My Novel-Length Work in Progress (WIP) Turned Five this Summer

Ember Everly was killed 5 years ago last month, August 16 in fact, which was a Friday that year and this. But she did not exist in this life; she is fictional. In the real world, 5 years ago August 14, then president Trump was quoted at one of his rallies as saying the solution to the gun problem was to lock up the mentally ill. If I was an American, this would terrify me, as a mentally ill, non-violent woman. I abhor violence yet myself and others like me, are constantly scapegoated for society’s violence. Rises in community violence have complex causation largely associated with resource allocation. As someone with lifelong mental illness, I have lived under stigma my whole life. In high school I wrote and directed a play exploring why a schizophrenic young person might become violent and what we as a society should do with such a person. I believe stigma perpetuates the suffering inherent in mental illness by preventing people from acknowledging their symptoms and seeking treatment. I myself likely would have sought treatments of varying kinds sooner, perhaps even finding one that brought me closer to remission, had it not been for the fear and shame of discrimination.

I had a few older ideas converge due to the inspiration to fight back against Trump’s sentiment. At the time, however, I was also writing a memoir-like project. Not long after the ideas for Hope is a Necessary Delusion came together, I applied to a local year-long writers program. In this program, a mentor chooses you to work with. I applied with writing samples of both my creative nonfiction and my speculative fiction. I was chosen by the speculative fiction mentor. My decision was made: I would focus on this novel, rather than the memoir, which has long been abandoned.

That year I wrote a complete draft of the novel, and outlined a sequel and a third book. I may have even started drafting the second book, I cannot recall. It was very heavily speculative and had bounty hunters and a king. Then the summer of 2020 hit and the protests for Black Lives Matter swept over our consciousness. I was already determined to make my book intersectional to reflect the world I live in and the world as it is. I chose to make my main character a mixed-race Black woman. There was a lot of pushback from the white people in my writing group, saying it’s not possible for me, a white writer to write a Black protagonist. All the BIPOC I consulted, however, had no problem with me attempting this. It was an odd place to be in, a hurtful place. I spent all that summer thinking it through and someone said I hadn’t thought it through enough, which touched a nerve in me for sure. It’s been a journey I continue on and will continue on for the rest of my writing life: how do we write in an intersectional way when we are limited by our own perspectives? It’s especially important to write an intersectional work that is focused on mental illness and stigma against mental illness because stigma affects BIPOC and LGBTQA+ people more than it does cis white people in a hetero relationship like myself. That’s a fact that cannot be ignored.

A second thing happened that year which fundamentally changed the novel: I realized I wasn’t writing the novel I wanted and set out to write. Ember Everly dies in an accidental shooting, not an intentional one. That is the inciting incident and thus dictates the tone and purpose of the novel. It had been suggested to me that I make her death deliberate. I was convinced by this person’s logic that it’s what a male writer would do so whey can’t I as a woman do it? I remember the word feminist coming up as well. But that’s not the novel I want to write, and I shouldn’t do things just because men do them (far from it in most cases…). So towards the end of that year-long writing program, I threw out the completed draft and started again.

Since then, the energy of this novel ebbed and flowed with intensity: it was powerful and all-consuming when it was present, leaving me determined to keep pressing on; when it left me, it might as well have been orbiting the furthest star. I’m not sure I ever declared it dead and buried, like I often have with the full draft of a different novel I completed in 2012. I know I’ll always come back to this one. I have had another baby, taken workshops on how to outline and finish a book-length work, and also took on a mentorship to guide me through writing it.

But despite re-starting it over and over, I was stuck. Stuck on what those white writing group peers had said about what I could not do. The truth is, I am disabled. There is only so much I can do. I realized my passion and determination do not match my capacity. The novel was, up until recently, to be told through eight different intersectional character perspectives. This would have me writing first person from a bisexual Black man’s perspective and a non-binary First Nations person’s perspective, for example. To do this well, I would need to do decades of research and community call-in work. I finally accepted: that’s beyond my ability as a disabled woman. I also think that 8 voices, coming from any character, are beyond my craft skill.

The very mental illness I have wanted to write about is what is holding me back from writing the novel I want to write. So I recently made my main character white again, after four years of trying to write her as Black. And I chose not to write first person from multiple points of view. I will retain the intersectional characters I planned to write but I’ve come up with a conceit that will allow me to be both deep in their heads, and also removed from them. There will be a meta element of me as a white woman learning about the inner lives of people different from me.

I am a privileged depressive, as I have written about before. Any book I am to write about mental illness must inherently acknowledge that privilege and include the perspectives of less privileged mentally ill people. That includes people who have even more severe mental illnesses than me. I never really understood how people argued I couldn’t write from a different racial perspective but not from, say, the perspective of a person with schizophrenia. A Black man’s inner world is just as foreign to me as that of a person with schizophrenia. Then again, stigma lumps us all in together, just as racism does. Every person is unique. There is no universal Black experience, there is no universal schizophrenic experience. We are all individuals. I hope that I will finish this novel one day and you will get to meet Ember and the people who are affected by her death. I hope you will get to learn from their fictional experiences. And see that violence happens in this world, tragically, but it is perpetrated by individuals, not by the mentally ill as a group.

My Journey with the Label “Disabled”

I have a disability. It's taken me a long time to come to this statement. I am able-bodied, white, privileged, a mother of two kids so why is it fair that I call myself disabled? This is a question I still grapple with. I am not ashamed of the label of disabled; rather I don't feel like I have earned it. Am I disabled enough? is a common question in the disability world, a world I'm not sure I belong to or would be welcome in. Everything in life is on a spectrum. No two people are alike; we know this. I am accepting the fact that not only do I fall on the disabled side of the spectrum, but my symptoms warrant the label. Maybe accepting that I am disabled, is the key to letting go of my shame of being unable.

