It's About Time—The [Actual] Hard Choices

Go Back to Part 1

So Rhapsody is better. I'm not in the middle of a medical crisis. And copy of The Muppet Christmas Carol is missing. Clearly, it's time to get back to writing. However, that turns out to be a lot harder because of all this other stuff that has cluttered up my schedule in the meantime. I didn't just have five empty hours a day waiting for me like "Insert Writing Here." I have to go and get rid of things to make room for it, sweeping my calendar clear like it's a desk of bills and I'm Steve Martin in The Jerk.

What? Too '70s for you? My 46-year-old references aren't "hip" enough for you? 

Well anyway, I sat down with my priorities and my calendar and I made some really hard choices. 

The 7-10 Split (Finding Four to Five Hours a Day—Not Twelve)

First let me start by saying my days will be shorter now. I'm not trying to find 8-16 hours a day to write. Even my overachiever ass was having trouble with that. The vortex of writing noisily slurped up everything and swallowed it down….uh….but not in the fun way. Noisy fun slurping would be so much better.

I'm in a very different place than I was five years ago. That place is Concord. Which is nothing like Richmond. (Haha, little Bay Area humor there.) 

Okay but really though. Cancer. Miscarriages. Death (not mine). These things make you look at life a little differently. Even before I met Rhapsody, I was starting to realize that I could pay the bills writing only if I had absolutely no work/life balance and my "innie" worked twelve-, fourteen-, or even sixteen-hour days. Sometimes I would wake up, wander downstairs and spend a whole day on an article without ever changing out of my pajamas. It was high pressure and low reward.

I technically made ends meet, but only technically. There was an AWFUL lot of extra money watching The Contrarian that paid for brand-name peanut butter and Prada paperclips.

True story: I ended up in Urgent Care after a series of sleepwalking incidents and the doctor got about five questions in before it was obvious even to me that I needed more rest, more sleep, and less stress. I actually got told I was going to get heart disease and die early if I didn't learn to chill the fuck out. Now I pay attention to my sleep hygiene so I don't wake up binge-watching Iron Fist Season 2 (~shudder~).

But something funny happened when I forced a work/life balance—particularly one that involved a little bit of physical activity. You would think the less I wrote, the less I would get written, but that's not how it shook out. I started to notice that I could do the same amount of writing in less time. Give me sixteen hours, and I'd finish up around 15:55. Give me twelve hours, I'd finish up around 11:55. Give me six hours, and I'd finish up around 5:55.

I mean EVENTUALLY I would run out of time before I finished. I can't write a five-hundred-page novel in an afternoon just because there's a stopwatch ticking off the seconds. But my productivity almost always involved absolutely exactly as much procrastination as the job could handle, whether that was five hours or five days. 

Not only that, but my head felt clearer after a good walk and between that and the way the smaller container of a deadline "put a lid on the pot" I was able to get a lot more done in a lot less time. After about four hours, I reached a point of diminishing returns. (Or, to be more accurate to my ADHD ass, it was only under deadline with four hours REMAINING that I achieved a point of maximum increasing returns.) So I started trying to exercise more and more and even took up running. 

Then I fell in love, moved, had a miscarriage (well, Rhapsody did) and got cancer, my liver blew up, Rhapsody's boss was killed in a robbery, we got evicted by a landlord who wanted to flip the house we were in but not pay a relocation fee, and then chronic pain struck DURING the move and didn't go away until surgery. Good times.

After cancer, I decided I wanted a whole new thing. Not a change from writing—I still want to write—an addition. An "equal partner" in my career. A yin to my yang. A Bert to my Ernie. A donkey to my Shrek. A Chewbacca to my… okay, you get the point. I still want to write, but I wanted to stop living my financial life so close to the edge (even though I was technically "making it"), and I wanted a second job (not a side gig, but a full 50%, half-and-half job) that was as FAR AWAY from sitting in a chair as I could possibly get.

I also had some other guidance and direction that I speak of in my other blog. My calling to serve The Morrigan became clearer, and one of the things I was called to do was create a container from which I could do the work of being a priest. Everything from training as a death doula to continuing to be a loud and obnoxious writer to martial arts. One of those things was to help people find fitness (and try to make it as accessible as possible, but I'll get into that elsewhere). So I went back to school, got a Certified Personal Trainer certificate, took my NASM test, and took on clients.

So now I spend time working out and teaching others to work out. I write MUCH faster in a lot less time. I still need to find time to work, but I only need to find FOUR HOURS.

Will I write a little less? Probably. 

Will I be happier and more well balanced. Almost certainly.

Will I binge watch Season Two of Iron Fist ever again? Absofuckinglutely not.

Easy Changes

The first round of changes wasn't really going to be much effort. They just took a little recalibration. I spent a long time with a lot of buffer time between activities just because you never knew when plans were going to explode and a day was going to take a sharp right turn into Whatthefuckersville. By eight in the morning, a day of classes and work could turn into staying home to nurse Rhapsody through a panic attack, a handhold to the doctor, or a step-up to take care of the kids because the pain was just too great.

I spent tons of time on frivolous phone games and time wasters just trying to regulate my nervous system from the last panic or crisis and keep myself from getting too deep into anything before the next one cropped up.

But Rhapsody had surgery and is feeling much better. Last weekend she danced all night and then woke up and walked around the neighborhood for three hours. The grief has faded to a dull ache. She is a little worried about what's next since it's been four years of needing to get through [the next thing] in order to survive, but these are like the background radiation of generalized anxiety, and not a special version of pain or grief.

And my own nervous system's response to that unrelenting couple of years is starting to calm. I don't need an hour to wake up in the morning just so I can face the day. I don't need to keep the afternoon open any longer because I might need 90 minutes in the middle to do school pick up. I don't need to be "on call," and that means I don't need to be playing phone games for hours or just giving my fourth rewatch of Supernatural a thousand-yard stare. My trauma response isn't hair trigger, ever ready for another several hours of being in a support role and then a couple more of regulating myself.

The problem is that I did this for years. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. Adaptations turned into habits. And habits turned into lifestyle. Eventually you stop trying to jump right back on the horse because what is the point? So now, after years of taking it slow because it might blow up, I'm used to moving at snail pace, and it's hard to hit the ground running. I have to make a conscious effort to crack my overcautious cadence open and undo it all for a little bit of focus and urgency. But if I can tighten things up again, I'll gain a lot of time in moments here and there just by being a little more disciplined about how I use my time, a little more determined to get some work done, and less distractible by things I needed for the last few years to calm me. 

Estimated time gain: 3-4 hours/week

Tougher Changes

So once the easy changes were identified, it was time to really get to work. When a schedule is bleeding, there are usually two reasons for it. 1) You're spending time on things that aren't a priority. 2) You have no idea how much time you're spending on anything—priority or not.

In my case, both these things were true. 

So step one was to track where my time was going and step two was to make a list of priorities. These are MY priorities. Yours might be different, include more family time, include more downtime… whatever.

Priorities

• Family
• The Morrigan Priest Duties*
• Writing (Job #1)
• Certified Personal Training (Job #2)
• My Own Physical Fitness
• UU Church (Community Service)
• Further Morrigan Priest Skills (Death Doula, Martial Arts, Tarot, Irish, Fiddle)
• Personal Leisure Time

(*A lot of The Morrigan Priest Duties are double dips with other things. I can write a social justice article and it's priest work and writing, for example. [The Morrigan is big on social justice.] Or when I go to the Unitarian Universalist Church, it is because the pagan community—even here in the very woo-woo, alternative Bay Area—is pretty scattered, disorganized, and largely into their own thing rather than community, so it is the compromise I have made to find a community of like-minded, multi-denominational, queer-friendly, leftist-activist folks to be of service to AS a priest while I begin the work of decades building something local and intentional.)

