Another Tuesday Night In April

Content warnings: hospitals/medical stuff (including needle mention), asthma/lung stuff, death, near-death experience. 

 

I spent most of Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in the hospital.

 

There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm mostly writing this to sort things out in my brain.

 

On Easter Sunday, we went to the in-laws' place for an Easter meal. This had been planned for a couple of weeks, so we dutifully woke up early to make the drive out. When we arrived, we found that 90% of the family had either had a cold within that past 48 hours or were actively in the throes of one. My husband's sister sounded like she'd been chain-smoking for centuries. If it wasn't for that, we may never have known. Nobody said a single word about being sick. Even the sister said at first that she'd just lost her voice yelling during a hectic card game the night before. Less than five minutes later, she was saying she caught it from her son.

 

Within hours, my husband was showing symptoms. He took it upon himself to sleep in the spare room to spare me. He had a very sore throat and complained of headache and joint pain -- just a regular, annoying cold.

 

Tuesday night, April 7th.

 

I was sitting at the kitchen table playing Core Keeper (I LOVE THIS GAME) and my husband was beside me at his desk, playing Valheim/Helldivers, depending which of our friends on the Discord call needed more help at the moment.

 

I started coughing more than usual around 7:30 or so and my immediate thought was 'oh no, I'm getting that cold too.' But the cough felt different than both my usual chronic cough and the cough I get when I have a cold. It was an abnormally dry, persistent cough that moved absolutely nothing, and it was happening after every. single. breath I took. Not intermittently, not every other breath, every single breath.

 

I noted that that was weird, but kept drinking my tea and kept playing the game. I took shallower breaths to try to avoid triggering the cough, and while that sort of helped, that also meant I was not getting as much oxygen. Focusing on the game became harder and harder, even though I tried to switch to more mindless in-game tasks like gardening. Finally I quit the game and rested my head on the table. Breathing was taking every ounce of my focus and I no longer had enough spare brainpower to hold up my head.

 

I slid to the floor and literally crawled to get my blue inhaler (maybe ten feet away, if that?). I laid on the ground for ten minutes trying to gather enough energy just to shake it. I managed one dose, at 9:30pm. My lungs were burning, like a chemical burn, like there was acid in my chest. I was trying to breathe slowly and calmly to avoid triggering a panic response on top of whatever was already happening.

 

The entire time I lay on that floor with the inhaler in my hand, I kept thinking of the girl who lived in the room next to mine in my freshman year of college. She was a bit of a writer too, energetic and empathetic, with that determined zest for life that many depression survivors have. I remembered reading the news stories that ran after she died of influenza in January 2020. Healthy to dead in eight hours. She had only been married for a few months. She had been so happy for those few months.

 

Was this what influenza felt like? Or was I just overreacting again?

 

My husband asked if I should go to the hospital. I said 'maybe,' and started packing a bag. Phone charger, extra sweaters, extra pair of warm socks, water bottle, my daily meds in case I wasn't home by morning.

 

Around this point, my chest muscles were becoming fatigued. After every exhalation my muscles were so exhausted that I didn't have the physical energy to trigger an inhalation. I would sit there in a fully exhaled state for a full 5-8 seconds before my automatic nervous system would kick in and force an inhalation. This was happening every breath. I considered calling an ambulance to transport me due to the fatigue, but the hospital was less than ten minutes away, and the decision to go to the hospital had given me enough adrenaline to stand. I drove myself.

 

By then it was 10:15. There were exactly three other cars in the entire parking lot. The place looked abandoned. I parked as close to the entrance as I legally could, shuffled very slowly to the door (wondering the entire time if I was overreacting by coming here), pressed the 'night call' button, and lurched through the automatic doors into a dark and completely deserted emergency room. A nurse appeared at a door to the side.

 

"Are you here as a patient?" she asked. I had no breath left to respond, so I just nodded. She beckoned me into the room behind her and got me registered and triaged, then led me straight into a room.

 

I fully expected them to do bloodwork and 'diagnose' me with anemia, the way every other doctor in the country has for sixteen years. But no needle appeared. The nurse listened to my chest in several places with a stethoscope, then the doctor came in and did the same thing. He quickly formed the opinion that I had a virus, and I feared I was going to be sent home to struggle, but I was not officially released. The doctor swabbed my nose for a COVID test, then left. After some interval of time (I was so focused on breathing that I didn't track how long), the nurse returned and deposited a pile of inhalers and a cup of water on my little side table.

 

It was then that I learned I was having a legitimate asthma attack.

 

She gave me a spacer and careful instructions on how many doses to take of each inhaler, then brought me a cup of applesauce with a Reactine and a Prednisone crushed and stirred into it (because I can't swallow pills). She returned yet again with a needle -- not for bloodwork, but to inject Toradol. I tried to argue that the pain wasn't that bad and probably a standard Advil would suffice, but I did not officially refuse so she went ahead and gave it to me.

I took all the inhalers as instructed, then got the medication slurry down (Prednisone tastes awful, even in applesauce).

 

Then... nothing, for a very long time. I drifted in and out of sleep, wrapped in all the sweaters I'd brought with me. The pain in my joints and my chest did ease up, a little.

 

Sometime around 1:00am, the nurse poked her head in to ask how I was feeling. I asked what exactly we were waiting for, and she said the doctor wanted to keep me for observation for a few hours.

 

That felt strangely validating. It meant they were actually worried about my condition and didn't feel safe just handing me a prescription and sending me back home. Content with their level of concern, I texted my husband an update and drifted back to sleep... no easy feat on such a hard bed.

 

Around 2am the nurse went off shift and was replaced. Shortly after, the doctor came in and gave me the option to stay the night or go home and rest there. As much as I wanted to ask to stay the night, the bed was so hard and the burning in my lungs had indeed gone away. He asked how far of a drive it was. I told him not even ten minutes. He asked if I felt safe to drive that far. I said yes (after all, I had driven to the hospital in far worse shape). He then gave me a run-down.

 

The COVID swab would not get back for testing until late the next day (there are no testing facilities in this region; all specimens are picked up daily and trucked in to the capital city some 3-4 hours away for actual testing). His educated guess was that I had a viral infection, so he prescribed three more days of Prednisone. This as-yet-unnamed infection had triggered an asthma attack, so he directed me to keep the inhalers I had already taken -- two puffs of one twice per day and two puffs of the other one every 4-6 hours as needed. They would contact me with the results of the test once they had it, if it was COVID or influenza, I might be asked to return for further treatment. (Personal aside: I don't think it's COVID, as I've had it twice already and both times it presented like strep throat. This does not line up at ALL with my experience this week. But maybe a different version would cause different symptoms?)

I packed my colourful collection of new inhalers and went home.

 

The next day (yesterday) I was tired but feeling surprisingly good, considering. I took all the inhalers as directed and filled my prescription. My boss had already found someone to cover all my shifts for the week and told me to focus on resting.

 

I thought a lot yesterday about my cousin. Playing with her siblings at the playground across the street one Tuesday evening at 7:30, dead in an ER bed by 10pm. Tuesday nights were tainted for years following that one. Tuesday nights in April were the worst of all. And here I was fighting the same monster that killed her eleven years less three weeks before.

 

The losses echo in my head. Eight hours to dead. Three hours to dead. Healthy to ER in three hours. It seems hours aren't really that long, and yet within each one hangs an entire life in suspension. When lungs hit a wall, they hit it hard and fast. Somehow Brittney lived like this every day for 22 whole years.

Today I feel measurably worse than yesterday. I've set a timer for the 4-hour inhaler and am taking it EXACTLY every four hours (not seeing if I can stretch it to five or six hours), but I'm not sure it's helping as much anymore. I am considering going back to the ER. The burning has not returned, and the cough is not quite every single breath yet, but my chest muscles are getting fatigued again and there is a distinct sense of pressure. At what point do you go to the hospital? How close was I to death on Tuesday night, really? Should I have gone sooner? How bad is too bad?

 

I don't feel that this will be my last post on here, however life is only dealt out to us in hourly doses and none of us really knows how many doses we have left.

 

If it is, thank you for being here. Remember me as a quiet courageous person who felt whole while writing and dancing, who loved her husband, her friends, and her family dearly, who could do nothing but rely on the scandalous grace of God (as she was not capable of earning His favour). Play some Daniel Amos or White Heart and dance for me. Maybe learn some choruses from the Nachmo Alphabet project.

 

If it is not, then I look forward to writing in this composition window again soon.

