Top of the wheel

I’m not setting goals anymore in regards to novel writing, they get done when they get done but I haven’t given up; Yes I’ve had a respite since September 2022 and that is a long time, unreasonably long, but I had to have it due to mental health healing.  I had a hard time, there were lots of things happening in my life I had to think about – think a lot.

Lots of things in fact, lots of different problems to solve and many of them just needed me to try and calm myself enough to allow myself to think, then once I had managed to do that, I needed to calm myself again and stop thinking in order to heal from it all.

There was grief, death of a relative, a revelation I wasn’t sure was a trick or not, an announcement, an opportunity, a break up, a diagnosis and so many things all rolled into one major thing for me – that I could not cope.

Ultimately my entire life has been turned upside down and I am still in the situation of not really knowing if it is a good or bad thing just yet, I am still teetering on the edge of trying to determine which – it could be either!

It’s a strange situation to be in.

I feel at the moment I am standing on top of a wheel and if I fall backwards I will land in shark filled waters and if I fall forwards I will fall safe into someone’s arms.

At present I am still on top of the wheel.

It’s like sitting on a bomb really.

My mind has been so preoccupied with all these things that I haven’t been able to keep to my reading goals, my writing or practising of my art.  I haven’t even been able to hold a conversation without my mind wandering off, worrying about things.

It’s only been this past week I have manage to slowly and surely restart my habits.  I have started to write a little again, I have started to read a little again and I have even done some art.

Not as much as I would normally do in a day, in fact, I am doing less than ten paragraphs every couple of days towards anything, my one poem a day has become three or four again; my art practises are happening every couple of days.  It’s more than what has happened between September 2022 to March 2023 in any case and I am proud it’s coming back together again.

The frustrating thing is this – my typing speed has got extremely slow and I can’t seem to speed it up again.  I used to write 90 to 120 words per minute and now I struggle to get above 40.

I am making a lot of spelling mistakes and errors, cognitively I am suffering a lot and I don’t know what to make of it.

My Easter Project and Project AD has hopes to be finished before Midsummer, but I am not going to force myself, it’s still early days for me, I still haven’t fully healed.

In reality, I need a holiday – get out of this environment, get out into nature and remember how to laugh and play again – playfully scream – wash my hair with the rays of the sun – chase faeries – hug trees – and try to learn how to feel happy again.  Because happiness is a distant memory, one I am not sure I can remember how it feels anymore.  Strange as that sounds…

I also need to learn to trust again.

Trust in the process, trust to love again, trust that I have self-worth, that I am someone deserving and someone who can be free to laugh without someone complaining about the noise or worrying I am going to get over excited and hurt myself.

Because a couple of years ago I was bedbound sick and laughing really did hurt me, because it would cause a coughing fit and my spleen was swollen and so it genuinely was rather painful to laugh – but those things are behind me now.  But still, out of habit I have people trying to calm me down, because they’ve forgotten how much I have healed.

I need to lose myself in feelings that are opposite to negative ones – I need to, because I don’t feel very human anymore.

There are times I have sat back and realised all the negativity around me, all the bitterness, envy, jealousy, contempt and discomfort and I wonder what am I becoming exactly?  Am I becoming a demon?  Because the only things I can feel are variations of darkness…

It’s a scary place to be – see, there – fear – another negative emotion… but you see, I try to remember something a motivational speaker called Mel Robbins once said – that fear is the exact same chemical in the brain to excitement and that you have to change your perspective and realise when you fear something that you might actually need to try and tell yourself it’s exciting, rather than something to fear.

Odd… but I am trying this trick.

I am on the cusp of something amazing which is about to happen in my life and all I can think about is how scary it is – I know there are wonderful things coming with it, especially a lot of love and tenderness and protection – but I still can’t help but focus on that one major problem.  I have like 30 pros and only around five cons to this chance, yet it’s the cons that are taking up brain space!

