Lessons

You can give it all you got, and squeeze blood from stones, and you can give a little more after that.

Writing Down the Bones

One of the things I've tried very hard to do with my adult life is to be a strong woman. I took it for granted that I was nominally intelligent: I could put a sentence together and pass a test without homework and I didn't put my hand on the stove just to see what would happen.

What I never had - or felt I never had - was physical strength. I always felt big and uncoordinated, and all attempts to lose weight were met with fierce resistance from a body that will never see a size smaller than two digits.

It took me a long time not only to accept that but to embrace it, and to begin building myself not based on the template I was given by the popular media, but a template that a body like mine could find more immediately useful; something far more realistic and attainable. I started taking boxing lessons and lifting 30 lb weights and going jogging, and I firmed up and got super strong and finally started to feel comfortable in my body. I started to define myself by how far I could run, how much weight I could lift, how good I felt when I threw a punch.

All that changed when I started to get sick, and found myself rapidly falling toward the fulfillment of that media template in the skinny department but spiralling futher and futher away from the goals I'd set for myself - the ones that really mattered.

It's hard to fall off the path I created for myself. I worked a long time to get comfortable in my own skin, to find my own strength, and to feel like that was all brutally ripped away from me with the unexpected devastation of a natural disaster was... well, devastating.

One of the most horrifying parts of coming out of my sugar coma and being able to think clearly again, to look forward, was my deep fear that now, finally, after all this work and all this time, after I finding the strength in myself, after learning to love and accept myself - all that was being taken away from me. I wasn't going to be strong anymore. I couldn't be this person I wanted to be. I had to take on the shroud of an invalid and live out the life of some other person, someone I had not chosen to be.

And that hurt. That was hard.

Worse: it wasn't true.

But when you're getting to know your new body, your new condition, when you're learning how everything works now that something is broken, you aren't sure what's true, what's not, what's possible and what's pure fantasy. You read up on all the horror stories and you lie in bed at night and you fight all those feelings of despair and you tell yourself, "I'm going to be different." It's what I've told myself about writing fiction for the last fifteen years: failure, giving up, that's what happens to other people. I'm going to work hard at this. I'm going to succeed.

And, like the writing, there are days when I feel like a total fool. You wonder if being delusional is really the appropriate way of handling yourself. Maybe you should be preparing for a different kind of future. Maybe you should be studying tax law and forgetting about climbing around Peru. Maybe you should just be small and quiet and weak.

There's already a template there to step into. Pull on that hopeless shroud! Complain about how "hard" it is cause you have a "condition"! Just hide under your bed and feed on your own feelings of self-hate and self-disgust at your body's own weakness, at your inability to cope like the strong woman you were supposed to be.

You can flog yourself with this shit forever, but it's not going to get you out from under the bed.

One of the hardest things I've had to do is give myself time to pick myself up again. I wanted to spend a couple of months setting things in order, learning my limits, and emerge like a phoenix. I wanted to be better this minute, this hour, today!

I have learned a lot about my limits since May, and some of those limits have been disappointing, but most of them have been surprising. I can still do all the crazy shit I want to do. It's just going to be harder. Some days that does get me down; it feels overwhelming. It feels like the whole sky is going to fall down, and it feels too big for me to bear, and then I flog myself for being so weak minded, so stupid, when did I become so weak?

The hardest lesson of all has been to measure out when I need to be hard on myself so I don't hide under the bed and when I need to ease up to allow myself the time to heal that I need. I have a whole new template to create. The last time I did it, it took me ten years. At least now I have a base to work with now, something I was very happy with, but learning to accept myself, to create a whole new conception of self, to some extent, that's taking so much longer than I was ever prepared for.

It is such a long road. I realize life keeps going until it stops, and, like writing, it doesn't get easier, but it's supposed to get better.

I am working toward a better place. A stronger place. With some patches perhaps, some addendums, some allowances for error.

There is always someone I'm striving to be, and I try to live like I'm already that person. It's why it's so difficult now to act when I feel so lost.

Year's Best SF 12

I was going to wait until they officially posted the TOC, cause there's always the chance of the story getting cut, but I've seen a couple of other people mention that they've got stories coming out in it, so hey:

My short story, The Women of Our Occupation, should be coming out in Cramer & Hartwell's Year's Best SF 12 this spring.

If you buy a copy, I'll even sign it for free!

BW is Back! Long Live BW!

& etc.

Let's Be Bad Guys

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

Come and visit my new blog:

http://kameronhurley.blogspot.com/

And remember to change your links!

Comments are now closed.

THIS BLOG IS NOW UP AGAIN (2/12/07)

They Want to Send Me to Indy Again

Oh sweet jesus.

