The beginning of March is always a bittersweet thing. On the good side, it usually means that the weather is starting to turn. Sky dandruff falls less often (though we've had precious little snow the past few years). The lawn outside my office window begins to start the process of maybe even trying to think about changing its color from depression-yellow to tentative-green. I can crack my window for some fresh air and to better hear the grumbles of traffic. My brother's birthday shows up, as does my second child's. This year, Daylight Saving Time leaps into action mid-month, which means my homeward bound commute will no longer involve squinting against the rays of the setting sun. So there are some definite perks and positives.
The downside, however, is that my schedule almost always puts the beginning of my World War I unit at the beginning of March. And that is, in and of itself, a bittersweet thing--a confession I'm loathe to make, despite it being true. I'm not much of a historian. There's a very narrow subset of historical moments that I know extensively--perhaps to the level of having forgotten more than what most people will ever know--and the rest is expansive enough to cover what I teach in class. I have been steadily trying to increase that knowledge over the years, and while I certainly know what I'm teaching, I don't have a grasp on other aspects of the same time periods. For example, I couldn't tell you what was happening basically anywhere on the African continent during the 13-1800s, except maybe some Napoleonic fighting in Egypt. I'm pretty ignorant about China pre-19th century. The list could go on. My point is that I know what I need for my classes and then a bit more, except for in certain areas where I know more than is needed for my classes. Those areas tend to revolve around the Tudor/Stuart dynasty in England, and the World Wars. And that's the "sweet" part about starting the World War I unit: I'm going from something that I have some knowledge to something I have (comparatively) more knowledge. Feeling confident and comfortable and knowledgeable about something makes a big difference in the satisfaction of a unit. I won't say there's never a question I can't answer, but I can give a bit of an answer to most of them, and that's a good feeling. Not only that, but I'm pretty passionate about remembering and learning about World War I. I focus a lot on the Western Front (going beyond the trench warfare is one of the areas that I aim to improve my knowledge about as time goes on), yes. Nevertheless, I feel like what and how I teach is not only elucidating for the students, but is valuable for how they understand the world that we live in. I can't think of an event of equal importance in the past century than World War I. (And if you want to argue about World War II, you have a lot of explaining on how we would've ended up with fascism and despotism throughout Europe without the catastrophe of 1914-1918.) And, in a lot of ways, I view it this way because my students have a probably-unhealthy interest in WWII and view WWI with dim curiosity at best and outright apathy at worst. Not only do I get to change their understanding of history through this lengthy unit, but I also get to share some poetry by Wilfred Owen, one of my favorite poets, and that's always exciting. So I have some positive things about "starting the war" this week. But there's also some "bitter" mixed in there, and that's the reality that I'm about to embark on my annual trek through human misery, brutality, callousness, and horror. I know that there's a lot of hero-worship of the doughboys (just kidding; precious few people care about WWI vets; our national memorial to the 116,000 killed in the Great War won't be dedicated until 2024), and it can be hard to go against a received tradition of veneration. Teaching about what humans did to each other, and the hell unleashed upon the world is taxing and draining and depressing. I don't dwell long on the Armenian genocide, for example, but it's one of the things that really kicks me in the guts every time I have to explain it. The disgusting waste of life on 1 July 1916 at the Battle of the Somme is hardly something to relish describing, nor its French counterpart that started in February of the same year near Verdun. We read All Quiet on the Western Front to get a view from the German trenches, only to see that it's basically the same as the view from the British or French ones. We see black and white photos, maps, colorized film clips, and modern day images of century-old weapons. I try to give them a broad understanding about the conflict, because there's so much and one must be firm in cutting out details. But I also try to instill in them the understanding of what modern warfare looks like, the pains it can cause, the scars it leaves. Add to that the utter futility of the fight--the pointlessness of the conflict in the first place, to say nothing of the way in which it set up the world for greater misery and bloodshed just two decades later, and my World War I unit is a bleak prospect indeed. So that's why I find March to be a melancholic month, despite its manifest positives. This year, with the world "celebrating" the first anniversary of COVID-19, I'm reminded of how I taught this information last year--parked in my office, looking out at the world through my window, talking to my computer screen with a handful of dedicated students who "showed up" for the actual lecture, rather than relying on the recording. I get to teach in person now, albeit in a modified manner, and that has some positives. (Of course, it also led to me getting COVID and almost infecting my heart-warrior son, so on the whole I'd say it's mostly negative.) Here I sit, then, on the week when we "start World War I" (as I sometimes accidentally say before correcting myself and say "start our study of World War I"), I hope you can forgive me for feeling a mixture of bittersweet emotions. The Sundays of 2020
There are so many things rattling around my head right now, few of them positive or happy. This is not unusual, as Sundays have historically tended to be the days that my depression is keenest. That being confessed, the past nine months have seen that historical trend skewed. It isn't much of a surprise to me to realize that the pressures of being in an extroverted (we prefer the term missionary-minded) church as an introvert were wearing me down. In Church BC, I would be fine in the first hour--Sacrament meeting, after all, requires very little in terms of personal interactions--then find solace in drawing notes about the Sunday School lesson. I sat next to my wife, whose presence calms my anxieties and explicates my eccentricities to others, so though Sunday School required more interaction, it was mediated by Gayle. Once the third hour showed up and I was off to the gender-segregated Elders' Quorum, thinks became even more uncomfortable. It's hard for me to really parse how I felt in many (by no means all) of the EQ lessons. I do know that part of what made me uncomfortable--and still does in other circumstances with other people--were the invisible lines of power that adults have to navigate. Some don't care about them, don't worry about them, or intuitively weave through them, but I'm not someone like that. In my classroom, there are very clear lines of autonomy, authority, and expectation. If something bothers me in my classroom, I can address it. In more grown-up situations like Church meetings and family gatherings, those clear lines efface. I don't know if it's appropriate to call out someone for a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, and when I do, I worry that I will have ruined a relationship or caused offense. (Example: I'm pretty quiet when my brothers-in-law gas about politics, but it was only when one of them declared the Second Amendment gave him the right to shoot someone on his property that I had to speak up. He retreated when I said that, but I know that it raised questions in his mind about what I think with regards to the Bill of Rights.) The stress of being in that kind of situation is really draining. It should come as no surprise that, when the Primary presidency stopped by the Elders' Quorum to find last-minute substitutes, I would almost always volunteer. I could be a warm body and quietly urge six-year-olds to sing along with Primary songs. Those are power dynamics I can understand. Church attendance--a major portion of a Mormon's Sunday--was one of the reasons that the first day of each week was one in which my depression was larger. Add to that the feelings of inadequacy that I gleaned (rightly or not) from my own lack of piety, faith, and commitment as opposed to what was on display at the local chapel, and you've a ripe recipe for feelings of self-loathing and -insufficiency. The gospel of Jesus Christ is very positive and affirming, very confident in the individual to become better, through the merits of Christ. The Church is very good at (purposefully or not) generating a type of pious competition. And while everyone's experience varies (and I should say that my current ward doesn't have this problem quite as much as previous places I've attended), what I've outlined here pretty well reflects how I feel about the end result of three hours of worship. In the past eighteen months or so--maybe longer? It's hard to tell with COVID fog in the mix--the Church shifted to a two hour schedule, with more focus on learning the gospel at home. I appreciated the change--for what should be obvious reason--though not all of the problems I had with Sundays disappeared. Once the pandemic struck and in-person worship cancelled, I felt significantly better about Sundays than I had in a long time. This doesn't strike me as some sort of cosmic indication about how I should treat Church services--if it's ever safe to worship in person again, I'll be attending once more--as it also tracks with the other areas of my life where additional stresses show up, and how those anxieties receded once the expectation of non-participation became the norm. In other words, not having to be around other people meant that I wasn't as stressed as I had been during the Before Times™. By worshipping at home exclusively, there have been some positive moments. My wife and I are in control of the situation and conversation, and my boys are (I hope) gaining a more intimate understanding of the doctrines we abide by. The down side to this, of course, is that trying to keep a seven-, ten-, and thirteen-year-old interested in the topic without it becoming too diluted for the older one or too complicated for the younger one has been a hit-and-miss proposition. