Tackle It Tuesday: Blogging With ADHD and Anxiety

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Having a brain that doesn't work the way brains "should" puts a person on a lonely road in this world when people are impatient and unwilling to understand. Which, to be honest, is most of the time. With posts like this one, I hope to foster tolerance and to encourage an attitude of helping people learn and grow rather than ostracizing those who don't fit the mold.

I'm not talking about trolls and spammers. They should be banished with extreme prejudice.

I'm talking about those bloggers who aren't "good" bloggers. The people who may not reply to comments right away and sometimes don't reply at all. The people whose participation in blog hops is irregular at best. The people who don't return visits or sometimes visit only a few people on the blog hop. 

These kinds of people tend to get labeled with epithets like "jerk" and other less kind names and are thought of as being rude and selfish. However, in my experience, most people whose "blogging etiquette" is not up to Emily Blog-Post's standards are not the bungholes of the blogging world, they are overwhelmed.

These guys actually are bungholes

I still struggle with the comments part of things. I'm pretty good about visiting all the blogs in the writers' blog hops (except for the IWSG--let's not go there), but sometimes it may take me a while to getting around to publishing comments, and, depending on my state of mind, I may not be able to reply to them. That isn't ideal, but I'm better than I used to be about it, and I probably will never be perfect. I could get drunk before replying to comments, but that wouldn't be pretty and it's not a good idea, so I think I won't employ that strategy.

I have ADHD, which means that I'm garbage with organizing things. However, one trick I've learned--very recently--is to prepare my posts ahead of time. I missed this month's MFRW Steam Hop because I'm disorganized and forgot about the sucker. 

To ensure that I'll be up to speed for future MFRW Steam hops, I've prescheduled my posts for October, November, and December. I can go back in and edit the posts as needed, and they will be there in my queue for this blog to remind me that I need to add my linky to the hop at the appropriate time.

Thus, the TL:DR for this post is:

Disorganized Wonders, schedule your posts ahead of time whenever possible. It will make your blogging experience easier.

Practically Perfect People, please try to be patient with those who seem to always be running behind and whose etiquette may not entirely align with yours. You don't know what challenges they may be dealing with. Don't curse them out or call them names like "dead weight" or "jerk." 

I'm in my fifties now and am just learning certain things that might have saved me a lot of misery if I'd caught on sooner. Nothing has come easily to me, and it didn't help that I had people calling me stupid, flaky, and selfish. We should try to build one another up rather than tearing each other down.

~Ornery Owl Has Declared It So~

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The Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp Come As You Are Party + Inner Champion Workbook Chapter 7: Find Your Why

Disclosure: If readers purchase a copy of the book through the preview link, I earn a small commission from Amazon.

Five things that make me happy:

1. My son

2. Writing

3. Doing crafts, i.e. loom knitting

4. Exploring nature

5. Learning new things

Identify why each of the above makes you happy. For example, if vacations make you happy, ask yourself why. Are they relaxing? Are they a hassle or expensive, but worth every penny because of what you learn about the world? Is it the time spent with loved ones?

Why these things bring my happiness:

1. My son is simply one of those people who was born with a desire to be kind. He wants to make the world a better place. He doesn't care about being showy or flashy. He just wants to be able to do his own thing. He is very good at working with his hands and has a great artistic eye. 

At times, I have not been as supportive of him as I should have because I misunderstood him. My parents also misunderstood him and scolded him for not "trying harder" when he would withdraw. 

Neither my son nor I were aware until he was an adult that he is on the autism spectrum. He hid a lot of his distress from overstimulation. He was born in 1990, and at that time, most people believed that autism was identified by the pronounced behaviors in people who are more severely affected, i.e. rocking and screaming. Most people believed that everyone with autism is non-verbal.

My son has since been able to reveal such characteristics as extreme sensitivity to sounds. He turns on rain sounds because otherwise, the humming from his phone charger disturbs him. I can't hear the phone charger at all. He is very aware of the sounds of water running through pipes. One time when the washing machine hose was dripping and causing water to run down the laundry room wall into the basement, he heard it all the way up on the second floor of the house and went to check it out. I was completely unaware of the problem.

I first started to suspect that my son might be autistic when he would turn the air conditioner in his room down to the coldest level while he was sleeping in order to be able to sleep under his heavy comforter even in the hottest days of summer. Weighted blankets have been shown to be very helpful in calming people with autism. Fortunately, at this point, the knowledge about the condition has increased exponentially.

However, society is often very slow to catch up. People with autism still tend to be treated as if they are retarded. People with autism are intellectually diverse. Some have severe intellectual disabilities while some have higher than average intellectual capabilities. People with autism are often pigeonholed as having lower than average intelligence because they tend not to learn well using traditional methods. 

My son, for instance, has trouble learning anything at all from a textbook. He does not have problems reading long novels that hold his interest. The best way for him to learn a new skill, however, is by observing and doing, not by reading a boring textbook and attempting to answer a long roster of meaningless questions. For instance, when he was in the EMS program, he would become extremely frustrated by trying to read and answer questions in the textbook. It did not matter if I read the text to him, he didn't absorb it and trying to just upset him. However, he took a lot away from his clinical experiences, and he did well with the medical terminology and even the pharmacy calculations which were always a sticking point for me.