When you see it like that, you realise there is something seriously wrong with how you are wired!

Wired might not be correct actually… trained is perhaps the best way to describe it.   Because I used to be such a Positive Pollyanna and it has only really been in the past decade that the Pollyanna in me has started to die.

I need to do what happened in the book Pollyanna – I need to find my tribe to help resuscitate me, bring me back to the light.

Although saying that, I think I don’t need to, I think – if I am reading things correctly, my tribe has come to find me and all I need to do is wait a little while longer, then reach out my hand fearlessly and say to myself – I am excited to be a part of your life!

Thanks for reading!

Sods law

I believe I am writing daily to add towards my blog consistently for the past three to five months now, that I can now say I don’t believe that scheduled posts are any longer necessary.

I think that I can now write daily and publish daily, though no doubt I will have some things in drafts for when I think my immune system is going to have a hit again – talking of which I seem to be developing a really bad bacterial ear infection right now and a cold, so who knows what is going to happen in the next couple of days.

Expect up to four posts per day, but I will refrain from doing more – because I don’t want to overload my readers.  I will try to make a poem daily, but we’ll see. 

I do aim to do more prose like short stories in the future too.

I am saving up money for a passport as my instinct is telling me something is going to happen soon where a passport is going to be needed.  It will cost £85 I think and will take 10 weeks to get at the current length to get it.  You can fast track it for a week but there are specific requirements and I think it doubles the price too!

Thankfully one of my personal debts has gone, which means I have enough money to save per week.  Unfortunately it could mean I won’t get my passport before Christmas, but we’ll see.

I don’t like to spend money on things I don’t need, so I am unsure if I will spend money on the passport, unless I have some notion as to why my instinct is telling me I should do it.  So I am not going to be too hasty, because £85 is two weeks food money here, it’s a lot for nothing… if you get me?

So I am trying to save £5 a week for it, I have been trying to do this for a while now and I am currently the third of the way.  But as I said, I won’t get the passport until I know for sure; there is a reason to do so!

Another thing I am trying to do is to clear the house a lot more.  Sure, a lot of the things I am getting rid of, I still actually want to keep – but I am getting picky now.  I have a feeling that my time in the near future will mean that I will need things like that less and less because my time will be spent doing other things – so get rid of the stuff I won’t need in order to not only make more space, but not to become a hoarder. You know?

I like knitting and crochet, but I know that it causes the carpal tunnel syndrome to flare up, so I avoid that activity these days, I am debating with myself, should they go?  I know during the winter I knit myself fingerless gloves and hairpieces, because they can be done within the hour, but should I actually just say goodbye to that hobby?

There are lots of things I need to wave goodbye to, old clothes that are now too big on me, styles that were given to me by my mother a few years back… do I really want those hanging around in my cupboards?  No, I don’t, because I don’t intend to wear what she picked for me and I don’t intend to gain my weight back anytime soon either.

For the first time since Henry was three years old, I am nearly in the 16 stone mark, another two weeks and I should be there!  I have came down from being over 22 stone, it’s amazing – because I literally thought I was going to die and never be thin again.  You ask Paul, this time last year I was sure I was dying!

I think the reason why I got this big, this time around was because I was bedbound sick and I had the attitude of “well, I’m going to die anyway”. 

Seriously I used to think that, because my lungs were so badly damaged over the four pneumonia bouts I’ve had since 2014.

It’s amazing the recovery I’ve had.  I really did give up.

But you know what made me start the changes in Easter?  The fact that I started to see that if I died, nobody would actually care, nobody but Paul and Henry will attend my funeral and I would be a forgotten part of the world and that made me feel – no fucking way am I going to exist in the crap that I’ve had and nobody is going to know about it… I am determined to make the world know me and I want them to mourn me when I die.  Vain I know, but it worked to give me the kick up the ass I so desperately needed!

