The Mind That Cried Storm, a post by @GiselleRenarde

Thunder and lightning woke me at five, this morning. Fireballs in the sky, crashes of sound and energy that reverberated through my bed. Storms are phenomenal, when they're happening outside your own mind.

Inside? That's another story.

I had a few bad months, mentally and emotionally. Well, more than a few bad months. But I had a few REALLY bad months. Depression and anxiety teamed up to poison my mind with all kinds of inaccurate thoughts. I kept imagining scenarios where everything went wrong, and reacting to them as though they were real. They weren't real. My mind created them out of nothing. My thoughts were not reality-based, and yet I responded to them as though they were.

One day I cried for 8 hours straight. I kind of reached my breaking point.

A friend of mine, who happens to be a doctor, recommended a workbook called Mind Over Mood to help me implement cognitive behavioural therapy techniques. It was exactly what I needed, because it teaches you to look at those thoughts, to examine them for accuracy, to determine whether real-life evidence supports them.

In most cases, for me, the anxiety thoughts had almost zero basis in reality.

While I was doing my worksheets, I didn't feel like they were helping me. I still felt anxious, I still felt insecure and unsettled. But the act of observing obviously changed me, over time, because these past few weeks should have been killer, and I've gotten through them with considerably more ease than anticipated.

I have my mother to thank, in large part. She doesn't know the meaning of the word "anxiety." Her philosophy is that she'll deal with stuff as it happens. No sense worrying about things that may never come to pass.

My mother's had a series of medical appointments throughout the spring and summer, culminating in a biopsy for which my siblings and I nervously awaited results. My mom wasn't nervous, though. "What's the point in being nervous? I'll just waste all this time when I could be doing other things. When I find out what's going on, then the doctors will tell us what to do."

We got the results last week. My mom has cancer. It always takes a while for these things to sink in, for me. I don't know whether I'm still in that numb stage, or whether Mind Over Mood truly did prepare me for this. Or maybe my mother prepared me by setting an example of not worrying. It isn't put on, with her. She is a truly happy-go-lucky person. She trusts her doctor. She trusts that the chemo and other therapies will do their job, and she'll be just fine by this time next year.

I hope she's right, but, more than that, I trust that she's right. Part of this is intuition. I woke up the morning of her appointment thinking, "It'll be cancer, but it'll be fine." It's just hard to trust intuition when its cousin, anxiety, has so often led me astray.

If you want more from me, consider following my music and anecdote site, A Friendly Musical Visit Every Day. I really do post there every day, and it pleases me so much to get visitors.

Traveling Light (#packing #possessions #anxiety)

By Lisabet Sarai

One of my life goals is to succeed in packing two week’s worth of stuff in a carry-on bag.

Don’t laugh. I’ve done a lot of traveling, visiting every continent except Australia. On almost every trip, I’ve been weighed down by excess luggage. I recall my first journey to Bali, in the mid-1980s. I’d bought a new soft-sided bag, what seemed like a clever innovation with four small wheels on the bottom and zippers that allowed you to add capacity, in several stages. I wasn’t able to find a picture even on the Internet—that’s how long ago it was!—but imagine something like a vertically expandable rolling backpack. Plenty of space, I figured, plus with the wheels I wouldn’t have to carry it. I stuffed it to the gills. Then I spent hot, miserable hours dragging it behind me along the dirt roads in Legian, looking for a guest house.

In 2000, my husband and I took a dream vacation to Provence. Ten days. Four suitcases, two large and two small. We’d booked an intimate, atmospheric hotel on the harbor in Marseille, quintessentially French. I adored the place—except for the fact that it had no elevator, just lovely spiral staircases. Our room on the fourth floor had a wonderful view. What I recall most vividly, though, is wrestling those heavy bags up to the room, then down again. We had to do that twice each way, since we both arrived and departed from Marseille and stayed in the same hotel both times.

Never again, I swore. I’m going to be really careful on my next trip, taking nothing but the absolute essentials. Just one suitcase for the two of us. It would have to be bigger of course, and would be somewhat heavier, but surely a single bag would be easier to handle than two... That’s a fine theory, I discovered, as long as you’re not traveling by train in France, where many of the smaller stations have no lifts and no elevators. (I was a bit shocked at the lack of concern for handicapped passengers, to be honest.)

Why do I always end up packing so much? There are a number of reasons. For one thing, my travels often combine business and leisure. That means I need both formal and casual clothing, and the shoes to go with them.