Unfortunately, at that point, the community college EMS programs were hell-bent on passing no more than 75% of their participants because they wanted to prove how "tough" their standards were. I was astounded by the amount of information that students were being expected to learn in the space of one semester. I had gone through the EMS program six years prior to when my son was in it, and at the point when he entered the program, the students were expected to learn skills that were previously part of the paramedic program. 

When my son opted to drop out of the program, I fully supported him. I was aghast at the changes that had taken place. It's a damn shame too because I think that my son would have made a good EMT. However, he probably would have opted to work in an emergency room rather than on an ambulance because, like many autistic people, driving is a skill that is problematic for him.

2. Writing has always been my main way to survive. I do not think that I would last long if I didn't write. If I go for several days without writing, I start to become clinically depressed. It helps me work through problems and provides me an escape from a world that I've always found hostile to my very being.

3. Unlike writing, there is no impetus for me to have a certain level of "success" when it comes to my crafts. I just do them because I like to.

4. Exploring takes me out of my everyday environment, away from civilization, to a place that does not judge me. Connecting to the natural world renews the spirit.

5. One should not cease learning simply because one is not in school. Without new knowledge, a person stagnates. Learning because I want to learn just feels good. 

How my goals connect to the things in life that bring me joy:

1. I want to succeed because I want to be able to support my son in his own goals and give him the best life possible. He deserves this.

2. I would like to earn my living writing. However, I doubt this will ever transpire. So, I intend to write as if I were earning my living doing so, but not as if I MUST earn my living doing so. I never want it to be a chore, and I never want it to become a duty or a means to seek acceptance. When I start doing any of those things, I know I'm on the wrong track.

3. I want to be able to have enough money to do my crafts anytime I want and not have to worry that I should be doing something that's earning money instead.

4. I want to have enough money to have the time and resources to explore and take care of nature.

5. Learning is necessary to find new avenues to obtaining my goal of multiple income streams. Also, without learning, life stagnates.

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Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp + Inner Champion Workbook Day 5: Taking the First Step

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An important goal that I’m going to achieve:

Publishing my own writing--again.

Why this goal is important to me:

It has been important to me for many years. To be honest, writing is the only thing I really know how to do, regardless of whether I do it well or not.

What has been preventing me from taking the first step?

I have published my own works before, in 2007 and 2009. It was a bad experience. I used a POD publisher who ended up with a lot of my money and I ended up with nothing to show for it but a couple of boxes of unsold books. I also ended up meeting some people who were really not good for me. My association with them very nearly pushed me to stop writing for good. There are still some areas of my life that never completely recovered from the experiences I had with these people.

How can I remove these obstacles or work around them?

I prefer to self-publish. I don't want to go the "paper my walls with rejection letters" route. For me, it's a huge waste of time. I'm not going for being The Next Big Thing. I just want to publish my work. So I am doing so, via Kindle. I can format the books myself. 

In the future, I will also not allow other people's opinions to get under my skin and destroy me, and I will be very careful about the kinds of people I allow to get close to me. I discovered that overenthusiastic "fans" tend to have problems that render them toxic and destructive, particularly to a sensitive person who has low self-esteem and a high desire to be liked. In the future, I will address any "fans" in a polite but cool fashion rather than seeming too available and/or needy.

The first step I am going to take toward achieving my goal:

I'm already taking it. I am working on a manuscript for a novella to be published in e-book form in early 2020. I submitted a poetry manuscript to one organization and am preparing another poetry manuscript to be submitted to Writers' Digest early next year. The poems I will use are the winners in my ongoing Battle of the Poems. I wrote 30 and had to narrow it down to 20, so I created what I thought was a fun competition. I appreciate everyone who participated and, hopefully, will have more participants in future Battles.

I am also working on the manuscript for an illustrated story in poetic form. I wrote the verses. The illustrations are being done by the Mexican Chibi artist Kamidiox. Kami's commission fees are very affordable. Check out her work and contact her if you'd like her to do a piece for you. Tell her Cie sent you!

For support and accountability, I am going to share my goal with:

My son and a couple of trusted friends (including Kami, who I mentioned above) know about my goals. I tend to not want to bother other people with my crap, so sometimes I keep things between me and the Universe. I'm still learning to open up a bit while also protecting myself. Everything is a balancing act.

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Tackle It Tuesday + Inner Champion Workbook Chapter 3: Staying on Track

Disclosure: If readers purchase a copy of the book through the preview link, I will earn a small commission from Amazon.

In Chapter 3 of her autobiography, Lauren reveals how her tendency to jump into situations both feet first without thinking led to a detrimental lifestyle of nonstop partying and drugs. One day she woke up and realized that if she kept on the same path, she was going to die. She successfully went through a rehabilitation program and has been sober ever since.

I am often surprised that I didn't end up either an addict or dead. I have an addictive personality and a self-destructive streak six miles wide. Which, to hear some people talk, is approximately the same width as my ass. These people are incorrect. My ass is, in fact, seven miles wide.

Butt-related jokes aside, I am an adrenaline junkie at heart, but my body won't allow me to indulge my addiction. I also have very low self-esteem. The ravenous hunger for acceptance combined with an addiction to excitement led me into some bad situations in my youth.