I have a feeling that the more I DON’T WANT the more of it I am going to get, so what the Hell!  I don’t want fame, yet it creeps along behind my back, I don’t want someone to help me, yet I am inundated with kind helpful people… I mean the universe is sick in the head isn’t it?

You want something… too bad… you don’t want something… here your cup runneth over!

I desperately want a dog, so my house has no dog… when I decided ok I can live without a dog, someone comes along and says, hey do you want to look after my dog for six weeks whilst I tour Europe?

It’s like the universe loves making me rant at it because its funny or something…

Ok, ok, ok, I really don’t want roast lamb anymore….I really don’t want to be thirteen stone… I really want to be alone… I really want to be ugly… I really want to have an uncaring partner… is it going to work this reverse psychology or is the universe going to double agent me right now?

Yeah, so I try.

Well anyway, happy reading.

Health update & cataloging books

For the next few days I will be cataloguing all of the books in this house (with maybe the exception of my son’s bedroom as I want to live till the end of the week), to put on Goodreads.com as there has been some debate from some of my reader friends about just how many books I actually own because according to what they see on Goodreads I don’t have much.  Well I only used to add those that I bought at the time I have been a member of Goodreads, not all the ones I had before I became a member of the site – so, apparently I have to prove my hoarding addiction to the world – lol.

So that is my challenge for the week and it is back breaking!  You’re probably laughing your heads off at what you think is an exaggeration, but for me it is a reality.  Being bed bound sick for the last 7yrs has severely weakened my core that even standing up for more than 15 minutes at a time is very painful.  I think the diet I have been doing for immune boosting is working, because I am having more days out of bed, in fact I haven’t had a full day in bed since around the 21^st of January.

I still need to go back up there regularly, but I am definitely seeing an improvement.  I am also taking extra vitamins with it all too.  I am not losing any weight, in fact gaining it – which is disturbing for me, because my calories are less.  Sugar and fat content is less, food is more nutritionally dense than before and I am slightly more active than I used to be.  It is puzzling why, I have the weight gain.  I am eating approximately 400 calories a day less than I did before these changes and I am doing more around the house, I am now able to care a little for the rabbit and even make snacks and lunches whereas I hadn’t been able to since 2016.  The weight gain is only 5 pounds, but it is freaking me out – somebody suggested my insomnia could be a reason for it, because your  metabolism is determined by your sleep patterns, not sure what to think of that!

My sleep patterns are all over the place.  I usually can’t sleep before 5am and sleep 9 hours a day on average, sometimes I need 13 hours, don’t know why.  I hate sleep, I really find it a time wasting thing and I resent that I need more than the average person because of my infections, arthritis and so forth.  I am trying to force my body into a sleep pattern, by forcing myself to wake up by 10am regardless of when I slept the night before; I started doing this 3 days ago, and last night I think my body decided OK, I will sleep now and the last time I saw the clock it was 02:10am, so I think it’s working a little.

I am really trying to discipline my body.  I am pleased also that whatever is happening to my body, I am able to do around 15 minutes of exercise before getting really tired – it’s a big thing for me, because as I said, I have hardly been able to move for a few years and all of this has happened much quicker than I thought it would.  But all in all there is not a massive difference in my pain levels or infections. 

I’m just trying to force myself and it is torture, I will tell you.  I need to get back to my athletic self again.  I used to be very athletic, I was always up and doing things and loved sport and I miss it so much!  Honestly, this was NOT a lifestyle choice for me, I genuinely became too ill to move and this is why I resent people who think they know about overweight disabled people, people like Anthea Turner!

I have been the victim of disability discrimination and fat discrimination for the past few years and I have seen the worst of humanity – it is especially prevalent with doctors who should know better!

Let’s pray you assholes who fat shame and hate on disabled people are never put into a situation where you are injured and sick enough not to be able to move and that you get fat too and get karma kicking your asses like you would deserve!

Fear, death and Dracula

Spoilers included of the new BBC Dracula series that was on at Christmas 2019.