Yes, shoes are a major problem. Another one of my life goals is to find a single pair of shoes comfortable and sturdy enough for walking miles, while still fancy enough to go with a suit or a dress. In fact, I can’t walk in any pair of shoes for more than a day. With my seriously pronated arches, I get blisters from any shoes if I wear them consistently. Thus, even for a few days away, I need several changes of footwear.

Another issue is weather. I live in a tropical climate. If I’m on my way to some place more temperate, I have to pack warmer clothing, including bulky outerwear, plus lighter items to wear on the way home.

Excuses, excuses!

Yes, I admit I usually pack more items than I need. I don’t want to have to figure out a week’s wardrobe ahead of time. I like to have a bit of choice about what to wear. Is that a sin?

If it is, it’s one I pay for in backaches and exhaustion.

We had a friend visit, back when I lived in the US, a woman from Scotland who was former stewardess. She’d come for a two week vacation, all the way from the UK, and was traveling across America. All she had in the way of luggage was a rolling suitcase that would easily fit in the bin above an airline seat. Yet she managed to look fabulous during her entire three day stay with us.

I realized after looking at what she carried that one key to traveling light is having the right clothes. You need stuff that is compressible and that won’t wrinkle. Everything needs to follow the same color scheme, so you can mix and match. Plus you need lightweight fabrics that you can wash, preferably by hand. If your destination is chilly, plan to wear layers rather than bringing individual warm but space consuming pieces.

I’m proud to report that I am getting better, though I haven’t yet truly met my goal. Lately my DH and I have been managing with a single medium-sized bag for all our clothing and toiletries, plus two carry ons. Those hold our laptops, tablets, cables, charges and other essentials of the twenty-first century. That’s something I didn’t need to worry about when I went to Bali.

At the end of September I’m off to Europe on business. It will be a relatively short trip, but I’m already stressed about packing. I’m especially concerned because I will likely still need crutches due to my broken leg. Clearly I can’t pull a suitcase behind me.

Some people have nightmares about monsters or murderers. As for me, I have a recurring anxiety dream about packing. The details vary, but it’s always a situation where I have only ten minutes before I leave on a trip. I have to select what to take, often no more than what will fit in a backpack. I race around, frantic, trying to make decisions about what’s essential.

I guess that’s the critical point: deciding what’s essential. For the upcoming trip, I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter what I look like. The main point is surviving the twelve hours in the plane, not freezing to death, and managing to get around while I’m there.

I wonder if I can do that with just a carry-on?

Addicted to Power

By Lisabet Sarai

A few weeks ago, on a Wednesday, there was a notice posted in the elevator of our apartment building. The metropolitan electricity authority had scheduled some major upgrades for our neighborhood, so on the following Sunday, electricity would be cut from 8 AM to approximately 2 PM.

My husband and I looked at each other, aghast. What would we do? Where would we go? How would we manage to live for six hours without power?

Our concern wasn’t completely irrational. I try to devote Sundays to my writing. He typically works on a variety of projects outside of his job responsibilities, most of which involve the computer. Plus we live in the tropics, where, especially in the hot season, being stuck in a place without air conditioning or fans is uncomfortable bordering on dangerous.

Still, what strikes me, looking back, is our extreme consternation. We weren’t exactly panicked, but our planning engines immediately went into high gear as we tried to figure out a strategy for dealing with this looming problem.

How widespread would the problem be? How reliable were the times (previous experience suggested not very...)? If we didn’t leave the apartment until Sunday morning, would we have electricity for the espresso maker and our showers?

I also started worrying about the food I had in the freezer. I altered my meal plans for the next few days to make sure I could use up the pork chops and the smoked salmon before they could spoil.

What files would we need to take with us? What applications needed to be installed on our laptops? Could we get by without our chargers? Or the USB DVD reader? Did I need my portable mouse?

Eventually, we decided to spend Saturday night in a hotel in another part of the city. We chose a place we knew would have a desk in the room and made sure it had wifi. We requested a late check-out, so we could devote the maximum amount of time to working. The best the hotel could do was 1 PM. At that point, we left our overnight bags at the hotel desk and set out on a quest for a likely coffee shop, hauling our computers with us. We didn’t want to head back to our neighborhood too early. What would we do if the electricity was still out? Sit around in the lobby and sweat?

