It never really goes away.
Naming my issues helps me, and if you need to not read this post, that’s fine. I feel like I’m screaming into the void in any case.
I don’t have it in me to make this a pretty, easily scannable post. I don’t have anything in me right now except a sucking well of darkness. (I’m fine, I’m not thinking of hurting myself, I will persevere because I have kids and I don’t have a choice.)
You can recover from depression to some extent. Some days are good, some days are better, and some days are like today. Where I just… sit here and stare, trying to find something worthwhile inside myself. Where I have to repeatedly remind myself that my husband and kids count on me and love me. That no matter what I prefer, I can’t check out.
Part of my angst is worry. For so many reasons. My spouse has to go to the states for a conference this week, and I worry about him running into trouble at the border, or ‘over-there’. (The fact that the country I was born in has become this foreign, scary ‘over-there’ is not lost on me.
I’m so very selfish that I’m glad he passes in every way. (He’s Wendat but has a Welsh last name. Cause his dad is white, hubs looks white.)
But it means that he has a higher percentage chance of coming home to me and our kids.
I’m worried about coping with being a single parent for a week without him. I have no idea how full-time single parents do it, and I give SPs all the kudos of ever.
I’m worried about my health, about how I’ll have to make a terrible choice soon (to give up my calling to go back to soul-deadening work… I can’t keep living with so little income. We can’t keep doing it. Writing and editing just aren’t doing it, and I think it’s coming time to acknowledge that the rest of the world just doesn’t care. I can preach and talk about the needs of creators to have patrons, and how they have through history (like I did here) for hours. But… why? No one cares.
What else am I to think? I see kickstarters and the like succeeding for potato salad recipes, but my sales on amazon are non-existent and I can’t get reviews even when people message me privately telling me how much they adore my stories. I’m sitting on three books right now that are ready to publish, better edited than a LOT of books on the market from the big five… in the hope that I MIGHT interest an agent or small pub in my work enough that they’ll help kickstart this new career I’m trying so hard to make work.
As for reviews… I’ve sent out unlimited free copies of my stories, I have two reviews. People on KDP read my work a lot by the page count numbers, still… no new reviews. I review other authors ALL THE TIME because I GET how important it is. I realized today that if I had a review for every one I’d done for others my sales rank/ratings would be MUCH higher on Amazon.
In case you don’t know, here’s how it works, reviews = a rating algorithm on sites like Amazon, Goodreads, et cetera. More reviews equals higher visability. Higher visability = higher potential sales (cause the book is right there in front of someone looking for that type of book). Obviously, higher sales equals well… so much, but at least the idea that you might actually be decent at what you do.
My editing clients… they rave over my work, but when it comes time to pay for it, they quail. Even some of my CPs don’t do close to what I do for them… so. Part of that is my asperger’s. When I say I’ll do something, I DO it, to the best of my ability. Others don’t seem to be so burdened.
People tell me they value my words, (on twitter, on my blog, my website) they tell me they’ve learned so much from me… but a buck a month for more of those words to keep me providing that content through Patreon? Yeah… that’s not happening either.
Faith in humanity… lessened. (Y’all do know I didn’t have a helluva a lot of it to begin with, right?)
Part of my issue today is also grief.
It’s the first day of spring. In November we lost our house, and my garden, that I had poured blood, sweat, and tears into for half a decade.
It’s gone.
I don’t know how to start again. The very idea of digging out my pots, and soil and starts and seeds… it hurts so much and it’s bloody exhausting on top of it.
I gambled on moving to a new country. It was supposed to be better here, but because of poor legal representation (if they weren’t lawyers I’d SO sue them for how badly they fucked us over) my paperwork took 5 freaking years to finish. We found out in the interview that it should’ve taken 6 months.
6. Months.
On top of that, my husband’s family is amazingly almost more broken than mine is. Which is… pretty fucking flabbergasting to be honest. (I hadn’t spent much time around them before we moved here… um. Yeah, BIG SHOCK!)
Today is just one of those days where I wonder why I’m bothering with writing at all. It’s hard fucking work, other than being a parent it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. It will be so. much. easier. to give up and work a job where I’ll HAVE to take anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds and painkillers just to function. At least I should have a prescription plan doing that kind of work to help me afford the meds I’ll need to do that kind of work.
I *can* do the work of writing, educating, curating content, editing, with little physical cost to myself, and I don’t have to medicate myself into insensibility to do it. But I can’t do it if I’m not given a chance, a break, something.
and I don’t have forever to wait for it.
I have a little over a year left before I have to have a job, unless life takes another downturn (which, given our life the past year, I’m expecting any moment).
Truth.
It hurts. There’s mine.
Now I’m going to go edit my science fantasy book so I can put it on amazon and no one will buy that one either.
How’s that truth for you?
I don’t even know why I bother to put this here…
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