Tackle It Tuesday: Tackling the Truth Part 1: I Suck At Blogging

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I am a walking contradiction. It isn't that I set out to deceive anyone, but I'm not always forthcoming. This may be part and parcel of the fun shenanigans played by a brain with bipolar disorder. (Type 2)

When I am hypomanic, I tend to be very forthcoming.

When I am depressed, I withdraw because I don't figure that anyone wants to hear anything that I have to say.

When I'm euthymic, it's somewhere in between, only without the self-loathing. On one hand, I don't feel like I have anything to hide. On the other hand, I figure nobody needs to know anything that I don't feel like revealing.

I have a high degree of social anxiety. Sometimes the hypomanic component overrides this, but it always comes back. This is why I may have a day where I'm waltzing around promoting my faboo posts on blog hops, and the next day I am overwhelmed and may not be able to reply to comments for a long time.

People tend to feel that someone who doesn't reply to comments right away is simply a rude a-hole. Most of the time, I find that people are overwhelmed by trying to do too many things, for instance, they may have a job and a family and are also trying to create and promote. Also, many people have anxiety and other psychological issues and these can sideline them. I tend to assume in most cases that the person who didn't reply isn't rude, they're simply overwhelmed.

There are two things that I suck at. Sheesh, I wish it was only two. Truth be told, I suck at everything, but these are the two things that pertain to this discussion.

I suck at blogging. Seriously, I am not a good blogger. Someone once said that being a blogger and being a writer are not the same thing, and boy howdy is that ever true. 

I suck at promotion and networking and all that kind of happy crappy. I seriously wish I had the money to hire someone to do it for me because I make such a mess of it. This ties into the whole sucking at blogging thing.

Here's how I messed things up this time.

On Sunday, I thought: "Say, let's do some blog hops with my Sunday Dinner post!"

On Monday, I thought: "Well, let's continue with that..."

On Tuesday, I was still trying to get to all the blog hops that I thought it would be a good idea to share that post with.

There are some of y'all out there who participate in a metric butt-ton of blog hops every week and I have to admit that I HAVE NO IDEA HOW YOU DO IT! That right there is a full-time job. Maybe (probably) I'm just stupid. But my hat would be off to you if I wore a hat. I could take off my pants, socks, or shirt, but ain't nobody wants to see that.

I have a group of goals (more like a cluster f**k of goals) that I'm trying to make happen. Some of them I've been trying to make happen for years. Admissibly, it's harder for me because I'm not a social butterfly. I'm more of a social hermit crab. My attitude tends to take one of two forms.

1) I scuttle up, present my work, and say "here ya go, love it or leave it." Then I scuttle off to make something else.

2) I scuttle up, present my work, and whimper "please don't be mean to me!" Then I scuttle off and withdraw into my shell for a week or so.

Now, let's talk about me for a minute.

I've been belittled on many occasions for not honing in on JUST ONE BIG THING WITH LASER FOCUS!!!111!! I've also been belittled for having shaky self-esteem. I always beat myself up for both of these "shortcomings." 

Why would I put "shortcomings" in quotation marks?

Because I don't think these things are shortcomings. It sucks to have poor self-esteem, but how the actual hell do people think it helps someone overcome their low self-esteem when you're berating them for having low self-esteem? Improving one's self-esteem isn't the kind of thing that happens overnight.

People with low self-esteem have one thing in common. We have all been abused. Whether this abuse comes from family, schoolmates, or society at large, we've been abused. Abuse gets internalized, and it can take a long time to reverse that process. Often, it is never fully reversed.

The self-esteem issue is a post in itself, so I'm going to table that for now.

As to being unable to hone in on one target with laser focus and pigeonhole myself into a niche, I've tried that. Again and again and again. I have failed at it every time. 

It took me 54 years to learn some important things about me. First, I have ADD. This has an effect on the way I interact with the world and what it throws at me. Combine ADD with bipolar disorder and you're pretty well guaranteed to have a person who will not do well trying to have LASER FOCUS!

ADD affects the way I write. I'm a prolific writer, but I go off on sidetracks. I learned that instead of trying to write focused novels, I need to write collections of novelettes that have a central theme and that can work together or be read as separate short stories. 

My thought process works a lot like the way time works according to Dr. Who.