What combing through my calendar this carefully meant was that I needed to make sure my time reflected my priorities. Not just a matter of not wasting time, but was I spending a lot of time on something far down the list from higher priorities that were getting neglected? Here are a couple of examples:

1-My service to my community through the UU Church is important to me, but if I sign up for every march, vigil, sit in, "know your rights" class, volunteer opportunity, food distribution across their LGBTQ+, POC, and help-for-the-unhoused activism, I would be doing that a couple of hours a day and three to five hours each day on weekends. That's wonderful, but I have other things I want to be doing as much and sometimes more than church activism, so I need to spread those things out and go to one or two a week instead of every one I get an email about. I want to go, be seen as reliable, learn to organize, and also do a lot of other things too.

2- I want to run really long distances—half and full marathons—but I'm going to have to give those up. They take months of training and involve more and more hours of running and cross-training every week until they eat 10-15 hours a week of time. I had to make the tough choice that the time investments for me to run those kinds of races were going to take too much time away from things I want to do more. I'll stick to 5k's, 5 miles, and the occasional long run of 8-10 miles and set my goals within that container. Maybe someday I can push for longer distances.

There are a half a dozen or so more choices that were like this—they're activities I want to do but that are clearly down the priority scale. Now that I'm writing, SOMETHING has to get bumped, and if I'm not deliberate about what it is, I'll end up scratching my head at where the time has gone.

Estimated time gain: 1-2 hours/day

The Really REALLY Hard Choices

So that left nothing but really hard choices.

And I mean REALLY hard choices. 

Up till now was Kirby's Dream Land and now we were on to Dark Souls.

Things I wanted to do held up against other things I also wanted to do…and one of them HAD to go. The stuff that stings to admit you're not in a place to do. The stuff that HURTS to give up. It's not enough to say, "Hey I want to be a writer more than a death doula, so that training will have to wait until I have a little more free time." No, that's child's play compared to this shit. These are choices that require a careful examination of my priorities and the most strategic way to serve them, and the grudging admission that I can't do everything I want to do. That required just acknowledging that my time was going towards lower priority shit. This requires strategy and planning.

For example, I wanted to stay in school. There are more fitness certificates I want to get to be the best certified person trainer I can be, and I may want to get a nutrition certificate as well. Eventually I want to open my own community outreach gym/martial arts studio/woo-woo center that is accessible to lower- income folks, and I can imagine an associates in kinesiology will help immeasurably with that. I like the routine that classes bring to a week. I even just like BEING a student. Taking my work to the library or cafeteria and working in a change of environment. But right now, that's just six hours a week I don't have. I've got the certificate I need to take on clients and make money RIGHT NOW. So school isn't urgent compared to other things I want to do. 

And I had to admit that right now was not a good time for high-intensity dating. Technically, I have the TIME to date. But it's not just a matter of holes in the calendar where dates could go. There's so much energy expended in capital-R Relationships™. Particularly as you start to get past the "whatever's offered" stage and talk about what each of you wants. That hypothetical person would have to slide effortlessly into my life (local [but truly], kitchen table, experienced at non-monogamy, etc.), and I'm feeling pretty picky right now. I don't need a relationship to feel full and content. So while I'm technically open to the possibility, I have a lot of other things that are pulling my focus right now. Anyway, it's not like I wouldn't bang half my friends if they wanted to. That's a lot less emotional investment, is still pretty fun, and fits my life better at the moment.

Dropping school (for now at least) and giving up dating (for now at least) are huge. They're both things I really want to be doing, but they need to be sacrificed if I'm going to get back to writing. They put a lot of time back on my schedule.

Estimated time gain: 10-15 hours/week

The Final Answer

I ended up with at least three hours every day and big chunks of time on Thursday and Friday. Weekends are configurable but now include enough time to get some writing done. My Monday-Wednesday are going to be a little light in the writing department. I'll need to make sure my big articles are getting written between Thursday and Sunday.

It wasn't easy, but writing is worth it. And if you are trying to make writing The Thing You Do™--or even just An Important Thing You Do™, at some point….eventually…you're going to have to do something LIKE this. We all have to check in once in a while and see if our priorities match up with our activities. I can't tell you what YOU will give up and what you will keep, but maybe my process can help you streamline the things that are not priorities in your life. Most things in world out there are literally made to be just a little too addictive and creep in without you noticing.

But writing is worth the effort. 

The Hard Choices (Personal Update/Process)

I had to make some really hard choices last month.

This is somewhere between a personal update and a process article, but all writers have to grapple with the cold reality of time management at some point or another. I can't tell you how to make your own decisions—maybe you prioritize family or career over writing—but I can tell you you will eventually MAKE them.

And I can try to show you how I walked through mine.

Last month, I spent several days deciding how much of my current life I need to stop showing up for. Writing is too important to me to give up (or to relegate to a side quest), but how would I make the time for it? Do I abdicate from some of the help I've given Rhapsody with Treble and Clef? Do I drop some or all of the four units I'm taking to bolster my personal training resume? Do I stop running? Do I stop attending the UU Church where I have begun to form a few threads of community that I can serve in my capacity as a pagan priest? Where do I find the cuts that will leave me enough time? 

Particularly time to write. 

If you're writing AS a full-time job—or if you want to be—it probably takes you full-time-job amounts of time to get the writing done that you need to. One of the strangest misconceptions writers seem to labor under about making money writing (one that I am constantly calling out here) is that one can make Full Time Salary™ with Weekend Warrior™ effort. You can get published. You can finish your book. You can PUBLISH your book. You can get paid—maybe even enough to pay a bill every month with the fruits of your wordsmithery labor. But you won't be taking summers in the French Riviera if you don't work hard and almost every day. If you're a household name, you might be able to rest on your laurels for a few years making asynchronous income, but I fucking PROMISE you that you also didn't get to be a household name by working ten hours a week.

And let me tell you, when you're not writing full-time, other stuff seeps in. (And, of course, though I tell this as a cautionary tale and for the sake of transparency in my process, I should point out that by "you," I mean ME….but I probably also mean you, so be careful.) I never stopped writing every day (another drum I bang all the time), but boy did I drop off of trying to get posts up and sit down for ten to twelve hours and edit and do all the hard work of the space in between writing for pleasure and publication. I just made sure I was keeping the habit so that the tools of process (and maybe a few tools of craft) would still be waiting for me when I came back. 

Most are. 

A few are stiff and rusty. 

A couple I'm going to have to start over on. 

It could be worse. And if I hadn't written every day, it WOULD be worse. And if I'd written more, it would be better, but that's where your own life balance and priorities come in. I wasn't willing to tell someone I loved (going through the worst thing they'd ever been through in their life) that they needed to find someone else to talk to about it. Maybe you make different choices.

Now…..I am all too well aware that I have been writing a long line of "Here's what went wrong in the LAST few months…" posts spanning all the way back to 2021. Miscarriages. Cancer. Terrible breakups. Liver disease. Death of boss-friends. Evictions. Debilitating chronic pain. Multiple surgeries and recovery—both me and Rhapsody. Tons of pain and anxiety. I don't want to bore you with another post like that. In the words of Mrs. Landingham: "So you're having a little bit of a decade."

And it wasn't all bad. In there I fell in love a couple of times and took some trips and got to pivot completely on my career by going back to school for a year to get a certificate. 

But in that time of writing much much less, other stuff oozed into all the cracks…and not in the fun way. 

It wasn't like I ever said, "Hey, I'm going to do this other thinginstead of getting back to writing."

[Okay, actually, that's not true. There was that year of community college where I very deliberately said, "I don't want to take three years to become a certified personal trainer, so I'm going to do this all in one year even if it eats up some my writing time—which holy hells did it ever.]

But other than that very minor incident—hardly worth mentioning really—with the nine months off, I didn't ever deliberately sacrifice my writing time to other things. It wasn't like I was making a choice. It just sort of happened. I took on minor things in the cracks and crannies, since I was doing a lot less writing anyway. A commitment here. A diversion there. A weekly hike. A daily run. "Yeah, I can take the kids to school every morning." "Sure, I can help out with that." A sense of how much I could put on my plate that wasn't based on needing hours a day to write.

