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Do we live in a friendly or hostile universe?

Posted in Life, Writing, tagged , , , , on May 11, 2017| 5 Comments »

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or a hostile universe.” – Albert Einstein

I’ve been thinking a lot about this quotation recently. It seems both particularly jarring and particularly relevant.

As an empathetic person, as a sensitive person, this world has never been an especially easy place to live. Perhaps as a writer, also; I went to hear Elizabeth Strout speak tonight and she said for as long as she could remember she’d known she was a writer and she’d known she was somehow different. She talked about the essential estrangement of being a writer. I don’t know what causes it exactly, but I did know exactly what she was talking about.

One night long ago when I was at university, I was staring out my window at the redwood trees and for a stretch of time it was as if I could feel the suffering of everyone in the city from my own little room. The experience struck me, and I told one of my best friends about it. He laughed at me and made a derisive comment about how I sounded religious (he was a fervent atheist). I felt embarrassed and didn’t speak of it again. It was only many years later that I remembered that moment and saw it for the awakening of empathy that it perhaps was.

But this world is hard on empathy. It is particularly easy for me to see this right now, when inequality in my country is growing at an ever more rapid rate and we’re seeing the promotion of legislation that will continue to speed its advance and disenfranchise a growing population. It is incredibly painful to witness. People are being cruel, on both an individual and a societal level, and while I have always felt that peculiar displacement that is the hallmark of a writer, I have never felt it more acutely than I do now. I told my sister earlier this week, “I don’t feel like I belong in this world.” And I suspect I am not alone in this feeling.

And then there is my personal journey. When you’ve never learned how to institute boundaries properly or how to advocate for needs of your own, you get to see some pretty ugly behavior. Even now I get to see some of this, although it happily no longer has the chance to escalate as far. And then there are people who are perfectly happy to normalize and make excuses for this behavior, which is pretty bad behavior in and of itself. All of this is not exactly uplifting or encouraging.

So then why am I thinking about this quotation in which Einstein appears to at the very least believe in the possibility of a friendly universe? Why am I thinking about this when things are so bad? Why am I thinking about this when I know people can be so awful to one another? Oh God, is Amy going to start harping about positivity again?

Okay, look, here is what I know. I know people do shitty, shitty things. I know it’s important to be realistic and protect yourself. I know some people and groups of people are incredibly self-interested, greedy, ignorant, and intolerant. I know that humanity sometimes takes steps forward and sometimes takes steps back. The steps back can be truly awful to witness.

I also know people can do wonderful things. I know they can surprise you with their kindness, their integrity, their generosity, and their wisdom. I know they create beautiful works of art and useful technologies that make lives better.

I know when you see a lot of suffering and chaos around you, when you take hit after hit until it feels like life is personally against you, that it can be easy to see only the bad. That you can stop hoping for anything better, or even being able to imagine anything better, in an act of self-preservation. That you can dramatically say, “I don’t feel like I belong in this world” (cough guilty cough).

I have this uncanny sense of impending crisis. I’ve had it since adolescence. When a lot depends on being able to predict when something bad is about to happen, you can become remarkably good at it, and so I did. I actually kind of hate it though because it is ALWAYS FREAKING RIGHT. And then I have to go ahead and deal with it as if there’s a chance of me not stepping into chaos instead of, you know, spending more time in blissful ignorance before it hits.

Anyway, recently I had my sense of impending crisis. And as usual I told myself, “Well, you don’t know for sure, even though your danger sense is pinging wildly, so you still have to behave in a mature and thoughtful manner.” Which is something of a feat when your nervous system is basically screaming at you to do a roll dive into cover and never come out. Because of a danger sense that is ALWAYS FREAKING RIGHT.

Only this time something different happened. This time the danger sense was…wrong? It was. I am still surprised as I type this, but it was wrong. It finally happened. And I said to myself, “I need to always remember this moment when the danger wasn’t real after all.”

My point is this: By all means, have your danger sense. You probably need it. It will help you. It might even save your life.