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don't. The yearning here is hard to define: I don't really want to go back to the weekly slog of feeling inadequate and acting as though I'm excited to be at church. Yet I know that it's important to create friendships and connections with my neighbors (I know hardly anyone in the neighborhood), something that has been neglected throughout 2020. Maybe this upcoming year will see some sort of breakthrough in my own spiritual journey. Maybe. The Cancer of 2020 This week marks another surgery for Gayle. She needs to get her chemotherapy port "installed", which will require another out-patient surgery, another dose of general anesthesia, another afternoon in a waiting room where I watch the sunlight slide across the carpet to an early sunset. I'm yearning here for a quick recovery and that the process not take as long as last time. I'm sure it won't. The fact that we're at this particular part in our journey against Gayle's breast cancer is hard for me to come to grips with. There are so many things that have made me despise this year, but Gayle's cancer is by far the largest. We've done a fair job of using the holidays as distractions, keeping the need to focus on our annual celebrations as excuse to avoid thinking about the necessary steps. We did that with Thanksgiving; we did it again with Christmas. Once the holidays were over, however, reality came knocking like a debt collector on our door and now we have no choice but to face what's in front of us. Here's what is currently most on my mind about the cancer issue: Like so many people, I've been holding on to the hope the arrival of the vaccine would provide. The light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel is glimmering and could even possibly be sunlight. The conclusion of this pandemic's nightmare feels tantalizingly close. Real life and normality are returning…but not for us. After going through this hellacious year with the entire world suffering with us (to an extent) gave, if nothing else, a sense of solidarity and mutually shared and -endured hardships. But not for us. The hardest trial we have to face right now is stretching before us all the way into the early days of summer. I won't be able to attend my school's graduation without knowing that there's another chemo appointment either just passed or on the horizon. I'm looking down the barrel of another half year of difficulty and stress. It's possible that many people's goodwill toward us was heightened by the pandemic (and I'm grateful for that; the amount of help that people have extended to our family will always be a highlight of a dark year), when we were all having a hard time. But when the vaccine has finally added up to pulling the numbers down, we will still be in survival mode. We will still be taking each day as its own challenge, focused on trying to accomplish the most we can with what we have. We will remain in the crucible while so many others will be able to move into the next stage of rebuilding. It's hard to not feel a bit of acrimony over that. And while I acknowledge the great blessing and privilege I have that this is our grand trial (rather than, say, the manifold miseries that this world could otherwise offer), that doesn't diminish the fact that this is one of the hardest things I will ever have to do…and I'm not even the one who is going through with it. Up until 2020, the worst year of my life was 2007--my oldest's two emergency heart surgeries were some of the hardest things I've ever been through--and this year is the year that keeps on giving. I yearn for this nightmare to be over, to leave us alone, to move on…I yearn to move on myself, but the tendrils of 2020 are perfidious and plentiful, stretching into the future to corrupt us in ways both visible (the divisions of the country will not be miraculously healed because of a change in political parties) and invisible. I'm done with the problems of 2020; the problems, however, aren't done with me. The Sacrifice of 2020 Though it may seem contradictory to what I was saying in the Cancer of 2020, there has been something that has weighing on me for the past five-or-so months. I write this hesitantly, knowing that some who read this may feel called out and/or attacked by what I have to say. I'm speaking in broad terms and generalities, for the most part, though there are no broad terms that don't encompass some individuals. There isn't a way to sugar coat my feelings here, which are raw and angry. If you're not interested in seeing that, feel free to skip ahead to the next topic. Or stop reading, I guess, that's okay, too. At the beginning of the pandemic, back when we were unsure about what to do and what, exactly, would be required of us, there was a sense of communal response, mutual responsibility, and joint reaction to the immense trial in front of us. We were throwing down tracks as the train barreled behind us, responding to contradictory impulses as best we could. Education, economy, and governmental authority all started straining in ways that we didn't know how to handle. School was dismissed and moved online, with poor results happening for the majority of students. Business had to close down for a bit, and when they reopened, lukewarm support from states forced other businesses to stand up for public health, leading to the sorts of viral videos of entitled white folks screaming at Costco employees because of the business' requirement for a mask to enter the premises. The governor's vacillation and unclear explanations about what public health needs were added to the confusion. This is a story we all know. As the summer waned and the pending school year loomed, it became clear to me that the people of my state were never actually interested in the lives of others. The way we drive in Utah is, apparently, the way we view the world: Incidental to us and there for our exclusive use. We, and only we, matter. Everyone else can, well, die a preventable death. The data are pretty clear: Every time there was a call for the community to sacrifice for the betterment of the entire state, it was ignored. Mask mandates in schools were a hot button issue for a while, if you recall, because some people viewed the possibility of a teacher getting sick because of COVID-19 exposure a price they were willing to pay. The speed with which teachers went from being praised during the spring and derided (and, let's be brutally honest here, threatened with death) during the fall truly was breathtaking. We teachers were asked to put it all on the line while every Chad and Karen out there got to lather up their indignation at the idea of wearing a mask to the store. And skipping a holiday? Upset traditions? Oh, well, that was not a sacrifice they were willing to make. This hits me very deeply. I got sick with COVID-19, brought it home, infected three other members of my family, and could have been responsible for the death of my oldest son, because Utah was willing to do piss-all to get the virus under control. Utah has been doing horribly with the COVID response, with cases constantly escalating, ICU beds beyond safe occupancy, and an ever-increasing death count that--considering the sparsity of our population--is mind-numbing. Utah failed me entirely. I was told that if I did the right things--washed hands, cleaned down surfaces, kept my distance, wore a mask--I would be "safe" at my school. I wasn't. I was lied to. Like many (I don't even know if I can say most), I sacrificed a huge amount this summer. Every time I stepped out of my house, I knew I was putting myself and my family at risk. So I minimized those. We skipped every family gathering--from my sister's wedding to my nephew's baptism to each birthday and holiday. Oh, sure, we visited in the backyard with masks on from a safe distance on Mother's Day, but we didn't have a Mother's Day dinner together. We didn't go when I could see my siblings or my kids their cousins. We went, just us, for a quick visit in the backyard. And every time I did something like that, I felt guilty for not being more careful, for not taking "one for the team" and letting go of what I wanted so that the state could be healthy again. But it was a waste. I contracted COVID from a student--one who had been sick the week before but his parents wanted him at school so that they could go to work--and it very nearly led to a coffin and a tombstone. For over three hundred thousand Americans, it actually did lead to the cemetery. Yet the sacrifices of the rest of our country is too much? Those deaths are a price they have to pay in order to disrupt others' lives the least amount possible? Each time I see a video of people being together, or hear about other people's kids going off to play with their friends, I'm reminded that my children have not been in their friends' houses since March. More than an entire year of my kids' childhoods