Anxiety and a house that won't behave

It has been quite a while since I have blogged, and I don't quite know where to start. I already wrote about the first miscarriage I had. I got pregnant on the rebound from that one, and then miscarried again. My doctor told J and me to wait a while and let my body heal. We are working on that. I feel peaceful about it. I had my time to cry, and it occurred to me that either I have some children who were so noble that they didn't need much time on earth to learn, or I have some children still waiting for me to successfully make a body for them so they can come to earth and start their journey. Either scenario is comforting. I don't know when the spirit joins the body - whether it happens in utero or around birth time. I don't need to know; the Lord can be in charge of that. One major frustration for me right now is that our house is not behaving. We have a brick house with a porch that was enclosed a while after the house was built. Whoever did the enclosure did not have as much construction skill as possible; there is a leak in between the house and the sun porch. When we first got the house, we thought it was because the asphalt shingle roof was old and the shingles were starting to peel. We got a metal roof and put it on. It still leaks. We have tried a few different things to try to help - fixing the facia board on the front of the house, checking other things, I don't even know all of what we have done offhand. We finally called in a contractor, and he is just as baffled as we are. He has more ideas of what it could be, and it has gotten better, but is not fixed all the way. When I talked to him last, he said he was going to call a friend of his, a retired contractor, to come in and have a look at it. You know something crazy is going on when a contractor calls in the big guns like that. I hope we can get it resolved soon to minimize the water damage. I would also like to be able to walk into the sun porch without having to step over the buckets! J and I had a talk this morning about my anxiety. I didn't realize I had anxiety issues until some medical testing was done on me that wasn't really related to my mental health - it was for a completely different reason. I guess it makes sense that I have anxiety issues now. My short-term memory is messed up from a high fever I had almost eleven years ago, and I don't really feel like I can trust what I think or remember half the time. I was diagnoses with severe clinical depression about fourteen years ago. It took a few years after that for the doctors to realize that the antidepressant meds weren't doing anything, and that there was a cycle to my depression - I had seasonal affective disorder. So I have a light therapy lamp now, and I have learned lots of coping techniques with therapy. I am still learning how to cope with anxiety. This is a big one to figure out because too much stress makes me more likely to have a seizure. It is also difficult because it is harder to get the coping techniques into my long-term memory. When I get frustrated and feel down or anxious, I end up like a child throwing a tantrum, but I have a hard time recognizing that I am overreacting until after the fact. I feel thoroughly overwhelmed as I am faced with the prospect of figuring out how to change my behavior. I don't know how to deal with this, and I have a hard time teaching myself to change because of my memory, because I am stubborn, and just because I feel so scared. J suggested doing what I frequently do to cope - to write about it. He thinks it would be good to start by writing down the things that precede the temper tantrums - how I feel, what I am doing, what I am thinking, etc. Then when we have more of an idea of what is going on, we can come up with some ideas of what to try, and start trying different things until we find something that works better than me yelling and crying and feeling alone and useless. So we are going to buy some little memo books when we go grocery shopping this evening, and I am going to try to learn to change, even with a memory that makes it hard for me.

A new approach to the novel

J reminded me of something he had told me when we had been discussing me trying short stories. I have talked with him a lot about it, and he has helped me try to work through what I want to do to keep my creative juices flowing. He suggested trying to write the novel as a series of short stories instead. When he first re-suggested it, I wasn't so sure how that would help - I would still just be writing the novel. Then he explained (again) that since I am more of a character-based writer rather than a storyline-based writer, with a series of short stories, I could cover all the main events of the novel, but also change points of view and explore characters more as I go. Each story would be a snapshot of an individual or group of people, and all of the snapshots together would make up the whole novel. I really like this idea; it is a lot less intimidating. It is just a matter of figuring out where to start and what to do. Writer's club at the library is today, and I have something started in this new framework, but I need to get some more written before it's time to head over to the library. Here I go!