Unable to write, unable to finish writing, unable to edit, seek out beta readers, take feedback, submit submit submit. I am unable. I have watched my peers, who "started" in places and times along with me, go on to win national awards. I have chosen the life of a writer at the same time as friends who now have several books out. I know, in my heart, that I have the talent, the skill, the drive, the passion -- the heart -- to have a published book out by now. I know that the only thing holding me back is my disability.

My privilege is largely what's prevented me from accepting my disability. I am white, cis-het, living a financially comfortable and stable life in a country with peace on our soil. I am very lucky and grateful. I don't need to work or apply for funding. I am more fortunate than most people with disability. But it's the more successful than me that you hear about in the disability community: those who achieved despite society’s ableism. You only hear about high-achieving disabled people. And when you do hear about us, low-achieving disabled people, we're blamed for our lack of accomplishment. Because disability is supposed to be something we overcome personally, not something our capitalist, productivity-equals-worth society must overcome on the community level. Even the disabled are blamed when we are unable.

I've examined the many potential reasons for why I have not achieved anything with my adult life. I've given up on most of my career dreams and ambitions. But the one I won't forgive myself for is not having a book out yet. Am I not talented enough? Not determined enough? Not educated enough about the industry? About craft? Could it be because I chose to have kids? Do I not know the right people? The answer of course is maybe to all of these. But I see people out there working hard, hustling, with kids, getting published.

Now you might be thinking, come now, Danica, you need to finish a book to publish a book. And by finish, we mean write not just one complete book length draft but several, then take it to beta readers, then sensitivity readers and implement their comments, pitch it to agents and sign with one, then maybe you get a publishing contract. And I can't even finish drafting a book (though I have literally hundreds of thousands of words written in the past ten years on abandoned book drafts and shorter works). My goal isn't to publish anymore, it's to have something ready to take to an agent.

So why can't I just do the damn work? What is this invisible disability I am finally accepting? My recent strides in understanding it are helping me accept it. I have been diagnosed with Persistent Depressive Disorder, ADHD, Generalized Anxiety, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, an anxious attachment style (although I think it’s worse than that...), and struggle with chronic pain of various kinds, anemia, and otherwise unexplained constant fatigue. Recently, I have learned I may have Complex PTSD from an insecure and lonely childhood which was solidified by the one-two punch of a pair of what my therapist has called attachment traumas in my late teens. The idea of me having Complex PTSD fits so perfectly with my symptom profile that I wonder if I'm reading a horoscope. And with learning about C-PTSD comes learning about polyvagal theory (look it up) and the idea that childhood traumas have left me in a constant fluctuation between fight, flight, freeze, and fawning reactions to events in my life, with no real ability to stand down and relax. I don't know how to relax. I don't know how to experience joy. I have not learned, at the age of 42, how to regulate my highly dysregulated nervous system. (I am just starting to do the very intense work of learning how.)

Lots of people overcome trauma. There are lots of books out there written by disabled folx. My disability is not an excuse. It is an explanation. And it's a way of letting myself off the hook and not feeling so ashamed of being a failure. I'm not a failure. I'm disabled. My depression isn't just depression, it’s a freeze response from a childhood of trauma. My own ambition is at odds with this freeze response resulting in deep pain and frustration. I have never been able to really explain what it feels like, my disability. I just...can't. And no number of self-help books, craft books, no amount of coaching and techniques, no amount of time, will allow me to just do. Write. Be. Now, I'm finally at least beginning to understand why I am so paralyzed.

I've long believed in the lie that what doesn't kill you makes your stronger. Looking back, I was a strong little girl made weaker and weaker and weaker by adults as a child until I grew up to be unable. (Let’s hear it for the Weak People! Woot woot! To heck with the gross glorification of strength. But that's another post...)

Over two decades ago, when I first began questioning my place in an able and ableist society, I would think about how hard it was to get out of bed, how at the time I often didn't, even spending six straight months in bed in 2001. It's people without the right adaptive equipment and financial and social supports who are truly bedbound. But what about those of us who are in a mental cage?

Even though I've been on this journey for over twenty years, it's only been recently that I have been brave enough to speak the words "Do I have a disability?" to my psychologist of nearly a decade and psychiatrist of nearly two decades. Now, this is, of course, mostly because of privilege: had I not also married a man who can support me and our kids, I would have been forced to confront this question much earlier. When I talked about it recently with my psychologist, she agreed that absolutely, I am disabled. When I asked my psychiatrist, he gave an answer that went something like this:

“Yes, you are absolutely disabled, but you are only disabled because of the society we live in.”

So here is my plea: to be seen. Not as a failure, not as someone who should be ashamed of myself, not as lesser than. I could be out there with a published book under my belt, not left behind by my peers, out there as a peer with other published authors, living the full author life, respected by my own friends who have books out. Except, I can't. I am unable. I am disabled. Please stop leaving me behind. Stop leaving all of us behind.

On (Not) Reading as a Writer

I am surrounded by books, but I do not read. I am writing my own books, but I do not read the books of others. It’s the fundamental sin of being a writer: not reading the work of others. It’s not time, though I do have little for myself as a mom struggling to find the time to write my own words. It’s not the availability of books that interest me (I have a bad habit of buying books that interest me). It’s not even energy, which I usually lack and impedes my other productivity. So what is it?