Modern urban life depends on electricity, no question. Our reactions though... you might have thought we were facing an outage of days rather than hours. There’s no question we’re addicted to power.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was younger, I remember quite clearly that power cuts due to storms sometimes had a holiday quality. (Not the ones in the dead of the New England winter, of course...!) Bring out the candles and the flashlights. See if we can make dinner on the emergency Sterno stove, or the hibachi. Open a bottle of wine and celebrate an excuse not to work.

I’ll never forget when Hurricane Donna hit Massachusetts in 1960, causing a major blackout. My mom was so calm. She gathered my siblings and me around the candle-lit kitchen table and taught us to play bridge.

It was like camping, something I did a fair amount of in my youth. Back then I loved getting away from civilization, roughing it. I recall with some affection one summer at the Girl Scout camp where we stayed in big tents, with no electricity. I didn’t miss it at all.

Now, though, the notion of being without power (and without the Internet) scares the heck out of me. All I can think of is the email accumulating, the blog posts needing to be written, the adoring letters from fans that I can’t access... (Okay, I made the last one up.) I haven’t been camping in about twenty years. I wonder if I could stand the isolation.

Of course, I’m not alone in this addiction. In the Asian city where I live, everyone carries not just his or her cell phone, but also a portable power bank, just in case the phone battery runs out. (I haven’t sunk that low yet, mostly because I don’t use my phone that much.) Cafes and restaurants feature power outlets next to each table. I attend quite a few technical conferences and trade shows. These days every one provides stations where you can lock up your device in a little cubicle while you top up its charge.

I remind myself that millions of humans on the planet live without electricity and for the most part, survive without too much difficulty. Presumably I could do so too, if necessary. My clear addiction makes me quite uncomfortable. I’ve always liked to believe I am a flexible, adaptable sort of person, the kind of individual who can be creative in handling the unexpected. My frantic unease when facing last month’s power cut makes me question that belief, though.

Maybe what I need is a long vacation in some rural location off the grid. Going cold turkey, so to speak.

But I have so much work to do on the Internet, I really don’t have the time.

High Anxiety

Sacchi Green

Sometimes writing what you know is the last thing you want to do, and the last thing people want to read. I’ll tack on a short story excerpt at the end of this, so feel free to skip to that if you’d like. The story is from an historical anthology coming out later this year, and is about PTSD (or shell-shock as it was called during WWI), which may or may not qualify as angst, but is probably close enough.

 First, though, before the story excerpt, here's my write-what-you-know tale of angst, or something like it.

I’m not sure how different angst is from common anxiety—maybe an upscale, existential form. In any case, I have all too much of both for comfort. There are valid reasons for my anxiety, but when it extends into unrelated areas of life, becoming the default setting of one’s mood, I think we’re pretty much in angst territory. Situational angst, if that’s even a thing.

I’m not really that badly off, except when I’m semi-awake and it isn’t really quite morning and my defenses are down and I still need more sleep but worries both genuine and imagined get tangled together in dreams that feel too real. Daytimes, most of the time, I cope with whatever needs coping with, which right now means writing about angst.

In a stroke of serendipitous coincidence, I just came this bit of information in a local newspaper, a welcome aid to putting off getting personal:  

“Research suggests that anxiety is at least partly temperamental. A recent study of 592 Rhesus monkeys found that some of them responded more anxiously than others and that as much as 30 per cent of early anxiety may be inherited. Yet what is inherited is the potential for anxiety, not anxiety itself.”

How can they tell that a trait like anxiety is inherited rather than learned unless they separate the youngsters from their parents? And wouldn’t doing so quite naturally cause anxiety? Well, never mind. Let’s not get anxious about those poor baby monkeys.

Back to the hereditary theory. My mother was always on the pessimistic side, apparently in the philosophical belief that it was better to expect the worst so that it wouldn’t take you by surprise. That’s not to say that she was always in a state of anxiety, but especially in her later years she went out of her way to find things to worry about. She’d answer my phone calls, even those she was expecting and knew to be on benign topics, with a lugubrious, “What’s wrong?” (I don’t ever recall telling her anything was wrong over the phone.) In her last several years, when her health was declining and there were real things to worry about, she accepted her own condition fairly calmly, but worried all the more about other family members and various other factors. When I semi-kidded her about some really far–fetched idea, she admitted it, but said with a bit of a laugh that worrying was her hobby. “What else do I have to occupy me?”

I have plenty to occupy me, but lately I find myself getting uptight with far-fetched (but not impossible) worries. If family or friends are traveling I’m on edge until I know they’re safely home. My granddaughter is the light of my life, but as soon as she was born I thought of her as another hostage of fate. I think my mother did, too. Well, if anxiety is hereditary, I hope we haven’t passed it on to that next generation.