What I'm getting around to is this:

My writing comes first. I get very upset when I don't do it. I hate the fact that I have to promote it. It makes me very anxious. I know that I'm an acquired taste that most people don't tend to acquire. So is my writing. I doubt that I'll ever make a lot of money off my writing. But I can't hold a normal job, so I'm trying to find alternative ways to make money.

I need to promote the alternative means, just like I need to promote the writing.

But then people get angry with me for promoting...well, anything, really.

Anyway...

Here is what I'm getting around to.

I didn't mean to make anyone angry at me. I'm sorry if I didn't reply to your comment yet. You may think I'm a jerk, but I didn't mean to be. I'm still trying to refine my process, and I may never be any good at any of this. 

Thanks for reading. I'm going to go make some soda bread now.

~Your Ornery Old Aunt Cie~

Come As You Are Party: Wired Differently or Just a Flake?

Image by Wolfgang Eckert from Pixabay

This is my response(s) to a post on The Mighty.

It is my hope to back away from apologizing for who I am and instead explain about myself so that those I interact with might develop an understanding of those of us who are wired differently.

I have type 2 bipolar disorder and ADD as well as complex PTSD and OCD. I wasn't properly diagnosed with bipolar disorder or OCD until I was almost 40. I didn't know I had ADD until I was in my 50s. I was just always scolded for being forgetful and distracted. I have always vacillated between being Ms. Wonderful and being that flakey a-hole that everyone hates. I understand why it happens now, but I can't change the past. I wish people would try to understand me a little better, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

My son will be 30 this year. He is high-functioning autistic and has ADHD as well as anxiety issues and major depression. He is very intelligent and has read the entire Amber series (Roger Zelazny), much of Tolkien's writing, The Count of Monte Cristo, the works of C.S. Lewis, and the list goes on, but he can't learn from a textbook to save his life. I think the current educational system does a very poor job of addressing the needs of those who are not neurotypical. 

I technically also have a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, but it is my opinion that borderline personality disorder is actually a form of complex PTSD and is an outdated and sexist diagnosis. It is almost exclusively applied to girls and women. Everyone who has it has endured some form of trauma, whether physical, psychological, sexual or a combination thereof. 

~Cie the Ornery Old Lady~

Image copyright Open Clipart Vectors

Come as You Are Party/Catching Up With the Ornery Old Lady

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Hiya people! I had myself a little bit of a mental breakdown over the past week and went MIA, not, I'm sure, that anyone missed me. I came to one of those crossroads points in my life where I needed to make a critical decision. I'll just let this tentative introduction that I wrote for the book I'm currently working on tell you all about it.

A NEW TAKE ON AN OLD ISSUE

Here's how I will introduce my longer, more involved books from this day forward.

The chapters in my books can be read as standalone short stories or interpreted cohesively as a longer novelette/novella/novel. During the first half of my life, I had a lot of people tell me that my writing would never be good until I was able to make it conform to their ideals. Now that I am in the second half of my life, I refuse to apologize any longer for the way my mind and brain work or to force my writing to conform to rules decreed by others.

I have ADD (attention deficit disorder), type 2 bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. These factors affect the way my brain processes information and the way I write. While I strive to make my writing concise in its own way and to continually improve my skills, I will never be able to write novel-length stories in a cohesive fashion. My mind simply cannot stop developing subplots.

It came to a point where I realized that I must either stop sharing my work or start sharing it without apologies for the fact that I neither think nor write like other people. I have chosen to share my work with an explanation but no apology.

I write the way I see the Universe as working: in a sometimes seemingly haphazard and disconnected fashion with an unseen thread connecting aspects in surprising ways. As the Tenth Doctor once said, “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective point of view, it is more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey...stuff.”

My stories are a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, and I will no longer apologize for that. I will simply issue the warning that you are now entering the Zone Where Normal Things Don't Happen Very Often, as was once revealed on Johnny Bravo.

If that sort of thing really is your bag, Baby, then welcome! Leave your expectations at the door, and come join Team Netherworld for an adventure like no other! You may at times be baffled, but I promise that you will never be bored.

Cie the Ornery Old Lady with a Mind Like a Maze

I would dare you to try and figure me out

But that wouldn't be fair

Because I've never managed to figure myself out!

