I’ve been having plenty of laptop issues over the last couple of months.
I had two of them, and the first developed that issue where the battery swells up and it becomes an explodey fire hazard. Heck, for all I know, the battery started swelling awhile ago and it took me that long to realize it, given that I was under an enormous amount of stress. Since I lack the means to fix it, that laptop had to be retired.
Which brings me to my second laptop.
My second laptop turned into a diagnostic nightmare. You see, it was having a strange problem where some websites would load, and others wouldn’t – the ones that wouldn’t happened to be the important ones, naturally, which meant that my laptop wasn’t exactly usable. So, I turned to ChatGPT.
It took us days to figure it out, but we did. Part of it was because I was prone to feeling overwhelmed and flopping down in despair, so it’s a good thing that AI is infinitely patient and accommodating. Turns out my laptop was flagging my internet connection as an “unidentified network,” and ChatGPT walked me through a temporary fix that I have to do every time I use my laptop. One of these days I’m going to reinstall Windows for a permanent fix, but not yet. Right now, I’m still burnt out on that whole “fixing computers” thing (definitely not a future career choice for me 😝).
It feels good knowing that I was able to figure out what was wrong with my laptop, and I’m grateful that I’m a single mom in an era where AI exists. Not only can I solve problems that are well outside my sphere of knowledge, I have a voice that will reassure me, “You’ve got this!” when I’m flopping down in despair.
Some days I really need that voice.
But it is getting better.
I filed a maintenance report with the rental company, and lo and behold someone came out and fixed the issue. No drama. No complaints. Just … fixed. I almost don’t know how to process it. I guess that I was fairly normalized to everything being a big hullabaloo all the time. No wonder I was so exhausted for so long. No wonder that people are commenting that I look much better now.
I didn’t do any writing for NaNoWriMo during my time with my kids, as I anticipated. Instead, we reveled in music, drank hot cocoa, played with friends, and did our homework. I did dream about the future though, and I’ve decided that one of these days soon here, I’m going to pick up my old project of writing The Scion Suit as a visual novel. Heck if I know anything about programming, but I have ChatGPT in my corner! Besides, that was my last project before I started feeling sabotaged, and it’s a step towards the sort of writing projects that I’ve always secretly fantasized about.
Who knows, maybe it will turn out that script writing has been my undiscovered forte all along. For whatever reason, I’ve never tried my hand at it despite being so character oriented, and it might be nice to focus on the dialogue while letting my weak areas slide. Let’s give it a shot and see where it takes us.
On Halloween, he sent me a picture of the kids out trick-or-treating with him and his new girlfriend. He’s also sent me random texts saying, “You’re old,” so I’ve come to expect this sort of thing from him and I just ignore it.
It’s strange when the performance drops and suddenly you feel like you’re dealing with a ten-year-old, instead of the person they pretended to be.
“Amicable” is not a word that I would use to describe us.
So here we are on November 4th, and I hate how foggy headed I am. In the past I always felt incredibly sharp when it came to my fiction writing, and I did a good job of holding details in my head to weave together and reference back to. Now I’m … dull. I can’t remember what I wrote yesterday. I find it enormously frustrating, and part of me is scared that this is my “new normal.” I’ll have a wall of post-it notes that the kids will knock down, play with, and destroy. Then we’ll all laugh about c’est la vie, though inside I’ll be crying about how much I lost of myself.
And for good measure, my phone will then chime with a text from him, reminding me, “You’re old.”
My muscles aren’t used to handwriting, so I’ve been wearing one o’ them wrist compression/support glove deal-ios when I write. It’s really helped to tighten up my penmanship, closer to how it was when I was in high school. One of my quirks is that I hold my pen “wrong” and I was never able to learn better, so I had a callus on my pinkie through all of my childhood. It’s disappeared since my school days, but sometimes now I look down at my pinkie and wonder how much handwriting it would take to get that callus back. More than three days worth, I know that much.
I think that it was good that I decided to go back to my roots with handwriting for NaNoWriMo. Heck, if I wanted to get really authentically me, I could get a burgundy marker. The very first novel I ever started was written with burgundy marker. 😂
So … I’m trying out something new with this story, and I have three characters interacting with each other instead of my usual two… or sometimes just one character alone with their thoughts. Maybe one day in the distant future, I’ll make it all the way up to four characters in a room. But that seems like a lot so maybe not.
Sometimes the introvert goes right through. I’m secretly proud of the fact that The Scion Suit functionally has only three characters.