When I was younger I was infamous for trying any substance that didn't need to be snorted or injected. It's a good thing that I have a strong aversion to things in my nose. As I discovered when I was in the hospital 25 years ago after having an emergency Cesarean section, I really, really, really like opiates. Not the kind you swallow, those make me nauseous as all fuck. Codeine makes me projectile vomit. But morphine coming through an I.V.? That's the shit! I knew I would be addicted quick if I had a steady supply of that, and I was pretty sure that I would have been addicted to cocaine with the first sniff if I had ever tried it. 

Cocaine has similar effects to drugs like morphine. Fortunately, crack wasn't a thing in the area where I lived back in the day, and the crowd I ran with was too plebian to have access to coke. Also, there was the aversion to putting things in my nose. Much though I liked alcohol (and I liked it a lot), I never became addicted although I was a very heavy drinker and hard partier well into my thirties. I stopped drinking when I got pregnant but picked it back up once I was done nursing.

And now you know that part of my story.

Here are today's Inner Champion Workbook questions:

Wrong direction/action:

Equating excitement with happiness and lust with love. I partied hard and allowed guys who didn't care about me to take a piece of my heart in the hopes that if I was good to them they'd fall in love with me. It doesn't work that way.

How it didn’t match my values or goals:

I was destroying my body and going against my belief that a person should have to earn my trust in order to obtain intimacy, especially that degree of intimacy. I was disrespecting myself and it was destroying not only my body but my will to live.

How I got myself back on track:

It didn't happen until I was finally diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder at nearly 40 years old. I was at last able to see a pattern in my behaviors. I learned about hypomania and hypersexuality. I was able to start treating the physical component of my condition and understanding some of my psychological motivations. 

It took me a while to heal the most important relationship in my life, the relationship with my son. I am forever sorry about the chaos my untreated illness and my lack of self-respect introduced into his life until he was 14 years old. It took a while for him to forgive me. When I think back on how broken our relationship was, it fills me with sadness.

Wrong direction/action:

I equate my value as a person with money or lack thereof.

How it doesn’t match my values or goals:

I know that money doesn't make the person. Case in point: the rich but rank shitgibbon who holds the title President of the United States. Or, in my case, Mr. Not My President. However, my family always equated wealth with personal worth, and that is something that has stuck with me on a very deep level. 

I do not personally believe that a person's wealth has anything to do with their personal worth. If they don't do anything worthwhile with their wealth, if they squander and flaunt it, they're nothing but a giant walking rhinestone-encrusted asshole. Yet although I don't believe that wealth reveals anything about a person's true value, I believe on a deeply ingrained level that my lack of it defines mine.

How I’m going to get myself back on track:

I don't really know. I'm going to keep striving both to improve my position in life and my own self-respect. That's really all I can do.

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About Me Monday + Inner Champion Workbook: Chapter 2: Changes

Disclosure: If readers purchase a copy of this book through the preview link above, I earn a small commission from Amazon.

Greetings, fellow Crazy Creatives, and others. Today I am continuing my shared journey with the Inner Champion Workbook, which is an adjunct to the above autobiography by bodybuilder Lauren Powers. As I said in yesterday's post, this is a book that came as a complete surprise. I kept putting it to the bottom of my list of books for review because I thought it was a workout book. It isn't.

Today's chapter addresses changes. Let's get to it!

"Whether we’ve embraced it or not, we’ve all faced changes in our lives. In this chapter, identify some of the changes that you’ve experienced in your life. First, think of a change that happened to you that was out of your control. Then, think of a change that you actively made. How have these changes altered your journey? How can they be seen as contributing positively to your identity?"

Change that I made:

I no longer work for anyone else. I am not an employee or contractor. I am strictly a freelancer.

The reason I made the change:

Mostly out of necessity. My physical health took a few critical hits, and then I ended up moving to a remote location which is 50 miles from the nearest city. I do not have the strength or stamina to make 100-mile round trips to a job several times a week. I no longer have the strength to work the types of physically demanding night shift jobs that defined me for many years. Most clerical jobs are on the day shift, and I become severely depressed working day shifts because of my lifelong difficulty regulating my sleep. 

The impact it had on my life:

I am more stable emotionally, although I worry about my low income. However, I am not allowed to make more than $1100 a month or I lose Medicaid. Isn't that the stupidest thing you ever heard of? People outside of the United States often express their shock about our health care system. As someone who has been a victim of this system for a lifetime, I'm not shocked by it but remain appalled. A for-profit health care system exists to help nobody except for institutions gouging the ill and infirm.

Change that happened to me:

In 2017, my life changed forever. I was fired from my job after falling into a very deep sleep while sitting with a patient on the night shift. It is my contention that I had a TIA (transient ischemic attack). I was very sick with a severe respiratory infection that I had contracted from this patient. The coordinator insisted that I go to the job anyway, reasoning that I could not reinfect the patient because I had contracted the infection from him. The coordinator also used guilt, stating that "the family really needs you." 

A bit of further background to this story. My diabetes was becoming worse at this point. I wasn't yet using insulin but knew the day was coming soon when I would have to. I was working 60 hour weeks. I was afraid to say anything to my coordinator because he kept telling me that they were going to replace the primary nurse on the case with me since she had lupus and this meant that she called off sick a fair amount to manage her condition. So I kept my own health issues to myself, fearing that I would lose work if the company realized that my health was infirm.

