self-loathing of myself. My fear of getting in shape and losing weight is tied into not only self-esteem issues, but that i use being fat as a way to protect myself from being sexually harassed. (How’s that working out for me?)
Other fears can also be completely irrational: My fear of heights which is irrational as I love flying. My (new found) fear of driving on highways which I reasoned is just like driving on surface streets, just faster. My fear of walking over grates (because I can crash through them).
Those are the top fears and like many, the fears can go on and on.
As most of you know, being fearful of something (driving on the highway) can activate another issue (anxiety).
This is the picture we’ve forged: We have a fear (mostly irrational), which keeps us tied to not doing that thing and if we attempt to do it, we get trapped in that (seemingly) never ending cyclone of anxiety. If we don’t get the courage to do that thing, we lay guilt on ourselves on useless as if we are like a spread of peanut butter on toast.
Who wants to live this way?
The general we doesn’t want to live this way, consciously we know how silly this fear is but subconsciously, the one that tends to rule our world, says other wise. So the plan, then, is to slay the subconscious and moving forward.
I don’t have a end all be all plan to how to slay mine, but after reading RSL and DBT this weekend, let me offer up a few pithy statements I’ve been using to help me get over the bullshit
You cannot control the past
Sounds simple, right? It’s also pretty logical and unless a TARDIS is available, we cannot change what has already happened. Despite the obviousness, our mind thinks if we keep rehashing that thing over and over again in our brain, we can rewrite the past to our liking to help us move forward. C’mon. This is a bold face lie. No matter how much I want to rewrite a thing from last year, five years ago, or hell, from childhood, my present is and cannot change. (This lends to the other pithy statement, a million decisions brought you to this moment.) So now we’re stuck and nearly crippled in this hell of our own making. So how do we get out of it?

  • First, we accept what we cannot control the past. This is super hard and something I’ve started to practice. When my mind starts to wander of an event, no matter how minute, I catch it and start repeating, “I cannot change the past. I cannot change the past.” What’s the difference between a memory and attempting to control the past? For me it is if I am seeing

xoxo,
Lisa

This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2016, 2004, 2001

Your day in tweets for January 26, 2017

Senior State Department’s management team just resigned; Juggalos to march on Washington (for why exactly?); Enrique Peña Nieto, president of Mexico, says “fuck you” to trump and cancels summit; and the Doomsday clock goes ahead 30 seconds to name a few things

Today has been a fucking hell of a day. From 9AM to 4PM local time, the below has already happened. America is in desperate need of hope and we’re clinging to even the slightest hint of some reality (see Mexican president canceling King Cheeto’s summit). I am thinking it may not be a bad idea to start collating these tweets on a daily or so basis as some kind of record in what’s happening in the world as my site gets indexed by the Wayback Machine. Everything else seems to be irrelevant and pointless other than what’s killing Amerikkka.
(On a side note, I would recommend, if you haven’t already, to subscribe to Teen Vogue, Ms., and bitch.)
tl;dr: Senior State Department’s management team just resigned; Juggalos to march on Washington (for why exactly?); Enrique Peña Nieto, president of Mexico, says “fuck you” to trump and cancels summit; and the Doomsday clock goes ahead 30 seconds to name a few things that happened on January 26, 2017.

love notes into the ether

I am finding myself more reluctant to write about my experiences because of the shame that is so attached to those who are mentally ill. I could not bare, at the darkest time of my adult life, letting those wounds get picked on even by those who were doing it out of love. It is so exhausting these days just being.

If you’re an email subscriber, you may have received an email for learning to breathe / projection, which was written and to be published in April 2016 but it didn’t get posted for some reason so it got posted now. I cannot turn off publishing to email on a per post basis so if you sometimes get a deluge of emails from me, it means I’m going through and publishing old posts.

A couple of weeks ago I launched Excessively Diverting1, an all Jane Austen all the time (with the occasional Brontë) blog with the main reason as I am taking front end web development classes, I needed a project and durr, Jane Austen. There is so much news on our Jane, I am spoilt for blog posts and that is not including the long list of ideas I could write about. The blog is the little blog that could and if you’re a fan of our Jane, please do give the blog a read as it would be much appreciated.

It is a sunny Sunday afternoon and I’m finding myself at loose ends today. While I woke up late, I was able to finish the bulk of my chores shortly after noon and I’ve been looking for something to do since then which is hilarious, in its own way, as I’ve got plenty to do such as finish reading the chapters due this week for Mansfield Park or working on homework for the aforementioned front end web dev classes. Yet, I do not find myself attracted to these things right now and it should be noted I’ve been getting tired of my laptop as of late. Everything I must do or have to do stems from working online and oh gods, why? I’ve been online 22 years and it never fails to amaze me how the internet works but I get so tired of it from the news, the gossip, and the work I just want to move to a tiny island and be surrounded books such as this:

(If you’re not familiar with this episode of The Twilight Zone, Burgess Meredith plays a nebbish bank teller who survives a nuclear fall out as he was reading in the vault of his bank when the bomb hits. Realising he is alone, he contemplates suicide before noticing the public library is now all his. Then he steps on his glasses. So I want this but sans the glasses breaking.)
So I take short breaks and do a lot of self-care and while sometimes it doesn’t seem to be enough, it does satiate my need for some offline time.
(And yet, YET!, I find myself here writing this post on, you guessed it, my laptop.)