But also leave open at least the barest possibility that something good will come. Leave open the possibility that the danger sense that appears to be foolproof can in fact be wrong. Instead of shifting into automatic pilot, continue to ask questions and continue to be present.

It is a privilege to be able to perceive the universe as friendly. It is also a practice. Sadly, we don’t always have the privilege. And reality is never so cut and dried anyway; the universe can be both friendly AND hostile. But we can continue carrying on the practice in believing in the good as well as the bad and do our part to make the good manifest. 

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

Posted in Arts, Life, Personal Development, tagged , , , , on April 27, 2017| 2 Comments »

I was talking to a friend last week, and he said, “So what about the blog?”

I explained to him some of my thoughts about the blog. And then he said, “Well, why don’t you just be honest about it? What I always liked about your blog was how honest you were about everything.”

There are several reasons I haven’t been blogging much this last several months. The primary one, of course, is my health, and I’ve already written about that. But given what has been going on in the world, I’ve also been reluctant to blog because in some ways, it feels…weird. There is a dissonance between my personal experience of the world, which is what I blog about, and the greater events that are unfolding right now. And I have been uncertain about how to deal with that.

I feel like I want to give a constant disclaimer: I know there’s a lot of crazy shit going down in the world right now, and I’m aware of it, and that is the background context upon which everything else sits. Did you read that article last week about how an economist at MIT believes the U.S. is turning into a developing country for something like 80 percent of the population? That is the country I am living in. Anxieties about immigration, about health care, about nuclear war, about civil rights, about the rise of kleptocracy, these and many more are issues that those of us living in the United States are now stewing in.

I am also aware of exactly how lucky I am to be where I am now in my life. I write a lot here about taking opportunities to create personal change, to live an examined life, to heal what needs to be healed. I still believe this is incredibly important. In the past I have spent a lot of time thinking about why people don’t take the opportunities that are presented to them, and I have a lot to say on that subject. But recently I have been thinking much more about the many people who never received those opportunities in the first place, and I have little to say about it that other people are not saying better and from a stronger base of experience.

Finally, I spent all this time working on changing, and I’ve tried to give you a window to that experience through this blog. I spent years toiling away. And then I moved to a new place, and I was in an accident, and I sat and waited to heal, and now…

Everything is different.

It’s not as dramatic as it sounds, but it is the essential truth of my experience over the past year. Moving shifted everything, giving me a new foundation from which to work, and the changes I’d been working on for so long came together. Now I can see them informing my life in a variety of ways, and many of them no longer take so much work to maintain. It feels sudden even though it was anything but sudden.

So I’ve needed time to process how things are different, and it’s also a little uncomfortable that just when the outer world completely explodes is when I’m doing so well in many ways personally (except for health stuff, of course.) It feels strangely perverse to feel so much gratitude and well-being when so much shit is going down.

But I’ve had some downtime now, and I do still hope to blog sometimes. Here on the Practical Free Spirit, I write about my experiences, for better or for worse. My friend is right; I’m very honest in my writing here. I try to say what is true even when I’m playing with language or can’t get into specifics. So that is what I will try to continue to offer you: the truths as I see them, both small and large, and mostly personal.

I know these might not be what you need, but they are what I have to offer you. I know in the grand scheme of things I am not important; I say this not to be humble but to put things into perspective. I know times are hard, and it looks like they might get worse. But if my story can entertain you, or divert you, or give you a modicum of comfort or insight, then I am not wasting my time.

Writers write, even in challenging times. In the novel My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout, a writing teacher tells the protagonist, “You will have only one story….You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”

This is my story. It is the one I have to tell.

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Do Not Go Gently: On Combating Despair

Posted in Life, Society, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 31, 2017| Leave a Comment »

The day after the Inauguration, I had a long conversation with someone who was fighting despair. He was obviously a smart guy, educated, well-spoken, reasonable. He was trying to make sense of what was happening on the national political stage and come up with a plan to fix it, and he was failing. His failure, to which I imagine he is at least somewhat unaccustomed, was causing him a lot of distress.

I told him, “This is an unprecedented and chaotic time, and there isn’t a simple easy fix. No one knows what is this is going to lead to in the future.”