I’m not obsessed with worries all the time, or if I am, it’s more of an undercurrent. I don’t have a real claim to angst. I’m sitting beside a swift mountain stream right now, enjoying my surroundings, pleased to have harvested at least two gallons of wild blueberries in the last three days, plus a bountiful crop of wild golden chanterelle mushrooms, one of the kinds you can find in Whole Foods, but mine are much fresher, and free.

Life is, on the whole, good. Even when death has to be taken into account. A week from next Saturday I’ll be taking my ninety-five-year-old father for a PETscan, one more test for what looks right now as probably, but not quite conclusively, lung cancer. He knows this. He’s still quite sharp, just a bit on the forgetful side. He tells doctors that I come with him because of his poor hearing, but we both know it’s just as much so that I can remember and keep track of what’s going on. It’s also because he isn’t driving any more, thank goodness!

I know how lucky I’ve been to be on good terms with my parents, and how remarkably lucky I’ve been for them to live so long. My mother made it to ninety-three. What we’re dealing with now usually happens to people far sooner, and is a natural phase of life. But it’s never easy. Uncertainties, tough decisions to be made, questions that can’t be fully answered. If he does have lung cancer, we have to think in terms of how much arduous treatment would be worth it, and what the prognosis would be with treatment or without it. If it turns out that he doesn’t have cancer, he still has recent and worsening breathing problems, even though his health in most other ways is remarkably good considering his age. He was heroic in taking care of my mother the last while before she had to be in a nursing home for care, and he visited her there every single day. (My brothers and I made sure one of us went with him three or four days a week.) But he has a horror of being in a nursing home situation himself. He has so far resisted living with me, an hour or so away from where he lives now and where I grew up, or at an assisted living place near me, but those options are open to him. He wants to stay in the home he shared with my mother, with friends nearby, his church, his twice-a-week bridge games at the senior center.

I want whatever is best for him. I worry about what is best for him. I’m the one he depends on, and however much I worry in those early morning hours when I need to sleep but can’t, and often in the earlier night hours when I’m first trying to get to sleep, I’ll cope with whatever needs coping with. Anxiety is a natural phase of life, too, a repeating one.

Now for the story excerpt. This will be in Through the Hourglass, one of the three anthologies I’ve been editing lately, and isn’t actually erotica, although I’m tempted to expand on it sometime in the future and include the steamy bits I know are there between the lines later in the piece.

Crossing Bridges
Sacchi Green

Upstream the river riffled over stony outcroppings, but under the bridge it ran deep and clear.  Reggie leaned over the wooden railing and stared down into those amber-green depths, willing herself to see only the great speckled trout balanced in perfect stillness against the current. An ordinary Midlands English stream, all green shadow and shimmering sunlight and blue reflected sky. Just a big fish. Yet she could not block out visions of bodies submerged in other streams flowing ever redder with blood through the ravaged countryside of France, until they reached the Somme. Even the songs of birds in flight, spilling over with rapture, warped in her mind into cries for help, help that could never be enough.

"Shell-shock," the doctors might say, but it scarcely mattered what one called it. Pure, searing grief, not war itself—though war would have been enough—had breached her defenses. Grief for Vic. For herself without Vic.
             
Reggie's hands tightened to the point of pain on the railing. By what right did England bask in such a May morning, calm and lovely, while over there artillery’s thunder still shook the fields, and men rotted in muddy trenches? How could she bear to stand idle in the midst of such peace when her place was over there, even…even with Vic gone? All the more with Vic gone.
 
But she must adjust, must let the peace of home heal her—not that anywhere felt like home now. Or ever could again, without Vic. If Reggie could prove herself recovered, not just from her physical injuries but those of the spirit--capable once more, normal, clear-minded--they just might send her back to the war.  An experienced ambulance driver, strong as most men, skilled at repairing motorcars and field-dressing wounded men; here in pastoral England she was of no use, but over there she was desperately needed.

Reggie straightened abruptly, trying to focus on the tender green of new leaves, the glint of sunlight on the flitting gold and peacock blue of dragonflies. She shook herself like a retriever emerging from deep water.

“Don’t move!”

The low, terse command froze her in mid shake.

