I’ve been disabled for almost twenty years now, ever since a long fall military diving training messed up my nervous system (and immune system along with it). For the last couple of months I’ve been constantly ill. If the kids cough, I spend three days throwing up. Worst still, these maladies are overlapping, eroding my underlying health and aggravating my disability.
While all this is going on, my wife is striving against incredible pressure from work (she’s amazing), the kids are dealing with all the changes that happen when you’re 2, 4 and 6, and you need you parents close by, and I am trying to take advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime by writing a book specifically requested by a client (alongside a sci-fi novel, a research project and trying to keep my radio production company alive.)
Not to put to fine a point on it, and with all the damage to my enormous masculine pride admitting it entails, I’m not coping. So what should I do? What should any of us do, fighting to manage our lives while the world goes crazy around us?
Be Kind
I can’t do this for myself, but to you I’ll say please, please be kind to yourself and to each other. It’s easy for me to make a fuss what with my war wounds and courageous battle against injury (do I need a sarcasm tag there?), but a lot of people are struggling during confinement and sometimes the worst wounds are not the most obvious ones. Give your friends a call. Give yourself a hug. If you need to take the evening and watch a Brad Pitt film (or any of the Chris’s, including Chris Pratt, I don’t care what church he goes to – he’s never tried to shove it in my face), then take the evening off to admire some muscle. I’m also going through a bit of a Kate Winslet phase, so there’s that.
I know two people now who have died from COVID (death follows me like its shade followed Emily Dickinson – sadly I’ve never got any good poetry out of it) – so alongside being kind, WEAR YOUR FUCKING MASK (it doesn’t count if you don’t wear it over your nose) and GET THE FUCKING VACCINE (otherwise you may as well go sit with the flat-earthers, upon whom I shall be pouring hot lava as soon as I recover the strength to stand.)
Sorry for the harsh language, but the people we’ve lost should never have been lost, and if you can’t manage to put on a fucking mask than as far as I’m concerned your culpable.
Gosh, this started with being kind! I guess I’m in a worse mood than I thought.
Keep Writing
Now is an easy time to get blocked. I know being ill effects my self esteem – I guess it doesn’t match my James Bond-esque self image to be clutching to toilet bowl at 3am in the morning. It’s harder to write if you think your writing is shit but, you know what, it doesn’t matter. Somewhere in amongst all those words will be a good sentence, a good phrase, a fine pair of words. That’s better than if you didn’t write at all.
I’m not managing a lot of words a day at the moment. But I am getting ideas down, and if I can just get a clean week….
Have faith in yourself.
I was disabled when I got my degree, and my doctorate. I was ill when I sat the bar exams and was first of my call to the bar. Heck, I’ve been sick ever since I was injured and I managed to rattle out all sorts of work. It’s a normal part of the process for big jobs to feel impossible right before you complete them.
I will finish both books this year. I will publish more plays, and when they finally let us out I will round up some teams and record the wonderful scripts we have waiting. Just because I don’t know how yet doesn’t mean I won’t do it. That future Keith is a clever bloke, and he’ll have the summertime (and hopefully less disgusting child spread diseases).
Don’t underestimate your capacity to do amazing things. And don’t compare your amazing things to those of others, because they don’t count. Asking my then future wife out on our first date was a damn site harder than the bar exams, and the bar exams were REALLY hard. Everyone’s fighting their own demons, so don’ t underestimate yours – but don’t overestimate them either.
Get More Rest
This is going to sound silly from someone who hates sleep as much as I do, but try to get to bed earlier. The extra stress from everything that is going on, plus the typical February hit to your immune system, means your body needs more recovery time. Skip that extra episode of whatever your watching and go to bed. Reading in bed is, of course permitted. That counts as sleep, right?
What’s happening next?
I expect to have first drafts of the next two novels for spring. I’m learning to write around my illness – the tricky bit is setting myself up so I can get away quickly when I need to vomit, and not having anything fragile in a vulnerable position for when I faint. The less said about when both happen at the same time the better.
Thank you for tolerating this article. It is mostly me venting, and trying to get the website moving again. I have a backlog of written-up book reviews that I will start putting up and there are new book tours coming. A new Little Wonder play will be out within the month, and then we’ll get a semi-regular schedule going while we use up the last of our content (obviously we can’t record until the pandemic is over, although we do have a couple of ideas about that.)
One of the things I’ve had to come to terms with this year is that I am never going to “get better.” I am going to stay broken, and be broken, until something comes along that kills me. My fantasies of recovering my pre-disability health were exactly that. Fantasies.
But.
Something comes along and kills us all, sooner or later – COVID is busy proving that. I have had more of life than I deserved and achieved more since I was hurt than when I was able bodied. A little pain is the price we all pay to be alive. I think it’s worth it, but it is never going to be easy.
So be kind.
photo credit: Steven Pisano Storm Clouds over Red Hook, Brooklyn via photopin (license)