After being fired from this job I picked up more shifts with a company where I was working one night once a month with a patient I'd worked with previously. I lost $4 per hour but ended up being able to go back to full time fairly quickly. However, this patient's condition declined, and he ended up in the hospital. The agency never got me another job.

I went to work delivering food for Uber Eats. I was actually losing money doing this job. I found work with a company called GoPuff, which is a subsidiary of GrubHub, delivering groceries. The onsite managers were great but GrubHub does not give a flying fuck about either its employees or its contractors. 

Many nights, one manager was left in the warehouse running around like a chicken with her head cut off to pack the orders while the other two managers switched over to driving. The drivers were given ridiculously large numbers of orders and GrubHub customer service couldn't be arsed to call the customers and tell them about the delays. The customers were always angry and took it out on the drivers. 

As many of the deliveries were in downtown Denver, I often had to park several blocks from the location and carry heavy loads, sometimes up several flights of stairs in buildings with no elevator. On one occasion, I almost fell through the rotting boards on a porch. 

I started noticing tingling and numbness in the fingers on my left hand but ignored it. The tingling progressed to mild and then moderate pain running from shoulder to fingertips and then transitioned to pain so severe that I was having trouble sitting up for more than about 45 minutes before I had to lie on the arm to try and numb it. I ended up quitting the job. I had to wait for two weeks before Medicaid kicked back in. The pain was so severe that I considered committing suicide. I may well have done so if not for the fact that I knew I would be able to get physical therapy once Medicaid kicked back in. That was my only hope.

Fortunately, physical therapy helped greatly. My arm went from being in constant severe pain to being in moderate pain with some bouts of severe pain. It progressed to being in mild pain with bouts of moderate pain and then, to my joy, to feeling like a lump of clay with bouts of mild pain. 

Unfortunately, Medicaid only pays for 12 sessions of physical therapy for any given issue. My arm remained in the "lump of clay" mode for about a year. It has since progressed to low-grade numbness and tingling, which is where it will probably remain for the rest of my life. I have to be careful about lifting too much with this arm.

Once I was able to return to work, I delivered food for Cluster Truck, a delivery-only restaurant, from December 2017 until June 2019, when I found the wonderful Grover Hotel and my son decided that this building was our best hope for having a place to live for life. As I said, Grover is 50 miles from anywhere, which is why I made the decision that given my health issues, it was best to work from home rather than attempting to find a position working for someone who would be flexible regarding my health issues.

The impact it had on my life:

For the most part, I really like what I do. I wish I could have/would have made this decision sooner. I have always hated working for other people. In spite of the fact that I liked the patients I cared for, I was extremely burned out on health care, and my body was badly compromised from years of neglecting to take care of myself while devoting myself to caring for others as well as from the health issues which are due to faults in my DNA, i.e., my trash fire endocrine system.

One positive aspect or life lesson from the event:

I have been able to get adequate rest for the first time in something on the order of 40 years. I was always the "I'll sleep when I'm dead" kind of person. I often don't sleep well at night, and even though I'm a night owl, the night shift will mess your body up. I was always in a fog. 

I never respected my body and always told myself to shut up and quit whining. While I don't think I will ever be able to "love" myself (that concept is completely foreign to me) I have learned to respect myself and to be better about not letting people walk all over me.

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The Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp's Come As You Are Party + Inner Champion Workbook: Chapter 1

Every now and then in the course of reviewing books, I discover a book that genuinely surprises me. This book has been on my list of potential reviews for a while now and I kept shuffling it down the list because I thought it was a workout book. I finally read the description and discovered that it was a biography written by a person who has dealt with a fair number of challenges, so I thought I would give it a read.

The book surprised me again, as I discovered that there is a downloadable workbook to accompany the ebook. I am doing the exercises in the workbook and will share them with you along the way.

The first chapter requests that we recall two major events that influenced us during childhood and then poses these questions:

What is the lasting effect? Is that effect helping or hindering you? If it has hindered you, how can

you leave it in the past and move forward? If it has helped you, how can you tap into that source

of wisdom and strength during difficult times?

Childhood Event 1:

This may seem like a very "nothing" event to most people, but it reveals what an alien I was very early on. While my father (RIP) and I were walking on a rainy day when I was three years old, I saw a dead butterfly on the sidewalk. I don't remember having ever seen anything dead before. My father tried to explain to me about death and I was very upset. To my naive and stupid three-year-old mind, it was impossible to conceive that butterflies, which I loved so much, could die.

When we got home, my grandmother (RIP) was on the phone and my mother handed the phone to me to say hello. I wailed "poor butterfly!" in the poor woman's ear and ran to my bedroom to cry. I don't know when I stopped crying. I don't know if I ever accepted the fact that butterflies die. I became stoic about it because there was nothing that I could do to change it. 

What is the lasting effect?

My reaction to negative events that I have no power to change is stoicism.

Is that effect helping or hindering you?

It hurts me in the long run, but it helps me continue functioning. If I acknowledge my pain, it will break me. I do not think that there is a way to leave it in the past. It isn't like I have a lot of support. I have to do what I have to do.