“There’s a nest…” The voice came from below, less peremptory now, but Reggie’s mind raced. A machine gun nest? She fought the impulse to drop to the wooden planks of the bridge. Surely not gunners, not here. A nest of wasps?
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” The speaker was almost whispering. “It’s just that swallows are nesting below you on the supports of the bridge, and I’ve been sketching them, but they get uneasy when you move so suddenly and might leave the eggs.”

A flush of fury heated Reggie’s face. Forced to the verge of panic by some silly schoolgirl! She bent over the wooden railing, an angry shout surging into her throat, and saw, first, a head of tousled light brown hair cut short about the ears. A schoolboy, then! All the worse! “WHAT do you bloody mean—“

The artist looked up. The remainder of Reggie’s words halted, burning like mustard gas in her mouth.

Not a boy. Not a child at all, though she might have been taken for one if it weren’t for tiny lines at the corners of mouth and eyes, and a certain look in those eyes that spoke of a share of pain in her life; rather like what Reggie saw in her own when she was careless enough to look in a mirror. Her hair was really no shorter than Vic’s pale curls had been in France, and Reggie’s own dark thatch had been cropped a good deal shorter then, a necessity in the filth and chaos of battlefields. She realized uneasily that it was about time she cut it again. Five months in hospital had left it just long enough to tie back in a straggly knot, which she would have hated if she had cared in the least about appearance these days.

“I really am terribly sorry,” the woman said. “I shouldn’t have startled you like that. I get too engrossed in what I’m working on; it’s my besetting sin. One of them, at any rate.” A flashing smile turned her rather ordinary face into something quite different, almost enchanting, in the elven manner of an illustration from a fairy tale. “You must be Lady Margaret’s cousin, and this is her bridge, so really you’ve much more right here than I. We’d heard you were spending the summer with her. I’m Emma Greening from downstream at Foxbanks.” She stood from her perch on a mossy rock and made as if to extend a hand, then realized that she couldn’t possibly reach up to where Reggie stood and withdrew it in some confusion. “Just a second and I’ll climb out of here with my gear.“

Reggie found her voice, or at least a version of it just barely suitable for the occasion. The hoarseness couldn’t be helped. Vic had claimed to quite like what being a little too slow to get her gas mask on had done to her tone.

“No, you can go on sketching. I was about to move along at any rate.” Emma Greening…what had Margaret said about her? Something, in all that chatter about the local population, something about being an artist, but Reggie had paid no attention to any of it. No one in this dull, placid, countryside mattered to her.

Now she wondered just how much Margaret had told the local population about her. Or how much Margaret herself understood.

“I should be going myself,” Emma said. “I can sketch swallows in my sleep—it was the bridge itself I wanted to catch in a certain light, and I think I have enough now to be going on with.” She packed her sketchbook and paint box into a satchel slung over her shoulder, and stepped from the rock onto the steep riverbank.

“Here, I’ll give you a hand with that.” Reggie heard the brusqueness in her own voice, and couldn’t quite erase the remnants of her angry frown, but found herself reaching down from the top of the riverbank without remembering how she’d got there. Emma’s sun-browned hand met hers in a firm grip, and she was up the slope so quickly and easily that it was clear she hadn’t needed any help at all.

“Thanks. I’ll be getting along now, and I do apologize for disturbing you.” Her smile now was merely polite.

This would be as good a time as ever to practice behaving normally, Reggie thought. Best to scotch any gossip about her being a bit odd. “Don’t leave on my account, Miss…Greening, is it? I’m Regina Lennox. Make that Reggie. Sketch here all you like. I’m the one who should apologize for being such a troll when you startled me.”

Emma’s smile flashed brilliantly again. “A troll? How funny that you’d say that! This is indeed a perfect troll bridge, which is why I was sketching it, for a book I’m illustrating. A children’s story, the one with the three goats.”

“Trip, trap, trip, trap over the bridge?”

“That’s the one,” Emma confirmed. “For now I wanted to get the bridge itself, rustic and charming, with the swallows, and that wren darting in and out of the bittersweet vines on the other side—she must have a nest there—and the clump of purple orchis just where the bridge meets the bank. All lovely and peaceful before the goats or troll appear. A lull before the storm sort of thing.”

“So the troll got here prematurely.” There was something comfortably familiar about the conversation.

Emma tilted her head, surveying Reggie with mock seriousness. “No, I wouldn’t cast you as the troll, exactly. In any case, I was the one below the bridge, or nearly so, so I’m a better candidate for trolldom.” She leaned her head the other way with a frown of concentration belied by a twitching at the corners of her mouth. “I see you more as the biggest Billy Goat Gruff, stern, shaggy, putting up with no nonsense from any troll.”