In the meantime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMgFRTfeGYI

 

 

 

 

(Don't think I wasn't tempted to do a Rick Roll there.) 

Day 1

Silence all, nobody breathe

How in the world could You just leave?

You promised You would

Silence that evil with good...

 

- Elle G, Newsboys, 1994

Day 1 without Jesus.

 

Remember the day after that good friend or close relative died?

 

Remember how you had to navigate the world without getting to bounce ideas off of them, tell them stories, vent to them without judgment? Remember how you kept counting them in place settings? Remember finding little gifts or cards that you couldn't buy for them? Remember having to correct yourself when you talked about them in present tense? Remember how every single atom of your being protested having to make those changes?

Remember the day after the end of the world?

 

That's what today was for the first followers of Jesus.

Grief, Ten Years Later

The Year From Hell (2015, for any new readers) is now ten full years ago.

 

In retrospect, this was probably the time when we should have started to suspect my brain wasn't quite up to par. I was sending college update emails trying, trying, trying yet again to explain the depths of the pain I was in. I was writing five and six thousand word emails to everyone back home, trying to make sense of everything that was happening to me. And to be fair, it was a lot. How many other 21-year-olds are mourning three deaths in two months, two family-destroying divorces, and a late-stage aggressive cancer diagnosis (for one of the very few not-dramatic members of the family) while also trying to graduate from an extremely demanding program from a very tough college?

 

By all rights I should have been making friends and going on dates to find the guy to build a family with and starting a career. Instead I was losing friends, losing family and watching money divide what little family survived all the deaths.

 

I was such a baby adult, and instead of getting 'real life' drip-fed to me over the course of 30-40 years like everyone else does, I got a full lifetime (maybe more) of pain and betrayal in one three-month wallop. And I could not understand how everybody thought I should just pop right back up and continue on with life as if nothing at all happened. I still sometimes think if none of those things had happened and the only bad thing that happened to me in 2015 was some kind of romantic break-up, I would have gotten ten times the love and concern from home compared to the amount of love and concern I did get during the Angel Of Death rampage that actually happened.

As the anger from the readers back home mounted about my (rightful?) despair, my emails grew longer and longer as I tried to make them see just how bad things really were. But of course they never saw. I was still in that naive autistic phase of 'if I just explain better/more then they'll understand.' I know now that some people have absolutely zero intention of understanding and that explanation in general is essentially worthless. That's a big part of why I don't really talk to people at all anymore. I'm so completely done with the wilful misunderstanding.

 

I can't even tell you how many times people just sent a terse email saying 'you need counselling,' only for me to fire back that I was, in fact, in counselling twice a week. Two hours a week was not even close to enough time to process everything. I would sit in the counsellor's office, talking non-stop for the full hour (and sometimes a little bit longer if his next person wasn't there yet), and leave without any appreciable difference in my soul other than the tiniest modicum of relief that I didn't get scolded for simply acknowledging all the bad things that were happening to me, in real life, in real time.

 

If I wasn't neurodivergent, would my grief have been smaller, easier to manage? Would it have been easier for all the email recipients back home to relate to me and show a little kindness? Would the pain have gone away at some point instead of still lingering in the shadows even today? Would the angry replies from back home have added less hurt to the already-insurmountable mountain range of pain? Would I have a slight hope of ever being happy again... without looking over my shoulder, still fully expecting to see the Angel Of Death leering over me, scythe raised?

I dreamed last night about a child drowning and I woke up crying, with the ever-familiar ache of loss in my chest. I didn't actually know or recognise this child, but in the dream, in the story my brain spun, it was my brother. He didn't look like either of my real-life brothers, but when he died the pain was the same.

 

Ten full years and I still dream of death when I sleep.

The Unborn Baby That Changed History

Content warning: death, child loss, abandonment, family trauma, mention of abuse. 

 

I have long wondered why I can be so angry, bitter, and distant. After 2015, that makes sense, but why was I already walking with an emotional limp before that phone call saying my uncle had cancer?

 

The other day, while cleaning the kitchen, I got thinking about my first experience with loss -- so long ago and at such a young age that until this week I had not categorized it as such.

 

In 2000, not long after the birth of my brother, my parents announced they were having another baby. I was delighted. I loved my baby brother, and I wanted very badly to have a baby sister as well.

 

In the fall of 2000, my mother went for a routine doctor's appointment. The doctor could not hear the baby's heartbeat, so she was sent -- with some urgency -- to the local hospital for an ultrasound. In that in-between time, I was told the truth -- that they could not hear a heartbeat -- but I was also told it was possible that something was blocking the stethoscope, hence the ultrasound. This was explained so calmly and in such a matter-of-fact way that while I do remember praying that the baby was okay, I was mostly convinced that everything would be fine -- the ultrasound would find the baby safe and sound.

Someone took me to dance class, I don't remember if my mother snuck me over between appointments, or if my dad or grandma took me.

 

An hour later, I left dance class and headed to the parking lot. Dad was waiting for me -- Dad never picked me up from dance. Even though I thought it was perfectly logical that Mom was still in her appointment, I knew somewhere in my soul that the baby was not okay.

 

I don't remember when or how it was explained to me -- probably on the car ride. But there was no sugarcoating (even as a child, I hated it when people danced around an issue, and my parents largely respected that). The baby, at 17 weeks, was dead. When I asked if the baby was going to stay in my mother's 'tummy,' Dad explained she would have the baby like normal (I was familiar with the concept from my brother's birth), only it wouldn't be alive when it came out. He also told me that would probably happen that night or the next morning, not in the springtime like it was supposed to.

 

I saw my mother only for a few seconds when we got home. She looked terrible (she usually did when she was pregnant -- she never had a single easy pregnancy, and it was only another year or so before I started to wonder why she kept putting herself through all that awfulness). She retreated quickly back to my parents' bedroom, and Dad put us kids to bed.

 

I don't remember much of the next morning. Dad told us (or at least me) that the baby had been delivered the night before. I don't remember if Mom was there at all.

 

I do remember over the following weeks how Dad would occasionally check in with me about it, to see how I was feeling about it. While I was old enough to understand death and emotionally connected enough to know I was sad, I didn't have the vocabulary or emotional awareness to go much deeper than that. He shared with me that he was sad and upset too. He also told us how his mother had also lost a pregnancy when he was young. He invited my grandparents over for coffee one night to talk about it. My grandmother shared that she had actually lost two -- news that surprised even my dad. She told the stories of both losses. Knowing her, she probably offered a lot of comfort and cried with my parents, but I don't actually remember that.

 

A few months later, my parents announced that they were expecting again. The doctors kept a much closer eye on her this time, but things progressed well.

At her 16 week checkup, the baby had a strong heartbeat and was moving well. At 17 weeks, my mother went to her doctor's appointment. The details in my memory aren't nearly as clear. But I remember her saying she hadn't felt the baby move in a couple of days, and then somehow I heard that this baby, too, had died.

 

In retrospect, this was the one that altered my mother forever.

 

I didn't realise that till this week, in 2025. I had wondered for years what had happened to the fun, kind, gentle woman who raised my sister and me, who took us to the library and baked cookies with us and showed us which blades of grass made the best whistles, why suddenly she was replaced by this screaming ball of rage with an absolutely hair-trigger temper. I'm shocked I didn't make this connection before.

 

The next few months were a whirlwind of specialists appointments as the doctors tried to figure out how my mother lost two pregnancies at 17 weeks within six months of each other after having three perfectly healthy children -- the youngest of whom was barely a year old. We, the living children, spent more time at my grandparents' and my aunt's house than we did at home, and as the oldest, I was in charge of my two younger siblings. My parents became strangers to me. After the first loss, my parents had held space for our emotions even while they were openly processing their own. After the second one, they disappeared. I lost them too when that second baby died.

 

By the time my mother's violent morning sickness started again, she was broken and terrified. She tried to hide it, but there was no hiding her symptoms. At eight years old, I was already a veteran of spotting morning sickness. I called her out, and she swore me to secrecy until she was past the 17-week mark. I kept that secret, and it worked... that baby is my little sister, and she is entering her third year of college.

 

It was around this time, I realise now, that the rage set in. She had always been opinionated and a bit fiery (I had to get it from somewhere), but after my rainbow-baby sister was born, my mother would scream bloody murder at anything that moved. In a house of four children under ten, there were a lot of things that moved. I remember writing in my diary many, many times how she would scream at us if we breathed too loudly. I spent the remainder of my childhood trying to figure out the triggers that would set off her screaming rages, but never succeeded in cataloguing them all. Seven months after my sister was born, I developed depression.