Check out the latest and greatest from Team Netherworld

How did I Love?

Image by Ajay kumar Singh from Pixabay

A response to this post.

Oh gosh, I don't know if this will go through and I don't know if it is even welcome, but here it is.

How did I love?

With much reservation, fear, and sorrow.

I used to have such a strong need to connect with someone that I let a lot of the wrong ones in, and they did me a lot of damage.

Romantically, my theme song is Love Stinks, and I do not want anyone telling me that I need to "try again." No, I do not, and I don't want to.

Even with friendship, my theme song is Love Hurts. Most people who have said they wanted to be friends really just wanted something from me. Money or connections, when I had those. Now that I don't have much of anything, these "friends" are long gone.

I can't really relate to other people with bipolar disorder because although some of them understand the bipolar part, they don't understand the ADD, OCD, and PTSD that is also part of the package.

A lot of people get help from medications, but I can't take anything except a low dose of Lithium. I have type 2 bipolar disorder, so I normally do not get full-on manias and I normally do not experience psychosis. When I take SSRIs, I experience both. I've learned a lot of coping skills, but it's a real balancing act. If I let someone in and they betray me, I could end up in the ER with blood running down my arms from slashing my wrists. It's happened before. I do not want it to happen again. 

I've had love to give in the past. I give it only to a select few and with a lot of reservations. Some people think this means that I'm cold and standoffish. However, I've found that people who demand love tend to be people that will only misuse it.

I didn't say this in my comment on the post, but, for real, other people with mood disorders have been some of the most narrow-minded and least understanding. When they have said that I need to have my doctor adjust my meds if I mention going through a severe depression, and I respond that I can't take the meds because they make me manic and psychotic, these people will suddenly become cold and judgmental. "Well, if you're that depressed, you need to be on meds." 

Well, if you're that much of an asshole, you need to fuck off.

I wish I had known then what I know now. Some people are miserable fuckers who want to rub their miserable fuckery all over others. I never said you were a bad person for taking meds, you defensive douche canoe. Why am I a bad person for opting not to take them when they send me straight off the rails?

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Ornery and Neurodivergent

Tanka Splendor: Vernal Equinox

Image Source

vernal equinox

fifty-fifth year of my life

will I find some peace

or will the dark curtain fall

as it tends to do in spring?

~cie~

notes

I created the Tanka Splendor badge with a free to use stock image on Pixlr. Please feel free to use it on your own blog. No credit is necessary.

I was not correctly diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder until I was nearly 40 years old. I was diagnosed with "depression and anxiety." I have both of those, but I have bipolar disorder rather than unipolar depression as my son has. My restlessness was sometimes blamed on ADD, which I have as well, but the restlessness becomes magnified in a hypomanic state.

My baseline mood is moderately depressed. Some of my depression is situational. Living in poverty is very stressful. I try to ameliorate the way I feel about it by the fact that I keep trying, but sometimes I feel like all my trying adds up to one big ole heapin' helpin' of horse manure and I become despondent. 

I live with suicide ideation. I think about offing myself a lot. Ideation is not the same as planning. My planning levels tend to be low regardless of how strong the ideation levels are. Generally speaking, I'm probably too much of an asshole to commit suicide because then I wouldn't be able to piss people off by existing in a corporeal fashion in their presence. But sometimes not having to struggle sure sounds like a winner.

I have experienced spring depression almost every year of my life since I hit puberty. My puberty was somewhat precocious and started coming on when I was nine years old. Thinking back on things, the first time I can remember seeing a strong manifestation that could have been identified as bipolar 2 was on my tenth birthday. 

Bipolar 2 can be sneaky since it presents with hypomania rather than full mania. Hypomania is like "mania lite." However, it can be just as destructive. I've learned to recognize the magical thinking that comes with the condition and to try not to act on my impulses during periods of hypomania. By magical thinking, I don't mean believing in fairies or even believing something potentially fatal like thinking I could get up on a roof and float down. Hypomania does not create that sort of delusion. (The delusion that jumping off a roof is a good idea. I like to hope that believing in fairies is not a delusion.) It does create the sort of delusion that I should buy into an MLM program for a thousand dollars and will make a butt-ton of money and be able to live happily ever after. I don't have the focus to be successful at such a thing, even if it is one of the few programs that is legit.