I’ve long focused on my depressive symptoms, which involve heaviness, lack of motivation, and psychological paralysis. All of these indeed make reading, especially a book, difficult. When depressed, reading is impossible. A text just isn’t powerful enough to erase the many ruminating, self-loathing, and catastrophizing thoughts inherent in my depression (the infinite scroll of social media can numb me enough to get through the day and has become a depressed addiction). The way my depression ebbs and flows through my life, I may pick up a book in a good spell, read about 10% of it, then dip into a depression, abandon it, then be uninterested and have lost the plot when I’m well enough to read again. I’m excellent at buying books, okay at starting books, and terrible at getting past that 10%. I’m also a slow reader. I’ve never enjoyed reading when scanning the page and not reading every word, hearing every word in my head. Maybe this comes from being read to as a child every night by my father until I was twelve. I expect to hear all the words the way my dad read all the words out loud (don’t get me wrong, I am grateful my father did this; it gave me a love of the words and a fundamental understanding of how they fall onto the page). My slow reading may also be because I obsess over not missing the words.

But there’s another reason, and one I may have resolved: a lack of concentration. Lack of concentration is a problem for both people with depression and, more infamously, people with ADHD. I am exploring whether I may have the latter, but the symptom’s root cause is less important than fixing it. I would attempt to read but have difficulty focusing and end up reading the same sentence repeatedly to try to take it in. Yes, seriously. It makes reading a larger work nearly impossible.

Recently, I started a new medication, a stimulant prescribed to help my depressive self with two symptoms: energy and concentration. It’s a drug commonly prescribed for ADHD. Yes, it has provided me with energy, but I noticed something else. Instead of struggling to read and take in one page in a 15-minute block of time, I am able to read and take in 10 pages during that same time period. As a result, I look forward to reading, am interested in continuing a book, and am able to enjoy myself. I’m reading! I got a full halfway through the brilliant Yellowface by R.F. Kuang before I had to put it away because it was making me want to quit writing. I’m now reading Real Self-Care by Pooja Lakshmin, and I’m confident I’ll finish it because the words are flowing for me. I haven’t finished a full-length book in years. I think this year I will.

I was an avid reader as a kid. Then my grade seven English teacher assigned excruciatingly boring books, and my love of reading died. I always blamed him. But I recently found out that there’s a theory that ADHD symptoms arise in women around the time of adolescence (suggesting a hormonal element), which for me was grade seven. Maybe my struggle to read has always been just about my neurodivergence.

Either way, I’ve been ashamed of it ever since. I don’t have a favourite author, I don’t have writers who have influenced me. I was excellent all the way through high school and university at getting As on assignments and exams without reading the book. I’m always embarrassed when I’m asked about what I’m reading and have read, an inevitable question from other writers and laypeople alike. I can talk about my own writing extensively. I can tell you if I recognize an author’s name, label their genre(s), and recognize the titles of their books, tell you if I own that book. But I have likely not read it. In my writing program, I was especially ashamed as I never did the readings. I know others in my cohort looked down upon me. I mean, what kind of writer doesn’t read??

But now I may have the answer: a neurodivergent one, maybe even a disabled one. (My relationship to disability has been on my mind a lot this year, but that’s a topic for another piece of writing I’m working on.) And I may have found a treatment that allows me to finish a damn book. Maybe.

When it comes to fiction, I’m finding myself so able to concentrate that I am immersed, losing track of not just time but my own train of thought. I am losing control of my awareness. And that’s a little scary for me. Previously, it only happened with video and computer gameplay, which is why I never really got into them. Losing myself for a while results in anxiety, not relaxation. (Note: I have never been high or drunk in my life for the same reason: I need to maintain control.) Now, this sense of anxiety is happening after I watch a fictional TV show or read a portion of a novel and lose myself in the fictional world.

It’s a new problem to solve. It may be less easy than taking a pill every morning, but hopefully, it won’t take me another thirty years to figure out. In the meantime, back to my book.

On Writing and Ritual and Trying Anything to Get the Writing Going

My Writing Altar.

I wasn’t raised to be spiritual, nor have I become so. I started listening to Big Magic on audiobook years ago and was turned off by it. I don’t believe in a mystical force that drives my writing. 

I believe my writing comes from me, from my brain, and what is triggered by my thoughts and surroundings. I believe this, even if I don’t understand it. But I often have trouble accessing that part of my brain that loves to communicate with the world through typed text. And so, I thought a writing ritual to prime my brain might be useful. Routine actions have been shown in studies to be successful at creating a specific mindset for productivity. Or at least I’ve read that somewhere along the lines. So I thought perhaps borrowing something from the spiritual world (but not the spirit world), dipping my toes, if you will, might be helpful. I came up with a writing altar as part of my writing practice ritual. I am wholly and knowingly appropriating from religion here. 

At first, I thought about buying something to be used as the basis for my altar. I looked on Etsy (of course) and found these plates that could be customized with text. Then I noticed they were made of air-dry clay, which I didn’t know existed. So I thought, “I can make one of these and customize it completely.” I knew it wouldn’t be as nice, but it didn’t matter; it was for me. Sure, another appropriation. So I ordered supplies and over the course of several days, made the plate. I made a little token as well that I can flip to begin my ritual. On one side it says “am” and the other “am not” and it goes between “I” and “writing.” It’s a message to myself and potentially others that I am writing (which includes revision). Then, what to put on the altar? 

An action to signal to myself (again along with the token flip) that I am writing: a candle to light. I chose a battery-operated one I turn on because my apartment is full of cats and children, so best to be safe. I put it in a Kintsugi cup I ordered from Japan a couple years ago, representing the beauty in repair of broken things (the cup is really from Japan, but I’m not sure it’s authentic Kintsugi, to be honest, as the gold is fading). 

