Closing Out The Year

2016 has been a real b!*&#.

I don’t know of too many people who would disagree with me on that point. I know from my own little corner of the world it was a year of grieving my father (who passed away in late October 2015) and yearning to be able to write.

I spent the year blocked until a med switch happened in November, which I blogged about previously. It felt so good to write something of any length (I ended up with 63k words in the end) and that actually made sense.

Still it wasn’t the kind of story I was really hungry for, and still am; the kind I can get lost completely in the way that I did with Godspeed and Wishing Cross Station. I didn’t write those books, I lived those books—Godspeed for almost two years— and it is so hard to think of them as being a part of my past now.

They do live on, though, as new readers are still discovering my books daily on Wattpad and for that I am truly grateful. I don’t know how I’d have handled the demise of my publisher if I knew that it meant that no one would be able to read my stories ever again (without self-publishing, which I am not healthy enough to undertake.) So for Wattpad, I am truly grateful.

 

I’m grateful for my support system at home and my doctors; even if I do scare them with my scary tendency toward allergic reactions to almost everything they try to prescribe for me.

I’m grateful for the roof over my head and the food in the fridge. I am grateful that today, at least, I have the medication I need even if access to it may be questionable next year.

I’m grateful that I am finally learning to recognize pretty early when things are going off the rails and that I can email my doctor for instructions about what to do. This happened this past week as I suddenly flipped over into mania and was rearranging all the bookshelves in my apartment and the art on the walls and wanting to set fire to everything I own (wanting to purge possessions can be a warning sign of mania.)

So now I find my mood going downhill again with less of the helpful med in my system after ending up with too much of it in my system; it’s such a frustratingly delicate balance, and I am left with a headache, a darker mood and find myself wanting to cry.

Maybe it’s also the closeness of Christmas and the melancholy that it brings me personally. I don’t know.

But I am grateful for art fairs and the people who make the beautiful things that make them special. Grateful for a new Star Wars movie to look forward to, and looking forward to giving, which is the best part of the holiday season for me.

Empty chairs at the table will weigh heavily on my heart, but I will try my best to smile.

2017 is shaping up to be a very scary year, for many reasons, most of them political. I worry about losing my Medicare. I worry about a lot of things, but in the end the worry won’t change things. I have to take one thing at a time, because otherwise I will just get lost in the avalanche of anxiety and panic.

I’m trying not to think automatically that 2017 is going to mean nothing but hardship… I am trying to build into it things to look ahead to for strength and hope; it’s difficult when you don’t know from one day to the next where your head and heart will be emotionally but that is the nature of the Bipolar beast. The OCD and PTSD only complicate matters, as do my multitude of physical health problems.

Chronic pain is a miserable companion but yet it remains mine, still I try to find something to think hopefully about.

I usually choose a word to be my keyword for the coming year instead of making New Year’s resolutions, and I think that for 2017 my word will be simply that: hope.

Without hope, there really is no point in anything.

It's my sincere wish that you all find plenty to feel hopeful about in this holiday season, and the days beyond it.

Happy Holidays xoxo

bru

P.S. Another thing to be grateful for is in the photo at the top of this blog: the gift from my husband of a beautiful, retro manual typewriter. I’ve been writing poems on it and posting many of them on Twitter in recent weeks, scroll back through my timeline if you want to find some. Here’s todays: 

Typewriter Poem #28: