5 Things I'm Thinking About
My ignorance, the glory of being alive, poltergeists, writing.
Hi everyone, how are you this week?
This is an experiment with writing a less polished, more personal, post, just for my paid subscribers.
Honestly, it means so much to me that I have you.
So much in fact that sometimes I don’t know how to thank and talk to you.
From my mum’s best friend (hi Kaz!) to writer friends I’ve made along the way to total strangers doing this for their own reasons. Thank you and I hope you enjoy my experiment.
1. It feels like Especially Terrible Times in the world. And I can’t understand how we got to this place. I’m not smart enough. Dont have the intellect or attention span for politics or history or geography.
At school I struggled to pay attention, for reasons I now understand as undiagnosed neurodivergence. So there’s a lot to catch up on.
Trying to fix my own ignorance recently, I watched a Louis Theroux documentary about Gaza. Immediately I remembered why I’m so ignorant. Heartbreaking, despicable situation.
A friend I Iook up to recently admitted he hasn’t engaged with the news for a while either. That made me feel a bit better about my shameful news ban.
Perhaps it’s ok when its a matter of survival? (Please say yes.) But also obviously no because then who is going to change things?
We cannot possibly process all the information available. I’m back to keeping it out. Tell me how you handle it. Does your work allow you to tune out? Are you active in any causes? As an academic I ‘should’ be up to date-ish.
How do you manage?
Drinking allowed me to tune this stuff out. To forget my powerlessness. Forget my shame about my ignorance.
I hoped by now to have worked out how to be more helpful. But my struggles with daily life make activism seem out of reach. For now, at least.
A lot of disabled and nd folks are counted out of a fight we care about because we already can't manage the baseline of our lives.
2. The way I experience the world is like living with a poltergeist.
Someone is with me always (it is me) and they are moving my things. They are retrieving the wrong item from the fridge. They are opening the wrong application, on my phone, and on my work laptop. Again and again and again. They waste so much of my time!
Before I was diagnosed I lived with this poltergeist but I used to drink often enough that it helped to distract me from the stress of it. If it didnt exactly take away some of the stress it at least offered respite.
It soothed me so much. To drink, to know I could drink.
But of course, when I drank, I struggled even more in the moments when I wasn’t drinking. Aka my actual life.
The poltergeist became more active and ubiquitous. And my anxiety was often unbearable.
I feel self-conscious to write about ADHD and Autism all the time. I would prefer not to. But my experience is so driven by them! Perhaps now so much because I am still assimilating my diagnosis.
3. For my own self-esteem and wellbeing, I try to take time to think about the parts of my perspective and way of experiencing that I enjoy.
When I am not overwhelmed and stressed by the simple activities (leaving the house, choosing appropriate outfits, parking, navigating, cooking, tidying, etc) I have a grand propensity for joy.
I laugh easily. Too easily! And too loudly. I embarrass myself with laughing too loudly and then feeling self-conscious about it all the time.
But I like that about myself, too, the openness to joy and connection. That i cannot suppress it. There is so much to enjoy here on earth. Its unbelievable.
Do you see the beauty of the world, clearly? Do you feel the strange thrill of being alive, deeply? Daily?
Strangely it’s another reason I drank. It felt right to mark each day with a drink, to celebrate the basic miracles of being born, the sun having risen, the sun existing.
All of it too strange and miraculous at times to bear.
4. Today I called a beloved friend and the day before I video called another. It is dawning on me that I don’t hate the phone.
The understanding of why things feel uncomfortable has helped to free me from or perhaps reframe the discomfort.
I’m making more effort to talk to the people I love and it feels really wonderful.
5. For the last year or so, I have been working on the novel I secretly think of my last chance at being a novelist.
It might not be helpful to think like this. But I can't help it (yet).
But my last novel was published 9 years ago. My best novel, the first one, Infinite Sky, was published 12 years ago. That is a long time to write, by anyone’s standards.
My diagnoses have thrown my struggles finishing novels into stark relief.
This latest one, I’ve taken a different approach. I’m considering the market as much as my own interests and abilities, and trying to plan rather than just making it up as I go.
I did this in the hope of speeding up my writing process. I’m not sure it’s worked. But it has taught me a lot of necessary information about story structure.
And it’s enhanced my teaching. So that’s something, I guess.
After a year, I have a detailed outline and the aim is to write now, with this map, and all this understanding of the characters and their motivations to help whenever I get stuck.
Who knows? Maybe it’ll even work…
There are lots more things I’m thinking about. If you feel like it, let me know whats on your mind.
Chelsey x