Then I added some objects, and these will come and go. The first is a bookmark in the shape of a gingko leaf, representing the need to read, to be in community with other writers, to take in as much as I produce. The second is a piece of a leaf from a small arbutus branch I found on the ground and brought back from Gabriola Island. As one of my novels-in-progress takes place on Gabriola Island, this reminds me to keep at my existing projects and honour my past work. Then a piece of a geode I smashed myself (so fun!) to remind me of my power and responsibility as a writer. Then a small piece of driftwood from a Tofino beach to remind me of the power of waves in my life, an enduring symbol, and how my writing ebbs and flows. Next a wild bird eggshell (likely a starling) I found in my garden. It reminds me of constant (spring) renewal and the end of wintering, which often marks the beginning of my writing. It also connects me to home and keeps me grounded. Finally, a shell a dear writer friend collected and brought me to remind me of the necessity for me to have support and supporters within (and outside) the writing community. It reminds me I am loved and believed in as a writer. The ocean shell also reminds me that I write for people like my friend, to build understanding and compassion among humanity. 

As for the ritual itself, it is fluid, but I am working on components that include ensuring I have water and probably Jelly Belly beans at hand, flipping the marker, turning on the candle, playing a specific song (currently “King” by Florence + the Machine although “Wake Up” by Arcade Fire is a longstanding go-to motivating song for my writing), stretching my arms and back, and saying a little mantra to myself to remind my mind that I am a writer and I am writing. These steps aren’t always necessary or possible, especially given I usually have my 11-week-old strapped to me or otherwise sleeping on me while I’m writing. Let’s see if this process helps me touch into my creative side and get the words flowing. 

The Impossible Task: My Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities as a Writer

Who has a right to tell what stories? Perhaps we writers have such difficulty with our own craft, with getting the words down, because every word carries with it centuries of context, relates to the experiences of many humans, has passed, like water, through the minds of so many, in so many languages, and with so many meanings. Being a writer is daunting. You’d think we feel entitled to it, to the task of it. I feel no entitlement. Only deep, heavy, thick responsibility that weighs me down deep. 

I do not write to tell stories. I don’t have much interest in stories. You can tell by my lack of plot, perhaps. My interest is in sharing experiences, creating connection, illuminating the dark corners of the human experience for readers. My lane is mental illness, and I’ve learned, moderate-severity mental illness at that. So when not writing my own stories, I tend to stick to my lane of writing stories that I hope will bridge understanding and break down walls. But I cannot write mental illness fiction with a cast of white characters only using my own white experiences. And I cannot write characters from other backgrounds, marginalized characters, with mental illnesses, through the white lens. I must write from their own perspectives. But of course, that is somewhat impossible. I must do what is hard, what is most hard in fact, because it is right.

I have never felt entitled to anything in my life. A chronic self-loather, I deeply believe the only thing different between me and a person without housing is luck; the only thing different between me and anyone is luck. I don’t have any rights at all, only privileges which I must not take for granted. I feel insecure about my lot in life as I don’t feel like I deserve anything I have, not love, not financial security, not a home, not even my cat or the clothes on my back. Other people have these rights, to be sure. Just not me. It’s taken years of therapy to believe otherwise, and I’m still not comfortable declaring that I have a right to anything at all.

I definitely don’t have an entitlement, let alone a right, to tell the story of a mixed-race person, even if my son is mixed-race. I don’t even have the right to tell my own story. Billions of people cannot tell their own stories due to various systemic barriers. If you’re a writer, think about all the pieces of the puzzle that must be in place for you to write, or better, to publish, or better yet, to make a living from your stories and experiences. If you’re not a writer, well, you’re all too familiar with the privileges we writers have to be able to tell stories. My ability to tell my own story is a privilege the majority of people don’t have. 

I do, however, have many responsibilities because I have that privilege. Because I have the capabilities of telling my story—literacy, time, technology, technique, freedom, courage—I have the responsibility to include characters like my son, like your children and parents, like you, like reality. I have a responsibility to write the world as it is. 

My world is beautiful. My world contains a vast array of difference, of unique pains and joys. It is my responsibility to do right by my world with the privilege I have. I will represent the pain of others to the best of my abilities. I will forever, until my last breath, be on a journey of understanding, a journey that can never end for any human. I am forever a student of humanity, of the nature of being. I have no entitlement to write fiction, to borrow from the stories of real humans to make up stories about fake ones. But I do have a responsibility to represent the world, with all its pain, with all its systemic failures, as it is. I cannot write a character of colour, for example, without representing the full experience of what it is like to be that person in the real world. If I were to erase the experience of systemic racism for that character, it would be upholding the white supremacy I benefit from, it would be erasing them. I do have a responsibility to get it right. And that is the hardest part. I have yet to get it right. I am young on my journey of understanding what it is like to be another human being, a being of different experience. The responsibility of telling the stories of myself and the interconnected world I live in is great enough. The responsibilities of telling the stories of others, real or made up, are daunting beyond words. 

Empathy is sometimes defined as the ability to walk in another’s shoes. I used to be a fan; I am not anymore. I believe not in feeling what it’s like to be me in another’s life but to be them in their own lives. True understanding of the other doesn’t ask us to guess how we’d feel to live the life of another, but how they feel in their life. True compassion in writing includes asking myself what the depths of experience this character I am writing may feel, especially those experiences thrust upon them by my own white, cishet, privileged peers.  To erase what white heteronormativity does to the lives of the marginalized because I cannot imagine that pain (true) is to erase their pain altogether. I will never get it 100% right. But I will try. And I ask you to let me try, try again, keep trying, keep learning. That is my responsibility, it is my privilege as a writer to be able to be a life-long learner. Heck, maybe learning is even my right. If I am to be a writer, I must write, and I must keep writing until I get it right. That is my privilege, but never my right. To write only my own stories, my own perspectives, would be like a rich person who does not share the wealth. I must do what I can with my abilities to write the stories of humanity, not just the privileged, white, cishet experiences of myself. 