 

It's obvious now that that depression came as a direct result of the loss, abandonment, and verbal abuse from those three years. I still suffer with depression today. It has impacted my education, my friendships, my decision-making, my career (both of the ones that I straddle independently), my faith, my hobbies, and my marriage. If the depression doesn't kill me directly in the end, it will still be etched on my heart when it stops.

 

My mother's rages continued until I left for college at age twenty. My youngest sibling at that time was three years old. That was the longest my mother had ever not been pregnant since before she was pregnant with my brother, the one before the miscarriages. My entire teen years had been a cycle of violent morning sickness; long, dramatic, difficult deliveries, and white-hot rage -- all of it hers. I raised all the post-miscarriage siblings because my mother was either too sick or too angry to do it herself and I couldn't bring myself to let those helpless babies suffer for something that wasn't their fault. I'm still not convinced it's a coincidence that the baby factory stopped when I left home.

 

Thinking back on all of this, it's not as much of a surprise why I all but stopped being human after my cousin died. Something in my soul remembered the deaths of those young babies all those years before and remembered how I was left alone, overburdened, and screamed at for every. single. misstep for a full decade in the wake of those losses, and it knew I could not go through that again.

 

This fall is will be 25 years since that first baby died and my life was irrevocably changed for the worse. I don't know what I can do at this point. Knowing why my mother's behaviour shifted so suddenly is helpful, but it doesn't take away the pain of having to choose which of my siblings to shield with my own body and which ones to leave exposed to my mother's rage -- whose cries I had to listen to helplessly as I was only so big and couldn't protect them all at the same time. It doesn't change the fact that my sister and I have basically no relationship because I prioritised the younger, weaker siblings over her and had to harden my heart against her pain because I couldn't handle being helpless in the face of it. It doesn't change how I've spent decades feeling like I wasn't wanted and that my parents were desperate to replace me with the next new baby rather than be content with the ones they already had. It doesn't change the fact that I dissolve into wild, uncontrollable, suffocating sobs the second anybody raises their voice at me or speaks with the very slightest of harsh tones because all my hear is my mother screaming at us that we're all failures and how she didn't want us.

 

It's nice to have a starting point, I guess, but I still don't know where to go from here. 

Meds And Gym And Shows And Van

I didn't realise it had been so long since my last post.

I'm still on the meds. No side effects, and the faintest whisper of actual effects. The pharmacist told me straight-up when I filled the prescription that I probably would need to bump up the dose. I did notice slightly less resistance to switching tasks in the beginning, and I have managed to stay on top of the household chores since I started taking it -- this is something that has never happened for longer than two weeks. I had a doctor's appointment on Monday, and we have increased the dose slightly.

I also got a gym membership at the end of January, and have kept it up so far -- I'm literally only using it for access to the dance studio. Tap shoes aren't allowed, but $48 a month is still a MUCH better deal than the $40 PER HOUR that it costs me to rent the local dance studio.

 

We are officially halfway through our current show -- my first show in the major city I've been trying to break into since 2018. My husband is also in this show and he's grown so much already as a person and an actor. It's in a beautiful old venue (over a century old) that's just packed with character and stories. The people have been lovely so far and I'm having a lot of fun.

 

An undercurrent to all this has been vehicle drama.

 

On 15 February, on a routine trip to the grocery store, my van suddenly gave a 'reduced engine power' message and did exactly that. Even pressing the pedal to the floor barely coaxed it up to 40 km/h.

 

I limped it home and my father-in-law (our unofficial mechanic) took it to his garage, where it sat in varying states of disassembly for over a month while he cleaned, fixed, tested, waited for parts, installed, tested again, repeat. In the meantime, he graciously lent us his old truck (which, it should be noted, has SIGNIFICANTLY more kilometres on it than the van does) as I was opening a show the following week and was in rehearsal for two others.

 

This was all well and good until the truck requested an oil change. We returned it to father-in-law's place, where he discovered a bad axle and recommended that we not drive it on the highway.

 

Not a single one of these shows are in the town in which we actually live. The literal only thing I was doing with that truck was highway driving.

 

He gave us this diagnosis on a Saturday afternoon. We had a rehearsal 150 kilometres away in less than 24 hours -- the final rehearsal before tech week, and our first in the performance venue. We couldn't miss that rehearsal. My husband despaired, and I, out of some old dusty reflex, began praying of all things. This is something I have not very seriously done since the night my cousin died -- fast approaching ten years ago.

That same Saturday night, I had been asked to work an event (in town, thankfully) at a performing arts venue I occasionally pick up hours at.

 

My former boss (from my last fast food job) was attending this event, and over the course of conversation, our vehicle troubles and the impending rehearsal came up.

 

"Do you want to borrow a vehicle?" he asked.

 

Arrangements were made, and the next morning he dropped off a very nice GMC (which, I noted, also had a lot more kilometres than the van). We made it to rehearsal and back, and within the week the truck was highway-driveable again (which was more than could be said for the van, which had already been declared repaired and highway tested once only to melt down dramatically again the second I touched it).

 

As I write, my father-in-law has taken the van to two separate repair garages in an attempt to figure out what's wrong, as by this time he's replaced almost every component in the thing with no success. The first garage followed a red herring, but the second garage discovered a catastrophic electrical failure (I'm surprised the van was even turning on at all based on the description I was given) and, at last report, were waiting for a replacement part to come in. We will be on the hook for over $800 by the time that part is installed (and we can only hope that solves the problem). That old prayer reflex kicked in again.

I put out a single plea on my social media, linking to my Ko-fi page. We received a decent donation right away, but then it sat for a week... until I woke up Sunday morning to a $500 donation.

All these years I thought maybe I had misunderstood God's calling -- that I had mistakenly attributed my love for performing to Him when it wasn't from Him at all. But He got us to that rehearsal, against all odds. He has brought us over half of the amount we will need to pay for that repair, and is there really any reason to believe the remainder isn't forthcoming?

And, looking further back -- He has provided not one, but three pairs of tap shoes when I needed them. I have not paid for tap shoes out of pocket since 2012.

I let that stupid 'Christian' college convince that God did not care about my pain and was only interested in my pre-existing happiness. I let the ones who claimed to trust God tell me that my 'talent' was only in my head and that I'd never be any real use to anyone -- in performing or otherwise.

 

This does not mean I'm over my cousin's death. I don't think I ever will be. But maybe I can find a way to live -- albeit differently -- in a world without her.

Nine Years / Yesterday

Nine years ago my cousin, age nine, drew her final tortured breaths into burning lungs.

 

This year marks the epicentre. She has now been gone as long as she was here.

 

It was about 9.45pm, with the last gasps of a golden sunlight running lazily across the wooden floor when my mother hung up the phone and made the pronouncement of death to me.

 

My cousin left us on the coattails of the sun as it dipped away from us into space. Every year as the days lengthen, so does my dread... more daylight to carry my loved ones away.

It still feels as if I'm sitting there on that chair in my parents' dining room. It's been nine years of sitting on that chair.

I've graduated college. I've gotten married. I've moved multiple times. I've rewritten a literal novel. I'm still sitting in that chair at my parents' house. I'm still seeing the golden sunlight take my cousin away. I can still see her face on the Skype call the last time I saw her at Easter -- you know, the holiday where we celebrate Jesus' resurrection and talk about how He conquered death.

She had two weeks of breaths left in her and none of us knew. My uncle, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer eight months before and had already outlived his prognosis by Valentine's Day, had another four years of breaths in his lungs. Yet somehow this lively, spirited little girl running around only had two weeks of air left and none of us knew.

The Drafts Of Yester-Decade

Recently I went way back into my blog drafts folder... and I mean way back. I often scroll back about 2-3 years, but this time I went all the way back to the very beginning, to the first couple of posts I wrote back in 2010 and never published... probably for the first time since I wrote them.

There was a lot of little stories of my life written there that I had forgotten about. And in a way those made me sad. I knew I was a brighter, happier person then, but reading these posts has put into sharp contrast just how much Brittney's and my cousin's deaths destroyed who I used to be... and who I wanted to be.

I still miss that person.