I want you to pause and let that sink in: No one knows what is going to happen.

Seriously. I don’t care how smart any one individual is. They do not know what is going to happen. Most of them do not even have all the facts. Unless X-men mutant powers have suddenly manifested around the globe, nobody knows what the future will bring. They can guess. They can analyze. They can plan. They can string together a line of facts with speculation. But they cannot know.

Why does this matter?

Fear has two sides. On the one hand, it can be an effective weapon. It can galvanize us into action, overcoming the impulses of laziness, denial, and apathy.  It can help us develop courage and integrity. It can act as a loud warning siren that something has gone wrong in the world around us.

But if left unchecked, fear can spiral out of control. It can deepen into despair and defeatist thinking. It can overwhelm and paralyze. It can lead a person into believing there is nothing they can do.

And spending too much time dwelling on and being terrified by an unknown future can lead to this spiral of despair all too easily.

How do we combat this? By aggressive self care, by acknowledging that we do not know what the future will bring, and by empowering ourselves by focusing on concrete actions we can take.

But Amy, I hear someone say, what good are my actions? They won’t make any difference.

And to that person I say, I understand how you feel. We are, each of us, tiny specks of sand being blown by the winds of history in the making. It is an uncomfortable feeling.

But you are wrong. Over and over again in this blog, I have written about the importance of the individual’s choices, about how we impact the world around us, about how living a mindful and examined life matters. And that has never been more true than at this moment.

What you believe matters. How you choose to conduct yourself matters. Acting with integrity matters. Reaching out and supporting your friends, your communities, your families, that all matters. Staying engaged and informed matters. Donating matters. Becoming engaged in the political process matters. Organizing matters. Protesting matters. What you create as an artist matters.

You do not have to conduct a very deep dive into history to find concrete examples of how these things have impact: various independence movements; women’s suffrage; the Civil Rights Movement; the LGBTQ rights movement; the Tea Party. And that’s just off the top of my head. These sorts of things are usually messy and often deeply imperfect, because we as individuals make mistakes and are deeply imperfect. But over time they can change the status quo. Our actions do matter.

And if the fear is strong in you right now, know you don’t have to do it all, and you don’t have to do it alone. That is why organizing is so important, because when it works well, you become more than the sum of your parts. You support each other. You don’t have to be an expert on every single issue. You can take breaks. You can focus on your strengths and not beat yourself up so hard over your weaknesses. You can raise up your voices together, and a million voices are a hell of a lot louder than one single voice.

As Dylan Thomas so famously wrote:

“Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Fight against despair because it will lie to you. It will tell you your integrity and your principles no longer matter. And that is simply not true.

Who you are will always matter.

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Well, 2016

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 31, 2016| 1 Comment »

I tried to write about 2016 this past week and I couldn’t do it. I wrote some words, but then I thought, these words don’t matter to me, and I let them languish unpublished. Instead I spent most of the week alone, reflecting and resting and, perhaps most of all, listening, giving myself the deep focused listening I craved.

When I think of 2016, the first memory that comes to mind is a day in early August. I was lying on one of those vaguely uncomfortable exam tables in a small private room at Urgent Care, wearing jeans and a thin cotton hospital gown. I was cold. I was frightened. I kept accidentally beginning to cry, not a loud sobbing with lots of tissues but more of a silent scream where I’d suddenly find tears plastered to my cheeks. My head hurt so badly, I was so confused, my brain kept betraying me again and again. I was alone.

I was waiting for my CAT scan to find out if my brain was bleeding. If my brain was bleeding I’d go in for brain surgery. At least that was my understanding from the brief forbidden peek on the internet I’d allowed myself. If I went in for brain surgery, who knew if I’d come out. It didn’t sound particularly promising. I knew I’d do whatever the doctors said without asking questions because I wasn’t capable of making any important decisions and there was no one else there to help. At that moment, it was out of my control and all I could do was sit and wait and try to hold myself together even though it felt like I was watching my brain disintegrate.