By the way, Watkins is not that sort of program. It is legit, and the "buy-in" for a year is only $30. I'm only saying this because the -666 of you who follow my blogs might be saying "oh, Cie, have you done this again with this Watkins thing?" No, I actually only signed up for Watkins to get discounts on my own merchandise but after reviewing the material felt good about recommending it to others.

I am trying to learn to forgive myself for sometimes really awful and personally destructive past decisions and to stop belittling myself for having a brain that works differently than the brains of the sort of people who tend to be held up as examples. Nobody will ever say: "why can't you be more like that ornery old hag cie? I mean, she's simply all over the place, and she's easily distracted except when she's laser-focused on one of her ruinous plans? Now there's someone you can look up to!"

I will be fifty-five in a month and a day from this writing unless I go tits up in the meantime. I have no hope that "this will be my year" as I always told myself on birthdays in the past and was inevitably disappointed. This will be a year. There will be no significant shifts. I will remain me and the world will wag on.

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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Ornery Literary Services

Will work for tips and links

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.

Friday Flashback: Why I Wouldn't take a Cure for my Bipolar Disorder

ORIGINALLY POSTED 8 NOVEMBER 2018

Note for those who are sensitive about profanity:
This post contains it.
It is also snarky.
So is the a-hole who wrote it.
Just sayin'.

Now, here is something that will blow y'all's minds.

If there were a cure for bipolar disorder, I wouldn't take it.

I know a lot of folks are saying "but why wouldn't you want to fix this thing that is wrong with you?"

First, you may have heard about people who have had procedures done to restore their sight or hearing after years of being blind or deaf, and they have trouble adapting to the world with this new sense. They have learned to "hear" by feeling vibrations, or to "see" by touch and sound. The new sense throws their perception off.

I would not know how to think and feel without bipolar disorder. I would have a lot of trouble adapting. I might even become suicidal.

Further, I have come to believe that this anomaly doesn't make me "wrong." It makes me different. The world is too quick to deem difference in cognition or physical ability a bad thing which needs to be repaired. I think it would be a better world if we embraced people who deviate from the norm rather than shaming them into conformity or isolation.

Would I take a cure for my endocrine problems?

In a heartbeat! I would love to not have to stab myself in the abdomen with a needle before every meal. I would love to not have to worry about whether I will one day develop diabetic neuropathy or start losing my vision because of diabetes. I would love to not have increased risk of vascular malfunction because of this dumb disease. I would love to have a thyroid that actually works. I would rather not have had polycystic ovarian syndrome. My endocrine system is a cluster fuck. If someone could cure this mess, I would be thrilled.

If someone could cure my glaucoma, I would be over the moon.

I don't want my bipolar disorder cured. I have navigated the world with it for pretty much my entire life. To completely change the way my brain works would be frightening and, I think, detrimental.

But if someone could start working on cures for my physical ailments, I'd really appreciate it.

 ~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

Click to share your Friday Flashback

Carpe Diem #1774 Renga With Jane Reichhold ... apples for lunch

Image Source

dad on high

dropping from his trees

apples for lunch

I walk to the chicken coop

to visit my friends the hens

southern sunset

filling the apple bin

a deeper red

thinking of a time gone by

when the sky was beautiful

applesauce

the cinnamon glow

of a kerosene lamp

we didn't need to have one

my mother liked how it looked

windfall apples

palaces for worms

American pie

I started getting to know

worms eating into my brain

straight falling rain

tiny lakes upon the tree

stem hollows of apples

I have always loved the rain

but it's the snowy season

baskets in a row

overflowing with apples

on one a sweater

was it my mother's or mine?

Dad goes on picking apples

~Jane & Cie~

Notes:

The Hokku stanzas of these Tan Renga were created by Jane Reichhold (1937 - 2016). The Ageku were created by me.

When I was writing my Ageku, I was remembering my childhood in New Mexico between the ages of four and ten.

It wasn't idyllic by any means. We were very poor. But we did have a half-acre of land, and we had chickens and fruit trees and we grew corn and beans.