The other day I contacted an old college friend who I haven't spoken to since 2020, when I was banned by my in-laws from anything I used to do or to be. I've been getting tired of being locked in the prison of my own mind, and I'm starting to rebel. I've volunteered for a local theatre. I'm starting to listen to music again. I'm starting to text people back. I'm starting to read the Bible and watch church services again.

I want my life back.

That may never happen. In September, I sustained a back injury at work, and seven months later, it is causing more issues than it did the week it first happened.

I have not yet brought up the subject of future dance endeavours with my physiotherapist. They know I have a history of dance, but they haven't asked for details, and I haven't mentioned it. I haven't needed to -- there are still no dance opportunities here anyway.

I am a different person now than I was fourteen years ago, but I'm not convinced it's a good thing. Perhaps I made some decisions that looked stupid -- but honestly, I made those decisions from a place of deep trust, and I never felt more free and 'whole' than I did back when I was living out on a limb every day of my life.

The freedom and joy in those old posts are palpable, even after sitting on a dusty server somewhere for well over a decade. I have not felt that since before my uncle left my aunt in January 2015. I was 21 years old.

All these tragedies I never asked for ate up all the best years of my life. My body was a well-oiled machine, and my mind was sharp and quick. But it was all wasted as I spent those years drowning in an endless ocean of grief. Now the grief has dulled, but both my body and my mind are no longer what they were. I wasted all of that potential, all those years... on something that wasn't even my fault and was completely beyond my control. It's so unfair. It's so unfair.

I'll never be able to get those years back.

NaNoWriMo, Day 26 - An Announcement

I'm into the final 7k of what may be my final NaNoWriMo event. At least for a while.

It's been a solid run. I've written twenty novels out of this contest since 2008. Only a few of them are really beyond redemption (or at least would take more work than I'm willing to put in). Kyrie (2014) is obviously my favourite, but there are definitely others I will be revisiting when Kyrie is closer to true completion.

This farewell to NaNoWriMo would not be complete without a huge nod to Chris Baty, the founder, and his book No Plot? No Problem! which I borrowed from the library at age 14 -- not knowing it would change my life forever.

Chris Baty made writing accessible for those of us with ADHD. He made writing seem like madcap fun, not a tedious chore. He made it exciting. He gave it a deadline (and you know how great deadlines are for ADHDers). He made it a social activity.

Chris Baty revolutionised what writing was. He unlocked the gate of writing so the ADHDers, with all our whimsy and colour and verve, could have a seat at the table too. He gave writing ADHDers a voice. And I am so grateful for that. Without that zany book, and without that deadline, I would never have written anything. I would still be spinning my wheels, wondering what could have been if I had only managed to try writing just once.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not quitting writing altogether. I intend to rewrite Kyrie again starting in 2024. As mentioned above, there are other drafts lined up for once Kyrie is 'done.' I am so excited to actually work towards publication for some of these stories. I still intend to write blog posts and maybe the odd short story.

Maybe in a few years I'll revisit the possibility of NaNoWriMo. But I'll be taking an indefinite, likely multi-year, hiatus. Up till now, the only years I sat out were 2017 and 2020. But my job, my marriage, and my mental health have all suffered during the past few Novembers and I have decided it's time to recharge. The annual hit to my marriage especially is just not worth it.

Is it sad? Definitely. I loved this event and the madcap fun it brought into my life. I loved writing alongside M and then writing to keep her memory alive. But as much as I love M and will never forget her, 'keeping her memory alive' can't be the only reason to subject my marriage to this substantial strain every year. I have other art pieces dedicated to her that accomplish the same thing. And NaNoWriMo just isn't the same without her actually in it. Every year since her death has been a huge struggle, and I think at this point, five years later, I have to accept that NaNoWriMo will never again be the same amount of fun. Time does not heal all wounds. Not completely.

For the time being, I think I have gotten what I need to get out of this event. Maybe one day I'll return. Maybe I never will.

But for now, I will try to savour these last 7k as much as I can.

Rewrite Update

I'm currently rewriting the MC's death scene.

It's a weird experience. I first wrote this novel, this scene, in November 2014. Even then, I was no stranger to writing death scenes, but that's not what's weird.

What's weird is all the losses, the deaths that happened to me in real life -- all happened after I wrote that rough draft. This character dies of asthma. I wrote this scene in November and lost my best friend to lung failure three months later. My cousin died of asthma five months after I first wrote this scene. I didn't even know she had asthma until the night she died.

It's also weird that this doesn't really trigger me or raise my anxiety levels (I don't have an anxiety disorder -- one of the few mental illnesses I've managed to dodge so far. My fear levels are normal, but my sadness and self-hatred levels are off the charts). Maybe I've accepted defeat and am just assuming bad things will always happen no matter what and there are absolutely zero ways to get out of it. Maybe I've been successful as separating fact from fiction. Maybe not really remembering writing the initial scenes in the first place is helping me be more objective -- there's not much emotional connection as far as 'I wrote this scene on this day while sitting in this place at this time of day' so I haven't had the 'I wrote this and then it happened' thought. Maybe the writing and the real life happened far enough apart that I was able to keep them separate.

Maybe I just knew that this is what had to happen for this book to work, and I have to do what I have to do. This book has no point if she survives. She's already had a near-death experience and the character's lives just continued on for the most part (as it does at college -- if you're not actively dead, you aren't sick enough. At least not at my college). For the MMC to learn what he needs to learn, he has to lose her. And it has to be severe and sudden, with absolutely no recourse. She's not the type of person to willy-nilly end a friendship, especially not one as precious as what they have.

Honestly, her leaving this particular friend character was the initial seed of the idea. At first the scene in my head was her driving away, never to return, but somewhere between initial idea and NaNoWriMo that year it morphed into what it is now, and I think that's a much stronger climax with more interesting repercussions. If she doesn't die, he never gets mad enough to stand up to the villain character -- at the cost of everything he's worked for. If she doesn't die, he never learns to live, really live, and to value people and experiences over money and 'proving people wrong.'

I guess this novel is kind of a synthesis of what was going in my own life at the time -- I was still very much dealing with implications of my own near-death experience several years before and I was in the beginning stages of learning those very same lessons. The main character was who I was striving to become, and the MMC was me in that moment, trying to figure out how to get from here to there.

In some ways I think I've regressed in my goals there. And that's what making this rewrite in general so hard -- because I shut down hard when my cousin died. Suddenly life was not beautiful and life was not worth living. I never fully had the chance to learn those lessons. They have never taken root in my own life. And because this character doesn't die until very near the end of book, that means I spend 97% of the book building her up into this Mary Poppins sort of magical figure (while somehow not being a Mary Sue) with which I am very unfamiliar, and only the final 3% of the book is MMC consciously learning the lessons (which I actually am familiar with). Since the novel is 'written' by him after her death, there are elements of him picking up threads that he missed while he was living them... but that's a tough line to toe, though, because I very much want a 'no spoilers' approach. He, our narrator, doesn't mention that she dies until she does, right in front of him, barely a year after he meets her.

I do intend to send this draft out to a couple of beta readers, though I can think of a couple of things I might need to rewrite after this. This time I did a straight-through, top to bottom rewrite with absolutely no jumping around (partly so I wouldn't forget to write 'smaller' scenes, partly so I wouldn't have to completely reassemble the book potentially multiple times only to find parts still missing -- in short, to stave off mind-melting, brain-burning overwhelm). I started in April 2022 and I am on pace to finish this month. I'm currently at 77,000 words. I've never written anything this long before (you'd better believe I'm backing this thing up on an external drive every other day).

I'm just so proud that I've gotten this far. Even if nobody pays money for this book, I'm proud that I have given it a fair shot at life.

The Time Gap

We've all talked, heard, or at least felt this dissonance regarding time in the past few years. It's as if we all fell asleep when everything shut down in 2020 and now we're all waking up again to realise that three years have passed without us even feeling them. I've heard people of all age groups, religions, genders, and colours say this -- that time simply... disappeared.

But I've felt this before.

In 2014-15, in the span of six months, my best friend, a family friend, and a cousin all died. My uncle was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given three months to live. There were two ugly, out-of-the-blue divorces in my extended family (both marriages were well over a decade old). My college roommate and good friend abandoned me when I needed her most. I was almost literally drowning in homework at college, all with little sleep and no nutrition because performing arts profs don't care that the cafeteria (the only food option in a small college town) is only open for four hours a day. Half of my mother's side of the family stopped talking to each other about some financial dispute that I'm STILL not clear on the details of nearly a decade later.