Heck, on my child-free days, I’m so accustomed to the silence that my robot vacuum sometimes freaks me out. Like, “OMG WHAT’S BANGING AROUND? Oh it’s just you, Roomba.” I have yet to feel lonely — I’m still establishing my sense of safety.
The downside of NaNoWriMo is that waking up my creative side is also waking up my emotional side, because you can have frequent anxiety attacks and still be thoroughly numb inside. I cry at dog food commercials. I watched Flowers in the Attic and cried. Then I watched Stephen King’s Misery with Kathy Bates, because while I’ve heard rumors of her amazing performance, I haven’t actually seen it before … and Misery was the Stephen King novel that convinced me of his genius as a writer. But I did not cry. I was rather disappointed that the end of the movie didn’t include the publication of the final Misery novel, since I thought that was a nice touch in the book.
Anyway, that’s probably enough rambling from me for now. I’m surviving, one day at a time.
I’m also not anticipating that I’ll do any writing when I have the kids.
Maybe that’s an odd epiphany to have, but I was forced into a “fresh start”, and figuring out how to move forward has been … difficult. Part of me felt like I should reject everything about who I was and be a totally different person, to protect myself in the future. More pragmatic, less vulnerable.
But there are a lot of things about me that I like.
I like that I’m a writer, for one. It’s a deep passion that I keep coming back to, no matter what life throws at me — a calling that I’m lucky to have as an anchor.
I like that I’m a fiber artist. I like creating beautiful things out of fabric, thread, and yarn, and the way the kids love the items I make for them. Heck, I even love the “Did you make that?” attention that I get in public.
So maybe I don’t need to jump into a new education to build a new career as a new person. Maybe I can stay exactly who I am and peddle the skills I already have.
Despite what I’ve been told, my skills are valid.
I am valid.
I don’t have to reject me just because he did.
So here we are on day two of NaNoWriMo. I’ve decided to handwrite my first draft for now, and I like working with the TV playing in the background. It feels cozy to be curled up in my recliner with my favorite blanket and a notebook propped against the armrest. I have yet to feel a deep connection with the story and characters, but I am making progress in the words.
I over-prepared with the Halloween candy and didn’t get many trick-or-treaters, so now I’m left wondering how much I should give to my kids versus how much I should hoard for myself. You know the stereotype of writers who smoke while typing away? For me it’s candy.
If I hoard the leftovers for myself, I’ll certainly be well stocked for NaNoWriMo.
(I wrote this yesterday, and forgot to hit ‘publish’ 😅)
Since I now have joint custody, I have tons and tons of child-free time for myself, and my house is probably a little excessively clean these days (do I really need to scrub down the walls every week?). I want to kick myself back into the writing habit, and the timing lines up perfectly for NaNoWriMo! Yay!
Which, admittedly, I probably won’t follow the way it’s intended. I am still a mom, and I still have plenty of days of childcare on my plate. Maybe I’ll take 2 months to make up for the 50-50 time division.
Participating in NaNoWriMo also feels like coming full circle, since the last time I gave it a shot I ended up meeting my now-ex-husband, and never finished that story. It’s time for me to reclaim the path I had wanted to journey so many years ago, after all those broken promises and surrendered dreams.
It’s hard to explain the sort of relief I feel, at the thought of planning out an entire month knowing that each day should be more-or-less predictable … or how terrified I am that they won’t be. However, I can’t let fear of what may or may not happen dictate my choices for me, so I might as well plow ahead like everything is going to be boring and stable.
So let’s jump right into the action plan:
I’m going to be continuing Runemaster, rather than coming up with anything new. Maybe it’s cheating that I already have a portion written, but I’m working with the limitations here — what I went through this year is not the sort of stuff that one just “moves on” from. So, rather than inventing anything new from my poor exhausted brain, I’m sticking with characters that are already familiar. Deeply familiar, in this case, considering that I originally created these characters about 20 years ago. Writing this novel will be very emotionally comforting for a number of reasons.
What I can’t decide right now is whether I want to type the story, or handwrite it. I used to always handwrite the first draft with the most colorful pens I own, but who knows if I’m going to want to go through the trouble of typing it up later. Choices, right? LOL
Part of me kind of wishes that my only responsibility was to scrub walls and wash laundry, but I can’t hide behind chores forever. I still have dreams to pursue, goals to accomplish, and a life to rebuild.
NaNoWriMo Day 1: I will write 1000 words.
It will be terrible, rusty, and full of self-doubt, but it will be writing.