i finally started one

I finally started a short story yesterday. I've been telling myself for the past several days that I want to try doing short stories for a while. It's amazing how much a change can set you on edge and make you want to procrastinate. Yesterday, I chose to sit down and write a while first thing. That tends to work well for me when I am letting writer's block kick me around. If I don't conquer the writing, I don't get to get to the other stuff on my to-do list that I want to do. I am essentially bribing my inner child - if you write a while, then you can do the other stuff you had plotted today. And it's not that I don't want to to write so much as I get myself worked up about it and how I want to do it perfectly. I forget that I have to get a draft down before I can fiddle with it and revise it into what I want it to be. So I sat down and brainstormed a while first - throwing down some ideas and toying with them until one struck me. Then I scribbled about that one for a while, and wrote out a rough draft longhand. When I finished it, I typed it up and brought it to the writer's club meeting at the local library. There were good suggestions about ways to improve it, but also a lot of compliments. That was reassuring. I think I want to keep going with writing short stories, maybe write a collection of them or something like that. I don't know. If nothing else, I feel like I am exercising my writing muscles by practicing more planning and structure as I write. That will help me when I do feel like it is time to go back to the novel. This kind of feels like I am making my writing rather like the patchwork afghan I am making. I am knitting eighty squares that are ten by twelve inches, then I am going to crochet them together into a queen-sized afghan. I work on it little by little when i have the time. It isn't as intimidating to knit a square as it is to knit a whole blanket, and it fits better in the time I have available. So I am going to practice my writing skills in smaller blocks for now and see what I can come up with. After I finish writing this post, I am going to go back and do the revisions I decided on in the writer's club meeting yesterday, and maybe I will start planning and plotting out another short story. It will be fun! =)

change in direction

After talking to J some, I am thinking about changing directions as far as my writing endeavors go. I am thinking I will leave the novel on the back burner for a little while and try my hand at writing some short stories. The main thing I struggle with when I am working on the novel is keeping everything straight in my head as far as the personalities of the characters and the main points of the story line go. I tend to go off on tangents and fill stuff in as best I can when I don't remember for sure. So now I am thinking it might work better to build my strength up a bit before I try to attempt something as massive as a novel. I am going to try writing some short stories and while I do so, I am going to practice my prewriting skills. J and I have been talking about some techniques specifically - things for me to try in order to get ideas down and sure before I start taking a pen to the rough draft. I have been resistant to this for quite a while - I always jumped into a rough draft head first before my memory got messed up. I could get it all down and not worry about getting things confused, even if I had to get up and do something else mid-draft. Now I am recognizing that I need more structure to keep me going the right way. I need a street with signs rather than a dirt path through the woods. I am going to try the brainstorming and prewriting techniques J and I talked about and see what works for me and what I need to try differently. If I can get things to work on a small scale - writing short stories - then maybe after some practice and honing, I can get those techniques to work for me when I return to writing the novel. We'll see what I can figure out. (And yes, honey, this is the part where you get to say, "I told you so." You are cute enough that I will let you get away with saying it!)