I returned to college after Christmas 2014 secure in the love of my family and the loyalty of my friends. When I graduated four months later, not a single shred of it remained. It had all been bombed out from around me as I floated in some parallel universe in a different province, unable to protest anything that was happening.

Time stopped for me. 2015 through 2019 was a blur of... nothing. Time did not exist. In late 2019, my concept of time was still shaky.

Then the pandemic hit.

As it stands now, I have no explanation, few anchors, little memory of anything that happened after January 2015. I still, now, today, fully expect to wake up and have it be 17 January 2015. The clock stopped, the tape paused... and yet things kept happening, as if in a dream. It's 2023 somehow. I'm not old enough to be asking, 'where did the time go?' and yet somehow I'm asking it. How am I married? Who really is this guy in the bed with me? Where did all those friends from college go? What shows was I in? How long has Brittney been gone? What novels did I write? And M and Grandpa are gone too? Why am I living this is dusty, scorching, one-note town? How did I get here? It's almost like amnesia, or like my brain was switched into somebody else's body and now I'm living the life of a person I don't even know. And this is exactly how I've felt since 2015.

I've never had the words to explain it till now, and even now, I feel they're not adequate. But now that everyone else in the world has that shared experience of losing two years to lockdown... at least they can understand too, even if none of us are ever able to put it into words.

Missing Person

Written 4 June 2022, 1.24pm.

Trigger warning: su*c*de

I've been thinking a lot lately about who I used to be. That passionate, fiery, justice-loving, people-loving, fiercely kind, deeply-trusting person.

I keep thinking about when I was eighteen. The friends I had, the joy and the time and the clarity and the passion I had. I'm still in contact with some of the important people in my life from that time; the rest have all died. I was genuinely content to sit in my pink bedroom and choreograph Petra and White Heart songs. That was the time in my life when I felt the most complete and the most spiritually satisfied. I had a thirst for God that I didn't appreciate at the time, and in retrospect it showed. I fell into a couple of traditionalist traps, but by and large I was a fighter for true justice and love even then. A lot of my views at least mildly clashed with the religious establishment, but I was skilled enough in writing to persuade several key figures to at least properly consider what I was saying.

I keep thinking what could have been. What if I had ended up with that guy from youth group? What if my cousin had never died? What if I had never gone to college -- or at least that college?

That's a big one. The day I arrived, my faith started dying. It was slow at first, but accelerated tenfold when Brittney died and none of my college friends cared. And instead of getting out after my second year when I had the chance, I fought to return -- to return to the place that pushed me to such dire depths, spiritually. I was severely depressed, deeply wounded, and grieving, and I ran out of province back to a place that was also abusing me, but in new and different ways.

By the time I left college, I was no longer the happy, joyful, passionate person I had been when I had started. The stress of the insane performing arts course load and the abuse from the director who tricked me into believing he had my best interests at heart had taken a heavy physical toll. I was probably a couple of months away from death, based on my physical health alone (I'm not even thinking about the severe depression I was in when I graduated). Instead of being a launchpad for what could have been a beautiful, God-honouring life, college was the death knell for me. I have so many still-bleeding emotional wounds that can be traced directly to that school, that director. Almost every single one of my dreams have died because of him and his words to me. He would say 'performers have to have thick skin,' but the fact is he is abusive and uses that phrase to justify his atrocities. I had thicker skin before I went to college than I do now. I had courage. I had spunk. I had joy. I had passion. I had LIFE, and now every single speck of all of that is gone.

I miss who I used to be.

In my pain and abandonment from God's people, I pushed away God Himself. And now I'm trapped in a tiny desert town with an absurdly high cost of living, absolutely no emotional support, and 'well-meaning' in-laws who are trying their best to take the place of that abusive man. It used to be nothing for me to jump in the van and drive several hours to do a show, or hang out with friends, or try something new. And now I never leave the house -- partly gas prices, and partly fear. I can feel my soul shriveling up and dying a little with every second I live, every breath I take.

I attempted suicide on 8 March 2017, and now, over five years later, I wish more than ever that I had done it then. I wish my life would have ended that day. But I trusted that things would get better, and five years later, they've gotten worse. My soul is dead, and that's a fate worse that still lungs. Every morning I wake up is the same and that's the one thing I never wanted to happen. I wanted to live with passion and joy and verve and courage and life, and I am doing none of that.

I want to busk. I want to make dance films. I want to make shows. I want to learn new styles of dance. I want to write publicly again. I want to be able to have an opinion and not be literally abused for it. I want to be free again. I'm not free. I am in a prison of 'if you do this, I will withhold the love I promised you and stab swords of stinging words into your heart.' I am in a prison of working eight hours a day at something that's fast-paced, but not intellectually stimulating. I am in a prison of hearing over and over the words 'you're not even trying and you have no business doing this.' I am in a prison of being years behind my peers in terms of experience because I stubbornly stuck to a college that had absolutely no intention of actually training me within the field that I went there for, and I had not even begun to heal those wounds before rushing off into marriage and bringing all of that anger and pain into a relationship that did not deserve such a burden and now is so broken by my issues it may never recover.

I miss who I used to be. I would kill to get her back.

April Saturday

Saturday morning.

My asthma is acting up the worst I think it ever has. I've doubled my meds for the last two days (as my doctor advised), but I still feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest and I'm breathing through a straw. It has not escaped my attention that the anniversary of my cousin's death from this same disease is this coming Friday.

At one time (late college), I would have welcomed this -- oncoming death? No more dealing with the world and all its neurotypical BS? Sign me up.

But now, I sit on my couch with a half-finished painting beside me, half a rewritten novel in front of me, and a crochet project that's almost done nearby, and now I think, I can't go now... I'll never see how these turn out.

The painting in particular stands out to me. I really don't like how it looks so far. I would consider it the first failure of my fledgling watercolour hobby. But I want to finish it, to see if maybe the finished project doesn't look so bad after all. My husband likes it so far and knew what it was without me having to explain it, so it's at least recognisable. If I die now, I will never know if it'll turn out all right in the end.

The novel... there was a time when I would have been okay leaving it unfinished. I made several attempts on my life between drafting it and now. But now I'm around the halfway point of a proper rewrite, and I'm invested. I want to know that I can finish it, even if the 'final' rewrite still needs some touching up. I want to send this out to beta readers. I want to send this to an editor. I want to publish it. I want other people to get invested in this story too.

The crochet project is a small one. I've made two others like it this week. But I used less stitches and a thinner yarn for this one, and I want to see how the final product changes with those variables altered.

I'm still stuck in the desert with no real hope of getting out on the horizon, and it's still beyond my ability to explain just how suffocating it is to wake up to this drab, soul-draining view every morning of my life. But if I can still be creative here, then I can be creative anywhere. Right now my main goal is to fill this dead brown place with colour -- and given how vast and stubbornly brown this desert is, that means I have a LOT of work to do.

So I have to finish this painting, this novel, this crochet project. And that means I have to take care of my health -- something I've never properly done before.

A Friend Restored

Anybody who's still alive from the olden days of this blog may remember me referencing Lila, my Neo 2 portable word processor.

Lila died after a brief illness in June 2019 -- the day I met my husband, actually. And while some depressingly poetic souls might try to turn this into a 'death to the old to make way for the new' story, I disagree. Lila was my friend. I couldn't bring Brittney or M back, but maybe, one day, I could bring Lila back.

She languished in my closet for three years as I waited for the day. My brother gave me his own Neo 2 that he wasn't using (a slightly newer model who I affectionately if somewhat awkwardly called 'Lila 2'). Lila 2 suffered an even more brief but similar illness in November 2021 and died on Day 17 of NaNoWriMo. Luckily I was far enough ahead by then to absorb the blow of not writing an extra thousand words during my lunch break, but I did feel the loss deeply.

As the world begins to open up again and I begin to travel more for performance training and opportunities, I miss being able to whip out that little device on the bus or in a guest bedroom between classes or rehearsals.

Months ago, when I was bemoaning the loss of the Lila twins in a Discord group, somebody sent me a link to a tutorial for changing the little button cell battery. Suddenly there was hope. The symptoms they both showed during their illnesses could very easily be explained by a dying backup battery, and both units were old enough to conceivably have this issue. (I had also been hyperfixating on The 8-Bit Guy's restoration videos during most of the pandemic and wanted very much to try doing a simple repair of an electronic device simply because it looked so satisfying.)

