Home Posts tagged "mental health" (Page 3)

Tag: mental health

Writing Through a Pandemic, Two Years In

It’s been just over two years since we learned the phrase “social distancing”. A lot of the writers I know have been struggling. Turns out it’s hard to be creative when there’s bone-deep uncertainty washing away at your foundations. Related: the romantic myth of the writer in a garret. It’s also hard to be creative when you’re scrambling to fulfill basic needs like housing or taking care of your health and/or loved ones…even without a pandemic on top of that. (Here we give a nod to musicians, many of whom have been determinedly putting up livestreams and online concerts while their main source of income was cut off. Those have been a huge source of comfort to me, and I hope to the various musicians as well.) I’ve had plenty of creative struggles, too, during this time. I barely wrote at all in 2020, although I did manage two installments of my clockpunk serial (I’ll get back to that one day, I swear!) and a few thousand words during NaNoWriMo. During most of 2021, I could only write short pieces that all confronted the state of the world head-on, from pandemic-themed poetry to flash fiction. (We won’t talk about the short story I started in 2019, set at the Olympics during…a pandemic. Oops?) Then came NaNoWriMo 2021. I’ve talked before about how I made my secret stretch goal of 10,000 words on my unashamedly escapist feminist fantasy WIP. It felt really good. I had energy again for a few months.…

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Buh-bye, Springing Forward and Falling Back!

Just in case you’re wondering, Kit and I switched blog slots this month, so you’re getting me a week early. Lucky you! 🙂 I just found out that the Senate passed a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. By unaminious consent. I found that interesting. They all agreed on this. Everyone. It still needs to go through the House and to President Biden, so we’re not quite there yet, but I am optimistic. I’ve said for years — years — that this crap needs to stop. It’s antiquated and from a time long past (1918 apparently). To save energy. But the world was so different then, right? Now…I don’t know about you, but every time we change, no matter which direction, it takes me about two weeks to adjust. I’m irritable, basically jet-lagged for all intents and purposes, and I’m completely out of sorts. My body even rebels. I used to end up in fibro flares, too. Back when I was a kid, and there was no internet to quickly check what date we were changing (yeah, imagine that), we’d end up either early or late for church on Sunday because we never knew. Now, with my Esperanto study? My friend just moved back to the States. So, we have time zones to consider and DST. Because where he lived previously, they hadn’t changed yet, but where he is now, they did, and so did we, and they were different. So this afternoon, we’re sitting here trying to puzzle…

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Comfort Everything, Take 2

Dear readers, this quarter of the year is always the hardest for me, and I know I’m not alone, especially with all the things going on this year. (Recently it seems like we’re saying that every year, though…) So this week I’m revisiting a topic I’ve covered before in these, um, pages: where to turn for comfort. Here are the comfort reads and comfort viewing that have been helping me get through lately. Books I’ve blogged about comfort reads before, so here are some I didn’t cover last time… Epic fantasy Although I read (and write) all over the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, I read Tolkien at a formative time, so fantasy will always be my first love. For about a decade now, I’ve been taking time around the holidays in December and into January to read epic fantasy. (No grimdark either, thank you.) This year, I read the first two books in Elizabeth Bear’s Silk Road–inspired Eternal Sky trilogy, Range of Ghosts and Shattered Pillars. Featuring a nomad prince in exile, a princess-turned-wizard, a very interesting horse, and lots of epic landscapes and cities and cultures. (CW: there’s a plague in the second book.) Book three will be next year’s read, and there’s also a sequel trilogy. (My previous epic-fantasy holiday read was N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which is breathtakingly good but 100% not a comfort read.) Historical fantasy Still in the fantasy vein: historical fantasy, roughly defined as a past era in the “real world” with…

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So how is the two-computer setup going now, Erin?