Childhood event 2:

Again, this may seem like a "nothing" event to those who are made of sterner stuff. There was a group of kids that I played with when my family moved from New Mexico into the faculty housing at the School of Mines in Colorado where my father obtained his job as a professor. I really liked them and I wanted so much for them to like me back. One day as I was running down the hill from my house to see if they wanted to play, I saw them walking up to the old gravel pits behind the housing development without me.

I took a shortcut and got to the pits first. They found me sitting in one of the pits and asked what I was doing there. I said I'd been coming to see if they wanted to play, but I now knew that they weren't really my friends, and I got up and left.

They followed me because they didn't want to get in trouble with their parents for ditching me. They told me that they (the brother and sister pair) just wanted to play as a family. I pointed out that "Marty" wasn't part of their family. The brother said, "yes, but he lives next door, so he's like family. But we want to play with you now."

I really wanted to believe them, but after a short time, they said they wanted to go watch TV. I said I wanted to come too. The brother said that they wanted to watch a show that I wouldn't like.

I said I bet I would like it. He replied: "No, you wouldn't. It's called 'mentally retarded.'"

He then repeated the words "mentally retarded" very slowly and pointedly.

I realized at that moment that my friends were not my friends. 

I was bullied and ostracized at school as well.

What is the lasting effect? 

I don't trust people. In fact, I tend to push them away before they can hurt me.

Is that effect helping or hindering you? 

It has hindered me and has destroyed relationships.

If it has hindered you, how can you leave it in the past and move forward?

I probably can't. I tend to form only very superficial relationships with people so they can't hurt me. Whenever I like someone, I always expect that they're going to hurt me eventually.

Well, that was certainly cheerful! But it illustrates how you can use this book to help you along your path. 

If you pick up a copy of Behind the Muscle through the link above, I earn a small commission from Amazon.

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Crazy Creatives Come As You Are Party + Weekend Wrap-Up + The Cheese Grates It: The Green Manalishi With the Two-Pronged Crown

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

Actual picture of the inside of my head

If you're the sort of person whose brain resembles a busy and chaotic train station, bus terminal, or that pole in the picture, you know what I mean. It could be ADD/ADHD. It could be OCD. It could be bipolar disorder. Or, if you're like me, you have all three. Well, my friend, then you are really fucked. But, hey, I sympathize.

If you're this sort of person and you decide to be a godforsaken fool (like I am) and put yourself out there even though you know you're opening yourself up for criticism and misunderstanding by the metric fuckton, you know damn good and well that you can't win. So, either you hide your light under the proverbial bushel (I'm not sure what it's a bushel of, but it has light hiding under it) or you throw down and let the world see a level of coolness that they cannot possibly understand. 

And then the criticisms start rolling in.

If you're like me and have lots of blogs because it's super-important to the OCD part of your synaptic mess to CATEGORIZE THE UNHOLY FUCK OUTTA EVERYTHING, you'll get people chiding you that you should put everything on one blog.

In a word, fuck no. Yah, that's two words. Fuck is a frequently used emphasis word around these parts. The main word is "no," covered in a big scoop of "fuck." 

Anyway...

If you do decide to put everything into one blog (I have a couple of catch-all blogs so I can see what this would look like) then you have people bitching that they can't understand what your blog is even about because their god forbid that everything isn't neatly categorized just the way they like it.

To these people, I say:

Do you have to live inside my head? No? Well, lucky you. I do. Sometimes that little task is really tough, so I try to make the most of it. Creating crazy shit is a way to relieve some of that pressure. The other way would be blowing the top of my skull off with a shotgun to let all the marauding thoughts out. I know you'd probably like that, but since they ain't found a way to force my hand yet, I've decided against that plan for now. Who knows, in the future, you may get your wish.

I would also like to ask if these people are paying my salary. If you paid me to design a blog or website for you and it was a spiderweb of chaos, then you have every reason on Earth to be mad and refuse to pay me. If I didn't come to you asking for payment, then you don't have any cause to be telling me to change my evil ways. I'm not forcing you to read my blog(s).

A lot of the time, people who are really quick to harshly criticize or ridicule people who do things in a way contrary to what they themselves would do are the same people who say: "oh, I would never make fun of or hurt a person with autism, learning disabilities, neurological dysfunctions, or psychological issues." However, these people think it's funny to make fun of "weirdos" who are "acting weird", or they think it's acceptable to talk down to us and treat us as if we are sub-human and lacking in basic intelligence.

Here's a two-pronged contradictory fact. This is my very own Green Manalishi With the Two-Pronged Crown.

I like interacting with creative spirits.

I hate networking.

The trouble is, I tend to naively believe that all creative people are weirdos like me, but a lot of them are normals who don't get weirdos like me one single bit and would like to squash us out of existence or force us to fit into the 'normal' mode, squeezing the souls right out of us with derision and pharmaceuticals.

Networking bumps me up against a fair number of these people. I fucking hate networking. Loathe it. Despise it. I would love to kick networking to the curb, but if I want to get the word about the services I offer out there, I have to keep doing it.

I've been thinking about the guy in the following photo a fair bit recently. Probably because I've been conducting seances to ask him to impart to me a portion of his mechanical abilities. He could fix just about anything. I'm a numb-nuts living in a very old house with a bunch of ramshackle appliances, and I have all the mechanical aptitude of an earthworm. 