There was nothing to lose. Both machines were unusable in their current state anyway. I bought two CR2032 batteries, popped out the AAs and cracked open Lila 2.

The hardest part was getting the old battery out. All the objects with skinny pointy ends in the entire house seemed to be made of metal and the last thing I wanted to do was short out the motherboard for good, as fixing that is definitely beyond my abilities. After trying my fingers, wooden knitting needles, and the hard end of a shoelace, I finally cut a fuzzy end off of a Q-tip and that did it (no, we don't have toothpicks in the house).

The next hardest part was getting twelve very small and fiddly screws back in. I spent six years in construction and screws don't scare me, but one was a particularly stubborn little thing and I had to enlist my husband's help in the end.

I put the AAs back in and tried to power it on. The screen remained blank. My heart dipped a little, but I plugged it into the computer, whereupon the screen lit up and asked if I had changed the internal battery. I pressed Y and it told me to press Enter to restart. I did, and within seconds it appeared to be ready. Of course everything had been wiped, as I had expected. When Lila 2 started showing symptoms of the same illness that had taken her predecessor, I had backed her up immediately (unfortunately I had not been so proactive the first time around, but I have come to terms with the fact that everything on the original Lila is now irretrievable). After a few minutes, I unplugged it from the computer and tried again to power it on.

Nothing.

I began to panic slightly more. The entire point of having a portable word processor is so that I don't have to carry my laptop around. It's no use to me if it only works when connected.

But in the spirit of trying everything, I raided my husband's remote-battery stash for more AAs and tried again to power it on.

It worked.

I almost screamed. I typed a few sentences, turned it off and then on again, typed some more, ran into the room where my husband was live-streaming and danced excitedly by his desk until he looked at Lila 2's screen.

One down... one to go.

Lila the original is in a bit rougher shape. I had a sibling dump a Tim Horton's frozen lemonade into her keyboard many years ago. Her motherboard seemed unaffected, however, quite a few of the keys stuck, especially on cold days. Not only that, the Caps Lock key came off right around the time of her death. I remember saving both the key and the scissor mechanism, but I've moved three times since then and could not begin to tell you where that key and the mechanism are now. Could I still use the button without a proper key? Yes -- the plunger's still there -- but if I'm going to restore her, I would like to restore her to her former glory.

I'm just happy knowing it's possible and that I have one of my buddies back with me for November. I already have a plot that I'm very excited about, and I feel much better knowing I'll be able to write on the go both during the event and in the pseudo-planning time leading up to it.

For once in my life -- a friend died and it wasn't permanent.

If

It's now seven years since my cousin's sudden death. This is the first year that I haven't been a complete basket case the month of the anniversary.

That's not to say I've forgotten. In fact, the opposite. Her death has sunk so deeply into the fibres of my muscles and the neural pathways of my brain that in many ways, it's simply a part of my body now. The way I walk now would not be the same way I would walk at this age if had she not died that day. There is no separating me from that night because to take everything that her death affected out of me with some magic vacuum would inevitably take away sinews, bone, and blood. The very shape of my heart -- my blood-pumping organ -- would be altered.

I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm simply saying that that experience and me -- the person I am at the core of my being -- are inseparable. Even if my mind forgets one day, my body never will. Every cell of the past seven years has been built on that night.

What if she had not died that day?

With every passing day it becomes harder to imagine. I no longer remember what it was like to not feel that hollow ache of loss. I can't fathom what my faith would be like had my prayers for her life been answered. Perhaps I never would have turned my back. Perhaps I would still pray regularly. Perhaps I would still have friends and those in authority at college would not have given up on me. Perhaps my marriage would be better. Perhaps my in-laws would think I was nicer. Perhaps I would still be the inspiration I had wanted to be.

If she had lived... if she had lived, I wouldn't be so bitter and apathetic and numb now. People who tell you bitterness is a choice have not gone through the hell of loss, and if they have, they're lying. Bitterness is inevitable when everyone you love dies, when the few who live turn their backs on you after promising they would be there for you no matter what. Sure, the Bible says 'rejoice,' but even Jesus screamed on the cross, 'why have You forsaken me?'

If she had lived, I could be the happy person that everyone wants me to be. I wouldn't carry all this pain around with me, in the very marrow of my iron-stripped bones. No amount of counselling or therapy, no matter how specialised, will ever be able to suck her death out of the cells of my body. You could wipe my brain clean like a brand new hard drive, but my muscles will remember. My joints will remember. My heart will remember. My brain may not be able to tell you who, but my body will know that someone is dead who wasn't supposed to be. You can tell me it was her time all you want, but you're wrong. It's never time for a nine-year-old to die.

You can tell me it was Satan all you want... but God is sovereign even over Satan and He did nothing. Just let him waltz in and take her like a five-cent candy in the bowl at the bank. As if she was nothing and meant nothing. As if he (and I'm not sure if I mean God or Satan) thought we weren't going to notice.

If she hadn't died, I would never think of God like this.

Maybe this is what God meant when He said He would harden Pharoah's heart. I wish I could come back. I wish none of this had happened and I could love God again; I really do. I miss those days when everything was so clear. Difficult, but clear.

If she hadn't died, things would have been so much different... so much better. I could have been the person I should have been. I can't anymore. I can act like I am, but I'm not that wonderful person at my core anymore. And I wonder why I was spared when letting me live and her die only served to turn me into this emotional black hole.

Pain And Choice

8 April 2022, 6.47pm.

I've lived my entire life being cut off by friends and relatives who tell me I'm 'too negative.'

Let's make a list of the things that make me 'negative,' shall we?

- 15ish years of childhood emotional abuse and manipulation by somebody in my household.

- 2004: only childhood friend moved two countries away and did not keep in touch.

- 5ish years of bullying and emotional abuse in junior/high school -- from Christians.

- 2009: first suicide attempt.

- 2014: aunt and uncle ugly-divorce.

- 2015: second aunt and uncle ugly-divorce.

- 2015: best friend dies. Found out through Facebook five days later. Unable to go to funeral due to distance and short notice.

- 2015: nine-year-old cousin dies.

- 2015: entire extended family implodes over some stupid financial dispute and aunt and uncle's divorce.

- 2016: grandfather dies. I was the only grandchild who didn't get to say goodbye.

- 2016: church gaslights and backstabs me.

- 2016: entire church leadership board tells me God can't love me because I'm 'too negative' and because I'm an artist.

- 2016: college best friend ghosts me. When asked, said I'm 'too personal' (whatever that even means).

- 2016: strung along and then ghosted by a guy I really liked.

- 2017: all my friends stop talking to me. Literally every single one of them.

- 2017: second suicide attempt.

- 2017: very good friend attempts suicide and is hospitalised for some time. All while I get told I'm being 'too needy' and 'too negative' when I share my struggle with similar things.

- 2018: strung along and dumped by a man.

- 2018: best dance friend dies suddenly.

- 2015-2019: bullied by EVERYONE at college for being 'too negative' over all these deaths (current tally: four in two years, plus extended family dissolving and church abuse concurrently).

- 2018: college program director who I admired and respected told me I wasn't trying hard enough despite knowing I was practicing 10 hours every DAY (60 unpaid hours training, tuition, and experience PER WEEK. For five years).

- 2019: eating disorder develops, third suicide attempt.

- 2018-19: voice teacher verbally abusing and gaslighting me because I improve so slowly.

- 2015-2020: unsuccessful job hunt. Applied to literally THOUSANDS of jobs across three provinces. Landed maybe three interviews and zero jobs.

- 2019: moved to a new city, landed a part-time job, was sexually harassed and stalked by my supervisor.

- 2020: two good friends die literally within 24 hours of each other.

- 2020: finally landed a job I loved. Lasted 30 days. Then Pandemic shut it down.

- 2020: in-laws refused to let me plan my own wedding; even resorting to screaming matches when I tried to insist on anything that I, the literal bride, wanted. Also they publicly dragged my father's name through the mud in an attempt to get their way (my father is probably the most honourable human being to walk the earth, next to Jesus).

- 2020: fourth suicide attempt.

- 2021: finally got into therapy, therapist told me I wasn't trying hard enough and that I was too stubborn and too sad.

- 2022: three good friends ghosted me. The only one to respond to my request for clarification said I was 'too much' for her.

- Present day: constantly screamed at by customers, gaslighted and lectured by my in-laws for existing, and told by people who are supposed to love me how stupid I am. Am saddled by unexpected debt in the thousands, rising cost of rent, and gas prices so high that I literally cannot afford to drive to my job, let alone visit my family several hours' drive away. I am not making enough at my full-time job to pay the bills and the debt.