One more thing. 

One more thing.

One more thing.

Mostly I was sick or in support mode…or sometimes both. Hospitalized. Doing chores. Running errands. Helping process grief or chronic pain. And it wasn't all bad either—sometimes I watched Daredevil because Rhapsody was tired of Love Is Blind and we were both home. Stuff just kind of dribbled into my schedule and once it got in there, it became VERY hard to get it back out. In the last year, I repeatedly noticed that on days where I wanted to write—where I was really excited about it—but there just wasn't time. I was running from thing to thing to thing and then my day would end. And every week I said "Okay, I'm going to be better on the weekend when I have time." And every weekend I would run ragged after the kids and say, "Okay, I'm going to be better during the week when the kids are gone and I have a routine." 

Months of this.

And loved ones…. Loved ones. Oh dear sweet loved ones. They ARE loved—and they love you, I promise—but they can smell free time like a shark with a drop of blood. And if you're not wrapping your arms around that time, declaring it writing time instead of "free" time, and growling at them when they get close, like Rocco when you reach towards his bowl for that bacon the kids slipped him…you're going to have that precious time taken away by the most well-intentioned, well-meaning, deeply-loving, sincere people in your lives who just don't understand why it is that you can't do this ONE thing for them during all that "free" time you have. 

Suddenly, I'm ready to write and champing at the bit to write and humping the WALLS to write, and my schedule is saying, "When, Chris? When would this writing happen?"

I'm a writer. I write. I have to write. If I don't write, it feels like a part of me is broken. So finding the time I'd lost to so many other things was the highest priority of February, and I wouldn't rest until I figured it out. I know a lot of people talk about writing in these terms, but when you take a look at their actual lives, they don't get much writing done. And I was about to be one of those people, speaking in florid, purple prose about how much I loved writing while doing little of it.

And so I took to my schedule. Every reclaimed hour its own battle of wills and Tetris'ed logistics. 

I'm not going to tell you what matters in your own life or what might be more important than writing in a moment or in a week or in a month or in a year. That's for you to decide. I've heard people tell me there's no time to write when they play 8 hours of video games a day, and they're clearly kidding themselves, and I've seen people keep at it every day but the scheduled date of their own abdominal surgery and they're clearly more dedicated than me. Most everything else is in the liminal space between those two extremes, and I'm not here to judge what makes a "real" writer. Real is someone who writes.

What I can tell you is that if you're not writing daily—or very very close to it—you probably won't be able to quit your day job. And that on a long enough timeline, your priorities WILL become self-evident.

If you write roughly a page a day for 20 years—which is a reasonable pace for well revised and edited work—and take a year off to help a loved one through cancer, your body of work will be 6935 pages instead of 7200.

If, on the other hand, you let paycheck-earning work, family, and leisure time take precedence (and I'm not saying you shouldn't—we all live life according to our values and priorities), and only manage to come to the page six or seven weekends a year, and write the same page every day, then your body of work in the same 20 years will be only 240 pages. 

At the beginning of February, I hit a crisis point. There just wasn't enough time for all of it and I HAD to write. I tried to add writing and four units into my already-busy schedule and the whole thing collapsed like a lung in a medical drama. And I had to have my Coming to Jesus The Morrigan moment.


OKAY SO WHAT WERE THE ACTUAL CHOICES???

On to part 2 

Everyone Needs An Unofficial Ted Lasso Puzzle Book

One of my true honors and privileges as an artist with far more reach than I deserve for the work I do or have done is that (provided that I do not abuse the privilege) EEEEEEVERY once in two or three whiles I can point at some art or projects that one of my friends is doing and give them a little boost.

It's not much, and it's a LOT less than people who get envious of my platform seem to think. I don't hit a button and make anyone thousands of dollars for their self-published NaNoWriMo drafts. But if their shit is awesome, they might sell another couple dozen.

Last year, my editor and a coauthor, both of whom are fans of Ted Lasso, published the third of three puzzle books. If you like word games and like Ted Lasso, they are a lot of fun. The coauthor supports a charity called Steps of Faith, and through that group (and a couple of steps I'm leaving out), met Jason Sudeikis—the man behind the Ted Lasso series. Jason autographed all three of the puzzle books and graciously allowed himself to be photographed doing that for the books' promotion.

Lift it Like Lasso Volume One

Lift it Like Lasso Volume Two

Lift it Like Lasso Volume Three

The coauthor that I mentioned also has a blog where you can check out her work with Steps of Faith and the way she ended up with copies of her own book autographed by the creator of Ted Lasso. Enjoy.

Rebecca's Blog

An Important Appeal

I need a new computer. 

Most folks on social media already know about this appeal, but for those of you following me in a way that avoids Facebook, you may not know that I'm struggling.

Gofundme link to help with computer cost--including the full story.

Hi folks. I really really hate passing the hat before I have been reliable about getting content out, but if you know what my last few years have been like, you know that I'm struggling financially already, and a portable computer will help me with GETTING the content out.

On October 21 (this year) I had a lot on my plate and mind dealing with a partner who needed surgery the next day, and I went on a 10k run and neglected to stretch out when it was done. (Never neglect your stretching. Even if your whole world is in chaos.) At about 3:15 am the next morning (the 22nd) I jerked awake in agony having terrible leg cramps and in doing so, I knocked my laptop and phone off of my bedside table and down onto the floor. My leg was spasming, and I fell off the bed....and right onto both. I heard my phone crunch into my laptop, and I knew immediately I'd cracked the screen. What I didn't know was that I wouldn't even be able to really turn it on. All I can see is the crack pattern (you can even see where the phone was) in the screen.

I just paid a $1200 car maintenance bill for my Prius's 100k service and then turned around and got hit with a $4200 tax bill from 2023. (I'm a freelancer, so I always owe and it's always a lot.) My life savings was completely wiped out and I can't just go get a new computer, so I'm asking for a little help.

$1700 should cover the cost of a new little MacBook air with all its taxes. I have some additional flex goals if this fundraiser goes extraordinarily well, but I will update those here and in updates if we get closer to this initial amount.

https://gofund.me/9d6708fb

NOTE- In the interest of full transparency and honesty, I want to let you all know that at this point, the laptop has been ordered. There were a couple of private donations (not through GFM) and my mom is giving me Christmas early. I called in favors I'd rather be able to say "actually, I'm alright--let's save it for a rainier day" but I'm at least going to be able to get back to work. So if you're having hard times, please hold on to your money.

What I'm adding as I go is the a DIFFERENT Gofundme for. (But since I'm doing this one, I think I better cool it for at least six months to a year.) If you've been following along, you know that the reason I usually just have money set aside for a new computer* but didn't this time is because of the last couple of years of medical bills.

[*I'm an artist. I don't spend a couple hundred on paints and canvasses every month, but I have my own expenses that show up every few years in a lump sum. Actually, buying a MacBook every four or five years is a lot less expensive than most people pay for art supplies it just requires I be smart about setting cash aside. I usually have a fund for it that I've been paying into, and I'm ready when it happens.]

I had colon cancer in 2021, and late that year they removed a tumor about the size of a softball and resected my large intestine. In fall of 2023 a complication from the cancer (but not a recurrence, thankfully) landed me in the hospital with blood vessels poking into my stomach.

For now my medical team and I are on top of everything. I get poked and scanned and double-end "-oscopied'  on the regular, so that I'm probably going to know if there's anything wrong in there before anyone who never had an issue. I'm healthy, in remission, and I can even look at a CT scanner without having a panic attack. All good things.

But even with pretty good insurance, the medical costs were staggering. Breathtakingly so. Copays. Deductibles (I'm still paying off the second hospital stay in payments.) Labs (SO many labs--even at eight dollars a pop, which is not too bad, I was adding a hundred a month to my expenses for a while). Prescriptions. Driving all over the bay area to see specialists. And so so SO much lost work. It took me years to get through the mental and emotional parts.