Review & Interview: "Occupation"

Eric Joel Bresin, Clarion grad and Tangent reviewer has a review up of "The Women of Our Occupation," (I am trying very hard not to argue with my reviewers...) and a short interview with me (my third!).

Have at it.

Gee, Ya Think?

The standard measure of obesity known as body mass index, or BMI, is badly flawed and a more accurate gauge should be developed, according to doctors in the United States.

Gee, you think that a random height/weight calculation that's not adjusted for *actual* body mass percentages, let alone gender and fitness level, might be a bad indicator of overall health?

I've always considered it about as scientific as phrenology, myself.

How many more years are we gonna get this thing thrown at us before it's retired?

Writing in Friday’s Lancet medical journal, the researchers from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minn., found that patients with a low BMI had a higher risk of death from heart disease than those with normal BMI.

At the same time overweight patients had better survival rates and fewer heart problems than those with a normal BMI.

Some Stolen Goodies

Reversed Proverbs.

Do not Troll the Feed
Let lying dogs sleep

Wave rock. Kewl.

Check out some volcanic smoke rings.

(all stolen from Spy's Spice)

Lazy Weekend

Took Friday off and spent most of the weekend sleeping, which is how I tend to deal with stress. Finished reading a few books that I'd been sitting on for awhile, cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, vacuumed the throw rugs, watered the plants indoors and out, did the laundry, packed my gym clothes for the week, cooked some tomato soup and made a salad for lunch.

I gave myself the weekend to relax. One weekend where I tried really hard not to think about all the things I wasn't doing, the things I should be doing, because I needed a break from gnawing at myself. I think I've been mostly successful. Lord knows I've gotten a lot of reading done. I'm hoping the long downtime will help kick-start my week. Jenn's gone until the 28th, and then it'll be September, and I'll have another long weekend, one where I'll hopefully get some shit done.

September.

Honestly, I'm looking forward to cool nights and a blanket of leaves.

Mmmmmm...

Whiskey.

OK, I'm only allowed to have one shot of it these days, but I'm learning how to nurse it....

Sugar, Sugar

My weight has stabilized! My doctor's not putting me on drugs! My sugar is good! I got more free insulin! They stuck me with needles again! But it was OK!

It Sure is Dark in Here

I got up this morning at my usual time - about 5:20 am - and pulled out my mat and my weights and gazed out the big bay windows and realized... it was dark outside.

I'd been noticing the shortening of the days, of course, but for some reason it just really struck me last night, and again this morning. We're losing the light. The summer's almost gone. My god, what happened to my summer?

Well, three months ago, I woke up in a hospital. For three months, my whole summer, I've been doing... this.

The last couple of weeks, I've been pretty deeply depressed, suffereing from those weird moodswings that you're well aware are crazy. The recognition is good, because it keeps you from acting on them. But they're there, and in order to not act on them, you have to acknowledge them. One morning, you feel like you're a loser and not accomplishing anything and you should just overdose on insulin and die, and by that afternoon things aren't so bad, and you're not bad at this writing thing, and then that evening life is shit again and you have no talent and you're going to die alone and be eaten by dogs.

It's a totally irrational way to live.

There's been a lot of turmoil here, trying to restore my friendship with Jenn post-breakup, dealing with sugar levels and weight gain and the huge gaping hole in my life where my writing used to be. I keep opening up files and staring at sentences and moving things around. This morning, I wanted to burn The Dragon's Wall and bathe in the ashes. And watching my summer tick by... going... going.. gone.

Jenn and I had a long talk last night, and she's made some decisions to better take care of herself, and I've been working very hard at being more emotionally demonstrative (in addition to repairing our friendship, she has her own huge issues as well - she's going out on the job market this year, and the world is full of fuckers), and some of my extreme terror died down. I had this huge fear that we wouldn't be able to repair anything, that we wouldn't be friends anymore, that I'd have to move out - somehow (god knows I can't afford it) - and we'd never speak again, and I'd have to tack up my friendship with Jenn as one more thing I'd lost to diabetes.

Because, really, what a lot of this crushing weight has been these last three months is trying to figure out how I'm going to live my life; how I'm going to fit in the rest of my life around this huge chronic illness. And yes, it's manageable, but I haven't been totally sure *how* manageable. That's something that takes a lot of time and experience and experimentation. Things are getting easier - I'm figuring out the diet/insulin dosage equations; I have a cooling travel pack for insulin that makes it easy for me to go wherever I want with my insulin; I have very few low sugar episodes that wipe me out for forty five minutes at a stretch; I know it's possible to go to the gym and not wake up in a hospital.