We also ate a lot of stuff like boiled soybeans and buckwheat groats. I still like buckwheat groats. You could put a bit of butter and honey on them and they tasted good. However, to this day, I loathe boiled soybeans. I would eat my shoe before I would ever eat another boiled soybean.

I knew I was weird and different from a very young age. These days doctors would probably put me on Ritalin and antidepressants. One did try to put me on phenobarbitol when I was a year and a half old because I didn't sleep for crap. My mother said it had the opposite effect and I was awake for three days straight. 

It probably put me into a manic state. It may even have been what triggered the onset of my bipolar disorder. Any doctor who would instruct a parent to give phenobarbitol to a child needs a damn good whacking, and nothing will change my mind about that.

How Not to Write About Neurological or Psychological Differences

Definitely, don't include the above statement in your piece. However, the points I'm discussing are a bit more subtle.

I recently read a review of a book about a woman with bipolar disorder. I have not read the book myself at this juncture but am taking it on myself to do so for the reasons stated below. 

The reviewer made this statement:

"Individuals affected with this disorder, eventually take up the nature of a 'zombie' because of the effects of the drugs given to control it. They are also known to be suicidal."

I left this reply to the reviewer.

As a person with bipolar disorder, I would suggest doing further research on bipolar disorder before making blanket statements regarding how people who live with the disorder behave. There are several types of bipolar disorder: type one, type two, and cyclothymia. There are also a variety of medications used to treat it, and some of us who live with the condition do not take medication.

There is an increased likelihood of suicide ideation with bipolar disorder, however, this does not always manifest in the same way. Speaking for myself personally, I have frequent suicide ideation but it tends to be situational. I have learned coping techniques to deal with it. I never "become a zombie" because of medication because I refuse to take medications which allow me to become a zombie.

As I have Kindle Unlimited, I feel the need to take it upon myself to read this book because if this is the sort of picture it is painting of people with bipolar disorder, that is troubling indeed. We already face enough stigma. We do not need the world viewing a varied population in an extremely negatively stereotyped fashion. 

As this book appears to depict a single case and one person's manifestations of bipolar disorder, please do not stereotype all persons with bipolar disorder as behaving in the same way. We are as varied as any other population of individuals. Your review was concise, but the sentences stereotype an entire population of people. Instead of saying "people with bipolar disorder are known to...", personalize the review by saying "Geraldine experienced feelings of lethargy due to the side effects of her medication" or "Geraldine was suicidal."

I would also avoid using terms such as "suffering from" when referring to neurological differences such as autism or psychological aberrations such as bipolar disorder. Such a description can be offensive. Persons with these conditions often are not suffering due to the condition itself, we suffer because of the negative ways in which we are treated. I have told people that if I could have a cure for my diabetes, I would take it in a heartbeat, but I would not take a cure for my bipolar disorder. Having bipolar disorder disappear would change the way my mind perceives the world, and I would not know how to function in the world. I am not going to say that bipolar disorder is a "gift," but it is an oversimplification to say that bipolar disorder causes suffering, implying that eradication of bipolar disorder would eradicate suffering. Many things cause suffering. Bipolar disorder simply causes a shift in the way a person perceives the world, which may or may not cause suffering.

Cheers.

Cie

WTF Wednesday: Assholes Will be Assholes

The following was written in response to a post by a person who has been accused by family members and so-called friends of lying about her illnesses, including cancer, because she "just doesn't look sick" and "doesn't act like she's in pain" and her attitude is "just TOO positive."

I find your approach enviable, and I don't find you pitiable at all. Yes, I'm sorry you've had to deal with cancer because I know cancer can take a lot out of a person, but I do not offer pity because pity is something no-one wants.

The best I can muster a lot of the time for the crap I deal with is an IDGAF attitude. I can't say I celebrate the hand I've been given. Then again, I do better with it when people aren't pitying me. I once said that I don't think I'd know how to navigate life without the lens of bipolar disorder, because I've never not had bipolar disorder. So, if I were given a cure for bipolar disorder, I wouldn't take it. People freak out when they hear things like that. Why wouldn't I want to be "normal?"

I can't say I think bipolar disorder is a "gift." Before it was correctly diagnosed, it wreaked a lot of havoc. It just happens to be something that twists the control knobs in my brain in different directions than most people's brains. It can't be "cured," and I wouldn't take the "cure" if it could be.