has been stolen from them by this virus. At the outset, I thought that we were "all in this together!" but it's clear by the roving bands of maskless teenagers that I see slouching through the neighborhood, the "sovereign nation" types strutting about the stores without keeping their distance while their mask is below their chins, the lies of parents who Tylenol their kid before sending them off to school with symptoms, and a litany of other stark examples that we are not in this together. We are in this alone. One thing my self-sacrifice taught me quite clearly: It doesn't matter what I do if others don't sacrifice with me. If it were a simple matter of the Dowdle family taking the rules of the pandemic seriously, we wouldn't have COVID in the state. But I have to rely on everyone else to do something for (and I know this is shocking and monstrous to dare dream) someone else. That, it has been made quite transparent to me, is asking too much of the community I live in. My responsibility for keeping my family safe was one that I took very seriously. I'm not saying that I was perfect at the lockdown. I'm human, too, and there were times I caved. Yet each infraction of the rules--we visited Sanpete county during the summer because there were very few cases there, despite knowing that traveling was a risk--made me feel guilty. Nevertheless, I do the most I can as often as I can to try to help put an end to this pandemic. So when I see videos on social media of family gatherings for the holidays, where mixed families have come together to do their annual traditions, with all the fixings, trimmings, and habits unchanged, it hurts me. When I see news clips of college-aged kids going to parties, dancing and singing without masks or social distancing, it hurts me. When I catch a glimpse of a selfie taken during 2020 with two friends who "haven't seen each other in ages!" smiling with their heads close together, it hurts me. Time and again I look out to see the solidarity of action. Instead I see the indifference to human suffering that has made America the world leader in both COVID cases and deaths. We have more than doubled the number of dead that World War I claimed, and it seems as though we're well on our way to have more dead to COVID than we lost in fighting on two fronts during World War II. As other countries demonstrated, it didn't have to be this way. We were told how we could save lives; we just felt that our lives were more important. And you know what hurts the most? Being a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means that, in part, I am supposed to "mourn with those who mourn". Yet so often it's members of the Church that I see who are doing the very things that are causing others to mourn. (The kid who brought COVID to my class? You guessed it: His family that sent him to school sick is LDS.) Yeah. That's the one that really hurts. COVID isn't going away. The coronavirus is potent, potentially mutating, and more of a threat now than it has been before. The vaccine still has question marks about whether or not inoculated people are still capable of transmitting the disease, to say nothing about its safety for non-adult people. My son wants the vaccine, but we don't know when we'll be able to say it's safe for half-hearted folks. The anti-vax and anti-mask movements have much more potency than logic would dictate is possible, and the fact is, we need more people to become vaccinated than have indicated that they would. The need for other people to sacrifice for each other is just as high as ever. But when has that ever meant people will do the right thing? So I yearn for my sacrifices to not feel invalidated by the selfishness of others. I yearn for some sort of solidarity and recognition of the crises we're facing. I yearn for a stopping of the hurt. The End of 2020 The year closes in four days (at the time of this writing). I have written about 480,000 words thus far. I had the chance to teach a Harry Potter class that was magical, generating worthwhile memories for the students involved. I have taught in all sorts of new ways that I had never anticipated, including livestreaming a lesson from my car while stuck in line for my COVID test. I have been rocked by personal tragedies, familial struggles, and societal unrest. I have been reprimanded for speaking up for Black lives and saying that they matter. I have missed more days of work than I have cumulatively missed throughout my entire career. Almost all of my goals ended as failures or were forgotten outright. There is precious little that I will cherish or treasure from this year. While there were moments of gasped-in air, the majority of this year I spent drowning. I yearn for this year to end. Today I see the last day of summer 2020. It is also the last time that I will wake up without having to go into a classroom filled with students since our school dismissed on 13 March 2020. It was like there was a fire in the far corner of our cafeteria when we evacuated. Now, most of the building is in flames and we've been equipped with a spritzer bottle to combat the inferno as we're called to return to our classrooms.
I am not happy about the returning school year, though I think such a bald statement misses what's happening here. I'm not happy because my children aren't getting the annual tradition of back to school shopping, the thrill of new backpacks and lunchboxes, the excitement of seeing their friends, the challenge of a new grade. I'm not happy because instead, my children will be stuck at their grandma's house, wearing masks and tooling around on Chromebooks for the majority of the day. I'm not happy because the hollow words of praise from society about what teachers were able to do in the spring quickly collapsed into criticisms for failures, many of which were far beyond a teacher's power to control. I'm not happy that there are people who are planning on using their children as a political statement and thereby endangering other people's lives when they send their kids to school without the mandated masks. I am not happy because I will not be a teacher this year. Oh, I still have a job. I'm still in the classroom. I'm still covering the same moments in history, the same literature of the time. I'm still doing a job, yes, but I'm not a teacher. For me, a teacher is someone who inspires, instructs, and involves students in the process of learning. It's someone who seeks out ways of connecting--emotionally and intellectually--to the students and curricula. It's a person who wishes to use the content to create better people. I'm none of that this year. In order to do that, there are a handful of things that I've come to expect, almost all of which are givens during normal times. I would expect to have a full classroom, a (sometimes beyond) critical mass of minds that come together daily to discuss the great things that I have in store. Instead, I'm getting half a class every other day. This is an excellent accommodation, given the circumstances, and I'm glad that there's at least that much attempt at allowing for social distancing. I would expect students to chat, have fun with friends, and share their thoughts in class-wide discussions as well as smaller groups and individual conversations. Instead, I have them physically separated (about four feet between desks on either side, but they're in rows front to back with only a few inches between seat and desk), will have to listen to their muffled voices, not see them smile (or frown), and keep them in the same spot throughout the year. I am glad that I have as much space as I do, since not everyone can get their classes down to a maximum of 14 kids (which is twice as many as the room would fit if following the guidelines fully). I would expect to see former students passing me in the hallway, eager to share a fun experience that happened to them over the summer, or maybe recollect an inside joke from our time together. Instead, I plan on arriving before the bell to rotate rings and keeping myself isolated in my classroom as much as I possibly can. I'm grateful that my admin allows for this sort of thing, as I know that other teachers aren't so lucky. Normally, I look forward to the recharge that comes during lunchtime, when I can sit and chat with other adults and build up those communal bonds that strengthen the school's spirit. Instead, I have a microwave in my classroom so that I don't have to go to the faculty room where maskless friends will be eating their lunches. I will sit behind my plexiglass partitioned desk and pretend that I'm not imprisoned by an invisible enemy. I'm glad, at least, that I have that small space in which to try to feel safe. A teacher should be a coach as well, and I am always excited to coach three drama students in Shakespearean monologues for our fall competition. Instead, I have to figure out how to walk someone through the intricacies of the Bard via online meetings and remote conversations. I recognize that many events are completely canceled, so even though the competition is just a video submission this year, we're lucky to even have that. I would have expected that our society would take seriously a clear and present threat to our children and their families, that safety would be paramount. But then I remember Sandy Hook and I realized that money will always be more important than human life, and there's no positive spin I can put on this. In a country where our solution to gun violence and global warning--one an immediate threat and one a larger, more abstract one--is to ignore or deny the problem, can I really be surprised that we exhausted ourselves with conspiracies and half-measures? To say that I feel abandoned and betrayed is to put it so mildly that it may as well not be said. Safety aside (as if that