Empathy is a flawed concept indeed. Its components essentially are understanding and compassion. Sometimes one is necessary and not the other. Sometimes one is possible and not the other. Understanding is harder than compassion, I believe. To truly understand the perspective of another is impossible because we are not them. To say, “I understand your experience” is an entitled lie. All we can do is try. 

There are lots of invisible traumas that are marginalized, yet we write about them freely. Being raped, having had a miscarriage, an abortion, are all marginalized traumas. Yet many writers write characters who have experienced these events, often without talking to invisible survivors. There is an entitlement to their stories, which further marginalizes them and prevents them from telling their own stories. We tell others not to write visible marginalization, such as race, gender, and some disabilities, saying they couldn’t possibly understand. Yet, we allow writers to continue to marginalize the invisible traumas of life. If I cannot write a person of colour’s experience of racism, even if I do the (never-ending) work of trying to understand it, why can another writer write a character who has had a miscarriage when the writer has not? I have. I talk openly about my miscarriage because I have a lot of privilege. Most people who experience them don’t. In some states and countries, they risk jail time if they do. 

This is all to say all of my writing—fiction, poetry, non-fiction alike—is informed by race, gender, marginalization, and privilege. And so is all art, whether it’s about robots or dragons or sentence structure or jokes. I will never claim own voice on any experience different from my own. I will, however, uphold and support and add chairs to the table for own voice artists, choose a Black story written by a Black writer over one written by a white writer, choose an Indigenous film directed by an authentically Indigenous director over one that is not, always. Cultural appropriation is a real threat to marginalized cultures and individuals. Writing the other is a delicate thing, one that requires consenting consultation with communities. Communities are more diverse within themselves than between them. So while I can have fifty sensitivity readers read a piece of my writing, they do not represent all the millions of experiences of their respective communities. Art cannot please everyone. That’s an impossible task. But we can teach and uplift, rather than tearing down, every artist. 

Alicia Elliot wrote that to write the experiences of others, one must not do so from a place of empathy but from a place of love. I am passionate about doing the right thing in life, obsessive even. I love the words; I love the characters I create with my words. But most of all, I love the people I represent with my words. I write about people of other races, health statuses, abilities, genders, sexualities, not because I am entitled to, but because they are my literal family and friends, they are the experiences of people I love. And to ignore them in my writing, well, that is not my right. 

I Don’t Know How I Do It Either

“I don’t know how you do it!” It’s a common phrase said to people who seem to be successfully managing life. I was shocked recently when a person said it to me. Shocked because I don’t for a moment feel like I’m successfully managing life. However, it wasn’t the first time someone has said something similar to me. I’ve been called a superhero or a supermom, even though I am far from being a Pinterest or Instagram mom who usually earns those labels. Recently I was accused of bragging about my life by another mom. It broke my heart because I am just another struggling mom like every other mom truly is.

Social media has put a filter on the real home life returning us in many ways to a time in history where women especially have to portray the perfect life. No one wants to put a picture on Insta of their messy-but-true living room. So we wait until it’s perfectly tidy for a moment and hurry to snap the picture before another toy box gets dumped. When I became a mother, I became very critical of the performance of perfect motherhood and the pressure that it places on the rest of us. I wanted true, real-to-life mothers. I would cringe when called supermom because it just wasn’t me. I don’t want to be labeled “super” at anything because I don’t feel super at anything. The mom who accused me of bragging broke my heart because what I wanted to tell her is I have nothing to brag about. I am constantly failing at everything I do. Or at least I feel like I am. (This seems like a common theme of modern motherhood and possibly modern womanhood but that is an essay I hope to be writing at a later date.)

Let’s go back to that “I don’t know how you do it!” phrase. I want to examine it, break it down to the truth with my life as an example. The person who said it to me went on to mention she didn’t know how I juggled school, writing, and being a mother. Juggling is a good phrase for this. All of us in our lives have balls of various weights in the air. Some are slippery, some have a good grip, some rise and fall in a perfect arc, others take off like a golden snitch and are hard to catch again.

The balls I juggle include writing, school, and parenting, yes, but also wifing, managing a home and the care of plants and our cats, social obligations, and managing my mental health. So how do I do it? Let’s break this question down into three key components: the “it,” the “do,” and the “how.”

What is “it” in the context of the question? “It” is usually something put on a pedestal, the seemingly unattainable image of successful life juggling. It is always a performance, a veneer, a public image. No one is doing “it” alone. No one is doing “it” without practice, without failure, without bad days. No one is not struggling, as much as Instagram would have us believe otherwise. “It” is a sham. Women are asked the question of how they do “it” all the time. How do we be both mothers and human beings with jobs/lives? Celebrities doing “it” always have two things: money and hired help. They are constantly asked about doing “it” but also constantly erase those factors that allow them to do it. Which is why no on has a clear answer to how they “do it.”

Men are rarely asked this. Men don’t do “it” because they do their jobs. They are considered to have less to juggle. “It” is the territory of women. We are met with surprise that we can do what we’ve been doing forever: juggling so many balls while men just usually have two.