So far, I haven't come up with the right offering of food and incense to invoke him. Or maybe the lighting is wrong. Probably both.

You can decide for yourself if I'm serious or not. One thing I do have in common with him is enjoying fucking with prats lacking a sense of humor.

Another thing I have in common with him is crippling shyness combined with a tendency to lash out if I feel like I'm being attacked. I managed to avoid the addiction to alcohol. How, I'm not sure, because I was a very heavy drinker when I was younger and there is a strong tendency for addiction in my family. We had depression in common, though. Now, if only I could symbiotically pick up on the mechanical aptitude--my man, let's talk! I've been having problems with my washer recently. Could you, like, come and possess my hands for an hour or two?

I'm revealing a bit more of my very weird sense of humor than I've allowed myself to do in a while. People don't get my sense of humor, and I get tired of trying to explain myself. So, you know, I hide my light under a bushel. In my case, it's probably a bushel of unwashed laundry.

My brother used to get my sense of humor. When we woke up on Saturday mornings before our favorite cartoons came on, we'd sit around making up dumb stories for an hour or two. I miss the friendship that I had with my brother before life beat that weird whimsy out of us. I kept writing stories because it's a thread that keeps me in the world, but sometimes I'd just like to let go and fall into the darkness.

I need to figure out a way to switch more in the direction of proofreading than book reviews. Authors don't tend to hate proofreaders. They tend to see proofreaders as helpful. Book reviewers are generally seen as assholes who want to destroy what the author has built. Despite the fact that I appear to be extremely prickly and hard-headed, I really don't like having people hate me. 

I guess that's about all for this party. That was fun, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Don't forget to thank the Green Manalishi before you split.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

The Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp's Come As You Are Party + Ornery Musings: Why Book Reviews are Useful

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

As the late, great Shorty Medlocke used to say, howdy solks, I mean folks! If you don't know who Shorty Medlocke was, it's time for you to at the very least hit Wikipedia and brush up on your music history, and then go listen to some Blackfoot, where you can hear Shorty's grandson Rickey shred on some sadly underrated Southern rock masterpieces.

Sadly for you, this post is not about great blues musicians, twentieth-century radio hosts, or great guitarists. It's about book reviewers.

At the bottom of many posts, you will notice the image of a plump owl carrying a couple of books, one with a pentagram and one with an anarchist symbol. This owl is my alter-ego, my inner badass. Where I am infamous for apologizing for myself constantly and becoming defensive quickly, this owl never apologizes (unless she has actually done something wrong) and has no time for defensiveness. If she is under attack, she will fight back, but she doesn't harbor any of the insecurities that I do. Therefore, defensiveness is foreign to her. This owl is unapologetically, authentically herself.

Me, on the other hand, I tend to always wonder if I'm doing something (or anything) right. I am a horrible--I mean adorable--little (okay, large) bundle of insecurities. I have both physical and psychological disabilities, and I also have ADD and dyslexia. Dyslexia does not have only one manifestation, by the way. I read most things clearly, and I'm a relly gud spelur. My dyslexia tends to present itself with numbers more than words, and I have a great deal of trouble with tests involving pattern recognition, which led to me being labeled borderline retarded when I was in the sixth grade. That label was a thermonuclear hit to my already severely compromised self-esteem, particularly when one of my nastier classmates overheard my parents and the school psychologist discussing it in the hallway and proceeded to ask my father if I really was borderline retarded, to which he naively replied, "yes, I'm afraid so," rather than telling her to run along as he should have.

So, here I am in my fifties with a lifetime of abject failures behind me, disabled and living in poverty, and I review books for a living. Seriously, that is how I eke out a living, and sometimes I become rather cynical about it. Here I am, doing something completely useless yet again because being useless is my M.O. in life. I would do very poorly as something like a virtual administrative assistant or customer service agent. I have moderate anxiety about talking to people on the phone, and if I get bored, I get distracted. I would be fired from these jobs fairly quickly. However, I can read books. These days I prefer e-books because of my vision and because they don't take up space on my shelves. I also enjoy listening to audiobooks. 

Anyway, I possess the ability to read, opinions are like assholes, and I am an asshole with an opinion. So I sneaked in the back door at the Online Book Club and tried my hand at doing reviews for them. My first few reviews were unpaid, and then I started getting paid for my efforts. Doing reviews for paid review services like Online Book Club means that I can do reviews on request for independent authors without charging money. My costs for an independent review are as follows:

If the book is available on Amazon, you give me permission to have an affiliate link in my review post. You won't pay me a cent, but if someone buys the book through the link, Amazon will pay me a few cents.

If you like the review, you provide a link to it on social media.

You understand that providing me with a copy of your book does not guarantee a positive review. There may be reviewers who get their rocks off writing negative reviews and destroying authors' dreams. I am not one of them. I love giving positive reviews. With most of my less stellar reviews, I find that the problem with the book tends not to be the story itself, but the execution and lack of proper editing. By the way, I am also available as a beta reader.

Very rarely do I give scathing reviews. On the occasions that I have done so, it is because I find the author to be an odious jerk with awful opinions who targets vulnerable people for ridicule.