We went home to Grand Rapids for the holidays and I had a lovely lady date day with several of my closest friends. As I love all of them equally, I cannot play favorites but this one is one of my favorites and she asked why wasn’t I writing a book on being mentally ill, specifically bipolar, since it would help so many people such as how it helped her to understand from the live in your face blog of a mentally ill person.
Truth be told, this is something I’ve been thinking about for some time but haven’t verbalized and it is something I’m still on the fence about. Since my nervous breakdown in October 2015, I am finding myself more reluctant to write about my experiences because of the shame so attached to those who are mentally ill (yet I have no problem banging on about it on Twitter, which is beyond public, so there is that). I could not bear, at the darkest time of my adult life, letting those wounds get picked on and over even by those who were doing it out of love. It is so exhausting these days just being that writing about it gives me a headache and a very desperate need to curl up with a good book, hot tea, and a pug by my side with TEH close by.
But oh! My dear, dear readers – I find myself in self-flagellated mode on this topic because wouldn’t now be the perfect time to write while emotions are high and the feelings are low and yet I look at this website on occasion with some disdain. Jesus, how time has changed in 20 years since this little website became a reality where then I would bare my breasts with nipples hard and prominent with a giving no fucks attitude and now I gave you a brief glimpse of my cleavage and demurely mention how lovely you look.

When TEH and I were buying Throbbing Manor in the winter of 2010, the seller was being a fuck twat and jerking us around. TEH and I were living in long stay hotel, our things in storage, and we were very desperate to move into the house. One day while at the hotel, something got in my eye and instead of a cool, “Oh, I must get this thing out of my eye” like some rational person, I went from “OH MY GOD, SOMETHING IS IN MY EYE” to “I AM DYING OF EYE CANCER” and no amount of consoling from TEH soothed my anxiety beast. It took a Klonopin to calm me down and lull me to sleep before I found myself the following day feeling fresh as a dewed daisy and not the least bit anxious.
We laugh about this episode now but it is used as the barometer of my feelings for that particular day. There’s been more times of late where I have scurried into the kitchen to grab my Klonopin because my anxiety was so high and no amount of meditation / breathing / yoga / self-care was bringing me down. I will yell “EYE CANCER!” in a high voice so TEH knows why I scuttling to the kitchen naked but for a towel wrap around my wet hair.

EYE CANCER used to happen every three or four months but now it’s moving to a near weekly basis. Frustration for a lack of money, job, possible loss of insurance (Thanks, Trump!),  mental health in peril some days, and the lack of snow in Louisville (truly) is taking its toll. Feeling frustrated is normal for these are normal things to feel frustrated about but my fucking brain — fucking gods my brain! — takes it to a whole new level and there are days I am so frustrated with my brain rather than my situation I want to get ECT to make it all go away. TEH and my therapists are against this method, I am, ha ha ha, still too high functioning to even consider such a thing and, well, my meds are rather working at the moment, so, why the need?

Before we started dating (or whatever the fuck you want to call what we were doing), TheBassist was hospitalized for deep depression and is in year two or three of recovery yet he still often finds himself exhausted by daily life to such a degree he still needs naps in the afternoon. I thought this was ridiculous — if you can play gigs at bars on the weekends, you can get a damned job.
Ha. Ha. Ha. The jokes on me! I now find myself in the same position where if I do more than one thing a day, even seeing my therapist counts, I need to take a break from the world. Being mentally ill is not only expensive but it is exhausting.

Imagine this:
You have a job and you work in the office. You have your morning rituals and commute times; you interact with your coworkers; you have meetings and lunches with other people; you come home and do your evening meal and delights; you go to bed and you start the process all over the next day. On the weekend you may sleep in and take some personal time. You get recharged and tackle the Monday just like you have every other Monday.
For me, and people like me, we can get up and do our morning rituals. But going out into the world and having to be “on” takes such a large amount of emotional and mental strength we simply do not have so we break down in some fashion. It may be we’re late to work. It may be we take a sick day. It may be we job hop looking for a job we can work without giving too much notice to our mental health. We may cancel evenings with friends or even self-plans like heading to the movies because it’s too much.
Everything is too much. It is overwhelming and there have been times in the last year I thought I was on the spectrum because even certain noises made me jittery (exhaust fans from the kitchen and bathroom). I cannot breathe when I’m overwhelmed in these situations so I need to check out so I can get breath back into my body.
This does not negate the normal exhaustion one feels when one is working 40+ hours a week, has a family, has a home, or whatever it is people my age have — because that is normal. Working takes the piss out of most humans as does daily life but what I want you to imagine is take that weekend feeling of exhaustion, jack it up by 100 and have it compound over the course of the week.
That is what the mentally ill often go through on a daily basis on top of their crazy.

I find myself nearing 2000 words on something I didn’t think I could sum up 500 so maybe this is the sign I need to start planning that book. From the varied research I have done over the last year, it is rare to find an adult fiction book of someone who is mentally ill and NOT depressive as it is to find a non-fiction book from someone in the first person of their own accounts of being bipolar.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

1. Careful readers will remember I ran an Etsy shop of the same name a few years back in which I shuttered (temporarily) when I was working full time. I do have plans of the store re-opening, I just don’t know exactly when.

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