I conservatively estimated it at about $25,000 for the two hospitalizations. But with the lost work, it's probably closer to $50k.

I'm not trying to make THIS a medical fundraiser, but the reason I couldn't just go buy a new laptop the same day I crunched my old one is that I had been setting aside for it since my LAST new computer is because I completely wiped out my savings on medical expenses. So if we pull in a little more than the cost of the laptop, I'm using it to replenish what was lost to cancer and liver disease, and to replace a writing fund that I had set aside for my novel.

So if you want to contribute now, that's awesome. But the laptop is covered and there will be a separate Gofundme in six months to a year that is JUST for the medical expenses.

Where the money goes

$1650 Replacement MacBook Air 13 inch. (With a couple of upgrades but not all of them) and ALL taxes and fees.

$107 Otter Box external case with all taxes and fees (so hopefully this doesn't happen again.

$2243 Attempting to recoup losses from medical costs that led to not having enough to just replace a broken computer in the first place. (I usually have the money standing by because a professional writer HAS to be prepared to buy a laptop at a moment's notice--just like a painter needs to budget for acrylics, brushes, and canvases.)

$1000 Gofundme payment processing fees and estimated tax burden.

https://gofund.me/9d6708fb

Writing About….Stuff

Last night at about 8p.m., I passed my test to be a Certified Personal Trainer with the National Association of Sports Medicine. Cliché bored housewives, sex starved coeds, aging movie stars, naiads, and rainbow-spewing unicorns everywhere in the Bay Area suddenly felt the need to have brief but torrid affairs with me (but, alas, I will be strong and resist for professionalism's sake).  

I've been working on that one for a year (and a year of hell), putting writing on the back burner. But now it's time to get back to the writing work. And now I have the best side gig everywhere that structures my schedule and is the furthest thing from sitting in front of a computer anything can be. 

We've got a lot of new stuff I'm going to be writing about now. Stay tuned not just for writing about WRITING, but also writing about: 

• My journey as a certified personal trainer
• Writing about Health and Fitness (generally)
• Writing about Running (my posts specifically about running and running goals)
• Election stuff
• Polyamory (Ethical Nonmonogamy)  
• The Morrigan and Pagan Priesthood 
• Buy Me Lunch Answers [My deep dive into identity intersections and what labels (and going beyond labels) means to me]
• Reviewish [My always behind the curve reviews of media—some of it woefully outdated]

And old favorites like: 

•  Social Justice Bard  
•  Personal Updates 
• And of course Writing About Writing

I know if you've been paying attention at all for about the last oh….three years at least, you know that a lot has been going on. I don't mean like 2016 a lot with breakups and rising fascism. That WAS a lot, but it turned out that was a lot in the way that England is "cold" when you're coming from Barbados. There's still Siberia to go. I'm talking 2022. When cancer, miscarriage, death, eviction, and other stuff started landing. One disaster after another just kept pouring in like distant relatives at the holidays passing off fruitcake. Let's not dwell on that. It sucked. I got knocked down. I got up. It sucked more. I got knocked down more. I got up more. Rinse. Repeat. Here I am now feeling Sisyphus-caliber shredded…but like metaphorically, you understand. You push a rock all day, you get pretty swol. 

2025: Coming to a blogger near you!

I am metaphorically swol AF. 

After cancer, death, miscarriage, evictions, and more, I started to realize that what I wanted to do was NOT just go back to exactly what I had been doing—pedalling my flying machine ever faster writing about writing just to make ends almost barely meet. My entire year back in school to become a certified personal trainer was exactly because I couldn't keep doing twelve- and fifteen-hour-days in my chair, seven days a week, just to barely scrape out the bills. I want to write. I want to write about WRITING. But that's not all I want to do with every day. There are going to be other parts of my life too. 

One of those things, nontrivially, is the fact that I have become a priest of The Morrigan. My calling involves duties that go beyond writing and broaden the scope of the writing that I am already doing. I will be doing the work, but primarily I'm a writer, so even as I learn to incorporate divination and death doula-ing into my practice, I will also write about those insights and my—occasionally alarming—spiritual journey. Yes, there will be Social Justice Bard posts, personal updates. If anything, my duties as a priest to a deity steeped in sovereignty and battle will necessitate stepping things up on the social justice front. Yes, there will be those weird goofy posts where Writing About Writing is somehow a place with a weird ass cast of characters. And yes, there will be deep thoughts about writing itself somehow shoehorned into a 12 item listicle for the perfect clickbait…

…but I also want to write more about nonmonogamy, my own explorations through identity, my OWN fitness and health struggles, including pushing fifty but trying to be a better runner, and even the reviews on popular media I got into right before the wheels came off the bus. And fuck, I spent a year getting this personal-training skill set….I might as well write about it. 

Everything will be labeled (so you can skip past the parts you're less into), and you might see a deluge of "Menu level" posts in the coming weeks as I set up the pages that will link out to everything that is to come.

This process will form the backbone of a new chapter here at Writing About Writing. We're moving forward, but we're not going exactly where we were before. The train will still stop at all the old and familiar destinations, but we've added a few more stops along the way. 

All aboard.

High speed rail will be discussed in the nonmonogamy section. 
Oh wait…that's high speed railING. Carry on.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation (Personal Update)

**stares at computer screen**. 

**types "I'm back…"**

**delete delete delete**

**types, "I hope to be a little more productive now that…"**

**erases it immediately**

**types, "I don't know what the future will hold…"**

**highlight all/backspace**

**types, "So I know I said I'd be back but this thing happened…"**

**hits undo until all text is gone**

**types, "I'm not going to say 'I'm back' but I'm kind of ready for…"**

**close window—click box that says "Ignore" when the computer says changes weren't saved**

**sighs**

You know what….? (You don't, because it's really random, so I'm going to tell you.) Entire religions are formed around causation/correlation superstitious crap like this. And while my pagan priest ass is the last person to be giving the Spock-brow to some questionable beliefs, I'm not going to live my life in fear of telling you all what I am planning to write next because I think that only by keeping all my hopes and dreams to myself and never being optimistic that maybe maybe MAYBE I won't be pack ravaged by dingos. 

Besides, it doesn't really seem to be working. I either announce that I'm back and disaster strikes, or I hold very very still and quiet, and disaster strikes anyway. So I might as well make a spectacle out of the sheer absurdity of not even getting the full sentence of "I'm ba—" out of my mouth before a "Luck of the Irish" neon sign falls from the ceiling and lops off my right arm or something. 

I'm also not going to apologize. It's gotten ridiculous. Bless everyone who stuck with me on Patreon through the last few years as life had fun kicking me further down the stairs every time I stood up, but four YEARS worth of "Hey, I was just about to write and then this NEW thing in my life exploded like it was….well pretty much ANYTHING in a Transformers movie (anything that's not Optimus Prime)" is getting old. I'm hearing myself and thinking "Oh my fuck, Chris, will you SHUT UP!" I can write through pear-shaped—I have written through pear-shaped—I DO write through pear-shaped— but holy FUCK have the limits of that ever found me.

I spent this summer moving. Not one of those planned moves. Not a joyous upgrade (although I do like the new place). Not a carefully planned move with a careful execution. 

No…our landlord decided he wanted us gone. And since the city I'm in adopted rent control and a relocation fee (so that shitty landlords who want to jack up the rent can't just evict their tenants every couple of years), he tried to make it an at-fault eviction. Oh how he tried! We were in compliance, so nothing stuck, and we learned our rights REALLY quickly, so we knew we could have fought, dragged it out for months, and even probably ended up getting the relocation fee and maybe a countersuit. 