You may be saying (as I sometimes do), "well, that's all fine and good, Cie, but the world wouldn't stop turning if all the book reviewers were abducted by aliens. Book reviewers do not provide vital services such as emergency services personnel, medical personnel, construction workers, mechanics,  teachers, grocery clerks, customer service personnel, cleaning crews, or, pretty much anyone else provides. Reviewing books is fluffy stuff and isn't a real job. Like, you know, the kind of work that you claim you can't do anymore but probably could if you tried, and don't give me that 'but I can't walk very far or very fast, I can't stand up for long periods of time or my back will start hurting, or, but my diabetes fucks with me and starts making me weak and confused' bit!"

Well, you hopefully don't say that last part, but my inner voice is, not to put too fine a point on it, an absolute twat. Anyway, the overall gist is, most people find book reviewers to be non-essential members of society, and I sometimes feel angry at myself for doing a job that most people see as sprinkles on a cake, not even icing or pretty decorations, just sprinkles. The kind of sprinkles that come in a jar and you pay a couple bucks for them and you sprinkle them on your kid's birthday cake and it makes the kid happy. Except that I have the potential to make people's inner children unhappy with my words.

However, today I read a wonderful review from one of my fellow Online Book Club reviewers, and I would like to share that review and my thoughts on it with you. Please follow this link to read it.

Here is a copy of my comment for the reviewer:

Thank you for your lovely, descriptive review. I had tears in my eyes reading it. Although I grew up in a home with both parents present my family was inadvertently emotionally abusive and didn't understand someone like me at all as they were very perfectionistic and I had learning and psych issues (I have type 2 bipolar disorder that wasn't correctly diagnosed until I was almost 40.) I did a lot of the same things that Eva did, moving out with my now-ex-husband when I was 19, being divorced by 29, having a string of abusive relationships. I really appreciate reviews like yours which tell me everything I need to know about a book, even better than simply reading a sample. Have a good day.

Sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. While being a book reviewer is not an essential occupation such as those mentioned in the previous paragraph, nor is it a meaningless occupation. Too many bullies calling themselves critics have given a bad name to critiquing. A professional critic should endeavor to be kind, discussing the best aspects of a work while, if necessary pointing out areas needing improvement.

~Cie the Ornery Old Lady~

Free use image from Pixabay

Cie reviews books and is no longer ashamed to claim it as her profession.

She is also available as a beta reader

Click the link to learn more

I'll bet that some of you would like to know which book I was referring to when praising my fellow reviewer. Well, now you know and can get yourself a copy! 

Disclosure: If readers purchase a copy of this book through the preview link, I receive a small commission from Amazon.

The Crazy Cheerleading Camp's Come as You Are Party: Hoarding Hurts

Image by Frank Winkler from Pixabay

This is one of those "it doesn't get any realer than this" posts, and I will tell you right now that this wound is one of those that may be healing around the edges but it isn't closed. It's still raw, and any unsympathetic or hateful bullshit will either be outright deleted or the sanctimonious sack of crap saying it will be ripped a new asshole. Choose your words carefully, and if you feel the need to be judgy, ask yourself what exactly you're getting from being that way.

I have had a problem my entire life: a problem which I was pretty well forced to keep secret, which meant that rather than being dealt with, it festered and grew out of control. Shit shows like "Hoarders" sure as hell didn't help, they just created a forum for people who don't understand the problem to say crap like: "I'm going to watch "Hoarders" now. At least my house isn't that messy--LOL!"

My thought regarding "Hoarders" has always been:

"And next up, just look at what those whacky Schizophrenics are doing this week! Woo-hoo! It's so great to look down our noses at people with mental health problems, isn't it, Folks?"

Hoarding is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (which I have in other forms as well). It is not a sign of "laziness." Having hoarding disorder is exhausting. People with hoarding disorder try to clean and get rid of things but crippling, obsessive thoughts take over. Medication helps some people, but others (myself included) can't tolerate the side effects of medication.

Finally, with sympathetic help from my son, we got rid of a storage unit which was costing us close to $400 per month. We did move some of the items to a smaller, cheaper storage unit. We still have a dilapidated mobile home full of items to go through. In packing for our move, we have gotten rid of a lot of trash, but there are some cases where we boxed things to deal with when we are in our new, more stable environment.

The "normal" people in my life never helped me with this problem. Instead, they shamed me for being "lazy," came into my home and threw things out willy-nilly, which traumatized me, and then commanded me to "never let this happen again." It took a young autistic man (my son) to help me start getting an actual grip on a very serious problem. My son is a planner, and he has helped me develop a realistic plan. Together, we are getting through this.

 I was having a panic attack this morning looking at the haphazard shelf and pile of junk in front of me. My son and I worked on it together. We ended up with many bags full of garbage and recycling. There are some boxes which contain stuff which people who don't struggle with this crap condition would have been able to dispense with without a qualm, but they are coming with us to be dealt with in the new place.

One constant in my adult life is always feeling that my house was built on quicksand. Everything was always temporary. I would hope for new situations to work out, and they inevitably fell apart. I did not know until I was almost 40 years old the magnitude or nuances of the neuro-psychological anomalies I was dealing with. I often wonder what could have been if I had been treated with compassion instead of disdain and if I had learned coping skills at a younger age.

Before you judge, educate yourself.

Now you know a little more than you did before about a person who doesn't quite fit into a world with very rigid rules for "rightness."