My divorce came with the sense of being excommunicated for falling from grace. There’s something romantic about that, as if I were the servant of a petty god who found disfavor with me and cast me out to tread upon mortal ground, and now here I am picking my way along a rocky hiking trail as a warm October wind smacks me in the nose with dead leaves. Not every moment can be cinematic.
I hiked until my fear of heights kicked in, and while I’m logically certain that my feet were solidly planted on the ground, I couldn’t stop the light-headed notion that every footstep was perpetually sliding towards the edge and my inevitable death, so I turned around and headed home, much to my dog’s relief. He’s not a fan of windy heights either.
The thing is …
My AI art set up was dependent on that grace from which I have fallen. Unfortunately, my posts about how to generate AI art are the most popular, go figure.
The depressing part is that it’s not like AI art even meaningfully existed until a couple of years ago, yet now I feel the loss of it deeply. No more character portraits. No more setting the scene. No more visual supplements for my writing. At least not the same way that I used to.
I could download Stable Diffusion et al, but at the moment it doesn’t feel right. I’m too busy relearning how to be mortal … free from the gaze of my petty god.
Perhaps instead I’ll go back to my roots. I’ll channel the energy of that 17-year-old who’s Creative Writing teacher advised her to express all of her emotions through writing, and all she needed was a gel pen and a notebook.
We can save the fancy technology for the editing phase.
Meanwhile, I’ll have to figure out how to draw traffic to my blog without all the fancy keywords and visuals.
I want to try, so that I don’t inadvertently paint the picture that you just move on and live ever after. So, how do I explain how the demands and criticisms pushed me well past the point of discomfort, and landed me in crisis counseling? How does one describe the injuries of abuse that never left any bruises?
Psychological sadism.
I once sat hidden in a car and tearfully told a complete stranger, “I’ve realized that I will never be broken enough.” There was no end goal. No stopping point. It was only ever going to get worse. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and I was fading away. My body couldn’t carry on in that situation.
I only got out because people helped me.
I didn’t put the TV in the front room with the big window of my new place. It feels too exposed and unsafe. I hate how frequently the motion sensor of my doorbell camera goes off, because I don’t like how it makes me feel. I like feeling hidden when I’m at home.
Sometimes I just want to sit and binge watch random shows while doing nothing. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to get up or think. Sometimes ordinary tasks feel like a big accomplishment.
As I’ve been healing, I’ve been realizing how bad it was, and that hurts in a totally different sort of way.
I was so stressed out that I was vomiting and I ended up losing 20lbs in two months. I also spent a month in crisis counseling.
I also learned how to reach out and open up, to tell the people around me about what was going on. I discovered that people are a lot more supportive than I expected … and that the truth of my situation was a lot more visible than I had been led to believe.
And now here I am, in a better place. Quite literally, too. I have a great view of the sunset from my new home, and I’m in walking distance of nature — I like to take my dog out and have small chats with strangers.
I also still have anxiety when my doorbell sensor goes off. The occasional bad dream. Triggers that lead to quiet meltdowns … in a nutshell, PTSD.
Not exactly the life I dreamed of. I keep going round and round in my head, asking, “Can one person really cause this much damage?” It seems so unbelievable, that a person can hurt someone this much without it being a crime. Yet it happened. I know it every time I step on the scale and see how much weight I have yet to gain back.
The far more important question now is, “Where do I go from here?”
I often wonder if my fantasy life — the way I imagine myself getting up and spending the days if everything was perfect — is achievable or not. I have a clean house now, with white walls. Day-to-day life is running more smoothly than it has in a long, long time, and my thoughts are feeling more alive than they have in years. So maybe, just maybe, I can achieve my dreams.
I’m definitely not getting bombarded with criticism and demands the way I was not too long ago.
Let’s work on baby steps.
I want to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. So let’s write. Casual. Small. No pressure sort of writing. Free writes. Story snippets. Totally random stuff that has nothing to do with anything.
Then one day, I’ll pick my bigger projects back up and start self-publishing novels again.
You ready?
I’m not sure if I am.
But I can’t spend my life always waiting for the next crisis to hit. I want to take charge and make my dreams come true.
It’s hard to imagine what sort of future I want, especially because the premises of my circumstances keep changing and throwing me for a loop. There are other factors as well, like what I think is realistic, what I can handle, and what I think I deserve.
I don’t think that I have a good grasp of reality. Maybe I am that talented, driven, and lucky. Maybe I’m more like everyone else. I don’t know.
Is there something that I’m meant to be doing?