But Rhapsody didn't have a protracted fight in her. You have to be ready to have people threaten you, to call you names, to tell you all the awful things they're going to do, and to initiate those awful things. You have to be ready to be blamed for everything and told what a horrible and irresponsible and wicked person you are. (And since in two years, we hadn't gotten the landlord to acknowledge our repeated attempts to get me on the lease, it all had to be done while I lived in a room two towns over.) You have to be ready to come home every day to an official notification on your door demanding your contrition and telling you you have days to move. Rhapsody is a gentle human—one of the kindest I've ever met. She's barely over grief and dealing with health and parenting issues and a half a dozen other issues that make life challenging. She's trying to find a job in a field she retrained in just last year. She just didn't have the time and energy for all of it.

Every step is suddenly wading through oatmeal. You can't just pop the rent check in the mail five days ahead of time—you have to drive it twenty minutes to the lawyer's office as a money order, or landlord-fuckspork might pretend he never got it. You have to start looking for places because who knows if he's going to throw something at the wall that sticks. 

We ducked the worst of the legal bullshit (the asshole's FIRST move was hiring a lawyer), and traded a neutral reference to our new place for a month's notice. 

And then the move began. It's very different when you don't know it's coming—when you can't plan it, prep for it, get some boxes, round up a strapping friend who likes pizza, get your kids to pack some boxes ahead of time of all those toys they are totally, absolutely going to play with again. It's also different when you're moving a whole house—I can't really remember the last time I moved more than a room. Packing, unpacking. Finding movers. Figuring out when to move. You end up with piles of stuff in the new place because you need the boxes to go back to the old place and get another load (because you didn't have time to stockpile boxes because it was all so sudden), so you just dump a box out where it's not right in the way and keep going. There's trashing what can't be given away and no one wants to move—sometimes including furniture. Cleaning the old place. Unpacking. Organizing. The whole time, your life didn't slow down because you weren't able to SCHEDULE this move—it just HAPPENED, so your calls and dates and visits and trips are all still on the calendar. It didn't help that Rhapsody was having a bad flare of chronic pain and while Treble and Clef can be a little helpful, most of the heavy lifting (in this case literally) fell to me. 

From beginning to end, it was like six weeks of absolute, unmitigated bullshit.

And you know (you don't, so I'm going to tell you)…after a four fucking YEARS of being like, "Oka,y NOW I am obviously done with this cavalcade of tragedies and can get back to writing—oh I appear to be throwing up blood/getting evicted/having alien spiders hump my mouth/whatever it is THIS month," I am so fucking ready to get back to my creative life. I don't even care about "productive" at this point. I mean I CARE because that's my paycheck, and I'm going to end up having to be a human statue on Fisherman's Warf if I can't get my income back up to snuff, but really, I just want to write again.

Back. Not back. It doesn't even matter. I'm just going to do what I do. This summer sucked. And this year was hard (and I'll talk about that in another post). And the past four years have been this horrifying nightmare. But we're moved and even though I still have that last level of organizing where you're like, "Yeah it goes here now, but I think I want it to LIVE somewhere else when I have the time," I'm not going to wait another minute to get back to my creative life.

A (School) Year to Remember. (Personal Update)

There is about to be mischief. 

I've written so little in the past few months—the past couple of years, really.  

I'd like to hope that the period of low productivity is coming to a conclusion, but I know better than to state definitively that "I'm back." This way lie chaos and despair. I may as well start an activity with a rousing, "What could possibly go wrong?" or look at the cloudy sky and say, "At least it isn't raining." 

Such words tempt fate.

No…at this point saying "I'm back" isn't actually just TEMPTING fate. It's more like waving your dangly bits in front of fate and sneering, "I TRIPLE DOG DARE you to do something about it." It's finding fate, and giving it a wet willy and saying "What? Stop me if you're so fucking powerful!" The minute the typing fingers press the keys of that ending "K," a Tesseract would open up and me from the future would come out and say, "I know you think you're back, but trust me that you need to leave your house through the back door if you don't want them to find you!"

"Who?" I'll ask.

"There's no time! We have to go now." Future Me will say.

"You just showed up from the future. Why didn't you show up…like, you know….thirty or forty seconds earlier so you…I….we could answer this critical question. Or better yet, like a couple of hours. That way we could have lunch and a conversation, I could ask a few follow-up questions. Maybe quiz you to make sure you're really me. It's not as dramatic, but it would really help me get through this situation which I'm guessing you REMEMBER as being super confusing."

"I did jump in forty seconds early. You just wasted it deconstructing the trope." F.M. will say.  

"Shouldn't you have remembered that you…I….WE…(fuck, what is the right pronoun?)…spent the first forty seconds—"

"Holy fuckwaffles was I ever this annoying?"

Never do figure eights around collapsing black holes, okay? It's just not worth your chill. 

ANYWAY…

I'll just say this: I have a schedule with built-in time to write in a writing conducive environment—a thing that hasn't happened in a couple of years.

No. Wait. That's not dramatic enough.

Enter Ian McKellen in Gandalf robes. Looking out over the forest of my works in progress. "A thing is about to happen that has not happened in an age."

Gandalf: "It is not despair, for despair is only for those who—"
Aragorn: "Why do you TALK like that?"
Gandalf: (pauses) "This is going to be lit, bro.
Do you have any idea how long things have been FUBARed around here?
Shit's about to be legen—
wait for it…and I hope you're not lactose intolerant because this next part is
—dary."
Credit: New Line Cinema

I now have the drive and will and motivation to get back to writing. Not like this mere mortal daily writing stuff of habit building, practice, discipline and regimen, but really digging into content and deadlines again. Drive and will and motivation have happened with increasing frequency in the last year but not when I had time. 

Time has happened, but usually only when I was stressed and depressed and overwhelmed and needed a break in the worst way. 

I haven't had BOTH those things at the same time in…well it might have been early 2021. And…(~glances nervously around and whispers~) nothing absolutely terrible has happened in a couple of months. I have a career pivot path forward that includes writing but also some really exciting other work I want to do in service to my community and in the name of The Morrigan. 

So let me tell you a couple of stories. One about the past, and one about a possible non-"I'm back" future that may involve some tiny modicum of back-ness that I only dare whisper. Because anything more than a whisper and it might disappear, it is so fragile. 

Or it might grow tentacles and tear up the foundation of what I'm building. So yeah…let's whisper.

The Tale of What WAS

Last spring (2023) was full-throttle grief on the Rhapsody front. I've written about what happened, but haven't really had the bandwidth to put more in-depth thoughts into article form yet. (They ARE coming.) I don't want to retread that ground from square one because even though it's been months since I wrote it out, from this blog's perspective it was like three articles ago. Suffice to say that the mourning had only just begun and the tears were fresh and bitter.

It was a difficult time. And when I say that, I need you to understand that it's like saying the cultural zeitgeist of the '80s involved a "little bit" cocaine. You know…like just a line or two. Rhapsody and I haven't really caught a break in three years. We almost don't even know what we look like outside of a crisis. Before the new relationship energy had even worn off, we were dealing with a miscarriage, health issues….that turned out to be cancer, surgery, and recovery. She went through a major breakup. And as both of us felt the clouds parting a little bit and life giving us some space to breathe, the death hit.

For months, I didn't even try to be anything more than her support. That can be harder for me in a lot of ways than going through the thing myself. Cancer was hard, but supporting someone in grief turned out to be harder.

Spring started to warm up into summer and we both started to feel the winds of change. She knew she wasn't going to keep being a baker. I knew that I didn't just want to go back to 60 hours a week of Writing About Writing*. Both of us hatched intricate schemes for the next phase of our lives, and we both knew we were going to be going to need some formal education, and some non-formal certificates and training for the work we wanted to do. 

[*If you're just joining us, or haven't been paying attention, Writing About Writing isn't going anywhere. I like blogging. It's just going to be joined by some other kinds of writing and play co-career path to some other stuff I plan on doing. I still have every intention of doling out my F-bomb-heavy writing on all who will suffer it. We might need to adjust to a 3-day-a-week posting schedule, but we will still be here.]