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

Get To Know The Netherworld Crew: The Real Cie

The theme for Silver Threading's Writer's Quote Wednesday Writing Challenge is Comedy. What does the above picture have to do with comedy? It doesn't, it has to do with me, The Real Cie, the butt of the Universe's cruel jokes. We'll get to that.
I created the above picture to be included in a mass email for the birthday of Jared Padalecki, the actor who plays Sam Winchester on Supernatural. Jared lives with depression, and he created the Always Keep Fighting charity to raise awareness. There's something about Jared. More on people with "something about them" later in the post.
Yes, the tattoo is the permanent kind.

Am I doing this right? I don't know. Will they like me? Probably not. A few people do, but most people don't understand where I'm coming from at all. Nor do they get my sense of humor.
In this post, I refer to myself in both first and third person. Referring to me as I am now, I always use first person. Referring to my past self or the fictionalized version of myself, I will use either first or third person. I tend not to edit posts of this nature too much, because I want to preserve the emotional rawness.

I've never fit in. I was badly bullied. I had a serious mental illness (I have three diagnoses, actually: Bipolar disorder type 2, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Obsessive-compulsive disorder) that was improperly diagnosed until I was nearly 40. There was always something different about me. People saw that and wanted to destroy it. I wasn't pretty, I was socially awkward. I tried to make people like me, but they didn't. I started self-injuring when I was in my early teens. I made my first suicide attempt at age 13 by swallowing a bottle of aspirin.

Because I was raised Catholic, I believed that committing suicide was a sin that would get you sent to hell. Because sending a person who was already suffering to hell makes a lot of sense, right? Not here to argue theology, but that idea is a crock of shit, as is the idea that people who commit suicide are "selfish" or "stupid." Suicide may be "a permanent end to a temporary problem," or it may in fact be not a permanent end to a lifelong problem. Pithy sayings don't work on serious issues.
"This is really fucking depressing, Real Cie," you're saying. "When are you going to get to the comedy part?"
The prompt mentions Robin Williams.

Mork is one of the friends I turned to when real life was too painful.
I was a writer from the time I was very young. I was precocious and learned to read at a first grade level when I was four years old. I'm not saying this to brag about how smart I was, because I don't really think I'm that smart overall. I was in the top percentile for the English category when I took my SAT's. I have some sort of gift in the English comprehension and writing areas, but I've never learned to use it in a way that appeals to most people. I'd like to thank my bipolar disorder for that.
I always had a real sense for the absurd as well. I could find bits of humor in the oddest places. Other people didn't get it. I used it to survive.
Young Me used her literary and metaphysical gifts to escape to an alternate world. Unlike the world I was living in, this world was filled with fun and friends.
I didn't know it then, but I was an empath who could pick up on other people's emotions. I wish I could have known Robin Williams in life. I think that Real Cie and Robin would have been friends, just like Cie in my stories and Mork were friends. That's what I like to think.

This became Mork and Cie's favorite band after one of Cie's few friends' older brothers played their music and Cie said "wow, who's that?"
Keep in mind that in the 1970's, there was no public Internet. Young Cie had to go into record shops and look for imported magazines to find out more about her new favorite band. She liked doing research anyway, and liked pretending to be a detective.
If you see evil rather than humor when looking at the above picture, you need to adjust your perspective. I'm still gobsmacked that anyone could have thought of these men as "evil."
Cie liked AC/DC not only for the music, but because, like her, they were outcasts and freaks who used their sense of humor both to cope and to entertain others. They didn't like people who bullied other people. There was also "something about them."
I didn't know it yet, but "something about them" means "walking wounded."

Even at ten years old, when I was watching Star Trek reruns I really resonated with the Empath character, Gem. I didn't know it yet, but it was because, like her, I take on other people's pain. I don't get physical manifestations, and, unfortunately, I can't do psychic healing on a physical level.
This plane is purgatory, and this world is in a lot of pain. I used and still use my sense of the Ridiculous to cope, and most people don't get it. I've suffered a lot of derision because of it.
I still do it because the Pissed Off Crusader for Justice in me doesn't want me to destroy who I am to please other people. I've tried it several times. I almost didn't survive. I won't do it again.
I think that many people who express themselves through comedy use comedy as a coping mechanism. Like me, they have been bullied, or they suffer with a mood disorder such as depression or bipolar disorder. Seeing the ridiculous helps us survive. Often we try to make the world a better place. Sadly, it doesn't really seem to work.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though. If we make the world a somewhat better place for a few people, it's worth it.
I've got more to say, much more. But the foam mat on my bed has slipped sideways and it's really irritating me, so I need to fix it.
Did I mention that I have OCD?
I have to joke about my mental illnesses, because otherwise I'd go crazy!
I'll be here all week. Also, for the rest of my life.

~Cie~

Cross-posted to:

Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp

Encyclopedia Netherworld

One Love

The Cheese Grates It: Squelched Creativity

Click to enlarge

Trouble is, every time I feel passionate about something, other people have to "should" all over it. Then my doubt causes my passion to be dulled. Any more, I tend to water down my emotions before I even begin because I expect to end up feeling disappointed.

I know I "shouldn't" care what other people think. It's not like I'm trying to become a published author at this point. The problem is, I don't know how to short-circuit a lifetime of approval seeking.

~Cie~