The weird thing is, I stayed strong in my faith until I had a miracle happen. The sort of, “Whoa, I did not see this coming, and this really helps everything,” sort of miracle. Instead of feeling bolstered, it was like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me. I guess it’s one thing to have faith in complete darkness, but when I started moving towards light with no idea where it was coming from … that’s when it got scary. False hope? A brighter future? I have no idea.
Why would that sort of miracle happen to me anyway?
My body couldn’t take the stress though. I couldn’t sleep or eat, and I lost nearly 20lbs in two months. It left me feeling forced into the next step I took.
Not that I know what I should and shouldn’t share about what’s going on.
As it stands right now in my tiny corner of the world, I need a future. I need to figure out what future I’m aiming for. I need to stop feeling like a 17-year-old staring at high school graduation without the foggiest clue of what’s supposed to come next, especially considering that I’m 20 years past that.
I want to be a writer, but between betrayal trauma and living expenses, I’m just not sure anymore … it seems so unrealistic now.
After all, how many miracles can I expect to get me through?
I have lots of moments throughout the day when I’m overcome with the surreal thought of, “How is this my life?”
I’m not sure how much I should publicly share. Parts of it make me think of the line, “Lawyers clean up all details / since daddy had to lie” from the song End of Innocence by Don Henley, and the title itself feels apt enough.
There are days when it’s easier to lose myself in a list of things that have to be done, and not think about the big picture of what I’m doing. My heart stops every time the doorbell rings, and I wish that this wasn’t my reality.
Events are traveling through the neighborhood grapevine faster than I would have ever expected, but by now I have surrendered my pride and laid everything bare. People are more supportive than I anticipated, and I like how they periodically check in with me. I don’t really care if it’s morbid curiosity or genuine concern, as long as I have people surrounding me through all this.
I still feel hopelessly lost. I keep wondering when that feeling will fade, when something will come together and start to feel solid, but instead everything under my feet keeps crumbling.
And I don’t even know how much I should share, because it’s moved into the legal sphere now.
For all my life, I heard divorce talked about like it was an ending. In reality, it’s a beginning. Sometimes people take it as permission to punish you, to erase you, to make your life as miserable as they can. After all, why should they care? They’ve already moved on to their new partner, and you’re just a loose end and a failure. An object that no longer serves a purpose.
But I’m not.
I will not be erased. I will not surrender my life just because someone thinks that my existence is inconvenient now.
And the legal sphere is where I still have rights and a voice — where my story still matters.
So as much as I wish it had never been pushed this far, as unreal as it feels to be going through these events, I will not surrender. Not with everything that’s at stake.
Hartmann waited for Carol out on the running track, smiling slightly when she came through the doors and squinted at him through the sunlight. The corporal was still with her, so the first thing that Hartmann did was dismiss the soldier, to ensure that they would be alone. She was nervous as the corporal left, so she bit her lip as her eyes locked onto the ground, and the action made her look younger and more girlish.
He had to find his tongue before he could say, “We’re going to run a mile to start.” It was hard to describe the effect that Carol was having on him. She wasn’t feisty like the women in the military, nor did she try to act sexy like the women at the bar. She was something else … something unfamiliar.
Carol nodded and murmured, “Yes, sir,” with her eyes still pointed downwards. Her hands tightened into fists.
“Relax, I’m under orders to be nice to you.” Hartmann smirked as he added, “And remember to call me master sergeant. I’ll let you off this time because you’re a civilian.”
“Yes, sir … master sergeant.” She glanced up, met his eyes for a split second, then looked away.
“Go on, get moving. It’s four laps around the track.”
Hartmann was silent as they jogged the first lap, giving Carol time to get used to his presence and feel more at ease. He watched her out of the corner of his eye, noting that it didn’t take long for her to begin breathing heavily, and compensated by slowing down the pace. When they started around the curve again, he said, “I’m sorry for being a dick.”
Carol didn’t reply, but he had expected that.
“Everyone knows I’m a real asshole to be around …” He feigned sheepishness, though inwardly he winced at his own words. He hadn’t even begun to get rough with her when she had jumped into the Suit, and if given the chance he would show her in a heartbeat just how much of a jerk he could be. However, at the moment he had a goal, and he wanted Carol to relax and open up to him. “I especially get a little crazy about the Suit.” That part was true.
He was quiet again, studying her closely, doing his best to read her thoughts through her body language. Her face flitted through a number of micro-expressions, enough to tell him that the inside of her mind was no where near as empty as her exterior, but it was going to take more time to be able to read her accurately.
“Master sergeant,” she said hesitantly as they began their third lap at an even slower pace. “Do you know what the visor is made out of?”