If there were a cure for all my endocrine problems, I'd take it, because I hate having no energy. I've been tired my entire life, and it's gotten worse in middle age. People have no sympathy for that sort of thing because the illness is invisible. "Well, if you'd just get up and get going..." Yeah, if I had a penny for every time I heard that I'd have enough money to hire someone to get up and get going for me! Not that I'd actually want to do that.

I truly believe in accepting people as they are, and I don't believe in pathologizing people. Nobody lives forever. I wish my attitude could be more like yours, but I tend to be a bit of a gloomy cuss by nature, and no, it isn't a "choice." 

~Cie~

Inspire Me Monday #224 + Spread the Kindness #119: Real Cie Reviews: Eighth Grade

This post is a duplicate of my review of this product for Amazon.

4 out of 5 stars

Elsie Fisher does a marvelous job as the insecure, likable Kayla and Josh Hamilton plays his role as the sweet but sometimes irritatingly out-of-touch and overprotective dad perfectly. Kayla's high school mentor Olivia is adorable if a bit clueless. There is the eye-roll-inducing stereotypical pretty mean girl Kennedy, and Kayla's crush Aiden has all the personality of wallpaper paste.

The movie does a nice job of addressing sensitive subject matter such as Kayla's panic attacks. I was a teenager in the late seventies and early eighties, and was unable to discuss my psychological issues with anyone for fear of being placed on a psych ward or dismissed as "seeking attention" or being "overly dramatic." When I read about bipolar disorder (then called manic depression) in my junior year psychology class, I recognized myself in a lot of the symptoms. I approached the subject with the teacher and she told me I couldn't be manic depressive because manic depression was a psychosis and I wasn't psychotic. I would not be properly diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder until I was nearly 40 years old.  If nothing else, movies such as this one approach issues such as panic attacks without pathologizing the person suffering from them.

The movie also does a good job of addressing the pressure on teens, particularly teenage girls, to be sexy and sexually active. Olivia's creepy friend Riley attempts to pressure Kayla into removing her shirt during a game of Truth or Dare when they are alone in his car together, and Kayla's crush Aiden is rumored to have broken up with a previous girlfriend because she wouldn't send him nude photos.

The movie is appropriate for teenagers. Kayla is a relatable character, an ordinary and likable if socially awkward young woman. I found myself thinking that it was a shame for her to waste any time or energy on a shallow, self-absorbed twit like Kennedy or a limp dishrag like Aiden. 

Teens struggling with feeling like they don't fit in and those of us who used to be (and sometimes still are) the odd one out will feel a kinship with Kayla and be proud of her as she learns to stand up for herself.

~Cie~

Also sharing to the Spread the Kindness blog hop on Tuesday April 23, 2019.

Crappy Fucking Birthday to Me

Copyright Prettysleepy

You know what I don't get?

Shaming people because they don't care for a particular season.

Now, I'd have plenty of company if I did things like normal people and got depressed in the winter but loved the spring. 

Newp. Like always, I'm ass-backwards.

 I'm fine in the winter. My most severe depression hits at the beginning of spring. It probably doesn't help that my birthday is here and I have one more year of being a crappy, unaccomplished, broke-ass loser under my belt. Another year to suck at everything is ahead of me. 

But I am supposed to pull sunshine out of my ass and fucking love the god damn springtime regardless of how I actually feel, or I am a BAD PERSON on top of being screwy as all fuck.

I can remember the first year that the spring depression hit like a ton of bricks and I started really hating who I was. I was ten years old. I had hit puberty a year before, and that is what triggered the onset of my bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. The OCD was already firmly in place, but I didn't know it at the time, of course. 

I didn't want puberty. I was well aware of how women were looked at, and I didn't want to be looked at that way. I became a feminist when I was 8 years old because it made me angry that women were seen as lesser and not allowed to do the "cool" jobs like astronaut or pilot. When I was 10, I knew how I would be looked at the rest of my life, and I tried to hide the body I didn't want.

Like a prophecy of what the rest of my stupid life was going to be like, my stupid birthday cake fell apart. I pretended I didn't care. I laughed. I spent the rest of the school year pretending I was fine when I wasn't at all. There was something screaming inside me. Something was wrong. I was wrong, and I needed to hide it so I wouldn't be "put away" somewhere.

