Chronic Pain

It is February and I had intended to write about love and its various forms, specifically the love between my cat Jay and I. However, having spent many hours last night being overwhelmed by my physical pain, I decided to talk about pain instead.

I am not talking about pain from an injury that may last months but eventually subsides. I am referring to pain that impacts every day, year after year. As with all pain, some days are worse than others and on the better days I truly think “this is not so bad” and enjoy life. Of course those are my good days. Most people don’t see me on the worst days because I stay where I am now – at home in bed. On the bad days where I still have to go out, well I would not say I am exactly stoned but I certainly have taken enough medication that I am not completely there either.

This pain leaves me feeling set off and isolated from the world. I feel if I mention it I am complaining or looking for sympathy and if I don’t mention it then no one knows and expects me to be able to do things (and even move) as though I have nothing wrong with me. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. The pain I have does not make me look sick nor even apparently in pain although as the pain has worsened I have gone from looking ten years younger than my age to looking older than I am. I have no cast, no visible scars.   How I got this pain is not as important for this blog as the fact that I have it. I find the emotional component to living with it as difficult to deal with as the physical side of it. When it becomes severe (thankfully not every day) it naturally leaves me very depressed, feeling incredibly low and alone. I don’t know where to turn to relieve it. I try all the things that sometimes help distract me but nothing really works. I am afraid to take more medication than I absolutely need to survive because I am terrified of getting horribly addicted. I don’t drink for the same reason.

I thought I would lose my mind at 5:00 this morning.

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New Year’s Resolutions & Introspection

It was New Year’s Eve and Charlie Brown and Linus were leaning against a brick wall, talking about the past year.

“Well, here it is again,” Charlie Brown says to Linus. “It’s the last day of the year and I did it again.”

“Did what?” Linus asks.

“I just blew another year,” Charlie Brown replied.

I’m with Charlie Brown. I have always felt that way. Ok, well maybe not entirely but when I sit at the end of the year and look back, my accomplishments seem very few. I feel I have made no progress in my life. Even 2012 with one book published after 34 years and another up as an e-book and doing well, I still felt this way.

For my entire life I have hated New Year’s Eve. It all feels so artificial to me. People party, drink too much, and pretend to be having a great time. The clock changes at midnight and suddenly our lives are supposed to change with it, transformed somehow. I have always seen New Year’s Eve as an ending rather than a beginning.  This belief was further entrenched a year ago when, with little warning, my mother died on New Year’s Eve.

Maybe the fact I hated the day is one reason why I always had so much trouble making New Year’s resolutions. They also felt artificial. Suddenly I will start to lose weight, look for a better job, volunteer somewhere, or take a dream vacation. We don’t need January 1st to do any of those things but somehow our “resolve” is supposed to be different then!

But I think I was wrong about resolutions. They are important but not for the reasons most people think.

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Family and Christmas

The holidays are approaching so before I continue let me wish all of you the best, however you celebrate this holiday season. I hope you find some moments of peace in a December that seems to become less and less peaceful with each passing year.

For those of you who love cats please check out the My Muse Jay page in the menu. I have added two Christmas videos from last year of my cat Jay plus a few photos of him with Santa.

During this season when we spend more time with our families, I am thinking about what family actually means to me.

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Author Readings & Attendance Anxiety

There are no small readings, only small audiences.

Almost any writer (or anyone doing a presentation or speech to an audience whose size is not guaranteed) knows what it is like to go to a reading and face only a few people. It is not as difficult when the space is small but if it is meant to hold 100 people and only five appear, it tends to make you feel very small as a writer! “Don’t take it personally” is a cliché but it is true nonetheless. It is not a reflection of you or the topic or your reading.

I don’t have performance anxiety as some writers do. I actually enjoy reading to people. I have what I call attendance anxiety which starts the moment a new reading or talk has been set up for me. I worry that no one will show up. Small I can handle but zero I cannot. I try to put it out of my mind. I am rarely successful but I am getting better at dealing with it.

In one of the writing forums I am part of, I heard about an author who went to a reading and there was only one person in attendance. I am sure they had a split second where they wished that one person had not shown up and they could go home. That second passed and the writer used humour to deflect any awkwardness and did the reading anyway.

If the audience is small, remember that all of them still came to hear you, want to hear you. They care enough about you and your book to be there. You owe it to them to be there too, in every way. Nothing else matters.

I had someone tell me in advance of my reading somewhere that it would not have a high attendance because of the location.  I took it as the criticism I think it was meant to be – why are you doing this reading because hardly anyone will hear you? I admit I was slightly irritated because, first, I thought any publicity was important. Who knows if one of the few people who does show up might not be very significant to the future of your writing career or to the sales of whatever book you are promoting at that time.

Secondly, on more than one occasion after a reading, large or small, I have been told by someone that I have inspired them in some way. Sometimes my talk stimulated their writing and occasionally even their life in general. I cannot begin to tell you what that means to me.

Yes, of course I am there to promote one of my books and it goes without saying I want to sell as many books as possible. However, one of my goals in writing is to somehow touch people’s lives, to help them in some small way, so to inspire anyone is immensely fulfilling for me.

In addition, the more I do readings the more I do not mind small audiences. Perhaps I have to have that attitude because I so often face them!!  Seriously, intimate is wonderful. I try to write as though I am sitting next to a person telling them a story, whether it is about murder or theatre or a family’s history. Because of that, reading to a smaller group of people feels comfortable to me. It has been decades (my school public speaking days or my time in amateur theatre) since I have “performed” in front of a full house.  I’d like to have that opportunity again because it means reaching more people. In the meantime, I am quite content reading to smaller groups. Size really doesn’t make any difference – unless you allow it to.

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