I wish somebody had been with me then. And I know some of you reading this right now are wishing you had been there, and in my imagination I edit it so you were there holding my hand. There is some comfort there. But at the time, of course, I wasn’t able to imagine things, and I couldn’t even access or control my own thoughts properly, and I was very alone, and I thought: “This is what people mean when they say everyone dies alone. I never realized quite how horrific that idea was until this moment.”

But I didn’t die. Instead I got some valuable practice, and maybe next time I’ll do better. Maybe next time I’ll find a small core of peace inside myself. Maybe next time I’ll have more grace.

When I think of my 2016, I think endurance. I endured, and I’m proud of what I accomplished. I made some difficult decisions that led to big changes that I believe will make my life better down the line. I suffered from the worst injury of my life and I didn’t give up. I learned a lot. I didn’t close down, and I held onto my vision of a brighter future. I found moments of joy and connection even in the midst of tremendous struggle. I went to great lengths to take care of myself and to respect myself, and I feel like, even though it was very hard for me, I did a better job of it than perhaps I’ve ever done before. I’m very tired, but here I am.

I didn’t like 2016, but I’m grateful for the time I’m getting, even when it really sucks. I feel lucky to be here.

For all of you who had good years, I’m so glad. You keep my hope strong. And if you had a bad year, I admire you for hanging in there, and I really hope the next year is better for us both.

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The longest night of the year

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 22, 2016| 1 Comment »

I’m sitting here typing this on the longest night of the year. After this, the nights will be a few minutes shorter, and then a few minutes shorter again. At some point in the not-so-distant future, it won’t be dark at 4:15 in the afternoon. The sun will make it till 4:30 and then even 5:00.

I can’t give you words of comfort about the state of the world because I don’t have any right now. What I can give you is comfort on a more personal level.

Every year I make a photobook of highlights from the year that’s just gone by and give it to myself for Christmas. This year I didn’t want to make one. I put it off, and then I put it off some more. I thought it would be depressing. 2016 was such a challenging and difficult year for me personally, what photos would I even have to choose from? But finally I forced myself to sit down and start the job by telling myself I could always just make a whole book of cute Nala pictures. No one else might enjoy looking at a book like that, but I would like it.

What I found, though, as I started putting photos onto pages, was that there was still plenty to be happy about in 2016. My book wasn’t a lot shorter than usual, and it wasn’t a lot sadder than usual. There was still joy and love and silliness to record on its pages. There was still hope.

And I realize, when I think back on the year, how much of my joy derives from the people I care about. It’s been easier than usual to forget this year because there was a lot going on, and much of that was disappointing or ugly or just plain tough. But when I think about the year, I don’t just think about all the hard times. I also think of all the people who were there through the hard times.

I think of friends in the Bay Area who took me out, who danced with me, who listened to me without judgment, who fed me sushi and waffles and peanut butter pie. I think of those friends who supported me moving to Seattle one hundred percent even though they were personally sad I was leaving. And I think of the phone calls and messages since I moved, and how those friendships haven’t gone anywhere.

I think of my friends at Rainforest who helped me figure some stuff out. I think of my friends in LA who I hadn’t seen in years who welcomed me back into their lives with open arms. I think of my high school friends with whom I shared a special reunion. I think of my friends at Worldcon in Kansas City who looked out for me since my health wasn’t good.

I think of my friends in Seattle and how humbled I have been by their kindness and generosity. I had only been living here ONE MONTH when my life completely fell apart, and you all stepped up to the challenge, even though many of you barely knew me. I can’t think about it without crying. Your willingness to show up and be there for me and help me means everything to me. And there were many people supporting me from a distance as well. You showed me how good people can be and how little it sometimes takes to make a huge difference in someone else’s life. You have forever changed my experience of the world.

I think of my close friends, my inner circle. The ones who know me best, who know my faults as well as my strengths and love me anyway. The ones who walk beside me as we share what we think and how we feel. The ones who understand the less obvious things about me, the ones who validate my feelings, the ones who I trust. I feel so lucky to have met you.

And I think of Nala, of course, who is loyal and sweet and mischievous and empathetic. And who was so scared of being left when we’d moved to a new state that she learned how to grab onto my legs with her front paws while standing on her back paws. There is no one more concerned about my welfare than that little dog, and she brightens my life every single day just by being herself.