We both signed up for classes in the fall, and summer turned into "hurry up and wait." To say nothing of the tribulation of trying to keep Treble and Clef entertained. Grief was still a frequent visitor and overarching specter, and there were sometimes days and weeks of solid hardcore support that kept me from doing much else at the time, but at least the difficult spots were starting to be punctuated by fleeting moments when Rhapsody remembered to breathe. Moments turned into the occasional day. Days turned into the periodic good week. The anniversaries were hard again, but the trending line has been that the torment and maelstrom of emotions have been relaxing their grip. 

And then it was fall. Time to hit the ground running. 

For me, my angle of study was to become a priest of The Morrigan. Priesthood isn't for the faint of heart, especially with a deity like this one. I've written about the beginning of my journey in other places (including my struggles with my own disbelief), and those posts will continue. The fall semester was bananas. I was taking a six-month intensive class ON The Morrigan (which will be starting again soon if you're interested)out of Ireland from a native Irish Draoí in addition to 10.5 units of kinesiology coursework so that I could get a certificate in personal training. That's in addition to the regularly scheduled life stuff and the more-than-occasional support mode. 

I had hopes of starting to write in fall, but if anything I was always desperately behind. I was always turning things in at the last minute and/or with effort more mediocre than I'd have liked. I would start to catch up and then fall apart again.

And then, of course, I was hospitalized. Another thing I've already written about, so I won't rehash it here. I wanted to write in the hospital since all I was doing was sitting in bed, but it's not quite like a day off. Actually, it's nothing like relaxation. You're tired. You're in pain. You're worried. And in my case, you're trying so so hard to keep down the panic attacks from the medical trauma from two years prior. 

And that fucking beeping machine keeps you up all night.

I've recovered from that, by the way. I didn't need a long recovery like with abdominal surgery for cancer. I was in the hospital for longer, but I recovered faster. Still, it took a few weeks (and I got a bad respiratory infection right as I was getting better). I'll need upper endoscopies (in addition to colonoscopies—isn't getting older GREAT!) on the regular to see if any varices have worked their way into my stomach, but now that we know what to look for, I'm okay. I don't drink. I don't have hepatitis. And though they don't know why my liver has cirrhosis (true of like 1/3 of cases), it's not getting any WORSE, so with some preventative care I may never even need a transplant or anything. Liver transplant priority is measured on something called a MELD score, and mine is currently low enough that not only am I not on any kind of list, but if I literally walked into a transplant facility holding a liver, they wouldn't do the procedure. They would probably ask where I got it though, and then I would have to come up with something pretty quick.

"It followed me home?" I'd say.

"And its owner?" they'd ask, furrowing their eyebrows.

"I must away to my ravens," I'd say, throwing a smoke pellet to disappear.

Anyway, I have to pick up about half a dozen more points to be a candidate and dozens more points to be prioritized. Which is all to say that even though I almost died, right now, things are pretty okay. 

Unfortunately when I got back, I was behind on everything and finals were looming in the distance, so there was no time to do something ridiculous like starting a publishing routine.

I finished up my finals (all As!) and with the vacation, instead of vast oceans of time to dig into writing, I got caught in the drift of that untethered time between end-of-the-year holidays where even knowing what day it is often a shock*. And then a trip to Boston. Suddenly it was spring semester again.

[*At one point I was having a conversation about "Tuesday," and I swore it was like four days away, and she said, "I'll see you tomorrow then." And I was one, three, five, seven, and nine because I literally could not even.]

It's Monday, bruh.

Then school started, and before I could even figure out what traffic would be like getting onto campus at 9:30 and where all my classes were, we hit the anniversaries. Those moments of loss that Rhapsody experienced—the attack, the moment brain activity stopped, the honor walk. Each their own dirge of pain and reliving. 

Right when I was feeling like, "Okay, I've given Rhapsody my best. Now it's MY turn to be supported," I got Covid. I had to go into isolation for a week. Covid led to brain fog, and let me tell you that shit is no fucking joke when you're in school. I couldn't think. I had no executive function. I sat and watched deadline after deadline fly by, wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Thinking was like swimming in oatmeal. My entire program was starting to unravel and I couldn't make it stop. 

I walked into my mentor's office during her office hours one day and told her I might need to drop several classes if I was going to salvage the ones that were left.

"You're going to be a great trainer, Chris. I watch you with your internship clients and you are amazing. I really want you to succeed. What would it take to keep you in?"

"More time?" I offered.

So she gave me a fistful of extensions. Some of these assignments were WEEKS overdue before I even walked into the office. She told me to get them in by the end of spring break. And so I just started knocking them out—one by one—and pulling forward. It ate up my spring break, which I had hoped to use to get some writing done, but I caught up.

This next part is boring. Let's do it as a montage with the Rocky theme song playing in the background. Here I am studying. Here I am studying in a different position. Here I am turning in my late shit. Here's another one of me studying. Here I am in my internship doing personal training. Here I am coaching a group personal fitness session of Tabata. Here I am studying some more, but this time with a National Association of Sports Medicine book in my hand and wearing glasses.

Here, let me help with the visual. 
This montage is going to break the fourth wall, apparently.

And then it was finals. So like…more studying. Cue another montage. And here we are. I have the official NASM test soon (not for a class, but the actual professional test), so I'm spending my days reviewing the earlier chapters and taking practice tests. I'll be trying to find clients and book out sessions—hopefully at least a couple a day. But my goals required a massive surge of front-loaded effort. I had to complete 20 units in one academic year or I was going to take another 8 months to finish (summer and ANOTHER semester). A 10-unit semester isn't much for a full-time student, but I was doing a lot more.

Adding thirty hours a week to adult responsibilities…no wonder returning students have their own little kiosk help desk. 

The Tale of What IS

There's something a little different happening now. 

Time AND energy. 

Together. 

Like the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of writing. Two great opportunities that go great together. Not that I've ever been shy about saying that a writer has to CREATE both of those things if they ever want to pay the bills with their wordsmithing (and I have the PLUMMETING writing income to prove that the opposite is also true), but sometimes life is throwing cancer and death at you, instead of personal scheduling conflicts, World of Warcraft raid guild demands, and "too many" people who want you to show them just exactly how your tongue ring works. 

I don't ignore my own advice. I never stopped writing. But I did stop blogging and working to get articles up and worrying about my "productivity." And now I'm….well, I'm not going to say it. But let's just say that I have both ingredients I need, and I'm not in the middle of my world exploding for the first time in too fucking long.

I'm not going to say it though.

Yeeeeeaaaaah.
So if we could go ahead and NOT have a miscarriage,
life threatening illness,
cancer, surgery, a long recovery with trauma, a major breakup,
death, liver failure, long covid, brain fog, 
or try to change careers completely in the next few months….
THAT'D BE GREAT!
Thanks a bunch, life.

The Tale of What MIGHT BE

There is a lot more I plan to do, including learning to be a death doula, mediation training, and even some fun stuff like learning Tarot and martial arts to start up side gigs. Writing has been wonderful and rewarding beyond compare, and I'm absolutely not stopping either my blogging or my fiction writing, but financially, it is a completely unforgiving career. 

I loved paying the bills with writing. I was so proud of that. The fact that I pulled that off was literally a childhood dream come true. It was asynchronous income (which is why I'm still making SOME money), and that has saved my life in a maybe-not-entirely-hyperbolic way these last couple of years. (Seriously. Thank you all who stuck it out so so much. I would not have made it without you.) But it took twelve- and fourteen- and sometimes sixteen-hour days that I don't have anymore. And the bills that it paid were bare bones. 