should be a thing), I have to keep reminding myself that these thefts of experience are only temporary, that there will come a time when I can return to the classroom with excitement and enthusiasm, that our competitions and assemblies may return, that the futures we hope to build for the students aren't mired by viral uncertainty and political errors. This reminder, however, always spins around when I push away from what I am losing and to what they will miss. I'm not so egotistical as to think that a student who doesn't attend my class will be permanently hamstrung in their future and that they missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from me. However, it isn't just my class that they're missing out on. It's the entirety of a learning experience that is being lost. I think of my own kids, and how my now-second grader struggled with school at first, but soon learned to really love his class and his school. His enthusiasm keeps twisting about, transforming from excitement into sadness that he can't return to where he wishes to be. Is there ever a year where it's "just fine" that they miss out on everything that year has planned? My now-fifth grader will not get to go on the exciting overnight campout that his grade always gets a chance to attend…I haven't reminded him about that, because why add to his sadness? My now-eighth grader was just starting to get the hang of the middle school experience when we dismissed; now he won't have middle school at all. He will be all online, learning via computer, and missing out on the interactions and friendships that he so desperately needs. As I roll over these realities in my mind, I get more and more frustrated. I don't blame the schools for wanting to be open--I want us to be open. Instead, I keep thinking about all of the missteps, the frittered away months where things could have gone differently but didn't, the energy wasted on pointless arguments and denials that have led to personal tragedies and a nation-wide catastrophe. I try not to look at other countries that sacrificed as needed to get their COVID response under control, mostly because it makes me feel jealous. That could've been us, but you playin'… In all honesty, I'm not surprised that we are in this situation. We are committed to the course we're on, apparently, and though there were offramps galore on this road we've taken, I don't see a lot of people in positions of power moving toward rectifying the situation as it stands. Is it possible to have prevented all of the deaths in the United States? No. Of course not. A novel viral outbreak is going to claim victims. Did we need to lose over 160,000--and be on track to lose maybe as many as 300,000 before year's end?--to say nothing of the untold and unknowable costs of COVID-related infections further down the line? No. Not even remotely. The frustration of people and the desire to seek out the normal we've lost is understandable. I recognize why parents want their kids to go to school--after all, many parents had the option to sign up for online-only schooling; most did not choose it--because of the many different realities that parents have gone through in their own individual journeys. For them, they don't see the risk as greater than the consequence; they likely also never saw their child embraced by cables and wires because that was the kind of hug that would keep them alive. I have. It's not worth saying goodbye to a loved one via Skype so that the soccer team can have a game. So while I understand where parents are coming from, in the end I have to say that what's being asked of me is not "my job"; it's asking for me to risk my life--or worse, my children's lives. I see no beauty in that cause, no desire to flout what's real in favor of hoping for something better. A new school year is supposed to be an opportunity to recommit toward personal growth and learning, to one's own education. All I can see is the potential for a grave, a breach in the ground where what I love has gone. That's not much of a vision for a new school year. And yet that is all I can see. Like most people, the news of the spreading corona virus has led me to some serious life reflections and considerations. What is essential? What am I prepared for? What do I view my life to be in the short term? How can I keep my family safe? For all of the unanswered questions, there's one that seems to nag at me the most, waiting in the wings: Is this it? For quite some time now, I've abandoned any millenarian theological interpretations about world events. My study of history--especially within the last hundred years--has shown me that as bad as things are, there have been times in the past where things were significantly worse than now. As a Mormon, I'm part of a millenarian church, but one that's been rather cagey about the end of the world, for the most part. After all, plenty of people--inside and, of course, outside--the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have made predictions about the pending apocalypse. My favorite would have to be the Great Fire of London in 1666. England, which had long thought of itself as God's Chosen Land™, was on edge about the whole year "666" thing. (I say "England", but really it was the more puritanically-inclined people; those who were less religiously devout/superstitious likely didn't mind it as much.) What better year to really show his demonic power off than in Satan's own year? Dire warnings about God's judgment were rife, particularly since the monarchy had only been restored six years prior and was still a sore spot for the revolutionaries who had believed in Cromwell's dictatorship. With a plague outbreak happening a year before, London was feeling like…well, that it was the end of the world. On 2 September 1666, in the King's bakery on Pudding Lane, a fire broke out. Due to a long, hot, dry summer, London was ripe for the roasting and soon half of the City was on fire. Attempts to detonate buildings with gunpowder to provide a fire break occurred (which is, in hindsight, rather an amusing picture), and despite their best efforts, by 4 September 1666, only a fifth of London remained standing. Even St. Paul's Cathedral was destroyed--the one that we all know and love today, that survived the Nazi blitz of World War II, was erected on the same spot in the aftermath of the Great Fire--and though only a handful of people died in the blaze, hundreds of thousands were left homeless and destitute. It was a catastrophe by every mark. (If you want to read more, here's a nifty article.) Who of that time wouldn't look at the great city of London succumbing to flames and think, "This is the end of the world"? On the first day of July 1916, the British launched a bloody and ill-fated attack on German positions near the Somme in France. The battle turned into a lengthy bloodbath, the likes of which have but rarely been seen since then. When I think of how we're behaving now, how convinced we are at the prospect of facing the End Times, I think of this footage. Filmed at 0720 on 1 July 1916 by Geoffrey Malins, this explosion at the Hawthorn Redoubt saw 40,000 pounds of explosive detonate underground. Watch this short clip and ask yourself: What does the end of the world look like? Surely seeing an 80 foot-deep crater, longer than a football field would be part of it? I see an image like this, and I'm reminded of Book 6 of Paradise Lost, when the rebel angels' cannon-fire pushes the loyal angels' ingenuity, and they begin to hurl entire mountains at one another: Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power When I think of the End of Days, I consider how, in the years between Hitler's rise and fall, human beings were turned into purses and riding pants, how Japan's Unit 731 experimented on Chinese prisoners with anthrax and vivisection, how Turkey yet denies having slaughtered a million Armenians…
…if that's not enough to spur Christ's return, why would a twenty-first century flu be sufficient? There's an entire cottage industry of predicting (thus far, wrongly) the end of the world, the Rapture, whatever one wishes to call it, up to and including the creation of a pet-service website for after the apocalypse comes. Mayans were believed to have predicted the end of the world in 2012, of course, and there's hardly a Sunday-gone-by where I haven't heard someone lament about how much more wicked the world is than in those idyllic yesteryears of yore. But I just don't know if that's true. Yes, the world is different, but it's been in a perpetual evolution since Day One. But more wicked than the wholesale enslavement of 16 million human beings from Africa? More wicked than systemic exploitations that led to children dying in mines and factories? History is replete with heinous behavior; why should this be it? The Mormon in me wants to believe that the end is nigh because there are many promised blessings. But the humanist in me wants to believe that we could have chosen differently; we could have aimed to save people, save our planet, save our future--that Christ would come not as a deus ex machina to prevent us from self-annihilation, but because we'd made the world safer, kinder, more loving, more caring, less violent, more equal…more heavenly. When I think of all the despicable things I know from my small store of historical knowledge, I can't believe that twenty-first century problems are what St. John the Beloved was looking at in his great uncovering of the end of the world. Maybe what really worries me is that if the Holocaust isn't sufficiently evil enough to trigger the Second Coming, what will be? One of the things that surprises me as a teacher of Paradise Lost? Students would not want to live in the Garden of Eden, according to how John Milton presents it, because "it would be boring."