So what do I “do”? What does my real life look like? Why does my own real life not match the “it”? Well to answer what my real life looks like, you need to know one thing: I actually have two lives. I’m a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde just without the doctoring or the Victorian murdering (was Hyde a murderer?). My life on any given day looks like a lot of planning and organizing (more on that later), sending and answering texts and emails, thinking while often scrolling through social media, attending to my son’s needs but not scheduling him into a complex routine, not playing with him as much as I should, allowing him to watch way more screen time than is recommended, eating, and sleeping a lot. On a good day, a Jekyll day, the day will also include some successful juggling: I might write or read, do some art, get out of the apartment to go for a walk or errand, get some chores or household projects done, read up on documents related to my son’s life, etcetera. But then Hyde comes—my depression—and all of the balls I am juggling fall. Splat. I go back to the bare minimum and wait it out until I’m feeling up to picking up the balls again and getting that rhythm going. I don’t write every day. I don’t play with my kid every day even though I’m with him all day most days. I rarely read anything other than social media. I spend too much time staring blankly at screens. I don’t exercise. I try and fail to eat right. I miss classes and am way behind on my assignments. My apartment is usually a mess. I only post the pictures of the veneer, the sheen, the “it” and I have fallen into the trap of being performative. I need to stop doing “it” and be real.

But “how?” How do I juggle at all? There are three advantages I have that make the “how” easier: my privilege, my husband, and my extreme personal organization methods.

I have paid help: a person who cleans for me weekly and another person who maintains my garden. We don’t have a nanny or daycare, but my son is enrolled in preschool and he has good therapists funded by the government for his autism. I have the privilege of a nice condo in a beautiful city and a husband who makes enough money so that we live comfortably without me having to bring in an income. I am privileged not only financially but also as a white, cishet woman. That goes a long way in easing the stress so that I can juggle. And I don’t have “clean” and “garden” as balls to juggle.

My husband is amazing. He is in charge of putting dinner on the table (literally), keeping the kitchen clean and he does the night shift with our son meaning getting him to sleep most nights and getting up in the night with him all while also working a full 5 days a week job schedule. He also supports my writing and believes in me as a writer. He will look after our son so I can write any time he’s not working. We are to celebrate our ten year wedding anniversary this summer. We are happy. We have balance in our marriage. I am grateful for him because he’s a large part of how I can appear to be doing it.

The final secret to my success is my terrifyingly elaborate organization system. My depression comes in waves. It enters my life, takes over, and recedes, leaving me shivering and wondering “where was I?” In order to create continuity in my life, I need to be organized. I always have. Over the years my systems have become increasingly elaborate. I was bullet journaling (creating my own day planner from blank notebooks) nearly 20 years ago. I eventually went digital, starting with Reminders, then Wunderlist, then Todoist, then Trello, then Airtable, then upgrading to Airtable pro, and now recently I’ve moved to Notion and am madly in love. This program may be it, may be the program I finally settle in on. My organization is my secret. I spend a lot of time on it but it keeps me sane. I’m lucky enough to thrive on organization, clarity, tidiness, and most of all I enjoy the process of achieving them. I am just one of those people who likes to have a plan and a tidy workspace. It does not make me superior. In fact, if you took away the scaffolding of my life that is my organization systems, I would not only not be able to do “it” I would simply be unable to “do.” I am organized as a coping mechanism for my depression. I am organized because that’s how I survive. It is my way of reaching the playing field.

I am very open about my messy internal life. I embrace that vulnerability because truth and openness are important to me. Because organization is important to me, I am less open about the many times of the day I fail at it. I don’t care too much about my own physical appearance beyond my clothing and body shape (okay make-up, I just don’t care about make-up) but I do care about the appearance of my home for reasons I don’t fully understand. And I suppose I care about the appearance of my life. But appearances are just that. They are not reality. I need to work, going forward, on showing the realities of my outward life more. Am I ashamed that my place is usually dirty and a mess, that the TV is usually on in my household, that I’m actually really behind on everything? Yes. I feel like I’m failing at it all too. Is all this mess and failure real? Yes. I need to be more honest. I don’t know how I do it either because I’m not doing it. No one is.

On the Cycles of Living through the Lens of the Writer’s Life

All anyone cares about these days is productivity. How can I be more efficient with my time so I can get more stuff done? Our capitalist, post-Industrial Revolution world sees us all as numbers and that number often boils down to tasks completed, sales made, word count. Busyness is a status symbol. Burnout, according to Anne Helen Petersen, the defining condition of our time. Somewhere along the line our worth became defined by our contribution to society. 

I don’t have a regular income job. I’m busy, yes: managing my household, parenting my atypical son as a stay-at-home-mom, and carving out a writing life. Despite all this, I am ashamed of not bringing in an income. I have no marketable skills and am very privileged that our family is happy on my husband’s income. I turn to my to do list and attempt to optimize it over and over so I can increase my number of tasks completed each day to try to find a sense of self worth.

Enter my depression and its absolute disdain for productivity which of course not only fuels the shame, and thus fuels itself, but results in my pretty inconsistent productivity tallies and sense of self in this capitalist world. Depression cycles in and out of my life. But isn’t that life? If it weren’t depression, it would be pain, chronic illness, stress, crises exhaustion or just busyness. 

We are not robots. We are not consistent beings. And we are interdependent on one another. Thus, even if we are on a plateau of consistency, we can be thrown off course by the life cycle of a family member, friend, or coworker. The industrial revolution was centered on automation of production. But we are not automatons, as much as capitalism would like us to be. We are beings who live our lives on a cycle of days, weeks, months, seasons, and years. Hormonal cycles. The life cycle. Nature is about cycles, rhythms, produce and rest. Nothing in nature goes hard all throughout the year. Trees lose their leaves to conserve energy in winter. Animals hibernate. We have been trying to discipline the nature out of us but nature will always win.