I would have written this sooner, as it has been a week now since the BBC’s Dracula was aired on our TVs and I must say, of all the vampire movies and series I have ever watched, this is the only one which had played into four of my most dreaded fears.

Regarding horror and the realms of fear, I am not known to be a sensitive person, but, like all human beings, I do have some sensitivities which make me fear aspects of life and some scenes in this Dracula did affect me badly in some way or another – though saying that, I would watch it all again. 

One thing of the four must have been so pronoun that I have forgotten it entirely, I just remember at the end of episode three that I knew there were four things I had to list about this series here – I did write it down but it must have been amongst the papers where I spilled orange juice when I had a coughing fit the other day.  (I lost a lot of works in progress that evening and I am upset about that, they were hand written in my sick bed).

One of the scenes which upset me was the “something in your eye” moment with Jonathan Harker and Sister Agatha, where sister Agatha paused in her conversation with Mr Harker long enough for him to remark what was wrong?  She pointed out that there was something in his eye and indeed there was a fly crawling on the eyeball of the eye, which is bad enough but then the next thing that happened was he blinked and looked sideways and the fly found itself behind the back of the eye of Jonathan Harker whom at this point was going through what I can only describe as a “Vampire in Brooklyn” body falling apart and dying, ghoul stage.  He had no idea what was happening to himself, and then he asked Sister Agatha if it had gone?  She gulped and said yes, but it was still behind his eye.

Eye scenes unnerve me a lot, anything to do with eyeballs affect me in horror.  Usually the gouging of them or the stabbing or eating of them, such as the scene found in Mrs Peregrines home for peculiar children – that sort of thing really makes me shudder.

The second and third things which played on my mind a lot in Dracula was the two things which scare me most about death and dying.  Since becoming ill around seven or eight years ago, I often have nightmares and thoughts about death and what may or may not happen during or before death.  One repeated nightmare I have had is that my body is rotting away and literally decomposing whilst I am still conscious and that there is nothing I or anyone else can do about it, then because I have rotten sufficiently enough not to move or talk, people presume I am dead and then bury me, whilst I am still alive and conscious and that this never ceases.  There are scenes in this Dracula where anyone bitten by Dracula is immediately a decomposing animated being forever and ever and that they eventually beg to be killed by him so they that no longer have to suffer rotting consciously as they are.  I had thought that I am a weird person for thinking such things and that not many people have done so, I had wanted to write this as a story, but now I feel like it would come across as copying. 

The third thing is another death fear.  My mother had always tried to talk me into accepting the idea of being cremated when I die because graves cause more pain to the visitors than if I was literally turned into dust and thrown away somewhere.  I had always told her that I fear to be cremated, because what if I wasn’t properly dead?  What if someone got it wrong?  There are neurological conditions out there which can render people in a dead like state but are still in fact perfectly alive – how awful it would be to be woken up by being burned to death in a sealed container where no one can hear you scream?  She always called me silly for that, but this was another scene that Dracula portrayed and it did so incredibly well.  Oh and yes, I still hold firm that a burial is a better option for me, I have discussed this with Paul already as I am convinced I am dying of something or another but I just haven’t been told because if doctors commit to diagnosing me they might have to commit their money to try and save me and I really do believe that some doctors won’t tell patients the truth.  I am to be buried in a lovely place on the outskirts of Rugby town, it is a newly planted forest, a tree is planted for everyone who dies and is buried there, the tree will sit on top of a bio-gradable coffin with me in it and you can choose any native species of tree to have on top of you with a plaque on it – yes, I want to be buried in a haunted forest.  I would like anything that helps the most life of the woodland – an oak I have been told is the best, though I had thought of having a berry tree of some sort, like a rowan and then I thought of the avenging spirit of the elder and birch trees, I can see me becoming someone who would help others find justice if I were to become a ghost.  Protecting victims of the forest, the animals, and children, anyone who might need my help, fiercely, like some mythic forest guardian.