And some of what I've realized, coming again and again back to the page, to the pages I wrote before I got sick, or pages I was writing while I was progressively getting sicker, is that some of the things I was interested in, the approach I took, the worldview I had, the way I felt, has changed. It's changed a lot.

I don't know that I can express exactly *how* it's changed, but there's something very different in me when I look at what I've written now, and more often than not, I wonder what the hell I was thinking, or I think of totally different roads for stories to go in than I'd thought I was going in before.

I've been listening a lot to the soundtrack to Solaris, because it's haunting and creepy and it brings me into this silent, still place where I look out at the world and I can see that everything's different. Not darker. Not lighter. Just... different.

People, you know, we don't really change. We're always going to be, at core, who we are. It takes a profound emotional experience to alter you significantly, dramatically, in a short amount of time. Other changes happen more slowly, they creep up on you, until one day you wake up and you don't recognize the person you used to be.

It's not so dramatic as that for me, but there's some kind of difference. And it's strange and it's scary and I'm not sure what's going to happen on the other side of it, but it is what it is.

I lost a summer, but I think I'm getting a whole other life.

Or at least, quite literally - another shot at it.

I Had the Strangest Feeling This Morning...

... that something interesting is about to happen.

I'm the Most Dangerous Kind of Feminist!

Do I get a cookie? Do I? Do I?

The Brilliant Educated Girl: This is a girl with one hell of a mind, and because of it she spends too much time thinking. Whether she feels she deserves more simply because she is smarter, or she was filled with feminist propaganda in an institution of higher learning, there is no greater threat to Man's sacrosanct position as master than the BEG. To make matters worse BEGs are usually FAGs (Fucking Angry Girls). These girls are pissed, and imminently capable of furthering the feminist agenda. They often have a softer face in public in order to obfuscate their true nature. They may marry men, but only after they have busted their balls. The whole concept of proverbial castration is the creation of the BEG. Note that BEGs tend to be liberal with the occasional (fanatic) conservative. Conservatives are just too dumb to fall into this category. Kameron Hurley seems to fit into this category perfectly."

Oh, how I love the internets!!!

When is a Book Not Worth $4.99?

These are the questions that plague me.

How Much Is it Worth To Extend Your Life? (and, for how long?)

Before the discovery of insulin in 1921 (by a Canadian! Who says the Canadians don't do anything useful!), by the time you were diagnosed with type I diabetes, you maybe had a couple of months to live.

In my case, since I was lame and didn't go to the hospital until I dropped into a coma and Jenn called an ambulance, I would have died that night.

In fact, today is my three-months-yay-I'm-still-alive-anniversary-date.

In fact, as the cardiologist from Durban pointed out to me in the ICU, if I would have been living in South Africa in the 1980s and come in in as bad a shape I was, I would have died anyway. They wouldn't have had the resources to save me.

If you're wondering how much saving a life costs, it's about 30K (in this instance, at least). My insurance covered all but 6-8K of that. To extend my life, it costs me about $1800-2500 a year in medical visits and supplies.

That's a doable amount of money. Not great, not spectacular, but - like the disease - manageable.

I'm basically living on borrowed time, extending a life that should have ended three months ago, and extending that life costs money. I've weighed the potential risks and benefits, and you know, I figure $2500 a year is a small price to pay to live. I spend more a year on food, and I need that to live, too.

But what happens when extending your life a year, a month, a week, costs 30K? When one month of treatment is 4K, and the average person on that treatment only gets three more months?

What's the worth of your life every month? I'm delaying the inevitable because it's possible that "the inevitable" is another 60-70 years away.

But what happens when "the inevitable" is a month, a week, a day, an hour?

What's the hourly worth of your life?

Because I want to say that every minute, every hour, is priceless. You can't measure that. You can't put a sticker tag on it. But somebody's putting a price on your life, and it's you who's stuck in the middle, wondering whether you should feed your children or give yourself another hour to help find them a better place to live when you're gone.

How do you measure a life?

Note to Self --

Three units of insulin for the evening meal really is too much, even when you're having a square of low-carb chocolate afterwards.

My doctor can also kiss my ass when it comes to this insulin resistance thing. I'm down to 25 u of the long-lasting stuff in the morning, 3-5 units of the short acting at breakfast, 1-2 u at lunch, and 1-2 u at dinner.

This is down from 27 u of the long-lasting stuff, and 4-10 units of the short acting at every meal.

Low carb diets rock for diabetics.

I have also never eaten so many damn vegetables in my life.

Also: candied pecans are God's food.

I'm telling you: GOD'S FOOD.

Writing Today

Because it's good for me.