It was sometime last summer that I realized that my own life cycles between three life situations. I originally identified it as a cycle of living well, which is interrupted by a crisis or depression, which then results in restarting, unless the interruption is brief in which case I sometimes can go straight back to living well.

Then I took a class with author Wayde Compton and he talked about his theory of the rupture in the writing process, which he believes is a necessary part of any project’s development. The rupture is any moment when the smooth sailing of creating something suddenly is capsized, derailed, crashes. The project is turned on its head.  

This sounded like life to me. Life is good. Donald Trump becomes president of America creating a rupture in the world. We all have to rebuild. Now I’ve renamed my three phases of life as Build, Rupture and Rebuild. 

Before I get into why this seemingly common sense realization matters, let me tell you about the work of Anne Hungerford, a woman who studied the creative process, whom Wayde also taught us about. The findings of hers that he highlighted for the class were that writers spend very little of their writing time actually writing: fifty percent of our time is spent revising our writing and about 30-40% of our time is spent “inventing.” The inventing part is interesting because that’s the part that the industrial revolution killed, as Wayde explained. Before it, writers and other artists would honour the process of thinking and brainstorming, of living so that ideas would come to them. Deep creating comes from deep living. But after, writers became obsessed with word counts. Wayde himself had a mentor that preached a mandatory thousand words a day for all writers. A later class with Ray Hsu taught me that there is a difference between honouring the product (word count, publications, awards, bestseller lists) and honouring the process, the act of creation. We tend to honour the product more than the process. 

This is another cycle, this time of writing—inventing, drafting, revising. I know so many writers who beat themselves up if they do not write words on their current projects every day. We need to honour the time we spend living and thinking, brainstorming and creating without necessarily drafting or revising. The humming and hawing over a new idea. The experimentation. 

Recently, I was in the rupture—I was super depressed—but I was also inventing. A rupture can of course happen at any stage in the cycle of writing but it will always precipitate a back to the drawing board state of inventing and experimentation. If a rupture can also be a period of invention, then perhaps I need to honour the rupture period and make space for myself when I’m in it. 

Build, rupture, rebuild. Digging deeper into these three phases in my life and perhaps yours. The characteristics of the build are productivity, checking off the task list, keeping routines going and the home clean, being social, living life to the best of your current ability. This is the phase of consistency. It also means running with whatever new systems were born of the rebuild/invention phase. In terms of the cycle of creating, this is where drafting and revising happens. I classify this as the build because life, even normal consistent life, is always building towards a goal. 

So you’re going along life and you’re thinking that nothing could go wrong. Things feel good, or at least normal. Then the rupture happens. The rupture can be positive: a happy life event or an exciting new idea for a project. But it can also be negative: a crisis, illness or, in my case, a depression. During the rupture, the systems built in the rebuild and executed in the build, are no longer maintained. Routines go out the window and tasks become triaged. This is a bare minimum, emergency mode, only the necessities of life phase. The more time spent here, the worse things get. Often, we are isolated as we deal with the crisis. The longer we spend here, the longer the rebuild will take. If the rupture is short enough, however, we can move right back into our systems and the build phase. But the rupture period also can allow for a lot of internal time, time spent inventing. Sometimes big ideas come out of this period. Ruptures are also what we end up writing about later. No one writes about the day to day life because it’s boring. Ruptures are the plot points in life. 

Rebuilds are the fall-out from the plot points. After a recovery period which is part of the rupture, the rebuild can begin. This, for me, is motivated by a feeling of being lost and needing to find my way again. They are the readjustments, the new normals. This stage involves a lot of planning, learning of new techniques, creating new goals, new routines, new structures. It’s a period of introspection, re-evaluation, and recalibrating. Sometimes it’s all internal work, thinking it through, brainstorming, trial and error of new ideas. From the outside, this phase of the cycle can look like a fallow period. The home continues to be messy, unimportant tasks continue to be put off while we figure life out again. 

At least this is how life goes for me. I overthink EVERYTHING. I can’t function without a plan, I feel lost without a list. If it’s not written down, it ain’t getting done. I scaffold my life on an ever more elaborate to do list. I started with Wunderlist, went to Todoist, then Trello, then Airtable, a brief period in Things, and back to Airtable. Organization is my passion but also my lifeline. 

I feel like this theory could work for people with a less complicated system of life scaffolding as well. Everyone experiences unexpected life events or massive ideas for new projects. This is life. There is a period of living the crisis, getting through it, followed by the rebuild and finding of a new normal then living the new normal. 

The sooner we accept that we as people are not capable of robotic consistency, that we have productive days and less overtly productive days as a natural part of the ebb and flow of life, the better we can accept our less productive days. The greater acceptance we have, the less stress, the less beating ourselves up, the less burnout. If burnout is the product of our post-industrial, capitalist society, maybe returning to nature’s waves, accepting them, is the cure. 

This post first appeared on my blog https://thewordscomeinwaves.com/ in 2020.

The Boat Metaphor of Depression

Depression is like trying to cross the ocean of life without a boat. You're constantly drowning and you fight wave after challenging wave on your own. Worse, you can see everyone else in their boats as they pass by you and leave you behind. Some of them have yachts, some have row boats, every boat is different. But most people you see in life have boats of some form or another. You may have had a boat once yourself even. But now you don't. Now you just gotta keep your head above water. Therapy and medication is a life jacket and the therapist will teach you how to build a boat for yourself from scratch. Some people have boats that are defective, that work but have a leak. Therapy in their case will teach them who to repair the boat. But it's hard, building or repairing a boat, while trying to stay afloat, in the middle of the ocean.