I didn't choose any of this. Not one single thing on this list was something I chose or even had any say in.

You know where all of this pain went?

Nowhere.

It's all still there inside me. It does not shrink. It does not dissolve. It does not go away. Nearly thirty years of intolerable pain still teems in my soul, just below the surface. There are only distractions, never relief. And even distractions wear thin.

We are told to reach out when we are going through tough times. So that's what I did. But it turned out -- every single time -- that the amount and intensity of pain I was carrying exceeded the willingness of the people around me to help me.

Oh, they try to frame it as a them problem while subtly blaming me... 'you're too negative' is the honest version that some have been ballsy enough to actually say, but more often the phrase is more like 'I'm just in a fragile place right now and need to cut down on sources of stress in my life' or sometimes they just ghost me.

99% percent of these people -- ninety-nine percent -- had told me WITHIN THE PREVIOUS TWELVE MONTHS that it was okay not to be okay and that they would be there for me. And without fail, every single one of them has either outright abandoned me or severely distanced themselves from me.

Do you really think that this insane amount of pain is a choice? If you can't bear even the smallest amount of pain that I show you, how on earth do you expect me to bear the full weight of it by myself? Do you think I'm superhuman? News flash -- I'm not. Why do you think I reach out so relentlessly? Why do you think I put so much of it on others? Because I can't carry this anymore.

When this pain finally, mercifully kills me, know this -- not a single one of you do-gooders 'did the best you could.' You didn't do a damn thing. You left me to shoulder all this pain alone. You knew the pain I was in, and you left me alone to be crushed to death under the weight of it.

I did not choose any of this. And you lot only added to the burden.

Rising

Lately I've been doing daily stretch and strengthen exercises, mostly cobbled from dance classes over the years... my favourite and most influential teacher was always on the cutting edge of strength and conditioning programs to keep her dancers safe. She regularly set aside 15-30 minutes either at the beginning or the end of each class for strengthening exercises.

I had made many of these stretches part of my daily routine for several years in college, however, when I moved back to Alberta, depressed and thoroughly burnt out, everything went out the window except laying in bed until the afternoon sun covered me as well as the blankets. Then came the major life change called marriage (nobody tells you how STRESSFUL that is) and my first full-time job since before college, both of which sapped my energy and motivation to do literally anything. It was all I could do to go to work, make it through the day, and stagger back home and stare blankly at the television screen or my phone until bedtime.

Lately I've had some motivation returning, and I decided to bring back my daily stretches. This was also partly out of necessity, as my ankle is very angry at being made to stand on a concrete floor for 32 hours a week, no matter HOW good my shoes are, and is requiring either physio or total bedrest. Obviously physio is the option that keeps the bills paid, and many of the exercises that the doctor gave me are exactly the same ones that my dance teacher made us do years ago in class. This, then, leads quite naturally into the re-instation of a daily stretching program.

The most basic and most effective ankle strengthening exercise (as far as I know) is what we in ballet class call the rise. Rises on two feet and rises on one foot could take up as much as 45 minutes of class time -- different amounts, different combinations, different speeds. Students from our school were known locally for their incredible strength and confidence en pointe simply because we had so much ankle training in class. Once I fell off pointe (at a different school, after this one), and while I nearly broke my wrist, my ankles were completely unscathed (well, maybe not completely, otherwise I wouldn't need the physio now).

Rises, then, are the core of my strengthening exercises. I have sort of accidentally claimed a specific spot by the big picture window in the living room as the spot to do my exercises. On my days off, I typically do my exercises in the morning, so then the late morning winter light lies pale along the snow-lined road, reminding me of more carefree days gone by... the days when I would go to morning dance classes and do rises in classes with M, my sister, and other friends with whom I've more or less lost touch, with the calm, caring spirit of my teacher filling the room.

I would give almost anything in the world to have those days back. Of course I savoured them as much as I could while I was there -- knowing even at that young age how fleeting life is -- but I still somehow thought that it would never end, at least not completely. I thought that M would live a good long life and that my friends would stay in touch and that that school would continue turning out well-trained and deeply nurtured students for generations and that no matter how far away I traveled or for how long, I would always have a place at the barre in the sunlight.

Doing rises in front of that picture window takes me back to those days in the tiniest of ways -- strongly enough to bring tears to my eyes, but never strongly enough to be real. It breaks my heart every morning when I do rises, but I would rather remember those days than forget them. All I can do now is carry M and the spirit of my teacher and the school she gave to us for that short time in my heart and keep doing the rises that keep us connected.

Music Day - A Song In The Night

I'm surprised I haven't featured this one.

Silverwind was, vocally, the 'Christian' equivalent of ABBA, and I loved both equally. There's not a lot of call for soprano voices in CCM, and from the day I first heard this album I was enraptured by Betsy Hernandez's pure, clear voice (come to think of it, those are also the same vocal qualities Rick Florian has). My short-lived desire to be a singer was born then, listening to my dad's vinyl copy of the album I'm about to feature.

For me, this was a slow burner of a song. It was pretty, of course, and I could appreciate the lyrics even then, but I liked Forgiven better (ironically the one song on the album that didn't heavily feature Hernandez's fairy-like soprano voice). It was around 2016 when this song sprang into my mind out of nowhere and I spent the next eight hours choreographing the entire thing start-to-finish from scratch. I had never even thought about choreographing it (there were too many Daniel Amos songs ahead of it in the queue), but suddenly I saw the entire thing in my head, fully formed, and it was all I could do to write it all down before it was gone. It was one of maybe two dances I've made that I would suspect were divinely inspired. There were seventeen dancers, angels flooding the stage. I'm not normally one for angels, but that was what the piece demanded so that was what I wrote. This is probably one of the ones I would most like to see on stage before I die.

The song itself is written as a lullaby -- a rather more lush and fleshed-out lullaby (the song clocks in at nearly four a and half minutes long). It includes not only Silverwind's signature harmonies, but also a child choir. If you can tune out the oom-pah-pah-like bass line (I promise, it is literally the only kitschy part of the song), you will find a beautiful bed of piano work (I wish I knew who played piano on this so I can buy everything they ever played on), accentuated by some light synth touches.

There are several highlight moments here. The first is the second chorus. The first chorus features only the children singing the melody in unison on la la la, accompanied only by a gentle rhythm section. The first and second verses are lovely and touching but not overly arresting -- painting a picture of a frightened child singing a simple song to beat back the terrors of the night -- but after the second verse there's a short but hard stop and Betsy's voice, nearly a cappella, puts words to the melody that the children sang earlier.

Take me soon, O morning star

To the heavens where you are

Sailing on a silver wind

Take me where my dreams begin...

In recent years, I've begun to imagine singing this to any future children I might have. It's the only time I have ever really pictured having a child of my (our) own. But the angel theme that I suddenly associated with the song in 2016 is a hard one to break. It does make sense -- in 2016, I was still very much grieving the losses (read: deaths) that happened in 2015, including the death of my cousin at nine years old. And in the past year or two especially, I have developed a very intense longing for 'home' -- the heavens, beyond the stars, beyond the wall of sleep. It's much deeper than the suicidal urges I've fought off and on through the years. This is a pervasive longing -- not to die, necessarily, but to go to the place where things are Good. The words take me, morning star / To the heavens where you are (as it is sung later in the song) sometimes fill me with so much longing to go there that it brings me to tears. This song is a lullaby, but a very emotionally intense one, one with the aura of death.

The second major highlight moment is where is seems the song comes to an end. At this point, it's been a lovely but mellow lullaby. It slows to an ending with a repeated line and a cadence... then the piano surges into the space and a triumphant trumpet kicks off a repeat of the chorus...

The third highlight is after this repeat. The chorus is repeated again, but with the children singing a counterpoint line -- which is something you literally NEVER, EVER hear in CCM (yes, DA did it in Horrendous Disc, the song, a couple years earlier, but by then they were in the process of being relegated to the 'probably heresy' section in Christian music stores). It is absolutely otherworldly.

Title: A Song In The Night

Artist: Silverwind

Album: A Song In The Night

Year: 1982

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Shadows fade and then disappear

When voices rise up sweet and clear...

Music Day - Desert Rose

I really only have two criteria for Music Day posts: 1. It must be legally available for purchase; and 2. It should be a song that means a lot to me at the time of writing.