I'd like it if no other kid ever had to feel the way  I did. Pretending  I was okay when I wasn't and believing that I was bad and wrong and broken. Well, I am broken. Bad or wrong, maybe not so much, but I've always felt like I was.

So, no, I am not "evil" or "bad" or just a big meanie mean because I dislike seeing spring come on. Spring tends to mean several months of wanting to crawl into a fucking mausoleum and sleep forever. If I'm lucky, April will be rainy and I can get back to being a salty asshole who gives no fucks sooner. 

I hate summer because of the heat, but I don't tend to be depressed to the point of having no fight left in me at all.

I'd love to like spring with all the pretty plants. But spring made it clear to me long ago that this is an unrequited affair, so spring can go fuck itself.

~Cie~

Cie's Year-End Wrap-Up 2018

Image copyright Conger Design

I love the above image. Back in the late 1990s, I went to school for one semester for graphic design but dropped out. I didn't know it at the time, but I had untreated type 2 bipolar disorder, OCD, and borderline personality disorder, three exciting co-morbid conditions which happen to feed each other in ways that are just, shall we say, really special. I wouldn't be properly diagnosed until 2004.

When I think of how many years were wasted mired in shame and stigma because I had no idea in this Universe what was going on with me, I thought I was just an attention-seeking fuckup, it makes me very angry. Granted, some of the tools available to me now simply didn't exist when I was younger. E-commerce was in its infancy in the 1990s. There were no smartphones. 

Hell, even GPS was still in its infancy. (I still have my TomTom Go.) The job I have today could not have existed in the 1990s. Back when dinosaurs and Ronald Reagan roamed the Earth in 1984, I delivered pizzas. Even the TomTom Go was as yet unheard of. How the hell my dyslexic ass didn't get lost more often, I'll never know. When I think of trying to do my job without Waze, it gives me that feeling of waking up with a start after a terrible dream and praising whatever powers there might be that the dream isn't real.

So, I didn't initially come here to talk to you about type 2 bipolar disorder, but now that I've thought about it, I want to talk about it. This is how people tend to think of bipolar disorder, and it's a reasonably accurate depiction of type 1 bipolar disorder.

Image Source

The post that the image comes from is worth reading.

The late Patty Duke had type 1 bipolar disorder. She is a personal heroine of mine. Her book, Call Me Anna, helped me understand better the things that I had gone through and to help me forgive myself for some of the truly awful decisions I made while hypomanic. 

Being diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder helped me understand why I had seen some features of bipolar disorder in myself but was convinced that I didn't have it because I'd never experienced a full mania. I tended to go from crushingly depressed to positive and overly functional. I never flew off to Vegas and got married to a guy I barely knew or anything of that nature, although I did convince myself several times that the Universe wanted me to be with guys who raised red flags like nobody's business and who, unsurprisingly, turned out to be horrible and abusive.

When I was hypomanic, I would take on second jobs and be the world's greatest employee that everyone loved until everything came crashing down and everyone ended up thinking I was the world's biggest flake and fuckup. I would be mired in depression which felt like being at the bottom of a dark pit that there was no way out of. 

When I would finally, miraculously, find myself pulled out of that pit, I would admonish myself that from now on I would be positive and productive and would never go back THERE again. When I inevitably went back there again, I would shame and berate myself for being a worthless fuckup.

Click to enlarge. 

This is a fairly standard bipolar disorder screening questionnaire. It tends to miss people with type 2 bipolar disorder.

Was there ever a period of time when I wasn't myself? No. I was always myself, although I often didn't like it very much. 

The late Peter Steele of Type O Negative, who had type 1 bipolar disorder, describes reflecting on occasions following a manic episode where he felt that there was something he could have learned from the time in question if only he could remember it. I never experienced anything like that.

I've never presented as talking extremely fast or seeming particularly hyper. I've never slept well anyway, so the "sleeping less than usual" criteria didn't send up any red flags. The late Julia Lennon described having periods where she wouldn't sleep for a week at a time, and doctors didn't know what was wrong with her. She was institutionalized on several occasions.

