State of the Author

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I’m not really sure what kind of writer I am these days.

You might know that up until recently I’ve been dealing with a depressive…episode? I’m not sure what to call something that lasts more than five years. During this half a decade it felt like all the things I recognized about myself from my early 30s just sort of…stopped. Spirituality. Dancing. Blogging. Anything that used to matter to me – anything I used to write about! – stopped mattering.

In the last half of 2019 and the first bit of 2020 things started getting better. There were three primary driving forces, though I have no idea if any one was more influential than the others. First, I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church a year ago, and my growing involvement with it started pulling me out of my cave, pushing me to make friends, to join in the world again. Second, I started meditating and studying tarot again, which along with church drew me back to my spiritual life. And third, I got on a combination of psych meds that WORKS. Having been on over two dozen meds and combinations of meds in the last 22 years I had about given up on anything better than baseline survival punctuated with the occasional week or two of high functioning before the inevitable, and despair-inducing, slide back into the pit. Now I measure my days from a baseline of “not bad” instead of just “alive.”

I joined church teams, I contemplated doing YouTube videos. I redid my website yet again with a fresher look. I was developing a social life again, being brave again, testing my edges.

Enter COVID-19.

As I said in my last post I am very lucky. I am not currently in danger of losing my job. I don’t have to parent during all this. I have plenty to eat and a world of entertainment at my fingertips. While I have health issues none of them really put me at greater risk for serious complications should I come down with La Rona. Aside from my student loans (LOL) all my bills are paid and I have health insurance. I can work from home pretty easily and it’s actually been kind of nice, although I miss daily interactions with my team.

When it comes to my greater work, though – by which I mean writing – I have no idea what to do with myself.

I was in the middle of a LGBTQ romance novel about werewolves that I was already growing frustrated with; I have no desire to work on it. I abandoned the fourth…fifth? attempt at starting Shadow World 8. The nonfiction project I was outlining has about as much appeal as a finger in the eye right now.

And yes, I know I don’t have to do anything. It’s not about productivity, in this case, it’s that writing is in my blood and I haven’t been letting my blood speak. I feel itchy on the inside when I’m not writing. But even before all this craziness I was in a weird place where I just…don’t know what kind of writer I am anymore.

I feel like I’m no longer on the path I was before this bout of depression started, and what started it was, largely, disillusionment over my writing career that cascaded into a ditch full of shit. So trying to write the kinds of things I used to seems a bit regressive.

(Do not take this as an indicator that I’m abandoning the Shadow World series, I am absolutely not. But no, I have no idea whatsoever when book 8 will be out, sorry guys.)

It’s easy to say “write what you want to write,” or “write what you wish you could read,” or any of the zillion other bits of helpful advice (that was sarcasm) people love to give writers. I’ve never been a Morning Pages, writing “practice” kind of gal. Writing and I have a relationship that I think ensures I’ll never be Stephen King and churn out an entire book a year. The mere thought makes me want to autodefenestrate. I think it also means I’ll never be able to get by without a day job.

I guess I’m having something of a creative identity crisis.

Not knowing what to say, how to be of service, what I need to express, or where I want to go, the obvious solution was to start blogging again, hahaha. I’m hoping to keep this up, and it’ll likely be kind of random both in frequency and subject matter (so really not all that different from Before). Right now I feel like I need to both chronicle my weird internal spooling and my experience of the world as much as I can.

So welcome back, friends, and thanks for still being here. Hope you’ll stick around. Should be weird.

Okay and Not Okay

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

The sky is just so blue.

Spring is happening in Texas even though nobody is really watching; the Earth needs neither our permission nor our attention to do what She does best. The bluebonnets have come up, blanketing the roadsides even though so few cars fly by. Trees have exploded into flower, which even sheltering in place we Austinites are acutely aware of as the pollen count makes life miserable just like it does every year. My car’s hood is coated with bright green oak pollen. There suddenly seem to be bugs everywhere. We might not have any idea what day of the week it is but we all know it’s Spring.

Rainy days are hard, stuck inside, weather and mood sliding into a grey puddle on the ground. The gravity of what’s happening presses down and leaves me feeling pinned to the floor. On sunny days it all seems much more manageable, even if all I do is look out the window at a world of crazy-vibrant greens and oh, the blue sky.

I avoid the news.

It started as a twice-a-day limit – I’d let myself check local news ONLY in the morning and at night. But enough of the national idiocy creeps in – those circle-jerk “press conferences,” catastrophe profiteering, completely unnecessary shortages of equipment and supplies. God, how we must look to the rest of the world. I know what it looks like from in here, and it’s so enraging, so depressing, I can’t deal with it anymore. So, for now, I stop clicking on links. I mute words and users all over the place. I have to stay sane. My meds are holding me together really well and I’m not risking that just to spend my days and nights poisonously angry at everything.

I am not a productive quarantista or whatever the nonsense influencer parlance is these days. I am not making progress on any of my projects, and in fact I’ve stopped even looking at them. I’m not learning a language, I’m not taking up a new hobby, I’m not forcing myself into extra productivity when productivity obsession is part of how we got here. If I feel like making or doing something, I do it; if I feel like sleeping the day away, I do that. I am working from home with my day job which gives me both a paycheck and some structure to my days, and I am grateful for both of those things. I realize what a privilege it is not to be terrified about money right now.

I am also grateful that I don’t have children. Sweet lord.

There are no rules, no proper reaction to something unprecedented. You can’t screw up something that’s never happened before. There’s no right way; there’s only the way that gets us through.

We’re all grieving what we knew and doing the best we can and maybe for you that means baking sourdough or learning guitar, but for me it means…well, apparently it means blogging again, ordering cold brew by the gallon, and listening to lofi hip hop radio – beats to study/chill to on Youtube. Next week it might mean finally starting a morning yoga practice or rereading the Harry Potter books. I have no idea. I’m pretty sure it’ll involve naps regardless.

A seedling pushing up through the soil has no idea what the world looks like. It doesn’t know what it’s getting into. Will there be enough rain? Will the sun be too harsh here and burn it to a crisp before it’s six inches tall? Is this a sidewalk crack or a meadow? The only way to know is to move toward the unknown. None of us really know what the world is going to look like when we poke our faces out again. We just have to take it one painful, scary inch at a time, and as Anna sings in Frozen 2, “Just do the next right thing.”