Oh, God. Don’t even. I had a really important editing job that needed to be done quickly so I was waiting before ordering the new computer (and I’ve decided to go with a Windows computer — long story), so I am still doing the two-computer thing. Except I am not really using the main one, except to do one thing for one client that requires a specific program that’s only on the main. Because it is extremely dodgy at this point. So I am spending 90% of my time on the spare. It’s going. I was finally able to do a Facebook call on it today! That was cool. It hasn’t worked until now. So one good thing. Although the volume was completely borked. I had it up to the highest setting and I could still hardly hear my friend. I’ve had issues with files saving. Even after freaking checking the dates and times to see if they saved. Even after getting that lovely “do you want to overwrite this file?” message. THEY DON’T FREAKING SAVE. I am not kidding. I’d go to pull a file up from the day before and none of my changes would be there…a serious problem when you are editing and you are on a deadline. So I started emailing myself the file every day after I was done. The one day I freaking needed that emailed file? IT WOULDN’T LOAD. I’m telling you, I’ve never had so many problems in my entire life with…

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Not Dying.

Earlier this month, I wrote up a post with my goals on it for the next 30 days in a forum I frequent and I literally wrote as one of my goals “To not die.” Seriously. The past, oh, year has been particularly rough, not just because of the pandemic, but because of severe sleep deprivation. Things just aren’t going well in dreamland, and I have been feeling like crap — and my overall functioning hasn’t been 100%. Obvi. But to add insult to injury, technology has, once again, given me the finger. My phone, which is a fairly new iPhone 12 Mini, began inexplicably not returning to my home network after I was out and about. We ended up running through a whopping 75% of our data plan and got a text about it — gee, thanks AT&T — and finally I figured out the problem. Because I was the culprit, and we’d had a power outage recently, and yes, I had been checking my email (for business purposes!), but not that much. Sheesh. So I figured out that after coming home from the vet and finding myself still on cellular and not on Wi-Fi. Many hours later. Ugh. An update fixed that. But not after struggling with it for weeks. Then my battery started draining extremely quickly. I mean, lightning fast. That’s still kind of happening? A bit. It’s improved after the update, but I still feel like it’s not in keeping with my usage. And my battery…

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Re-entry, Part 2

You’ve got me for a second time this month because KD is busy putting the finishing touches on her awesome haunted-house ghost-chaser found-family novel, which will be out just in time for Halloween! (Are you excited? I’m excited.) [CW: pandemic, mental health] I blogged a couple of months ago about facing down the prospect of re-entry, and enough has shifted since then that I thought it would be worth revisiting… Since getting my second shot in June, I’ve seen friends a couple of times a month (not that far off from the frequency in my pre-COVID social life, except that pre-COVID there was dancing, which meant seeing a lot more friends each time). I’ve been to restaurants a few times, either on patios or in very well-ventilated spaces or with very few other patrons. I’ve stayed in a hotel. I even got to see (and hug!) a few family members I don’t live with. I’ve gone out to run errands more often. I’ve been to the mall once or twice. I’ve been to the dentist, the hairdresser, the optometrist. It’s gradually getting easier and less weird to be around people again. November, though, will be the big test. I’ve been working from home since March 13, 2020 — quite happily, aside from this whole pandemic thing. But my dayjob is calling people back into the high-rise office one day a week (which, for me, also involves a long public transit ride). I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t causing…

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This Time, I Will Breathe

It’s that time again, friends – the time when I come back from vacation vowing that Now Things Will Be Different. This time, in my day-to-day life I will get outside more and move my body more (like I did during vacation…we walked 8 km / 5 miles upriver one day, and went kayaking downriver the next day!) and get on top of all those niggling appointments that need to be made (the kicker is when you get them made and then they spawn MORE appointments). This time, I will make my house feel more like the hotel I just came back from – calming, nicely decorated and nicely lit, not stuffed with random crap – and take care of all (or at least some) of the little things that have been bugging me. Oh, and this time, I will make sure to relax more. Right. You can see the problem. The goal, of course, is to stop feeling like vacation is a precious breath of air before I go under again. I’m not drowning, exactly, but I am swimming very hard. My day job is the lake I’m trying to cross, with a shoreline that seems very far away and is always moving. The pandemic is a constant undertow that makes everything ten times harder (mentally/emotionally, that is; I’m lucky that my work isn’t directly affected, except for having gone virtual). Bad news (pandemic-related or otherwise) is the slap of a wave in the face. Weekends are when I…

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Vacation Time!