I know that they're fifteen years old ("I'm sixteen!" That One Kid™ is always quick to irrelevantly point out) and still getting a grip on the world, but it really is shocking to me. Here's the deal with Milton's Eden, in case you've forgotten since the last time you read the poem: The Garden is filled with every conceivable fruit and vegetable--indeed, inconceivable fruits and vegetables are also available. There are bounteous rivers, crystal clear, that are healthful and delicious. Animals live there with no danger, including lions that play with lambs, snakes that coil around harmlessly, and tigers prowl through herds without the latter getting freaked out. It's not unusual to see an elephant writhing his "lithe proboscis" to entertain Adam and Eve. The days are warm enough that a constant cool breeze is needed--and provided--and beautiful scents fill the air around flowery bowers. At one point, the amiable angel Raphael says that Eden is patterned after Heaven, which, he tells us, has variety and change because it's nice. I take that to mean that something approaching seasons is possible there--though Adam and Eve don't stay in Eden long enough for us to see for certain. Additionally--and this is crucial for me to explain to my predominantly LDS students--Eve and Adam are fully expecting and waiting for "additional hands" to come to them. That is, Milton doesn't conceive of a sexless or childless Eden*. And, since there's no pain in Eden, childbirth is (we can assume) essentially painless. Death, of course, is completely foreign there ("Whate'er Death is," says Adam when the topic comes up (425)), and wickedness is likewise unavailable. In short, the Garden of Pleasure** is truly a paradise: All of the things that make life beautiful, none of the weaknesses that make it miserable. Milton, I think, does this on purpose: If we as readers are to feel like we've truly lost something, it can't be a conditional paradise. Eden must be a place that we long to be in, so that when it's lost (the spoiler is in the title, people), we care. So when I ask the kids if they'd want to be Eden, their number one critique is that it would be boring--and I don't get it. A lot of kids argue that without opposition, there's no growth. No growth is, essentially, uninteresting (or, rather, boring). And while I understand that from a postlapsarian point of view, Milton goes to show that there's plenty to do in the Garden--gardening, as a matter of fact, to say nothing of exploring all of the cool and beautiful things in Eden--because, again, Eden has to be a place that we'd unreservedly want to go to. "But you wouldn't have anything to do after a while," the children groused. "Eventually, you would waft yourself heavenward," I rejoined, "refilling the celestial halls with humans-turned-angels to refill those numbers lost by the fall of Satan and his Atheist crew!" "What would you do, though? Just, like, tend a garden?" "Yeah." "Nothing else?" "There's an elephant who writhes his lithe proboscis…" And what they're saying--or, rather, what I'm hearing--is that they don't realize just how monotonous life really is. You'd think they would: They are, after all, students. There is a constant grind of schedules, bells, expectations, and repetitions. But they have summer to look forward to, or graduation, or a job… …but that's where I am, and I have to say, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of growth here. There are small lessons here or there, but life has hit the this-is-life-for-the-foreseeable-future-and/or-until-you-die plateau. I've been teaching the same curricula (with some noteworthy exceptions) for over a decade, going through the same jokes, asking the same questions, pointing out the same cool things. I get quite a bit of satisfaction from that, but when I zoom out, the monotony of day-in-day-out living is grinding. Living becomes habitual. Mountain peaks of the past fade into rolling hills of the present and it gets to the point where speedbumps give me nosebleeds. Part of the reason that I can see so far into the future is because there's nothing to climb between here and death. In other words, this brave new world that is filled with so many possibilities--more possibilities than I can ever hope to touch--will collapse until there's variety in the names I memorize and that's about it. Oh, sure, there are changes. My children are still at home and in school, so watching them grow and learn and burst out into the world will be moments to look for and savor. I don't deny that there will be changes, of course, and new joys--and also new sorrows. A life in Milton's Eden would omit that last part, which is why I'm still baffled by my students' responses to the question "Would you want to live there?" When they answer, in effect, "I wouldn't want to live a boring life that's the same every day," I realize that I need to refrain from telling them that I ask myself almost daily: Is this all there is? --- * In LDS doctrine, our First Parents were told that they had to "multiply and replenish the earth"--which is interpreted to mean that this "commandment" was in effect at the same time as the prohibition on the fruit. Where Mormonism and Milton differ is that LDS doctrine claims that childbearing was impossible whilst Eve was in Eden. Until she and her husband departed from the Garden, they couldn't have kids. Milton just assumes that, had Eve not partaken of the fruit, all of humankind would still be in the Garden all the way up to present day. ** Eden in Hebrew means "Pleasure". YouTube provides a lot of content for me, mostly while I'm doing the dishes or putting away laundry. It's fun to be able to learn something, gain a new insight, or just have a better grip on a particular topic whilst also getting some of the domestics done. Recently, I was directed to Kate Cavanaugh's YouTube channel. While her tendency to giggle a lot isn't my favorite thing, she is a really positive personality and makes good content. She has a great shtick of "Writing Like…" where she does a lot of research into the methodologies of big name writers and tries to write according to their routines. I'm a junkie for that sort of stuff--I love hearing new ideas of how to go through a writing process, and so these videos are really enjoyable to me.