When we go through hard times we learn a lot, both about ourselves and about the people who are around us. What I learned this year is that even when everything is going to hell, some people will be kind and they will be true. And there are an awful lot of people out there who love and care about me, and who I love and care about back.

On the longest night of the year, I think about all of you, and then it doesn’t seem so very dark.

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The State of My Brain

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 2, 2016| 4 Comments »

In some ways having a brain injury isn’t so different from any other injury. It’s about the long game. It’s about keeping up the spirits so you can give your body the time it needs to heal without going completely insane in the process. It’s about figuring out how to meet your basic life needs while dealing with new restrictions. It’s about finding the things you CAN do to distract yourself from the things you can’t do.

That being said, it has been three months and I still can’t work on fiction. That this state of affairs does not make me happy is an understatement. I ignore it as much as I can because of the importance of the long game, but it chafes. A writer writes. I am not writing. This state of affairs feels wrong. I keep grasping at it and coming back with empty hands.

I also cannot dance, and I cannot play most board games. I can’t do anything that requires large amounts of concentration or that is particularly mentally taxing. I am very tired most of the time and I have to take naps most days. I don’t deal with stressful situations as well as usual, and I try to avoid them when I can. I am supposed to experiment with activities, but if I miscalculate, I have relapses that last several days and are fairly miserable.

But. I can drive again, which is huge, and I can read the majority of the time, which is even better. I can keep the practical aspects of my life going indefinitely at the capacity I now have, which is a big relief. I can get out of the house. I have plenty of lovely social time. I can take care of Nala. Sometimes I feel pretty okay.

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I have a lot of time, although not as much as you might think, given all the time I must spend sleeping and napping and resting and deliberately not focusing too much on any given thing. So maybe it’s not as much that I have a lot of time as that life is moving at a different pace, and it is much slower than what I am used to. I can only do a few things per day so I must choose carefully.

Sometimes I feel upset about my limitations. I want to be a better friend, a better writer, a better human being. I think, why can’t I just do this? Why can’t I just handle that? But I try to think as little as possible about this as well. I am doing the best I can, and that’s what I try to think about instead. My focus has to be primarily on me, whether I like it or not.

I thought I’d be all better by now. I am not, but I am better enough to look back at how I was doing before and feel appalled. In August, I’d reach for my brain and it was as if there were a wall preventing me from accessing it. I’d batter myself against the wall, frantically trying to break it down, to no avail. I tried to keep up as good a front as I could, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been so lost.

I can reach for my brain now and it is there. Even on bad days. There is no longer a wall. Even though I’m tired, even though I’m not writing, even though my life revolves around being careful. I appreciate my brain so much.

It is an ongoing process, this convalescence. It is boring and frustrating and uncomfortable. It is also humbling.

But every day there’s at least one bright spot. A book, a show, a doggie snuggle, a message, quality time with someone I like. It’s about the long game, and these precious things remain.

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I’m still here

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 29, 2016| 2 Comments »

You know when you really can’t be perfect? When you’re recovering from a brain injury!

Eight weeks ago I was in the car accident that gave me this concussion. Three weeks ago I was back at the doctor’s office because my symptoms were still so bad. “You need to go back on brain rest,” the doctor said.

But, but, but, I had never really gone OFF brain rest. I was so upset with this advice, even though it was obvious. Yes, I needed to rest even more. Yes, even though it was interfering with everything in my life. I spent about twenty-four hours being really upset while simultaneously trying to set everything up for what I knew I had to do while, you know, my brain was refusing to cooperate with me.

Since then, I’ve kept everything as simple as possible. I couldn’t shut all stress away, but I could certainly avoid the majority of it. I couldn’t meet the high standards I’m used to setting for myself so I stopped aiming for them. I settled myself into my new reality of Healing from Brain Injury as comfortably as I could.