So, I did it! As I mentioned in my last post, I was in dire need of a break, so I found some time to take a week off. It was particularly tough because there still were a few odds and ends to take care of, but those weren’t really too big a deal. My clients were good with it, so I went for it. It feels a bit odd, to be honest. I’m one of those people that can’t relax well. I need to “be productive” constantly, so relaxing or resting or whatever is like a foreign concept. This time, I made a to-do list. I know that is probably the opposite of “relaxing” and “resting,” but I always like to have some kind of plan…even if I blow it three days in. It includes writing, relaxation, reading…some cleaning, since my office is in dire need of it, and some serious catch up stuff. I’m also participating in a self-care challenge, which is just the thing I need to get myself out of this funk and maybe into a situation where I am feeling better on a regular basis. Because for me it’s been, “Self care? What’s that?” Terrible, I know. My only excuse is that in the midst of a health crisis, long work hours, life in general, the pandemic, sleep apnea crap, and general madness, it was way down on the list of priorities. And I know that is bad. So that’s why I am doing it.…

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The Anti-Blog Post

It’s finally happened, friends. It’s been so long since I’ve written any fiction, or even poetry, that I’ve also forgotten how to blog. Not that there’s nothing in my brain. Oh no, it’s full of all sorts of things — my ever-growing to-do list at the day job, whether my broken sandal can be fixed, when it will feel safe to fly cross-country to visit my family again, how to rescue my tomato plants from the various ailments they’re suffering from this year, the various comfort viewing and comfort reading I’m doing, whether my bathroom ceiling fan is on the verge of breaking down or just needs a good cleaning, various appointments I’m putting off making because they’re not urgent, just how perfect the weather has to be before I’ll go for a long walk, whether any of my fall/winter clothes still fit and how much I should buy to replace them if my size is still changing, what we should name KD’s upcoming spooky book. The problem is that there’s no narrative. No cohesive whole. Just a set of ping-pong balls ricocheting around and failing to get into phase. Maybe it’s because of the elephant in the room that we’re all trying not to think about too hard: nothing will ever be quite the same as it was before, but when will normal things feel safe again? Will they ever? Maybe it’s because existential anxiety on top of everyday busyness is not conducive to creativity, even though we’re all…

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I’m not writing this at 12:30a.m., noooo

We’ll just pretend it’s 12 noon because it is technically 12 noon somewhere, right? Le sigh. I didn’t forget this time, honest. Today just…grew legs and walked away from me. Let’s see. I had a dentist appointment at 11a.m. But see, I’d gotten to bed late (truthfully speaking, super late) the night before because work is madness right now (and so is my sleep disorder) so I ended up sleeping in a bit but still getting to the appointment on time. Yay me! Usual stuff there — no cavities, thank God, and I was back home. Worked a bit, then had to take our cat Hailey to the vet for fluids at 3p.m. A bit of a wait there. Not our usual time, since we usually go at 12 noon, but the dentist appointment required an adjustment. So got home, very quickly messaged a client about a few things that needed doing, put together a newsletter for her that needed to go out today, hubby came home, had dinner (leftover tacos, yummy), gave the cat her medication, worked a bit more, found out I didn’t have Esperanto today as my study partner had a power outage… Settled in to work on an editing job, a fun one, actually and…soon it was late. Very late. Oops. So here we are. Sometimes my days are like that. Rushing around, doing this, doing that. Sometimes I’m doing newsletter swaps, a type of free promotion, and because I do them in batches, usually I…

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