However, they can be a bit lengthy, so I sometimes bop around some of her other topics. (I'm new to AuthorTube, so I don't know if there are a lot of other content creators like her in this sub-subgenre of the website.) Yesterday, I was listening to her video about reading slumps and it kind of caught my ear. I'm quite familiar with being unhappy with the idea of writing--the feeling of not caring about any particular story enough to even start up the computer or pick up the pen--but being disengaged from wanting to read was something new. At least, having someone talk about it was new. I've been afflicted with this feeling off and on for the past however long, and the result is…well, I don't know. In retrospect, part of the reason that I wanted to reread It during the summer was because of a reading slump: Nothing else was engaging me, nothing else interested me, and I kept feeling a pull toward Derry and the Losers' Club as the only thing that actually satisfied my desire to read. Other books failed to really engage me, though I muscled through one thing or another. Most of the books on my crammed- and over-crowded bookshelves failed to so much as spark an interest in my mind. This ennui has been mostly in my writing life, so having it leak into my reading life is a bit alarming. Can I actually be bored with reading? Despite years of being a video game apologist, I think that my video game habits are to blame for a lot of it. I'm playing Persona 5, which is a lengthy game--and has pretty much broken me of my Overwatch obsession for the nonce--and as it's narrative heavy, I feel like I'm not simply entertaining one part of my mind. Nevertheless, a long-form narrative like Persona 5 is not the same as long-form novels, what with its constant interruption of narrative for gaming elements. So I'm not engaging my mind with text as thoroughly as I have in the past. I find that my honest analyses of these problems have manifold causes: My depression is certainly one of them. Work, however, is another, as it drains a lot of my emotional and mental resources. Fathering, usually done on the sparse fumes of my patience, is another area that pulls me from wanting to go through the additional work of reading. And, perhaps most surprisingly, is my preparation for the Harry Potter Winterim that I'm doing. I may (or may not, I don't know) have mentioned that I will be teaching a class about Harry Potter this coming January. To prepare for that, I'm rereading all of the Harry Potter books, looking over my notes from before (back in 2011 when I was preparing for the class the first time), and writing way too much in my reading journal. (As an illustration of that, I took over a year and a half to fill my first reading journal, and I had a good twenty or so books that I wrote about; for my new reading journal, I will be finished with it before six months have elapsed and almost all of it will be dedicated to Harry Potter books.) When I think of what I want to read, I feel a pang of guilt and a very mild jolt of panic when I realize that I don't really have any options: I have to finish the Harry Potter series, including (I think? I'm still undecided) a reread of Cursed Child. I don't have the luxury of reading anything else. This expectation--not unreasonable, honestly, that the teacher of a course be familiar with the content--is driving me again and again to the world of Hogwarts and my friends there. This isn't a complaint of this particular piece: There are much worse things that one has to read for a class or a job than Harry Potter. That being said, of course, it is pushing a type of reading fatigue onto me. I'm kind of tired of holding these--and only these--books in hand, carting them around, and trying to condense my thoughts about them into my writing journal. As much as I love Harry Potter, I do wish for some variety in my reading diet. And so maybe that's really what's behind my reading fatigue: I'm "forced" to prepare for a class that I volunteered to teach, which means I have to dedicate time and thought toward it. O, woe is me. Still, I hope that I can have the emotional and intellectual wherewithal to remain interested in reading when I finish this up, that I don't take my I-finished-reading-Harry-Potter reward as being more time in front of the TV. I hope that I can shake off this reading fatigue and get back in the mood of reading deep, profound--or even silly and slight--books again. I can hope. Back in January, I decided to avoid non-fiction writing in order to focus on reading more and dedicating time to my fiction writing, instead. I deliberately gave up writing an essay a day, a decision I'd hoped would give me all sorts of positive effects.
That has not been the case. It is the end of September (tomorrow, at any rate), and with three months left in the year I am standing at about 360,000 words (not counting this month). In 2018, I had surpassed that total by the end of June. In fact, my annual total for last year landed at over 625,000 words--more than half a million of these little squiggles--and that included both a NaNoWriMo novel and a completed summer novel project. At this particular juncture, though I've written three of my five planned novellas, I do not have nearly as much to show for my effort as I did previously. I mean, at the rate I'm going, I will have written more words by September 2018 than I did in all of 2019. I don't know why this surprises me. I knew that I'd have fewer words written than I had historically done. It isn't actually a shock to see this happen…except it is. I guess I thought that there'd be some sort of magical output in my fiction writing because I wasn't refining my mental vomit--I mean, non-fiction essays--as much anymore. But the end result was just more video games. I read less (though I'm pushing through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince now, having started in July my reread of that series, so at least there's progress there) than I had anticipated, even though the other aspects of my life are running more smoothly than ever before. We've lived at New Place for over three years now, so my timing, commutes, extracurricular activities, and other aspects of life are kind of getting done the way they're supposed to be getting done. I'm teaching with minimal preparation, as almost everything is a repeat of previous years and/or my own passions. Even with Puck being in middle school, I still don't have that many changes to my life. And maybe that's why I was expecting more of myself. I hoped that the stability of my life would lead to greater output. Since that hasn't happened, it's been harder on me than I care to admit. In fact, I've seriously considered giving up on writing. I'd still write in my reading journal, as it's one of the few places that feels like a worthwhile place to put my effort. But I've considered just giving up--deleting my query spreadsheet (having received two rejections in the past month), "boxing up" my digital manuscripts, and not even worrying about anything I've written ever again. Of course, those days were also dark days for my depression, so I didn't really trust any decision I would come to. Part of the reason I continue to want to write is I'm worried about changing fundamental parts of who I see myself as. I've always seen myself as a writer, and I realize that 36 years isn't really so old that I should give up on what is, historically, an old person's game. But that hasn't changed my feelings of wanting to be part of a profession at the exact time that profession has started its decline into obsolescence. I'm just old enough to have my dream-claws latched into the way bookselling used to be, and just young enough to see that the old way is continually dying. But I'm not young enough to feel confident in the alternative types of writing in the twenty-first century. Wattpad frightens me. Kickstarter is anti-union for its workers and, besides, what do I know of self-publishing anyway? And, yeah, self-publishing is going a long way from its roots of error-riddled schlock, but you still don't get a lot of exposure or value in self-publishing, do you? (This isn't to say that self-publishing isn't a good move for some people; in my case, it feels as much like a failure as walking away from the keyboard entirely. It's simply not something that I want…and if I change my mind, I don't know how I'm going to feel about myself. Is it capitulation? Or finally finding my voice?) I think I see things this way, in part, because I've had so many things go right in my life--the only woman I ever dated in my life became my wife; I went to exactly one elementary school, one middle school, one high school, one college, and I've taught at only one charter school as the entirety of my twelve year teaching career; I got my degree without failing a class or being unable to get into the education system. Essentially, I bear a charmed life (even taking into account the immense difficulty I personally had while caring for a heart baby some twelve years ago). And, with the exception of my family situation, I have only had one over-riding goal for myself in my life, one thing that I had always assumed would happen with the same sort of thoughtless faith as reliance on gravity: I would be a writer. I pinned my sense of identity and self to that (among other things, which I won't worry about putting down here), and the fact that I'm still not a writer is leading to a bit of an ontological crisis. What am I if I'm not a Writer with a capital W? An imposter, maybe? An aspirant? A pretender? What's most frustrating about this, is I'm aware of how wrong it is for me to think this way. The external validation of having a book, of seeing it sit on the shelf at the book store, of being able to watch a stream of would-be customers avoiding eye contact with me at a book signing…I've always pinned my hopes of feeling like a writer on that experience. I've been dreaming about it since I was single-digits old. And anyone who's been working on a dream for almost three decades and isn't much closer to fulfilling that dream than when he started isn't likely to feel like there's a lot of value in continuing the fight. I realize that this has been quite the pity-party post. I'm not apologizing for that, as I feel justified in expressing my feelings on my own website. However, I'm not writing all of this as a bid for assurances from others about my goals and dreams--I'm explaining, more to myself than anyone else, some of the thoughts that have been hurting me lately. It's the kind of cheap therapy that even a teacher can afford. I talk about my writing goals a lot on this site. I've a couple of reasons for this: I find that writing things down helps me to understand stuff better. (That's why I started the close listen to Before These Crowded Streets, for example.) Another thing is that I often find closure when I do so. That is, as something bothers me or comes to my attention, by writing about it, I find myself closing off the idea and feeling it's complete. I constantly write about how my writing goals are working because neither of the reasons I write about something applies. I don't feel I understand my goals better, nor do I find any closure.