I’ve developed this mental shrug. It’s for all the times (and there have been so many) when I think of how I would normally do something or how I ought to do something. And then I mentally shrug and say to myself, “Well, that’s not going to happen.” Some of them will obviously have small consequences, like I can’t deal with going to a new dentist right now so there’s going to be more plaque on my teeth when I do finally go and that will probably suck. But it’s amazing how many of those things don’t actually seem to matter all that much.

In being forced to simplify my life so extremely, I’ve realized how hard I am on myself when I’m fully healthy. I am so hard on myself! Even now, I think to myself, why did you miss that gathering, you are such a flake, or why haven’t you texted or called this person, you need to try harder, and then I catch myself and am appalled. I have a brain injury, you ridiculous self! I don’t have to go to any events or talk to anybody and I get a pass because BRAIN INJURY. I don’t have to say everything perfectly because BRAIN INJURY. I can’t figure everything in my life out right now because–yeah, you guessed it–BRAIN INJURY. I doubt I’m only being this hard on myself because I’m convalescing. I feel like my little shrug is going to be useful for a long time to come.

I try to go outside every day and walk with Nala. Sometimes we walk for over an hour. We walk surrounded by lush greenery, and if we walk far enough down the path we can catch a glimpse of Lake Washington. Sometimes we cut through the fern forest and pretend the car sounds are the wind blowing through the fir trees. Sometimes Nala tries to convince me to walk in the mud.

We walk and I feel more and more like myself again. I may have to avoid most stress, I may struggle with headaches and mood swings and fatigue, I may be unable to do many things, but I can walk.

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I’ve been asking myself who I am all these weeks. Who am I when I can’t write anymore? Who am I when I’m easily overwhelmed by stimulus and decisions and stress? Who am I when I must abandon my usual goals of perfection? Who am I in this new state, in this new apartment, surrounded by new people and places and things? Who am I when I can literally feel not like myself?

My life is stripped down to essentials, and I am too. I am relieved to find there is still someone there. Someone who is not defined by physical place or relationships to others or passions or hobbies or work. Someone who is not even necessarily defined by this moment’s particular thoughts.

I stare into space. I breathe. I shift to find a more comfortable position for this body I’m wearing. I breathe again. Time passes differently.

I’m still here.

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In which I go through a terrible ordeal

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 25, 2016| 9 Comments »

It is hard for me to know what it is I want to say. This might be because I have a brain injury, or then again, it might be because I’ve recently gone through a traumatic experience that is hard to talk about. I revolve around this question–is this a brain injury issue or something else?–several times every day.

I didn’t know anything about concussions a month ago, except that you’re not supposed to sleep through the night with one. Only that might not be true because I slept through the night eight hours after sustaining a serious one and didn’t die. Hooray?

I mean, yeah, definitely hooray. I really really really don’t want to die right now. There were times when I was in such bad shape I was asking to make sure someone would take care of Nala if something happened to me and trying to give instructions about reaching my sister, who is off on her annual silent retreat right now and therefore complicated to reach. We (we being mostly myself and my friends Sara and Tony, who are two of the best people I know) tried to downplay it a bit on social media because freaking everyone out didn’t seem like the thing to do, however much I personally was freaking out, but now things have gotten a bit better, I will say things were pretty bad. They are still not great, although I look great and if you have seen me, I might have seemed great, and when I have company to distract me, I am certainly greater than I am the rest of the time.

One thing about concussions I didn’t know is that concussions can cause mood swings, anxiety, depression, you name it. Like, BIG GIGANTIC MOOD SWINGS. Like, I am in so much pain and it is very early in the morning and I don’t know what to do and I don’t know who to call so instead I will just cry for an hour straight type of mood swings. Combine those swings with cognitive impairment that makes it almost impossible to engage in critical thinking or make decisions and things get very interesting indeed.

In case you haven’t gotten it, by interesting I mean nightmarish.

Focus in on me that morning, in pain and sleepless in the dark in what felt like the middle of the night but was probably more like five a.m., questioning myself, my life, and the decisions I’d made that had led to me lying there, terrified and alone. What, then, did my life amount to? I suddenly wasn’t sure. It seemed as if every other person on the planet was an impossible distance from me.