“Certainly shaggy…” Reggie stopped short. Memory hit her like an icy blast. Vic used to tease her, rumpling her hair when it got shaggy and needed cutting, calling her a troll—often followed by, ‘Well, get on with it, you slouch, kiss me if you’re going to!’ She felt her face freeze into grim stillness, bracing against the familiar onslaught of grief.

Emma stepped back. “Sorry again,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “I have such a bad habit of blurting outrageous things without thinking.”

“It’s not you,” Reggie got out, but no more words would come.

 “I really should be going now, anyhow.” Emma said quickly. “I’ll just leave you in peace.  I expect we’ll run across each other in the village from time to time.”

Reggie watched in silence as Emma picked up the bicycle lying beside the lane, settled her art supplies in the canvas panniers at the back, mounted it, and rode away. Her divided skirt revealed a brief glimpse of quite nice lisle-stockinged calves above sturdy boots—and a smudge of moss stain where she’d been sitting on the rock.

So much for behaving normally! Reggie’s spasm of grief was subsiding, and she wished she could call Emma back, but the bicycle had disappeared around a bend edged with dense shrubbery. And what could she have said? “I froze up because you reminded me of someone.” Which wasn’t even true. Emma didn’t particularly resemble Vic. It was more the light, pleasant conversation, the brief exchange of banter…

Ah. That was it. Just as the rehabilitation counselor had said, but Reggie had resisted. Guilt. Survivor’s guilt, they called it. Why should she be the one to survive? How could she deserve, or accept, even the least bit of pleasure?

Well, she had enjoyed herself, if only for a few minutes. Maybe that was a sign of healing. She rubbed her hands across her eyes, then turned back to the bridge. A swallow darted under the arch, and a second bird took flight from the nest on the wooden underpinnings while the first took over hatching duty. On the far side a wren darted in and out between clusters of tiny white flowers on a trailing tangle of vines—bittersweet, Emma had called it. A small butterfly speckled like polished tortoiseshell flitted between masses of ferns on the upper bank. Emma would probably know what it was called.

It occurred to Reggie that this side of the bridge was the farthest she’d been from Margaret’s house since she’d come here, and also that it must be close to time for lunch. A quick sound in the water and a spreading ring of ripples showed that the trout concurred, and had snatched a mayfly from the surface.

She went back across the bridge, pausing to look down into the water. Only when she was well along the lane did she realize that her mind had played no tricks this time, and she’d seen only the river, and the fish, and reflections of a swallow in flight.
__________




     

Help Me Make It Through the Night

By Lisabet Sarai

I don’t think I really intended to kill myself that morning. I just couldn’t face what seemed like the insurmountable challenges of the day. So I swallowed half a bottle of my anti-depressants. Then I stumbled out of the bedroom to tell my father what I’d done.

If I’d actually wanted to die, I would have simply stretched out on my bed and let the pills take over. Dad wasn’t about to barge in while I was getting ready for work.

So I guess I must not have been ready. Still, at the moment I gulped down all those tablets, all I wanted was for the world to go away.

It did, for a couple of hours. I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat. Fortunately I was barely conscious. I don’t remember any discomfort, not until later when my mind cleared a bit more and I saw the desperate concern on my father’s face. The taste of vomit and the raw fire in my throat from the stomach pump were nothing compared to the guilt that slammed into me—along with twice the anxiety I’d felt that morning.

I was stuck in this life, I realized, stuck dealing with the old feelings of dread and self-disgust, along with new remorse for the blind, self-centered cruelty with which I’d inflicted my pain upon him. Talk about angst.

Probably I shouldn’t have been working in the first place. I’d only been out of the psychiatric hospital for a few months. But what was I supposed to do with myself? My family and I both knew I couldn’t yet handle college, living away from home, trying to keep my weight up, constantly tempted to skip meals or fill my stomach with cabbage or cantaloupe. I took a full time position as a nurse’s aide at a rehab hospital three subway stops from my dad’s apartment where I was staying, as a way to fill the empty days.

The job really stressed me, though, both physically—after all, I was barely five foot two and weighed about eighty five pounds—and psychologically. The patients were mostly recovering from surgery or strokes, not terminal but hardly the most cheerful people to be around. Though I was just an aide, I had a good deal of responsibility. Furthermore, I was on my own all day, fighting the food demons, drinking can after can of the free diet ginger ale available to employees and trying not to be lured by the fried chicken and ice cream on the patients’ meal trays. It was an unending battle.