first attempt at a new form of creating

I am not entirely sure how to write what I want to write with this post, but I know that writing has a healing effect on me, and I want to write about this. I had a miscarriage on Wednesday. I was eight weeks and one day into the pregnancy. It was the first miscarriage I had that was a confirmed pregnancy, although having experienced it, I wonder if I have had a very early miscarriage once before. J and I celebrated ten years of marriage this past December, and this was the first time we were sure I had gotten pregnant. It was after a surgery to remove some polyps from my uterus that were apparently the problem both with my fertility and with the severe cramping I always had during that time of the month. We were both ecstatic that we were going to have a baby, and had to work really hard not to shout it out to the world. We told family and tried to leave it at that. We needed help with getting me to appointments since I am not currently okay to drive because of my epilepsy. Sunday evening, I started spotting. (I think it was Sunday. I was napping and exhausted through all of this, and the days were a blur.) I went to the doctor on Tuesday and got my HCG levels checked. They were borderline okay. I was told to rest and not do any strenuous activity. I obeyed that counsel to the letter, hardly getting up unless I needed to eat or use the restroom, or unless my dog needed to go out and no one else was at the house. (It would be easier on me to take him out than to clean up after him.) On Wednesday, I continued to bleed, and we went in to get me checked again. My HCG levels were down significantly; I had lost the baby. I had cried a lot while I was wondering and waiting after things started to take a turn for the worse. I didn't have very many tears left in me. At first, I felt numb and frightened. Then I felt peace. I don't know when a spirit joins with the body of a baby to make the living soul - if it is in the womb or after birth or somewhere in between. I felt that one of two things had happened. Either the baby was such a noble spirit that he/she didn't need to be tested or to learn in mortal life, and is already waiting for us in heaven, or if the spirit had not yet joined with the body, this little one is still waiting impatiently for another chance to come and join our family. Either thought is comforting. I don't know which way it works, or if there is something else going on that I can't quite comprehend with my mortal perspective. But for all of my tears and disappointment, I do feel that all is well, that the Lord knows what He is doing, and when the time is right, He will bless us with children. I will be able to join in that pinnacle of creativity and help to bring a new life into this world. It is a matter of waiting on the Lord's timing. In the meantime, I am comforted to know that I can be certain that I am able to get pregnant - my body is capable of it. For many years I was not sure of that. My husband and I will be able to create a new life and teach and raise the little one. When that happens, it will be a great joy.

feels more like i'm writing again

I worked on the novel some today. I didn't get a whole lot done, just my baseline 750 words of rough draft goal, but it felt good to actually get some work done on it. It felt like coming home again. Yesterday was also writer's club day at the public library, so I got some feedback on the novel. That also helped me to feel like I was making some progress, and to see the novel on a larger scale rather than focusing on the hiccups and bumps you always seem to encounter in the day to day rough draft writing. I have had happy news and sad news in large scale in my life recently. I won't go into the details, but it makes me stand back and realize how much life is prone to changing without our knowledge or permission. Maybe I need to incorporate that more into the novel. I believe I've got it in there to some degree already. It feels good to write again, even if I am still rather fuzz-brained.

Creativity calling to me

I still feel like junk. When my husband left for work this morning, he put me under orders to take a nap as soon as I finished with the vital stuff like eating breakfast and taking my morning meds. I just woke up from the nap, and I still feel fuzz-brained, but I also want very much to write. I find myself missing the characters I have created in my novel, missing both the creativity and the adventure of discovery inherent in writing some on it. I have been writing the novel down on my to-do list even as I have been feeling icky. I haven't crossed it off in a while, but it has been there, a reminder that I do want to work on it. I think I will actually try to work on it today - test the waters and see how I do, even with my mind feeling more like pudding than crystal clear water. We'll see what comes out of the pudding.

still human

I haven't written a whole lot in the last while except for my morning scribbles - the free writing I do every morning when I am doing light therapy. I am experiencing the evidence that I am still human, and my health gets frail sometimes. I am trying not to get too frustrated by it. Epilepsy is decidedly not my favorite thing because when the balance gets thrown off, it can take a while and some finagling to get myself as close to functional as I can again. In the meantime, I am trying to do what I can, and trying to maintain the balance of feeling somewhat vaguely useful and not pushing my already stressed body and mind too much. I haven't been sleeping very well, and I've been having strange dreams, which is evidence that I am worrying too much about being on a downswing as far as my epilepsy goes. I've already gone through feeling frustrated about it this go-round. Now I am trying to focus more on what I can do, and trying to enjoy the down time. Not everyone gets forced down time like that. I don't always succeed in being as optimistic, but I am trying to be. If nothing else, there are a lot of blessings and positive things happening in my life too. I can observe everything that I see happening around me, even take some notes when something strikes, me, and when I feel a little better; when I don't feel so fuzz-brained and disconnected from the world as I do right now, perhaps I will write about it and find a story line in there.