I questioned my recent move. I questioned all the time I’ve spent writing books that practically nobody has read. I didn’t question relationship choices, but I did feel terribly sad. All that time and effort fostering connections with other people, and there I was, so confused I couldn’t figure out if there was anybody I could call who would be okay hearing from me at that time of night and in that terrified state of mind. I wanted my sister very badly.

I thought of this blog, and I thought, “That has been some good work, even if hardly anyone reads it.” I thought of Nala and how devoted we are to one another. I thought of integrity and courage–even a faltering courage, which is what I was experiencing at the time–and love. So there was some comfort.

Eventually I did call a friend, cried for another half an hour on the phone, and said I wanted to go to the doctor. Voluntarily. I voluntarily thought it was a good idea. (For context, I hate going to the doctor. I never want to go. Sometimes I force myself because going to the doctor is part of being an adult.) I kept coming back to the panic of knowing I couldn’t do this, and the only answer I could come up with for not being able to do it was to get some help.

When the advice nurse told me to go in, I was relieved. If the doctors could do something to alleviate in any way even one of my symptoms, I thought it would be worth the horror that is Urgent Care when you have a concussion and are super confused and light and noise sensitive and about ten seconds away from bursting into tears at any given point and also have neck and back injuries that make sitting in their uncomfortable chairs a particularly unpleasant kind of torture. That is how awful I felt. When the nurse brought out the needle to take a blood sample and get me started on the IV, I again felt relieved, even though I have a lifelong phobia of needles. And indeed, he had to make two tries to get the IV going because of my teeny tiny veins. Whatever, I thought. It was so worth it. Anything to lessen the pain. Anything to blunt my awareness that I was about to go in for tests to show whether my brain was bleeding and the knowledge, given to me by surreptitious forays into the internet, that if it was, there was brain surgery in my near future. I told Patrick, who was with me during the wait, that if I went into brain surgery, THEN he had permission to contact my sister.

There was no brain bleeding. I want to say thank goodness, but that doesn’t even begin to cover it. Instead there was me trying to get all the information I needed from the doctor even though I was confused and exhausted and not even with it enough to think to take notes or record the conversation. But hey! I had already figured out how to take cab to Urgent Care, and that had only taken me an hour of dithering.

Even doctors don’t seem to quite get how disorienting having a concussion can be. When your primary means of self-definition is your brain and suddenly your brain isn’t working right, it feels like the bottom has fallen out from under you. Suddenly easy problems seem completely insurmountable and normal stresses want to consume you whole. And it’s not like brain injury is a particularly normal stress anyway.

Today marks the three-week anniversary of my car accident. Like I said, I am doing somewhat better. I have good days and not-so-good days. Yesterday was pretty bad, today is better. I have recovered some of the cognitive function I was missing, which is a relief, although I still become easily overwhelmed with decision-making. I am no longer stuttering or pausing as much between words, and the sound and light sensitivity have improved. I still have spikes of anxiety. I still have sudden weird memory gaps. I still lack focus. I still have frequent terrible headaches. My neck really hurts. When the pain is bad, I become more confused. I’m exhausted all the time, and I usually need an afternoon nap. If I don’t get enough to eat and drink, things can go downhill quite quickly.

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Me today. Turns out concussions aren’t always very visble injuries.

But I am here, and I am very grateful for that.

Next time I am well enough to write, I will tell you about the help I’ve been receiving and how it feels like a miracle.

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I have a concussion.

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 16, 2016| 6 Comments »

Yes, I was in a car accident on the freeway a couple of weeks ago. A guy ran into the back of my car in stop-and-go traffic, and I ended up with a concussion. At first the doctors thought it was a mild concussion, but last week they upgraded it to a more severe concussion.

For those of you who have never had a concussion, I can tell you it is both painful and terrifying. Also frustrating. At least in my experience. Once I am well again, I am happy to answer questions for writers who want to portray more realistic head injuries because now I know a lot about it.

I am not supposed to be writing. Or be using screens very much. Or doing lots of other things. It is unclear when I will be able to do more, but hopefully it won’t be too many more weeks. It is hard to say. Right now I spend a lot of time sleeping and hanging out and petting Nala.