My “suicide attempt” put an end to that job. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thankful. My parents shipped me back to the psychiatric crisis ward for evaluation. My therapist seemed to be the only one who wasn’t alarmed by my rash action. I realize now that he understood my motives, better than I did myself. Plus he’d dealt with truly suicidal individuals. I knew that from personal experience.

Carol flashed through my life, spending two weeks on the ward during my own two and a half month sojourn in the institution. She arrived with bandages on her wrists. I couldn’t believe this woman had tried to kill herself. Beautiful, brilliant, vivacious and talented, she charmed both the staff and the other patients. Though I was at least a decade younger than she—she had a good-looking husband and two cute kids who came to visit—we seemed to connect. We loaned each other books. She’d brought her guitar, and we’d sit in the common room together singing. Why, I wondered, would someone suicidal make music?

She taught me several songs I still sing. They all had a sort of wistful, bittersweet quality, even (I now see) a hint of desperation. The one I associate with her most strongly has the following lyrics.

“I don’t care what’s right or wrong.

I don’t try to understand.

Let the devil take tomorrow,

But right now I need a friend.

Yesterday is dead and gone,

And tomorrow’s out of sight,

And it’s sad to be alone.

Help me make it through the night.”

This tune resonated. I felt equally lost sometimes. Plus the sexual undertones of the song—especially when expressed in her rich alto voice—gave me a bit of a thrill.

Carol and I were both patients of Dr. R. But whereas I occasionally acted crazy (running up and down eight flights of stairs ever day, for example, to avoid gaining weight), she seemed psychologically healthier than anyone in the ward, including the people who worked there. Her wrists healed. She was released after two weeks and left with a smile.

I sensed something wrong during my next appointment with Dr. R. His normal ebullience was subdued. I can’t remember whether I asked, he volunteered the news, or I heard it somewhere else, but the gist was that Carol had succeeded in her most recent attempt.

It’s difficult to recall, too, how I felt when I heard about Carol. Indeed, those anorexic years have a hazy quality, the images blurred, the emotions, for the most part, muted—aside from the intense fear and confusion around food. I believe that malnutrition or hormone imbalance may have affected my cognitive abilities.

Now, though, I understand that my sense of emptiness, my guilt and my awful terror, were nothing compared to the emotional pain she must have endured. Yet she hid it all under a mask of normality. To escape that pain, she left us all behind—her husband, her children, Doctor R., me. Our love just wasn’t enough to help her make it through.

Looking back, I am full of sadness at the waste of her vibrant life— but newly grateful for my own survival.

This Road Is Forked

by Giselle Renarde

You can start close to your life, but that’s a starting place.
The question is, what’s the journey?

SALMAN RUSHDIE

I spotted that quote on Twitter last night and it seem serendipitous. Lately, I've been thinking/fretting a lot about my writing career. (Have you noticed? I only blog about it every fortnight...)

All my life, I've always felt like I fit in. Even as the quirky queer genderfucked asshole I am, I've always been pretty comfortable anywhere I went. The schools I attended weren't clique-y. People were who they were and they liked what they liked and everyone was friendly. Peer-wise, I've led a pretty charmed life.

When I started my writing career 8+ years ago, I felt at home once again. Erotica authors were all so helpful. Coming from the business world, I expected everyone to care only about their own interests. That wasn't at all what I found. Furthermore, the erotica writers I met online were all... well, people like YOU: sex-positive, queer-friendly, kinky, open-minded, all that good stuff.

As many of you have noticed/commented on, our precious erotic fiction field has lately been conflated with/shoehorned into romance--a genre that doesn't much appeal to me even at its best and, at its worst, I find pretty problematic. Suddenly we erotica people have been tossed into a world that is not our own. Sure there's some cross-over between the two genres--erotica CAN end happily and nothing's stopping our characters from being in love--but erotica and romance are not the same thing.

I've often said that I came to erotica totally naively, and I'll repeat it again this week.  More and more, I'm starting to realize my writing career is a journey of discovery--a lot like life.  When I started writing, I was like a child: I wrote whatever pleased me and took gleeful pride in my work. I never thought about things like formulae or tropes. I never considered that readers might not want social commentary with their fiction. Never in a million years would it have occurred to me that readers would actively avoid a book because of a character's sexuality or gender identity or race.

