My hours are extremely irregular. I put in eight hours writing today, but I started at noon, found myself worn out 3:30, napped until 6, wrote until 8, had dinner, started writing again at 9, and finished up at 11:30.
I get mentally worn out during the day. The temptation, which I've indulged, is to blame this on concussions I had as a child. I don't actually know. I have told doctors about it, but because the US now has the worst healthcare system in the industrialized world (and this is not an exaggeration), and the most expensive, I can't actually afford to find out, and our medical system won't solve it anyway.
I will get overwhelmingly tired at irregular times during the day, and if I don't go to sleep, I will begin to make stupid mistakes. If I try to push through it, I'll continue to make mistakes, my mood will crash and I'll get a migraine. This has been going on for decades. This isn't a normal tiredness, either, like one you get late at night, what I'm feeling now. This is, "I feel like I'm going to die" tiredness. I can't predict when it will happen, but it happens some time during the day no matter how much sleep I get during the night.
For the longest time, I wondered why I couldn't take feeling tired or work through it. Then I heard about after-effects of concussions. When I was eight, I had a thirteen-year-old beat me brutally. He started with a sucker punch and then kept right on punching. I had what were later identified as symptoms of PTSD after that. It pretty much made me helpless if I were bullied. When I was nine, sliding on a slushy schoolyard, I lost my balance and grabbed onto the eleven-year-old next to me for support. It was a Catholic school,; therefore he had to prove he wasn't gay by bouncing my head off the blacktop a couple times. That's what they told me anyway. I don't remember anything. After I lay down in the nurses office for a half hour nap, they then put me right back into class, with the whole side of my face bruised. Yes, in Catholic grade school, they taught you to walk off that head injury.
Those were two of the concussions. I won't go into any others. A few are too hard to describe; one is apocryphal, in that it couldn't have happened the way I remember it, so I don't know even know if it really happened.
That's one thing that makes me physically unsuited for a regular job. I love writing fiction. The current cost of doing it is isolation and poverty. On the latter, I'm not that bad off. However, tonight, with the temperature outside in the teens, my thermostat is set a 60 degrees. My apartment is tiny, but vermin free, and I love the neighborhood of Benton Park/Soulard.
I just have to hope my car doesn't break down or my cat doesn't get sick. Those, of course, presume that I also don't get expensively sick or injured. I have to somehow establish a career before any of that happens. I should have been doing this in my 20s, but I had different problems then. I already know I'm going to have a working retirement, that is, no retirement at all. That doesn't bother me.
Tomorrow I'll spend the day editing what I wrote today for reading at my writers' group. I hope it doesn't need much. Having a few free hours tomorrow will feel like a luxury.
BTW, the reason why I don't ever give the name of my writers' group is because they have so many people reading there now that they don't need anymore members. Think of a meeting starting early in the evening where eighteen people are there, and they have up to 2,400 word installments to read aloud, and those are followed by critiques. We don't turn people down though. No, we just don't reveal it.
I get mentally worn out during the day. The temptation, which I've indulged, is to blame this on concussions I had as a child. I don't actually know. I have told doctors about it, but because the US now has the worst healthcare system in the industrialized world (and this is not an exaggeration), and the most expensive, I can't actually afford to find out, and our medical system won't solve it anyway.
I will get overwhelmingly tired at irregular times during the day, and if I don't go to sleep, I will begin to make stupid mistakes. If I try to push through it, I'll continue to make mistakes, my mood will crash and I'll get a migraine. This has been going on for decades. This isn't a normal tiredness, either, like one you get late at night, what I'm feeling now. This is, "I feel like I'm going to die" tiredness. I can't predict when it will happen, but it happens some time during the day no matter how much sleep I get during the night.
For the longest time, I wondered why I couldn't take feeling tired or work through it. Then I heard about after-effects of concussions. When I was eight, I had a thirteen-year-old beat me brutally. He started with a sucker punch and then kept right on punching. I had what were later identified as symptoms of PTSD after that. It pretty much made me helpless if I were bullied. When I was nine, sliding on a slushy schoolyard, I lost my balance and grabbed onto the eleven-year-old next to me for support. It was a Catholic school,; therefore he had to prove he wasn't gay by bouncing my head off the blacktop a couple times. That's what they told me anyway. I don't remember anything. After I lay down in the nurses office for a half hour nap, they then put me right back into class, with the whole side of my face bruised. Yes, in Catholic grade school, they taught you to walk off that head injury.
Those were two of the concussions. I won't go into any others. A few are too hard to describe; one is apocryphal, in that it couldn't have happened the way I remember it, so I don't know even know if it really happened.
That's one thing that makes me physically unsuited for a regular job. I love writing fiction. The current cost of doing it is isolation and poverty. On the latter, I'm not that bad off. However, tonight, with the temperature outside in the teens, my thermostat is set a 60 degrees. My apartment is tiny, but vermin free, and I love the neighborhood of Benton Park/Soulard.
I just have to hope my car doesn't break down or my cat doesn't get sick. Those, of course, presume that I also don't get expensively sick or injured. I have to somehow establish a career before any of that happens. I should have been doing this in my 20s, but I had different problems then. I already know I'm going to have a working retirement, that is, no retirement at all. That doesn't bother me.
Tomorrow I'll spend the day editing what I wrote today for reading at my writers' group. I hope it doesn't need much. Having a few free hours tomorrow will feel like a luxury.
BTW, the reason why I don't ever give the name of my writers' group is because they have so many people reading there now that they don't need anymore members. Think of a meeting starting early in the evening where eighteen people are there, and they have up to 2,400 word installments to read aloud, and those are followed by critiques. We don't turn people down though. No, we just don't reveal it.
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