It was such a very good adaption to Dracula though I must say in some places it quite lost the plot.  I liked how they portrayed death as unsexy and how it showed the harsh reality of what death could potentially bring to the unwary or to the ignorant young romanticists.  I did not, however, like how it portrayed Dracula as a greedy, untidy eater.  I am pretty sure that drinking blood as a vampire would be similar to indulging in tomato soup, you do so neatly, you don’t just pick up the bowl and pour it into your mouth without a care of how much dribbles down your chin and clothes, especially when you are as well dressed and polite as he was.  Aristocrats are not slobs, vampires or otherwise!  It does seem to be a thing these days, I know Christopher Lee often dribbled when he played Dracula, but this day and age they act like bloody vultures, literally, they may as well tear the stomach in half of their victims and shove their heads into the cavity for what mess they blooming make.

I always imagined vampires to be discrete and clean creatures, you can’t walk down the street in the middle of the night looking like Carrie fresh from the prom – it isn’t done, especially nightly!

Well that’s my two cents on the matter.

Daily goals as a lifestyle

I no longer want to be in the league of procrastinating artists and writers, things are going to change.

For the past three weeks I have been living my life on a goal based lifestyle, thanks to some very motivational videos I have found on YouTube and the book I purchased last month called “Think and grow rich” By Napolean Hill.  Now I don’t fool myself for one second that art and writing is going to make me “rich” at all, don’t get me wrong – I am not just focusing on the money aspect, I am focusing on the aspect of happiness and feeling like I am achieving something, even if the rewards are purely emotional.

Obviously money would be nice, but ultimately, health and personal achievements for me, leads to a happy life and that is more important to me right now than financial gain.

I have had these talks before on my blog, the “No longer procrastinating personal prep talks” and they have always reached a point of returning back to old comfortable habits with excuses after excuses after excuses – I am sick and tired of failing myself and I watched on one of these videos last week that when you reach a point of being sick and tired of being sick and tired that’s when your life will start to change and I have reached that point in my life.

Living life day to day with goal based intentions for every day, is working out for me.  On the nights I forget to give myself a goal for the next day, I notice I go back into old habits, so I am almost paranoid that the last thing I do before I go to sleep each night is to list my goals for the following day, so I don’t slip up again.

Most of my goals are simple and may seem like nothing to anybody – how much do you think you are going to achieve in a day by doing these things which in their eyes, could be procrastination anyway – but for me, it is constructive.  It keeps me doing the “good habits” which make me a productive person.

My usual day to day goals are;

To write my morning pages via a site called 750words.com – this is non-negotiable, this is a must do, everyday forever.

Revising at least two pages of my old NaNoWriMo attempt from 2016, this was abandoned and forgotten in my drawers since 30th November 2016.

Writing two poems for advanced schedule posting on my blog, I am a month in advance at the moment, so the poems you are currently reading were written approximately a month before you are actually reading them.

Practise some sketches and art pieces in my sketch book, at least half a page a day.

Then there is a fifth random goal, it could be anything, such as take a walk, do something particular in the garden, bake a cake, visit someone, anything really.

This isn’t all that I do in my day, this is part of my daily goals, the idea is to get me into the habit of having something to wake up for, something to do.  I lost my purpose in life by allowing sickness to dominate me, but now I am trying to take back some kind of control in my life again and so far it is working.   I would never have thought about living my life in a goal based day to day way, if it wasn’t for the motivational archive on YouTube.