I did get involved in ill-advised relationships with abusive guys, but I never flew off to Vegas to do so. I took on multiple jobs and then crashed, often losing all of my jobs. When I was good, I was very very good, and when I was bad I was nonfunctional. 

I speak openly about my mental health struggles because I would be very happy if no-one else ever had to fight the way I've had to fight. I've been told that I should keep my psych problems hidden because people would avoid me if they knew I was one of THEM. I was told I would never find a job if people knew I'd been to a therapist. 

I was also told that I was "just being dramatic," that I needed to "stop seeking attention," that I was "just being lazy," and that I brought all my problems on myself with my "negative thinking." I can tell you that none of these criticisms did a damn thing to help me improve my life or to do anything except hide my problems and hate myself because I was never able to develop any decent coping skills for dealing with them until I was in my middle years. At this point, I'm still cleaning up the messes made by attempting to hide my problems, such as a storage unit full of stuff and a mountain of debt.

We've come a long way when it comes to mental illness in Western society, but we haven't come far enough. There is still a tendency to see people with mental issues as less intelligent or less capable or as loose cannons just waiting to explode and harm others. The truth is, people who live with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetrate violence.

There is a tendency to see jobs such as mine as "lesser" and to believe that the working poor, unemployed, and homeless "deserve" to not have basic amenities or a living wage. This needs to end. Everybody deserves the basic amenities, whether or not they are capable of working a "normal" job or at all.

I heard the term "lazy" so many times that I ended up with a terrible complex about taking breaks or doing things that are purely enjoyable and will never turn a profit. I once read a statement from a counselor which said that the term "lazy" should be replaced with "demotivated," because asking a person why they are so lazy shuts down the conversation and thus any chance of helping the person, whereas asking them why they are feeling demotivated leaves the conversation open and may help create a plan for helping them.

Exploitative shows like "Hoarders" should not exist. Like, at all. Capitalizing on people's illness for entertainment is twisted and barbaric. Hoarding is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is the symptom of malfunction in a certain area of the brain. It is not "laziness." Dealing with hoarding tendencies is exhausting, time-consuming, and life-destroying. People with hoarding tendencies need help from a compassionate professional, not a bunch of lookie-loos seeking schadenfreude at another's expense.

My son is helping me deal with the lifetime of hoarding without help contained in my storage units and the closets and spare rooms of the mobile home that I hope to have in a condition where I can think about selling it by the end of next year. With his help, the storage unit, which is about the size of a one-car garage, is 1/3 of the way clear at this point, and we are hoping to have it entirely clear by June of 2019. 

My late father attempted to "help with cleaning," but his help really only traumatized me and made me feel more ashamed, which didn't lead to me keeping up with the process. My son is understanding when I tell him that I can't deal with a certain item at the moment and we'll need to put it aside. We move on to the next thing. He also suggests creating scrapbooks and art from my vast collection of images from magazines, unlike my father, who told me that "anything that lands on the floor needs to be thrown in the garbage."

My father had piles of papers and magazines all over his house. He had OCD with hoarding tendencies too, but he came from an era when one locked their mental health issues in an attic and never spoke of them. This helped nothing, which is why I have come out of the attic and am speaking openly about my struggles.

For years I refused to make New Year's resolutions because I had learned to equate them with "new you in 52" crap, which really benefits no-one but the billion-dollar diet industry. I refuse to have or promote weight loss as a "health goal." 

I spent 33 years in yo-yo dieting hell trying to hate myself thin. There is no way I'm going to endorse that behavior. I'm going batshit at this point with all the blogs in my sidebar promoting "get paid to lose weight" garbage. You'll never see me promoting these things because dieting inevitably fails for everyone but statistical unicorns.

Diets don't work. Health at Every Size works. If you want to start exercising, increase the amount you're exercising, or eat fewer processed foods, great, but do it for overall health, not for weight loss.

We'll all be a "new you in 52" anyway. We'll have new experiences behind us, and many of our cells will have been replaced by new ones. Don't buy into the "new you in 52" crap. It only leads to frustration. Instead, pursue things that will lead to a more authentic you. 

Your authentic you has nothing to do with a number on the scale or even the amount of money in your bank account. It is the you who is true to themselves, which has nothing to do with looks or status at all.

Best wishes in the coming year,

Cie