This is a song that I always glossed over. White Heart has so many loud, interesting complex songs that I was very confused by this ballad's immense popularity. If you mention the name 'White Heart' (to anybody who even knows who White Heart is), this is, nine times out of ten, the first song they mention. And that boggled my mind -- what about Let The Kingdom Come? What about Raging Of The Moon? What about Heaven Of My Heart? I do primarily listen for the lyrics more than the music, but in ten years of listening, I never 'got' the lyrics to this particular song.

Until now.

I am currently living in a VERY remote 'small town' that is literally an hour and a half drive from any other civilisation. There are no arts, no theatre, no dance classes, not even a freakin Staples. We've talked of moving but small tourist towns like this have a way of hiking grocery and gas prices so high that it is literally impossible to put together any kind of savings in order to actually do it (gas prices have been $1.43 a litre here since July; meanwhile my parents three hours north are zipping around on $1.17 gas. In the same province).

I don't have dance and I don't have money. I'm just watching my dream wither and die without practice. And I've been crying out to God, asking why He gave me this dream only to take it away again; terrified that I'm going to die in this literal hole in the ground, completely forgotten. I'm terrified of proving my program director right when he said I would never amount to anything.

Is this one of those desert experiences that so many people in the Bible went through -- Moses, the Israelites, Elijah, Jesus...? Is there still some important thing I'm supposed to do forty years from now and I just have to go through the motions until then?

I still feel angry and ignored sometimes when I think about how Brittney and M and my cousin died and I'm still here. It's not survivor's guilt so much as it is jealousy. They already live in a place where mercy is unreceipted, but I'm not lucky enough to get that chance. Given the choice between life and death, I would absolutely pick death. I'm not suicidal, per se, but I wouldn't fight death if it came for me. This world is not my home, and I want to go home. I don't even really know what 'home' is, but I know this world isn't it. I'm just so weary of life here.

And it's hard not to despair completely when all you see is the desert rising up on all sides -- literally.

(Forgot I was supposed to be doing a Music Day post. Pretending those last five paragraphs never happened.)

The song opens with a mellow but very classic '80s keyboard intro that hints at some of the haunting woodwind flavours that the band would explore in more depth on their next album Tales Of Wonder. And the tender, clear, angelic voice of Rick Florian (who I still maintain in the greatest singer to walk the face of the earth, even after five years of listening to music of all eras and genres while acquiring a BA in Music) comes in, painting a picture of an ocean of featureless sand and the tiny beauty drowning in it.

And you wonder

You wonder

Can you last much longer

This cloud you live under

Will it cover you?

The chorus features White Heart at their band-harmony peak. Harmony was something that White Heart always excelled at (their best-known line-ups featured a minimum of four competent vocalists), and it shimmers here, floating along on that bed of gentle keyboard that Mark Gersmehl weaves throughout the song.

Sometimes holiness

Can seem like emptiness

When you feel the whole world's laughing eyes

This is the part that resonates with me. I feel abandoned, alone, empty, tossed to the side, unwanted, unneeded, and useless. I feel like I and my life have been wasted and I'm just a shell of all my old dreams and potential just shuffling around waiting to die.

After the second chorus, the heretofore muted harmonies go from backdrop to centre stage, filling the song with layers and that beautiful '80s 'big' production. Chris McHugh's fantastic drums go a long way here too, and the effect is so lush and rich that it was several years of listening to this album non-stop (because of the title track and Storyline) before I realised that there isn't actually a verse here, only vocalising and a bit of vamping from Florian. (They pull off the same stunt in their song Let The Kingdom Come from their previous album, but that time they did it by distracting the listener with truly epic guitars, giant drums, and energetic rock vocals.)

Title: Desert Rose

Artist: White Heart

Album: Powerhouse

Year: 1990

Label: Sparrow Records

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Heaven knows

Heaven knows

He will hold your tender heart

Oh desert rose...

Joy, Dashed

I dreamt of M last night.

She was subdued -- had definitely gone through hell and back, but she was starting to recover and she was choreographing a dance. She showed me part of it. It was all so real. I was so overjoyed to see her again because it had been so long. It was so real that when I woke up I had forgotten that she's dead. And I had to re-learn and re-experience her death all over again. It's been throwing me off all day -- I was so excited that she was there. We were talking about choreography again, just like before.

I would give almost literally anything for a reunion like that in real life. I thought I really did have it in real life for just a few beautiful minutes it and then it was gone again. There aren't words for how gutting that is. To have everything you've ever hoped for right in front of you, speaking to you, dancing with you, the thing that you thought would never happen actually happening in that moment -- then have that joy ripped away from you again. Only this time it's worse, because you had finally just let yourself get genuinely excited and relax into the knowledge that she wasn't actually dead... only to find out that she did actually die. And you have to mourn it all over again, just as raw and fresh as the day it happened.

I would give so, so much for that reunion to be real.

NaNoWriMo - Intro

National Novel Writing Month.

I started last year and petered out before I hit 20k. I was depressed, I was struggling both emotionally and in my marriage, the creative well was completely dry. The two years before that, I hit 50k only by pure determination and I hated every word I wrote. The year before that, I took a hiatus. The year before that, school commitments cut me off at 37k (though I did go back the next July and add enough to push the novel over 50k). The year before that was 2015 and I wrote 50k of a half-decent story in a fog of indescribable pain and grief. The year before that, I wrote Kyrie.

It's been seven years since I was able to enjoy NaNoWriMo. Seven years ago, M and Brittney were both still alive. Seven years ago, the world was pregnant with possibility and I had not yet become this broken, hardened, cynical, angry shell of the vibrant and hopeful person I used to be. Sometimes I wonder if it's even possible to write anymore. That Kate is so far removed from who I am now, and I wish that wasn't so. I miss who I used to be, and I don't know how to go back.

But we're going to try. Maybe that Kate hasn't completely died -- hope springs eternal, apparently.

So, about the story...

I got the seed of the idea from a 'plot bunnies' NaNoWriMo forum AGES ago. I think I still have the username written down somewhere, so that if I ever do publish it I can give credit where credit is due. As it stands now, the plot follows a police detective who's just lost her brother in a drive-by shooting. Said brother frequently volunteered at the youth drop-in centre run by the local megachurch, pastored by a larger-than-life man who has been a pillar in the community for several generations. Police detective is obviously not allowed to work her own brother's case and is instead redirected onto the case of a child reported missing by her foster parents. But the more she digs into the girl's case, the more names she recognises from her brother's life... She begins to suspect that if she can find the girl, she can find out who killed her brother. But of course, she can't take her suspicions to her superiors, because then she'll be taken off the girl's case and won't get another chance to bring his killer to justice.

It's a story with a few big twists. It's also very much in the same vein as my 2016 story -- a modern-day parable following a child who society would rather ignore, highlighting how backwards the world can be... the ones who should care and protect are the villains, and the 'evil' ones do the right thing.

I have a bone to pick with Christian evangelical leadership, and since I've been expressly forbidden to do so with other human beings or on social media, I'm going to do it in my own private novel that nobody will see for approximately 65 years (and that's if I do end up publishing the thing). Writing has long been my only safe place to say how I truly feel about things (that's actually how this blog started), and I guess that's going to continue. Maybe when I'm dead my best friend will send it off to a publisher and then people will understand. Or maybe it's just going to languish on my hard drive and in flashes in this year's NaNoWriMo forums and this blog. It has the potential to be a really good story, but I just don't want to face the inevitable backlash from my in-laws (my biological family has long since gotten used to my 'quirks' and have stopped trying to change me into a hyper-positive Barbie doll because they've recognised that it is literally NEVER going to happen). This story is for me, at least for right now.

I'm still scared to do this without M. I don't know how to write 50k without her (even though I've done it twice). I guess it's more that I don't know how to enjoy (or even have) the wild and crazy process without her right alongside me.

But I've noticed that my choreography after her death took on a richer emotional depth and resonance. They come fewer and farther between, but they are richer and deeper and seem to touch people more. Maybe that'll be the case for my writing too.

Do I think it's a good thing that M died? No, absolutely not. If I had to chose between writing better quality work and having her here, I would chose her. It's not fun to write good quality work all alone.

I have, however, recently joined a couple of NaNoWriMo Discord groups. I'll never, never, ever be able to replace M and her impact on my life, but maybe I can find a couple of comrades here.

I have enough plot. But do I have enough spirit?

Tune in next time...