Ovipets and health update

Today has been very exciting on Ovipets.com because yesterday they bought out a new species, a bear species the ursa!
I have wanted a bear, dinosaur, crocodile and cow species for a long time. I am so glad it’s the bear.
Unlike most times when they’ve bought out new species, I was actually active on ovipets.com and not on vacation mode and not too sick to play and I actually had 800 credits to generate the new pets, finally and I was one of the first to generate the ursa, in the first 20! So I made 16 pairs, not for a project, because I don’t approve of these rule infested projects, but to have a pair of every available colour except for grey.
Because I am ill a lot, on the days where I am not too bad, I love playing ovipets.com and flight rising as well as online scrabble to pass the time away, because I am often too sick to do anything else than sit down, especially with the dizzy spells I get a lot of when infections are starting up again.
It is games that inspire me to write too, some games give me a sense of mixing up animals to create new species for stories that have never been done before – almost chimera like beings. Others have already been done, like the other day I accidentally went into the fish tab to breed my stallion – oops, but actually in Scottish mythology that exists! The Kelpie, that’s like a mermaid for horses!
Playing ovipets.com in particular has also helped me understand art and colour mixing. I am very popular with people who play ovipets, for the bright colours and rare genes. I rarely sell anything for credits because it’s hard to get your money back once you’ve bought credits. So really, Ovipets is just a hobby for me. I am very generous, but in regards to these new species that come out once in a while, I am not that generous. I don’t randomly give up new species to an unpaid just to be nice. I generate lots and lots of the new species to breed, so in a few days’ time I can then give them out to the AC (Adoption Centre) for the unpaid.
Unlike some members of ovipets too, I don’t ditch the so-called mud coloured pets, because to me, I can work with them, did you know that when you choose the right colours to breed with, you can make a brown pets offspring, orange or even pink? Be more adventurous and don’t ditch the muds and find out for yourselves!
Talking of mud, I am a little disconcerted with the egg of the bear in this game – it’s a beehive shape and when you have black and red it looks bad enough, but two various shades of brown to get that stereotypical grizzly look, looks like something you find on the street by a lazy dog walker!
I mass breed on ovipets.com and I can breed over 300 pets on an average day. My main chosen species are, Equus, Lepus, Lotor, and piscium. I no longer breed Cebidae or Cetacean, because I simply don’t like them on this game. There is nothing against monkeys and sea animals in real life however.
Because I breed a lot, Paul helps me feed the pets whilst we talk in the evenings. He can be there for two hours just clicking feed for me, primarily because our internet is slow lately. But, whereas he would like to do this every day to cut down time, he can only do this really every 3 to 4 days.
He encourages me to breed whatever I want and how much I want, because he sees that lately, it’s the only thing that really perks me up, when they hatch and they are beautiful it makes me happy. Something that is rare lately.
I used to be a very positive and happy person, but four years of constant pain gets to you and wears you down. I didn’t realise that I had a cholesteatoma in both ears until our last consultant discussion; I could be heading towards surgery very soon, though how soon I don’t know. I had a mastoidectomy when I was 17, I can’t have it again in the right ear and because it was completely removed, apparently that’s almost an unheard of practise.
If I end up having the same operation on the left side, I will be unable to bend over and properly care for myself for up to two years, I remember from last time. I have no idea how Paul will cope around the house then, because I will be unable to do the smallest of things for the first year in particular.
I know a lot of people say they’ve had this surgery and I’ve exaggerated, but my consultant has told me that my condition for some unknown reason is the worst his seen in his 30yr career. This new consultant is amazed that I’ve had a total mastoid removal and isn’t too happy to allow that to happen again. He wants to give me a bone-anchored hearing aid and sew the ears up to prevent infections, but personally I don’t see how that’s going to help.
He is also confused about why my mum never allowed me to have my adenoids removed when I had my tonsils out aged 5. I am not too thrilled when he told me that he will remove the cholesteatoma and adenoids at the same time if surgery becomes the option. Which he did hint will more than likely be the case, I won’t know until approximately 8 weeks from now.
Anyway, I hope that I won’t have a bad recovery like I did before, whatever happens.
Since I went back to ovipets last month, I’ve neglected my flight rising a bit. I am finding flight rising boring lately.