So I'm hoping to create something more like ten side gigs in a trenchcoat moving forward. A few fitness-training clients. A few tarot reads over zoom. Writing. Maybe in a couple of years, I'm running a small business out of a local storefront that does fitness and martial arts classes on a sliding scale or free to the community. I have to survive capitalism, but I think I can also create something that will give back. I'm called to do other work (in a way I write about elsewhere), but also shoring up my income with something as different as possible from being in front of a computer for hours. I found that fitness not only helped me get out of the chair and feel better, but it helps me focus and make more of the time when I AM writing. I don't actually NEED fourteen hours when I'm fresh off a workout, rejuvenated, feeling good, it's 10 A.M. and have to be done by six for another client. 

I do still plan to make writing the core of my career work. I just want other things too.

But first and foremost, I want to start posting again here on WAW. There's fiction and projects and some compilations and a book and…and so much I just dropped when my world imploded, but I've got to start banging out articles again. I need my audience back and my income back and that foundation for everything else I'm about to attempt.

And then there is a tremendous amount of "digging out" to do. The blog basically needs spring cleaning. While I've been barely treading water, I have articles that are half done. Entire series that are unfinished. Links that go nowhere. A whole overhaul worth of work that needs to be done.

And during this, I will be taking the NASM, trying to find clients, and launching a small side gig while continuing my education and learning the rest of the suite of skill sets that I'm going to need. It's exciting. It's a lot. It's a lifetime of effort. 

It's a calling.

So here we go. I'm bac—

**power goes out and a Tesseract opens**
**in the distance, sirens**

Hospitalized (Personal Update) Health and Writing

A month ago (on a sun-kissed Monday), I went to the emergency room. I wouldn't come out of the hospital for five days. Then I would convalesce at home, get an upper respiratory infection, and it's probably only JUST NOW that I'm starting to feel a little better. 

This is that story. I will tell you that there will be medical procedures, emesis, trauma, and an objective discussion of weight gain and loss (not as a goal but simply as a matter of fact).  If any of those things sound like they would be upsetting to you or ignite some of your own traumas, then you may just want to read to the bold section heading, and call it a day.

I'm okay now. My full recovery took about three weeks even though I was discharged after five days. And right when I was feeling better, I picked up an upper respiratory infection that knocked me out for another several days. Doing school on top of everything else was hard enough. Being BEHIND on school has been its own super nightmare. There are a lot of things I'm behind on in my life. I sort of thought that being bedridden was going to give me the time to get to all those things I'm usually too busy running around to do, but as it kind of turns out, that's unicorn rainbow spew. It isn't real. What actually happens is that whatever reason you're bedridden in the first place is going to make it pretty hard to do anything but convalesce. 

So right now I'm behind on…well, everything. Everything. From phone calls to peeps to school to, of course, writing. I had to prioritize the academic classes I'm taking and spend two weeks doing five weeks of work (in five different classes), and it's only been in the last couple of days (since finishing my second midterm on Wednesday…which I did not do that well on) that I've not felt desperately behind. And now I'm moving into the last two weeks, so I'm feeling the pressure from other directions. 

[If you're looking for the writerly wisdom for all this, I try to bring it home below.]

Okay, but what happened? (Trigger warnings above)

I typically have low platelets and have to be careful—very careful—if I'm bleeding more than just a little. For me a bad cut can turn life threatening. I'm not supposed to go skydiving, and my career of juggling chainsaws was cut tragically short.

The greatest dream I ever had was torn to shreds like the torso of my 
friend Aspen (who can't even juggle balls) trying to pull this off one Tuesday afternoon
in early March.
So tragic.
Do not even attempt to contain your tears.

It's all part of having a jackhole liver. My liver is cirrhotic, and we don't really know why. (I found out that this is true for almost a third of people with cirrhosis.) There are a couple of possibilities, but no solid answers. But one thing is for sure. It spends a lot of time taking drags off of cigarettes and saying in an outrageous French accent, "Ah yez. I remember ze early aughties. Back when ze platelets flowed like wine in a Sex and ze City episode. Oh Miranda! Zoze were ze dayz."

Well, it turns out that ANOTHER thing that can happen from having a messed-up liver is that veins can start pushing into your stomach—eventually far enough that their lining is eroded, and they start filling the digestive tract with blood. When your stomach is full of blood, the results can be….dramatic.  

Like exorcist dramatic. 

Hello. I'm here because there's literally no "throwing up blood"
GIF that isn't absolutely awful.
Let's just focus on my cuteness.
Mew!

Anyway, I did that in the waiting room of the Emergency Room after being too dizzy to walk, and needless to say, I didn't end up waiting as long as the guy who skinned his thumb "really really bad."

Five transfused units of blood later, they had me stable enough to do an endoscopy, discover the problem, plan this really cool procedure to like fill my veins with Krazy Glue or some shit, so they'd wither and stop fucking bleeding into my stomach. There were a couple of days of observation before they sent me home with a fistful of diuretics to keep down the fluid in my peritoneal cavity, and home I went to try to recover. I was 20 pounds of fluid over my admission weight when I was discharged. (Which was bananas because I had had about three meals in five days and one of them was a "liquid" meal—which means you get some sugar-free jello and a cup of broth.) Once the diuretics started, over the next four days, I peed out like 30 pounds of liquid. (Like, no seriously—thirty pounds of fluid can make you bloated like you wouldn't believe. It's like four GALLONS and change.) I went from looking like a stuffed sausage to my skin kind of hanging off my bones a little.

So that was fun. 

And yeah, right when I was almost better, there was an upper respiratory infection. Not a cold—this was the real fucking deal. Fevers of 102 at night and coughing up a lung. I think my white blood cell count was tanked from the hospital, because everyone in two households got this infection but I was the one it absolutely leveled like a papier-mâché reproduction of Tokyo in the final reel of a Godzilla movie. 

Okay, no more gory details. Back to the touchy feely.

Where do I go from here?

I get back up. 

I dust myself off. 

I keep writing. 

I've lost a lot of income in the last couple of years as I recover from cancer, then "ha ha, no, REALLY" recover from the trauma of cancer, pivot on my career goals, get buried under school work, and lose weeks of productivity to everything from helping my nesting partner grieve the brutal killing of their boss and friend to being hospitalized.

I get it. I haven't been writing the way I used to and the economy has shifted even further away from most working class being able to make ends meet. People I know (including me), who used to have a few hundred dollars of discretionary income every month, are now barely getting by, and several of us trying not to bleed out our entire savings before we learn a new skill set. Even folks who were infinitely patient with my lack of updates through my cancer have noticed that I've fallen way off from then. I would never expect people to hang on ever, but it's been especially understandable lately. 

I'll rebuild that crowdfunding when I'm able to re-establish a regular practice of writing. I'm still determined to keep all my work (other than some newsletters) free and pass the hat instead of going traditional publishing or paywalls or anything like that. There may be some compilations made into ebooks, but the source material will always be available. 

So more than ever, I'm writing because that's what I do. Because I love it. I'm writing because not writing is the real difficulty, and I feel depressed and anxious if I neglect it. Maybe it's not much more than a Facebook post on any given day. Maybe it's for school. Maybe it's one more half-done article. But I sit and I write. It's not for money—that's dwindling. It's not for fame—whatever snippet of online infamy I once has disappeared these last couple of years when I stopped putting out two or three articles a week.

Now it's just me and the writing.

Which is all it ever is for most people.

And even though THIS isn't the most prolific time in my life and no one is asking me right now how I write like I'm running out of time, the wheel will turn. Life will shift and there will be time and energy (together…in the same room) again. And I will still have the habit and the routine and the discipline. But that will combine with the opportunity. And that's when things get exciting.

A lot of people can write (or sing or do their art) as long as everything's pretty smooth sailing. What a dedicated writer (or singer or artist) has to confront is how to handle things when the waters are choppy. Life is going to happen, and at some point, it's going to happen HARD. Someone's going to die. You're going to get very sick. You'll have a kid or two. Your world will turn upside down. That's when it's easy to quit…or maybe take a break that ends up lasting the rest of your life. 

