Replaced “Extremely online since 1995β in my bio with “Human cabinet of curiosities,” perhaps the most accurate way I’ve ever described myself.
Replaced “Extremely online since 1995β in my bio with “Human cabinet of curiosities,” perhaps the most accurate way I’ve ever described myself.
Want to read: Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender by Casey Kayser ππ
ππ Read On and Off Stage: The Deep-Seated Bias in the Culture of American Theatre.
In addition to thinking about whose plays get produced, promoted, and awarded, Kayser makes me think about who gets to be critics and who can afford to go to shows.
Mindy Thomas & Guy Raz have some great advice for writers of all ages in their National Book Festival video. ππ
π Read What Reading Looks Like When Youβre a Full-Time Author (Book Riot).
Asking for a friend: what do you think Kaz Brekker’s D&D class would be? Rogue? I feel like rogue. (The friend is me.) ππΊπ²
I realized reading Week 1 of THE ARTIST’S WAY that most of my negative self-talk isn’t modeled on how other people talked to me (I was blessed with supportive friends, family, and educators) but rather on how my parents talk to themselves. My kid said “Get it together, M” to himself the other day which I know is something he’s heard me say to myself. I’m trying to speak to myself more kindly for his sake as well as my own.
π¬π “…if we can become one-tenth as good at positive self-talk as we are at negative self-talk, we will notice an enormous change.” Julia Cameron, THE ARTIST’S WAY.
π Read Please Keep Doing Virtual Book Stuff After The Pandemic.
Jessica Pryde makes a great argument for maintaining virtual and/or adding hybrid book events even when it’s safe to hold them in person.
Γ°ΒΒ¬ðΒΒΒ “It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.” Julia Cameron, THE ARTIST’S WAY
π¬π “Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.” Julia Cameron, THE ARTIST’S WAY
π¬π “Creativity is play, but for shadow artists, learning to allow themselves to play is hard work.” Julia Cameron, THE ARTIST’S WAY
πRead
The Caregiving Economy - The Atlantic theatlantic.comRead: www.theatlantic.com
A lot is bad but my kid is dancing to Tank! by Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts and that’s pretty great.
Me today: Ooh what an interesting journal article! I wonder if I could pitch a research brief on it to my client for the company blog.looks closer sees author of article is, in fact, my client laughs at self
Want to read: Visual Research Methods: An Introduction for Library and Information Studies by Shailoo Bedi and Jenaya Webb, Eds. π
ππ πΏ Some good things I’ve read so far today:
Kid reading your book on a bench at the playground while your sibling plays: I see you. You are not alone.
That feeling when your own article is at the top of the “Recommended article” list on your Google Scholar homepage.
It’s hard to figure out exactly which of the many symptoms I have should determine when I got sick but based on the impact of treatment, I’m going to say it was the onset of anxiety and depression. These really ramped up in October 1999.
I was 18 and settling in at college. I had a roommate who was not a good fit. My anxiety and depression seemed to kick off when that roommate suggested at dinner that I had a crush on a dude in our building. I didn’t but I liked talking to him. I thought he was fun. I already had a boyfriend (spoiler alert, 10 years later I married that boyfriend) and I thought that, based on what my roommate said, thinking this kid was fun was basically cheating. (I was wrong. It’s okay to have friends.)
This one conversation launched a spiral of negative self-talk that persisted for months. It was exacerbated by my being at a big university, struggling to make friends, and feeling disconnected from my family even though I was only 12 miles from home.
At the same time, my brother was sick and in the hospital. He was only 5. I don’t remember, but I imagine I felt that going to my parents with my problems felt like adding a burden they didn’t need, in light of my brother being ill
I don’t think I got help until Spring of 2000.
In the following few years I gained a lot of weight, was so sleepy that I would fall asleep in the student union and miss class plus slept through service learning obligations, and started having irregular periods. My primary care doctor sent me to an endocrinologist who ran a lot of thyroid tests but not the one that would lead to my diagnosis 11 years later.