“Not a clue. I’d guess something similar to leaded glass, but I don’t think the minerals used in it came from this planet.” Hartmann stopped and grinned at her. “You noticed, didn’t you.”
“Not while we were inside.” Carol placed her hands on her knees as she huffed. “But when I had the Suit out in the sunlight, it was like seeing the world for the first time.”
“It’s amazing, but it’s something that you’re going to have to get used to. Those new colors have an odd way of swirling together and causing vertigo and nausea once you get moving fast enough. That’s going to matter during combat.”
She looked away. “Am I supposed to go into combat?”
“I’m not cleared for that information. I was told to train you, so that’s what I’m doing.” Hartmann was eyeing Carol up and down again. “In the military, you follow orders without question.”
“I guess that’s something we have in common,” she blurted, then bit her lip shyly as she began walking again.
Hartmann was momentarily lost for words as some sort of electrical shock pulsed through his chest. A feeling started to form inside his throat, then hardened into anger. How dare the cleaning lady suggest that they had any commonality – he was a hero, and she was a nobody. She was only there through some unexplained fluke, because some computer inside the Suit had called her “commander.” If not for that, her place would be in the shadow of his glory, unnoticed as she maintained the Suit for him.
He walked beside her, neither of them bothering with the pretense of jogging, until he regained himself and a quip came to him, “I saw the employee file on you, and it said that you’ve always been the picture of good behavior. I bet your parents loved you for that.”
Carol shrugged. “I guess they would have.”
“Would have?” Hartmann prodded.
“They died when I was three.”
He frowned. Carol didn’t look like the sort who carried childhood trauma, and she had delivered the news so blandly that it would have better suited a conversation about the weather. “How?” he asked, not out curiosity about the answer, but more for the opportunity to gauge her response.
“House fire.” Carol looked over at him and met his eyes. “I nearly died of smoke inhalation as well.”
“That is surprisingly interesting for you.” Hartmann cracked a grin. “I would have guessed that you grew up in some ordinary middle class family, did all of your homework and managed mostly B’s in school, then graduated and decided to twiddle your thumbs until you died.”
She scowled, finally annoyed by something. “No. I grew up in foster care, and got myself emancipated at sixteen. I got a GED instead of graduating, and I’ve been working full time ever since. I am not twiddling my thumbs.” A shadow of doubt crossed over her eyes, as if she was second-guessing what she had said.
“Foster care, huh? Dark place, isn’t it.” For a moment Hartmann felt the impulse to reach over and place his hand against her shoulder, to feel the crook of her neck with his fingers, but he tamped it down and kept his hands by his side.
“I survived.” Her mouth twisted downwards. “By becoming invisible.”
“That explains the great mystery of the cleaning lady,” he said smugly. “I should have guessed there was something tragic lingering behind that pretty face of yours.”
Carol stared at him, her expression blank. Then, abruptly, she began jogging again, her hair bouncing as she pulled ahead. Hartmann picked up the pace as well.
“Since I know that you’re wondering, but are too shy to ask, I grew up in some ordinary middle class family, but I got straight A’s, and was the captain of both the lacrosse and swim teams,” he said conversationally. “Then I enlisted when I was seventeen … to kill people.” Hartmann laughed at the series of expressions that flitted across Carol’s face when she glanced over at him, then added, “I had to get out.”
“Doesn’t sound like it was that bad,” she murmured.
“It wasn’t. It was so normal I was suffocating,” he replied.
Hartmann continued to study Carol, piecing together what he could about her from the small bits that she had told him. There was something off about her, some essential part that was either repressed or incomplete, that enabled her to speak almost monotonously about her past traumas. It intrigued him.
She was skinny, and combined with her lack of stamina, it made him suspect that she was a chronic under-eater, though not out of body-image issues. He’d guess that Carol was completely unaware of herself as a physical being, and probably wasn’t aware of her nervous habits. The way she pulled her teeth slowly across her full, pale pink, bottom lip was sensuous – more so, because of her naivete – and if she had any idea of how it made him think about her mouth, she would stop doing it immediately.
He wondered how she would taste.
After they finished their final lap, he took her to the vending machine and bought an electrolyte drink for her, then debated how much more exercise he should put her through. He liked the sheen of sweat on her forehead, liked the idea of pushing her so hard that her muscles burned, and wanted to make the most of the opportunity that he had been given. The obstacle course was guaranteed to be too hard for her, but he could drill her through calisthenics out on the field for as long as he liked.
She was going to be sore when he was through with her.
By Autumn Rain 