I am writing this to let you know I haven’t forgotten you. I still write blog posts in my head. This is not the best idea as it gives me a headache, but sometimes I do it by accident. I look forward to being able to write more. I especially look forward to being able to write an appreciation to all the people who have been incredibly kind and generous and have been helping me and keeping me company during a dark time. I love you all.

Please don’t forget me either.

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Nala looks disheveled and out of focus…kind of like how I feel.

 

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The Beauty of a Fresh Start

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 4, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Well, I’ve been living in my new home for about a month now. Not long enough to be completely settled, but long enough that the flood of moving-related tasks has slowed down to a more manageable pace, and a definite end is in sight.

Overall, things feel calm. Amazingly calm. Beautifully calm. Calm calm calm. Probably the worst thing that’s happened to me this week is that I had to spend half an hour on the phone with Comcast sorting out yet another problem caused by incompetence. Which is a little irritating, but as problems go, it’s not so bad, and the customer service rep was really apologetic and nice and appreciative of me being nice, so it was really especially not so bad.

I keep talking about how nice everyone is here, and I hear the slightly unbelieving note in my voice as I say the words. It also feels like damning with faint praise, but what I really mean is people are treating me with respect. They are listening to my preferences and boundaries. They apologize when that’s appropriate. They aren’t pressuring me to do things I don’t really want to do or be someone I don’t really want to be. I don’t feel like they’re going to do things they don’t want to do either. In short, we appear to be taking care of ourselves.

I feel a Flinch sometimes. For example, my friend wanted to come visit at a time that wasn’t good for me. So I delivered the news, and then I flinched and waited for the hammer to come down. In the past, and with this particular friend even, there most definitely would have been a backlash. But this time, there was a bit of disappointment, and then we actually ended up finding a different time that did work for me. I could hardly believe it. I simultaneously felt gratitude and a more prosaic, “Well, you know, this is not actually noteworthy because this is how things should generally work.”

This should be how things are.

This is how things are.

I look forward to the time when the Flinch no longer happens.

Do I think this shift is unique to Seattle? Do I think the people in Seattle are just plain better? No, not at all. I think what we might be seeing here is the beauty of a fresh start.

While I know many people here, for the most part we don’t know each other well, and certainly not as local friends. This gives us a chance to get to know each other as we are right now. Not two years ago, not five years ago, not ten years ago. Now, in this moment. And Amy Now, I am thrilled to discover, really is a different person. Amy Now pushes back when she feels pressured. Amy Now communicates her preferences. Amy Now says no when she needs to. Amy Now gives the side eye to people who say egregiously sexist or unkind things, or who are very obviously lying. The kind of people who aren’t okay with this sort of thing are probably not the kind of people that are going to want to be friends with me as I am today.

Over time, we accumulate habits with one another. Things we do with one another, what we talk about, ways we communicate, ways we DON’T communicate, behavior we tolerate, things that are simply “the way things are.” This is simply human nature. Some of these habits are wonderful and positive and contribute to that sense of knowing and being known. And in any relationship there is going to be some compromise and give and take.

But some of these habits can be less helpful. Sometimes we cannot be the person we’ve become and have the relationship continue to function as it has been. At this point, there are three main choices: to continue the status quo in spite of problems; to go through an adjustment period until the relationship supports you as you are now; or to distance yourself from something that is no longer working. All three of these choices come with their own difficulties, and sometimes they blur one into another. As with anything related to change, there tends to be a lot of inherent pressure to maintain the status quo. And if you actively decide NOT to, things can get…interesting.

Moving, then, becomes an opportunity to work outside the accumulated habits and build new habits without having to work against that pressure. There is no status quo to maintain. There’s no weight of the past. There is, relatively speaking, little to risk and much to gain. There’s simply me and you deciding whether we’re going to be friends and how that friendship is going to work in a way that supports both of us right now. And even existing friendships are naturally in flux in a way that encourages the building of new habits.

So how does a fresh start feel? It feels calm. It is hard in some ways, but it also feels right.

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