In time, a lot of these symptoms went away, but they recurred with a vengeance the summer after I finished library school in 3011. Again, it started with depression and anxiety - in spite of my being on an antidepressant - and by the time I did a direct-to-consumer test and took the results to my doctor, all I could do was go to work, come home, and sleep, without energy even for laundry or food prep.
Wentz conducted a survey of over 2000 of her readers to investigate what was going on when they got sick. Stress was the most frequent response. I think both of the times I’ve had big flare-ups have been in the face of the stress of a major life transition.
This connection between transitions and flares is why I’m being especially vigilant right now as I continue to live in the liminal space of post-PhD.
“The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” C. G. Jung, quoted by Julia Cameron in the Artist’s Way. π¬π
Hashimoto’s makes me feel like the opposite of myself. At various points in my life, if you asked friends about me they’d tell you that I have infectious enthusiasm, that I am an excellent writer, that I am a badass who gets shit done. (These are things friends have actually told me about myself.)
When I’m having a flare, I don’t seem to care about anything. I can’t find the right words or structure my thoughts into a logical flow. I don’t seem to be able to get anything done at all.
I’ve seen my mom go through this, too. She’s super smart, loves learning, and is amazing at making stuff. But on her worst days, it’s all she can do to get out of bed.
It’s hard for me to reconcile these two versions of myself. On bad days, I find it hard to believe I was ever enthusiastic, sharp, eloquent, or effective.
I don’t like feeling this way.
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One of the things I’m focusing on right now is feeling better. Today, that means reading Izabella Wentz’s Hashimoto’s Protocol: A 90-Day Plan for Reversing Thyroid Symptoms and Getting Your Life Back. We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of my Hashimoto’s diagnosis (driven by my own research, in partnership with a doctor I had to push to recognize it) and guess what? I still feel crappy. Not nearly as bad as 10 years ago, but still bad. And part of chronic illness is that there will be flare ups. But I know I’m capable of feeling better because I did, in the 9 months before I got pregnant. But the things that helped me then aren’t enough to help me now, it seems. So, Wentz’s book.
Wentz suggests keeping a health journal using “a method you are likely to stick to.” For me, that’s blogging. I’ll probably keep some private notes, but maybe this can even be helpful to somebody else to follow along. So to the extent I feel okay doing it, I’ll be keeping my journal here, in the Health category.
Wentz suggests beginning by identifying health goals. Here are mine:
I want to have more energy. I am tired, all the time. My kid will tell you. I’ve been the kid with the tired mom and I’d love to spare my kid that. So this is my highest priority. Right now, if I go on an outing with my kid, I have to take the rest of the day and potentially the next day to recover. So my energy goal is to be able to go on a family outing and stay in the swing of things the next day.
I want to feel better about my looks. Mostly I think I’m pretty cute, but sometimes I feel dull and puffy. I’d like to look in the mirror and be not dull and not puffy. I’m not going to worry about weight or even girth because those are tricky targets and easy to disappoint me. But I’d like to look in the mirror and see someone with normal bags under her eyes, not extreme ones, with pink and cheery skin rather than wan white skin, with more hair than I have now and with an appropriate amount of white hair for her age. (There is a clear distinction between the amount of white hair I have when I’m well and when I’m ill. I don’t want to eliminate it, just to have what seems like a reasonable amount of it. And then maybe dye it green.)
I want to have endurance when swimming. One pool length wears me out right now and I can’t at present exercise myself into improving that due to the relationship between thyroid hormone levels and respiratory function. But I want to be able to swim in a mermaid tail for long distances. My ultimate goal is 300 yards but I’ll set an intermediate one for now. By next July, I’d like to be able to do 2 full laps with only 12 breath rests.
Those seem big enough for now.
My aesthetic is Mermaid Academia.
In case you wonder what kind of parent I am: yesterday, my kid was recounting a Halloween episode of Muppet Babies and said that Miss Piggy was in costume as “Frankenstein’s monster.” (We’ll get to calling it the Creature eventually.)