Certain activities allow you to ride in temporary boats, little cardboard ones that will eventually sink. This depends on you and what activity gives you a boat for a few hours. For me, being with loved ones or my therapist is like riding in their boat for a little while. It’s nice. I feel like I’m free from fighting those challenging waves on my own. But eventually I’m always thrust back into the ocean to swim on my own, with my life jacket, trying to build my own boat. 

When I’m home alone, I’m swimming on my own. It’s terrible but at least I don’t see all the strangers in their boats passing me by, practically taunting me with their boat privilege. But occasionally you see another swimmer. You see someone who is lacking a boat as well, who may even be drowning. It’s nice to know you’re not alone in this boat world. When I see these people, I’m grateful for my life jacket, I’m grateful for the tools and supplies I’m using to build myself a boat, even if I won’t finish it by the time I reach the other side of the ocean, I’m grateful to be building it.  

This post first appeared on my Tumblr https://ragerageagainstthedyinglight.tumblr.com/ in 2015.

On the Dawn of a New Decade

While of course decades are arbitrary delineations of time, and rebooting ones life and life themes can happen at any moment, I do love me an excuse to start anew. I plan to write more about why I love fresh starts in my belief that life is about constant self-improvement as part of my core belief that change and progress are in fact the only things constant in this universe. But for now, lets talk about the concept of for now. 

While the phrase did not enter my life immediately, “for now” has become the defining theme of my 2010s. It first entered my life as the title of the closing song of the musical Avenue Q, a favourite of mine which I first saw in February of 2011. At the time, I was about six months happily married, had just quit a good job because my depression made it impossible to do without crying and had recently discovered that I love New York City having been there on my honeymoon. The worst thing that had happened to me were various personal failures, attachment traumas but not Death Traumas. The concept of “for now” floated into my life and became a depression mantra as in “I’m only depressed for now.” As I went through deaths and births and a birth of a death in the decade, the acceptance of the grand impermanence of life became my guiding theme. Joy, pain, flowers, fascism, it’s all for now. It’s an edict to savour the good and survive the bad. 

It’s also a passive theme, one where you become water and accept flowing through life rather than harnessing the power of nature to act. At the close of 2019, I saw Frozen II (twice). I latched onto the final song in the film, “The Next Right Thing” in which a character overcomes grief and trauma to “do the next right thing” step by individual, pain-staking step, as sung by the wonderful, fellow-depressive Kristen Bell. It quickly became an anthem for keeping going on bad days for me. It’s not a new concept, but one that finally hit home: be patient, take life step by step, don’t “look too far ahead.” Just do the next right thing. Then in the past few days, I realized that this was to be the theme of my 2020s. The phrase “do the next right thing” starts with “do” the ultimate action word. I’ve struggled a lot with psychological paralysis in the past twenty years. This decade, I want to learn how to act. I don’t want to be passive any more. I want to take control over my time, wrest it from my mood. I don’t want to merely survive, I want to live and perhaps even thrive. And I want to learn how to be more active for the world. I’ve used the excuse of having depression to basically not be active against the evils of the world for too long. I want to learn how to make a difference, a real one. I want to do the next right thing, moment by moment, step by step. I want to move forward. 

So from water that flows without agency to learning how to jump over caverns and to throwing boulders at both my own depression dam and the walls of white supremacist cis-hetero patriarchy, this is my plan for a new decade: do. 

This post first appeared on my blog While of course decades are arbitrary delineations of time, and rebooting ones life and life themes can happen at any moment, I do love me an excuse to start anew. I plan to write more about why I love fresh starts in my belief that life is about constant self-improvement as part of my core belief that change and progress are in fact the only things constant in this universe. But for now, lets talk about the concept of for now. 

While the phrase did not enter my life immediately, “for now” has become the defining theme of my 2010s. It first entered my life as the title of the closing song of the musical Avenue Q, a favourite of mine which I first saw in February of 2011. At the time, I was about six months happily married, had just quit a good job because my depression made it impossible to do without crying and had recently discovered that I love New York City having been there on my honeymoon. The worst thing that had happened to me were various personal failures, attachment traumas but not Death Traumas. The concept of “for now” floated into my life and became a depression mantra as in “I’m only depressed for now.” As I went through deaths and births and a birth of a death in the decade, the acceptance of the grand impermanence of life became my guiding theme. Joy, pain, flowers, fascism, it’s all for now. It’s an edict to savour the good and survive the bad. 

It’s also a passive theme, one where you become water and accept flowing through life rather than harnessing the power of nature to act. At the close of 2019, I saw Frozen II (twice). I latched onto the final song in the film, “The Next Right Thing” in which a character overcomes grief and trauma to “do the next right thing” step by individual, pain-staking step, as sung by the wonderful, fellow-depressive Kristen Bell. It quickly became an anthem for keeping going on bad days for me. It’s not a new concept, but one that finally hit home: be patient, take life step by step, don’t “look too far ahead.” Just do the next right thing. Then in the past few days, I realized that this was to be the theme of my 2020s. The phrase “do the next right thing” starts with “do” the ultimate action word. I’ve struggled a lot with psychological paralysis in the past twenty years. This decade, I want to learn how to act. I don’t want to be passive any more. I want to take control over my time, wrest it from my mood. I don’t want to merely survive, I want to live and perhaps even thrive. And I want to learn how to be more active for the world. I’ve used the excuse of having depression to basically not be active against the evils of the world for too long. I want to learn how to make a difference, a real one. I want to do the next right thing, moment by moment, step by step. I want to move forward. 

So from water that flows without agency to learning how to jump over caverns and to throwing boulders at both my own depression dam and the walls of white supremacist cis-hetero patriarchy, this is my plan for a new decade: do. 

This post first appeared on my blog https://thewordscomeinwaves.com/ in 2020.