And I'm not here to tell you what to do in those moments or what makes you "real" or how much you really care about your writing (or art) if you can't find the time or energy. I'm not here to tell you to get back on the horse in X amount of time. I'm not that inspiration-porn problematic for one, and moreso, I'd obviously I'd be a hypocrite if I tried.

What I AM going to tell you is that when that absolutely mind-numbing moment of shut down or overwhelm or frenetic chaos or debilitating depression/anxiety/whatever clears, and you have your first lucid thoughts after the upheaval….if those thoughts are of writing (or music, or art), hold onto that. 

There's more there about what makes you tick there than you know.

Summer Blues (Personal Update) Part 2

Part 1 is back here if you missed some context.

"But Chris—I hear you say*—You haven't failed. You're a righteous dude."

(*Okay, actually I don't hear you say it. I mostly read it in the comments. Although I did hear it from one friend in person. "Hey, so I read your blog….") 

I get it: You're saying I'm not A FAILURE. You're saying there is hope. You're saying that there were some successes too. You're saying that it wasn't my fault. You're saying that my story isn't over. And you're right, but I'm trying to hand out life lessons from my cloud of judgement over here. This world is big enough for both things to be true.

Thanks, giant incorporeal screaming cowboy!
That must be the cloud of judgement next to you.

But I have failed. Oh sure, there's some nuance. But that part shouldn't be in dispute. I set up goals and I didn't meet them. I had secondary goals, and I didn't meet THEM. And even my fallback goals for not losing ground, I didn't meet. I was paying ALL the bills with writing, and now I'm back to sitting pets and working side gigs to cover my car insurance and cell phone plan. And it's okay to acknowledge what that is. It is failure. We don't like failure in this culture—the only place we tolerate it definitively is as "the hero's lowest point" in a broader narrative of ultimate success. ("Get back up, Captain Marvel!") We recoil from the idea of genuinely failing like we've touched a hot stove.

But hey. Listen. It's okay. Breathe into this bag. It's just failure. If we humans are not failing once in a while (like literally about half the time), we've got goals that are too easy or no goals at all. Which is how most people kind of move through life—vague ambitions maybe, but no real goals. And if we're failing as much as I did in the last two years, we probably have goals that are too ambitious.

In either case, failure is an important compass in how we move forward. And an important barometer in what matters to us. And an electron microscope of…um…I think I may have overdone this tool metaphor. 

Failure isn't the end. Failure isn't moral or immoral. Failure is patient and kind and failure isn't envious or boastful…oh wait, that's something else.

Now I'm going to be the first to say that the post-capitalism hellscape we live in with its incessant demand for "productivity" is maybe not the most awesome ever atmosphere to be making goals. Unless you're in the top one percent of income earners (and really the top tenth of THAT percent), you are being exploited and not a little bit. So getting caught up in the hustle usually means your work life balance sucks so that you can make someone ELSE a lot of money. That voice you hear from everywhere around you that slowing down makes you lazy and worthless and means you deserve being lower class comes from a lot of people with a whole lot of interest tied up in you contributing to their lifestyle—which I promise has more more work life balance, leisure time, vacations, and relaxation than anyone making a million times less than them. 

I'm also going to say that understanding that we are stuck in capitalism and it demands more than most of us can give doesn't make NOT GETTING A PAYCHECK any easier. We can be kind and gentle with ourselves and self-care it up, but when the electricity gets shut off because the bill is two months overdue, we're not going to be able to explain to them that our lives have been "really overwhelming" lately, and we just needed a bit more time off.

Yeah, my goals were too ambitious. I had no business wanting to get back to writing so quickly. My body recovered from cancer in just a couple of months, but my mind and heart took almost a year. I kept thinking that I would be back to writing, saying I was feeling better, and getting absolutely overwhelmed for days by the slightest hiccup. It would have been better if I'd simply said, "Hey, I have cancer. I need a year hiatus. I'll be back, but I understand if your Patreon support goes somewhere else for the next year." Buuuuuut, I didn't want to go on hiatus. I wanted to muscle through and not risk the income I'd spent a decade building up. So instead I dragged things out and fucked them up and caused myself planetoids of anxiety about my productivity and made promises I couldn't keep month after month and kinda screwed myself.

I did that. I own it. It was the opposite of success. Learn from my mistake. 

Then my partner's friend and boss was violently killed and left her with sudden, agonizing grief to process. Again, I should have simply said, "I need to go be a good partner, and put my energy into caregiving and support. This is going to take all of me for a few months." Instead I spent every week thinking that the next week was going to be a little better, trying to pedal faster, and then it was June. And I had basically been making promises I didn't keep for 18 months instead of just a year. 

I did that too. I own that too. That was also the opposite of success. Learn from my mistake.

It's not my fault these things happened. I was absolutely too hard on myself. Capitalism sucks and the proletariat should not have to work 80 hours to survive. All true enough, but these things do not transmute my failure into success.

That's okay. Deep breaths. Use that bag from the fifth paragraph. It'll be okay that I failed. We'll get through this….together.

We can do anything as long as we have each other.
Now get to the choppah!

See…that's the brilliant thing about failure. When you succeed at something you had no chance of failing at, you learn nothing. When you don't set goals, you learn nothing. But when you fail (or edge out a success), you usually come away with some kind of deep insight. Maybe you know your limitations a little better. Or have an idea how better to accomplish something. The important thing is that you can sit on the porch with a piece of straw in your mouth and say it to the young'uns between your banjo songs. 

So what have I learned?  I mean, besides what to do the next time I get cancer?

• One thing is that I want to be writing about more than just writing. It'll still be a part of my work, but there are a lot of other subjects I want to start to tackle. From ramping back up my social justice activism to my spiritual journeys through paganism to writing about running.  
• Another thing I learned is that I'm going to want a more reliable income. I love paying the bills through writing and I felt ten feet tall when I could say I was a working writer without addendum, but a ten-year build to just barely covering the cost of a VERY modest living was only ever possible because of other income streams, and then letting those dry up because "ha ha suckas, now I'm paying the bills with writing…smell you later!" kind of screwed me over. I'm going to keep writing, but I'm also going to start taking on other projects.
• I learned that even the best, hottest, most explosive sex doesn't really help anxiety go away. It just shuts your brain up for a hot second. (Extra hot…if you know what I mean.) You'll have to deal with the thoughts eventually.
• I learned income is more resilient than I think. Oh, I lost a lot. Baby Jesus is over here weeping it up. My income got burninated like a peasant on roof-thatching day. I've lost over half my income at this point from this time two years ago. But…I didn't lose it ALL. And a lot of folks were just kind of quietly cheering my recovery even as I posted three or four things a month. It was going quiet for weeks and months that really hurt me. I probably don't need five updates a week to keep my crowdfunded income stream. That means everything from putting more attention to fiction to all these other side projects I'm working don't have to be overwhelming additions to full-time blogging. 
• I learned that "hiatus" is maybe not the dirty word I think it is, even for content creators. It might be better and less stressful to just go ahead and take a full break and come back rather than dribble out content in a miasma of feelings of inadequacy and obligation.
• When you get back to writing, you'll have to fight tooth and cliché to get your writing time back from all the things that have crept in where the writing used to be.
• The things I built over the last decade didn't go away—they just kind of went into a deep freeze. Some people cancelled or lowered their contributions, but I still have the reach I've built. I still have a readership. I still have fans ready to see me return. I still have a ridiculously huge Facebook presence. Rebuilding my income will be easier and faster than building it the first time. Maybe some of those peeps will even come back.
• If it's summer, get the kids into day camp. No seriously. No. SERIOUSLY.
• NO. SERIOUSLY.

Today the kids started school, and I was able to sit down for four hours and write this post. I am still reluctant to announce this as some kind of huge comeback moment. But despite my failure over the last two years, I seem to be starting to pick up steam on some of my successes. And while it's okay that I failed, I think I'd be pretty okay to put a few in the wins column.