Writing is an ongoing process for any writer, I think. In no way am I exceptional about it. Other writers desire greater success--any success, I suppose is more accurate--just like I do. It's not that I have anything specifically, notably unique to say, save it's my own voice speaking. I don't really know what it means to work hard at writing. I can track quantity--and I have been, rather obsessively, for years--and I know that I feel as though something has happened when I've actually accomplished a hefty amount of writing…but is that what working hard looks like? Rumors and urban (urbane) tales claim that Hemmingway wrote fewer than 1,000 words a day, while Stephen King clocks in a purported 2,000. I remember reading somewhere that Terry Goodkind wrote for twelve hours a day, seven days a week (which sounds exhausting). I get about 45 minutes three times a week to write with my students. I drop between 1,200 and 1,600 words--average being solidly 1,500--words. That's, maybe-almost-but-not-quite 5,000 words a week in my fiction. I can write more--a lot more, sometimes--but the circumstances are always special. What I'm getting at is that I can put down a lot of writing, if I bother to, but lately I haven't. This year I wanted to try to find a different balance, and now that we're two-thirds through March, I'm not so certain that I've found anything. I don't write as much, and there's an incipient fear of opening up a blank document that hasn't haunted me since I started doing daily writing. I'm like an athlete that only wants to play the game but never go to practice: I haven't been putting in the time at the keyboard to feel like I'm progressing--in that nebulous way--as a writer. It's hard, too, because of mental drain. The weather is finally starting to pull out of the bitterness of winter--though I'm sure there's still a cold-snap that'll punch the valley before we can settle into warmth--and Daylight Saving has returned (yay!), so some of my mental issues are pulling away. Nevertheless, I'm not in a good position with writing this year. I wanted to be putting away about 50,000 words a month: I'm not even halfway there this month and I have eleven days left. Reading is the same. I don't want to crack a book, despite having purchased a bunch in the past few weeks. I don't want to do anything but sit and play old school videogames. I'm not being sarcastic here: I gave up Overwatch for Lent this year (and I'm totally not counting the days until 18 April), so I've only put time into Final Fantasy VIII. The drive to do anything different simply isn't there. Sure, I've done a couple of worthwhile things. I wrote a song on the guitar--something I haven't done since my early college days--and I've written a couple of pretty good essays. I submitted my query for War Golem and even got my first rejection on that one. So it isn't that I'm useless and done nothing…I just don't do anything consistently any more. The habit of daily writing was, apparently, something easier to let go of than to form. The question that always picks at me is whether or not it even matters. I don't write as much. So what? Do I miss slapping together an essay each night? Sometimes, but not always. Do I feel accomplished when I write something instead of being lazy? Sometimes, but not always. Ugh. I don't know what I want anymore. I mentioned a while ago that my writing block has been pretty bad lately. I've been able to push forward in a little novel, so on that front it's coming together a bit. I just…I don't know how much I care anymore. Writing has been a long-standing aspect of my identity, and suddenly I'm thinking more and more often that I don't have much to contribute. It isn't about whether or not I'll get an agent or published (at least, not completely about that). It's just this…malaise that's been sticking to me. If I've always thought of myself as a writer, and I don't want to write…do I still want to be me? Well, I'll figure it out, I'm sure. I'll probably write an essay about it, even. Probably. It's painful for me to sit down and actually admit this, but I have a problem. It's one that I've had for some time now--over a year--and though it comes and goes in intensity, it never fully goes away. I've tried a lot of different things to get rid of it--pep-talks, distractions, buying something expensive to guilt-trip me into changing, and pretending it isn't there--but nothing really works. I used to deal with this back in my early college days. It was really hard; I found myself being more depressed than usual (which, since I didn't know I had dysthymia back then, I didn't realize that my problem was amplifying my depression, not the other way around) and immensely frustrated.
I get writer's block. Up until October 2018 (and I'll get to that date in a second), I really only had one major episode of writer's block. Back in my freshman year of college, I took a science fiction class. It was…okay. Thinking back to my educational experience, I don't know what I really expected or strove to get out of any particular class. I didn't really know how to learn--not the way that I've since seen the purpose of education--and I found myself taking classes that simply sounded like fun. I really enjoyed my science fiction class in high school--enough that I'd taken it twice, actually--so I hopped in to get the college-level version. For the most part, it was fine. I read a bunch of stuff that I never would have picked up otherwise--always a plus--and I got a broader sense of what the genre could do. One of the things that didn't work out for me, however, was the critiques I got from my professor on some of my writing. Up to that point, I had always been told that I wrote well, with few criticisms from my teachers.* Therefore, when I got my paper back, all marked up in green ("green for growth!" crowed my teacher when she explained that red made an edited paper bleed, and that was disheartening), I wasn't prepared for her comments. In retrospect, it probably wasn't my best story--I can hardly remember what it was about. As a mostly-discovery writer (I force myself to write outlines now, but that's a more recent development) who thought that he was a good writer, I explored my way through to the end of a weird story and then left it at that; I'd never edited my work in high school, why should I in college? Anyway, I have no idea if she was being generous or grievous in her grading, but I certainly felt attacked at getting a B+. All these years later, it still stings when I think of one phrase in particular that she disliked because she didn't understand what I was saying. The character was cowering in the corner, and I described her as "hiding behind her knees". Too weird, apparently, for my prof. When I got that paper back, its gruesome green grade leering off of it, I hit a major bout of writer's block. In those days, I wrote on a computer in my bedroom that was running WordPerfect software, and I remember creating new document after new document trying to write an opening that made me want to keep writing. It was the digital equivalent of a legal pad, pages torn off, wadded up, and thrown into the overflowing rubbish bin in the corner. I spent a long time in a tailspin over the grade. It was less the B+ that rankled (though that hurt) and more her "not getting" what was, frankly, one of my favorite lines from the story. (Clearly it meant a lot to me; I'm remembering it pretty well for it being 18 years down the road.) Eventually, I managed to tug something out--a lot of it through world building and character design; ancillary work on writing that helped lay a groundwork that my writing could develop later on--just in time to leave for my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While I wasn't explicitly forbidden from working on my writing during my mission, I never felt comfortable doing much with the ideas that I had developed before arriving in Florida. As a result, I let my writing languish, putting daily writing in my journal to document the events of my mission instead of a fictional world I had invented in my mind.