I miss my naivety. I want it back. There are some things you can never unlearn.

And once you learn them, you have to make a choice: do I keep on truckin, writing the kind of fiction I love and believe in even if it's only read by five fervent fans, or do I whitewash my fiction and dull it down and create something that might sell a few more copies because it mimics what readers want... until they actually read it and realize this Giselle chick is MESSED UP and she obviously can't inhabit the mind of the average cisgender heterosexual female reader?

Phrased that way, the answer seems pretty obvious.

Guys, I feel like I'm in high school again--except it's a high school from American movies, where there are football guys and cheerleader girls and bullies and nerds and A-tables. My high school did not have those things. Honestly, I've never felt this way before. I'm a teenager for the first time in my life. Suddenly I'm at a crossroads and I have this really important decision to make: do I repress the real ME to fit in or do I say FUCK ALL Y'ALL and carve out the path I want to take?

Never mind. I think I just answered my own question.

Wired Anxiety

By Lisabet Sarai

I woke up yesterday morning (Sunday) agonizing about this blog post. What should I talk about? We all have our worries. I didn't want to sound whiney. I thought about a post entitled 'Consider the Lilies', dealing with the futility of worry in the face of life's grand uncertainty, and the need to trust the universe. However, I concluded that would have been too preachy.

Maybe I should write a story addressing the topic, the way Garce always does? I actually came up with an idea (think about all our worries during the sex act!), but then I decided I couldn't afford to spend my time penning a random tale when I have a 60K novel due at the end of January and I'm only at the 30K mark. (I'll file that notion away in my notebook for some future date, when I've got free time – huh!)

How was I going to produce something as creative as Garce, as insightful as Giselle, as erudite as Jean? Being first to address each Grip topic is not an enviable status, believe me. The rest of the contributors can riff on my post, or take my initial direction and throw in a curve or two. Me, I'm flying blind.

All these familiar, minor worries faded, though when I got to my computer and discovered that our ADSL was down.

Oh my God! No email. No blogs. No way to check for comments or visitor stats. And forget about writing the darned blog. How was I going to post it?

These days even a single day of Internet outage is a small catastrophe for me.

I can check my “real world” email at work, but Lisabet's communications are restricted to a specific computer, with an encrypted drive to keep all my work and messages safe from prying eyes. Furthermore, these days, the business of being an author critically depends on connectivity. Without the Internet, I can't communicate with my editors, my readers, or my colleagues. There are rational reasons for me to worry about being cut off from the 'Net.

My panic, though, extended far beyond rationality. Disconnected, I felt helpless, alone, totally out of the loop. No Writers list posts flowing into my inbox. No requests for guest spots. No updates from my publisher. No notices of glowing reviews on Amazon or Goodreads (yeah, right...)

And I realized that I worry a lot about being connected, all the time. I don't have a smart phone and my husband the security geek strictly forbids the use of Wi-Fi. When I'm away from my home office for an entire day, I start to get edgy. I know the email messages are piling up. (I typically get 100 to 200 messages a day.) I wonder when I'm going to have time to sort through them. In a very real sense, the only time I can be Lisabet is when I'm online.

When we go on a business trip or a vacation – heavens! The anxiety is grueling. Before we leave, I unsubscribe from as many lists as possible, to reduce my mail volume. I try to pre-schedule blog posts, release and contest announcements and so on. While we're traveling, it's usually difficult and/or expensive to get online. When we went to France last spring, we paid $60 for a SIM card we could use in our GSM modem, so we could check email without worrying about Wi-fi malware. And we (both) took significant chunks of time from our holiday schedule to handle critical online issues.

I remember traveling in the eighties and the nineties. No need to worry about connectivity. We could disappear for a week or two. We didn't care who was trying to contact us. Sometimes we wouldn't even look at a newspaper for a week. A simpler, easier, more innocent time, that seems now.

I wouldn't want to give up this connectivity, though. I love “talking” to all these people, all around the world. I'd be terribly isolated without the 'Net. I'd never have “met” Desiree, or Lily, or J.P. Now that I've got this wonderful blessing, though, I'm always concerned about losing it.

The broadband link is still down. We can't reach our provider – yesterday we were on hold for forty five minutes. They're doing some sort of system conversion, so that might explain this lengthy (and unusual) outage. Meanwhile, my darling techie husband hooked up the GSM modem so that we can have a minimal (slow, expensive) connection to the outside world. And so I could post this blog.

Now I'm worrying about when we'll be online again.