This Is How I Disappear(ed)

Image: The MRI of my hips that got me diagnosed. I have no idea what to look for, but it does kind of look like a butterfly?

Title: This is How I Disappear by My Chemical Romance

I have not written in a year. 

I’ve done this before, back when I graduated college after finishing an 80-page thesis, I didn’t think I could read or write another word. Back then I didn’t think I’d even get that far, and when I actually did, I realized I had no idea why I’d done it. I went to school for writing because I didn’t take myself seriously in any other way. That was my “only skill” and therefore that’s what I ought to go to school for. Everyone believed I could do this too because I’d been writing since I was 9 and finished writing a book by the age of 15 so obviously this was only the beginning of my genius and obviously I was going to become the next JK Rowling. But the thing no one took into account was that being an artist, though it can begin with innate talent and passion, takes a lot of gumption and tough skin and ambition and I was not born with those things.

Any momentum of ambition always seems to end in burnout or is simply lost when my schedule gets thrown off. This time last year, I’d stopped writing because I had just gotten laid off. I was stressed, but it was summer and I had just gotten a new boyfriend (and therefore much less fodder in terms of relationship posts, and writing about a fresh one seemed inhumane), so I lost track of time. I lost the habit. And once the habit is dead it’s incredibly hard to jumpstart. 

I then got a replacement job, one that was 5 days a week (now 3) in an office so far away I have to leave at 5 am to get to it, and so I ran out of juice immediately and completely. Every week I spent 15 hours in a car and 40 hours stuck in a cubicle in front of a screen and did not wish to spend any more time in my similarly sized office (though with windows and a better chair) in front of a similarly sized screen (though with better specs) and do a similar task (writing). 

Then I got sick. Or rather, sick-er. Turns out, I was always sick! I’d been begging doctors for around 7 years to take my pain and fatigue (and a plethora of other symptoms) seriously. It took accepting a job with a shitty chair and a shitty commute to make my condition flare up to unbearable levels that it was finally caught in 4K (on MRI). But it took about 4 months of my life away. My every waking moment was spent managing and mitigating pain and grasping at spoons to get enough to shower, eat, and go to work.

But it’s been a year. And I miss you, blog. And I guess you, too, reader. I really don’t know how I could so easily let go of my one true love. How dare I, really? What a disservice I have done to myself, my craft, and any audience I once had. 

It’s tough to forgive yourself for inaction. Sometimes I regret not doing more to further my education and career back in college. I always think I should have done more like joined a club or gotten an internship, until I remember I was on a medically-unethical amount of medication and most days I was barely getting through the fog to keep myself alive and graduate. When I was unemployed for over a year, I always thought I should have done more, like written a book or started a business or something. But I was broke, tired, lonely, and goddamn depressed. It was never quite “inaction” in that I always seem to find myself focusing on survival. I was forgetting that a life simply survived is not really a life at all; If I’m not going to do the thing I love then what’s the point of living? They say the way one spends their days is the way they spend their life, and so if I am not writing then am I a writer at all?

So I beg your forgiveness for not writing. I promise to forgive myself too if you do.

Bonus Content:

So I actually just looked at my website stats for the first time in a year and people are still reading?? Thank you. I am glad that my body of work lives on even when I’ve left it to rot.

I did pay the domain bill though, thankfully lol