** After I got married, I took the beginning ideas and, after about a year or so (maybe longer; I'm not really sure), I had finished my first real*** novel, The Terra Campaign: Impetus. From that time, I've been working on one novel or another. Once I wrote a 310,000 word behemoth that I still feel is one of my best concepts--even if it didn't actually work the way I had thought that it would--and I even have some small NaNoWriMo projects that I've knocked out over the years. I have over a dozen completed novels… …and I haven't really felt like writing anything lately. Since I started taking Wellbutrin (coincidence? Correlation? Who knows?), I have had a significantly harder time writing. These essays drain some of my writing juices, admittedly, but I have been more and more disillusioned with my place within a writing community since I started taking pills to help reduce my depression. November 2017 saw a novel, but I hadn't really been on the medication for long at that point. By the time my novel writing class showed up in January 2018, I had no idea what to write about. I tried my hand at some horror, I picked at other ideas. Nothing interested me. June 2018 was on the horizon and I still didn't have anything to do with my writing retreats. Fearing I would ruin this rare opportunity, I cottoned onto an idea for a sequel to War Golem and slapped together something that is honestly embarrassing to me in retrospect. I may have printed out the book--I don't know, I haven't looked for it; I think it's somewhere around here--but I don't have plans to look at it again. Possibly ever. When my January 2019 writer's retreat cropped up, I still had a NaNoWriMo novel languishing, so I spent most of the time there slapping an ending on that particular story, rather than trying anything new. I'm orbiting around a novella that I really like, but I don't know where it's going. Now I'm in my novel writing class again and I have an idea that I'm working on. But when I thought about coming up to my office today and writing anything in that piece, I realized that I needed a haircut. And then I needed to take care of my water softener. Oh, and I needed to do the dishes. What about that comic book about Silk that I checked out from the library? I had to read that! My guitar wasn't about to play itself, so I had to give it some attention. Then I was hungry--can't write on an empty stomach. I even went so far as to open up my document of It and try to copy down some of King's words to try to prime the pump for my own writing: I closed it almost immediately. Now I'm using this essay as a way to avoid the work. My blockages, before a brief aspect of my life, are eating up more and more of my life and my bandwidth. I worry that there's a hypocrisy in this, as I have breezily given "sage" advice to students who are struggling with the same thing. Now that I've succumbed so deeply to the problem, none of my flippant answers help me. And, lest you think this is a post without irony, I've sent off four queries for my recently-completed-the-editing War Golem--a record for me, as I've always been more of a sniper-shot kind of submitter, rather than a net-caster--and I should have my rejections in hand by the end of the school year. Why would I be looking for representation and trying to sell my book if I don't feel I have any books left to write? That nothing I come up with is enough to overpower the slightest distraction? I still have a goal of writing at least 50,000 words per month, even without my daily work here on the website. Thus far, I'm on track. But I constantly feel like I'm on track to nowhere in particular. And that's hard. --- * There can be a lot of explanations on this front: They never read any of my work is high up there. Or, since I didn't struggle (for the most part) to remember the differences between "to", "two", and "too" or when to make a new paragraph, they assumed that the stories, likewise, were good. Or, perhaps, they were good…in comparison to other teenagers. Whatever the case was, I never got anything but A's on my creative writing whilst in high school. ** Some people might argue that serving a mission is actually trying to push a fictional world I had invented in my mind onto others. Those people are being mean to say that. *** I wrote a lot of Spider-Man fanfic when I was a kid. There was one that I wrote that was actually pretty good, which I finished sometime before my mission, I think. I can't really remember right now. That book kind of counts as "my" book, but since it's based on someone else's characters, I don't add it to the list. I have about 19 total writing projects, at varying degrees of doneness. I guess it'd be 20 if I included my old friend, Spider-Man. About thirteen months back, I wrote about how I was struggling with figuring out what to do about my depression. In the end, I decided to go ahead and try the Wellbutrin to treat the dysthymia that plagues me. I've been using it steadily (almost daily; I forget sometimes) since October 2017. I figured now would be as good a time to write about it as any, seeing as I had to go back to the doctor to get a refill. I had been trying to game the system for a while--I don't like phones and I don't like making appointments--pushing for refills and having the pharmacy get the permission from the doctor's office.
Today, that ran out. With only four or five pills left and The Holidays™ looming large, Gayle insisted that I get the prescription refilled. The only way to do that was to actually call the doctor's office and schedule an appointment. To my surprise, they were able to fit me in this evening, letting me talk with my doctor--a woman I've only met one other time--before my supply ran out. We chatted a little--she has very good bedside manners--and even deduced that I likely have a deviated septum in my head, which would explain why my nose always feels slightly congested. She was glad to hear that my depression had ebbed (some--enough so that the edge is off most of the time) and happily refilled my prescription for the next year. In terms of some of the concerns I had about the pill, some of them have come to pass: I do have some side effects, including moments of sudden dizziness. They aren't particularly pronounced--certainly not to the point that I'm unable to stand or anything--but they're more frequent now that I've been on Wellbutrin for a baker's dozen months. Poor sleeping is also one of the things that comes up as a potential side effect, and I have had that more often than I likely recognize. Most nights I lie down and almost feel like I've forgotten how to fall asleep, as if this easy and most natural of things is actually some sort of mental trick or learned behavior that I have to recall, as if sleeping required the same sort of mental "muscles" as playing the guitar. I wrote about the worst episode here, which was far and away the worst bout of insomnia I've ever struggled with. And though I'm almost always tired, I'm pretty sure it has more to do with the way my work schedule works than anything I'm ingesting on the daily. Rereading the original post, I mentioned that my worry was that I would find relief in pharmaceuticals, only to lose them to the ineptitude of the Trump Administration. With the recent news coming out of Texas, there's still some cause for concern--I know the president crowed at the Texas judge's ruling on the Affordable Care Act, so it's clear that the man is still interested in removing the protections and helps that the ACA has given me and mine--but, after having to suffer through an additional year of 45's attempts at governance, it's clear that there's nothing to do but assume he'll be distracted by something--likely the ratings of his State of the Union address--and healthcare will trundle on as it has the past eight years. And though it isn't a concern, necessarily, about my own access to increasingly-needed prescriptions, the entire political theater--currently, the hypocrisy and revolting behavior of lame-duck Senator Hatch--has added a great deal to my own anxiety about the future and the results that the GOP has harvested from their embracing of the most debased in us. That, however, is a rant for a different day. The last thing that I wanted to update on would have to be the largest concern I had about my ability to write. Though the year isn't out yet, I have put down more than 610,000 words--essays, novels, edits, and journals--so in terms of output, I think I'm doing okay. I did, however, plan on writing three novels this year--one throughout the months, one during the writing retreats, and then NaNoWriMo--and I have only completed one third of that. And though I'm proud of what I wrote in War Golems, I don't think it's very good. I "won" NaNoWriMo in that I got the goal of 50,000 words during the month of November (barely making the goal on the last day of the month), but I haven't finished Theomancy. And that third book never materialized, despite having an entire semester from January until May that gave me an hour a day, three days a week, in which to write it. I don't know if that's the pill, placeboes, or a little of both, but I'm really displeased with what I wrote--from a novel-writing perspective--this year. I mean, quite disappointed in myself. My urge to write fiction is at one of its lowest ebbs in current memory, but whether or not I can blame that on a daily white capsule or if there are other, bigger factors to worry about, I can't say. And here's the thing that worries me the most: A couple of times, I've genuinely thought about giving up being a writer. To stop with the daily essays (I skipped yesterday's simply because I didn't want to bother writing it), to cut out the edits, to forget the agent search…to abandon it all. Is that me? Is that the drug? Is it both? And is the refill of my pills to decrease my depression worth the price of giving up on my dream? It's hard to say this, but I don't really know. |
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