More subjects in the blog

Time to expand this blog a bit; there will be new categories and tabs for you to choose from within the next few days, they will include;

 
A page about my experiences with Cosmic Ordering

 
Game reviews

 
A rant page for me to let off steam and see if my fellow readers also suffer the fools I do

 
Art, my own, my friends, and those that inspire me

 
Alternative lifestyles, a page about witches, vampires, Goths and the BDSM community and much more

 
My pet’s page, where I will update about the lives of my many pets as sometimes they inspire me

 
Contests I’ve entered

 
Health update as I am often sick

 
Daily Pages dedicated to the work of Julia Cameron, the author of the artist way

 
Food and places to eat reviews

 
And last but not least, recipes

Crystallaphones and plans

My plans for after Christmas are to find distance or online courses to learn how to read music and actually start becoming proficient in a musical instrument that’s not piano/keyboard based; this is because my interest in song writing and composing is becoming almost unbearable to ignore, particularly as I don’t have anyone in my life who’ll cause me stress anymore (other than a 3yr old son, but he’s sweet and easily worked around). 

I have found a new instrument that takes my interest and I hope I am lucky enough to do a part exchange with my electric guitar to get one, but I’ve heard to find one even in a music shop is rare, the instrument is… a crystallaphone, or as some people will know it as a glass xylophone; however it’s very likely that I’ll end up with a left handed electric guitar as a replacement (as I didn’t take my disability into consideration – my left hand has short tendons).

I am still heavily interested in watercolor painting and sketching, but I have put that on a back burner since I’ve been ill for the last three weeks, also the house needs organizing as I need to prepare a workspace for the art and the music I would like to take up.  I am slowly introducing myself to small chunks of work a week, roughly two hours a time, three days a week to settle into it because I am regularly ill, hence the unemployment I am in, I can’t hold a job down, not even a voluntary placement these days.  The mind and heart is willing but the body will not comply.

I need to find something that I can do from home but does not require me to use the telephone (not because I am unsocial, but because I have fluctuate hearing and regular ear infections that even an amplified phone is useless with) and despite this being the age of texting, not a lot of professionals or customers like communicating with staff via text only and most forget your hearing problems because when they talk to you face to face and you respond (because you’re an excellent lip reader) they think oh it’s not so bad.

Yes I know it’s strange that a person who has regular hearing problems wants to compose music, but there’s been others out there who have done it proficiently, so why can’t I?  I believe I am right in stating that Beethoven was stone deaf wasn’t he?  And one of the bee gees, he was like me, partially hearing, wasn’t he? And their music is great, isn’t it?

I don’t want to be a singer, I couldn’t take the commitment there because I never know when I am going to be sick and most of my sickness is based around practically all the aspects of the ear nose and throat, which doesn’t help for a singing life.  When I was younger I trained in opera but after the age of 12 I couldn’t sing it regularly enough to be considered talented in it, because I developed regular mastoid infections which needed regular operations etc. and singing became quite painful for me literally.

So with that said, I am trying my best to make myself a creative life and I hope that when things take off I find people who are sympathetic to those who have health problems and will help me work around them in a non-stressful manner.

 

 

 

recent issues

Having second thoughts about taking up NaNoWriMo, I struggle with 250 words a day these days, let alone trying to squeeze in 50,000 in a month – reason?  Migraines, frequent for months now, also I’ve been told that I am showing mild signs of pneumonia which is a worry.  I’ve been ill for weeks now and I am getting progressively worse, been practically bed-bound though for two days, thankfully I have a new laptop so I can do things when I can semi-think.

My main concern is I am unsure how the job center will react to the fact I haven’t gone to the voluntary placement interview yet, particularly as it was supposed to be for the next day and they saw me happy and healthy, but I woke up really bad and it’s not left me for almost 3 weeks now.  I am worried; I wanted to do the voluntary work too as it focuses on a charity I never heard of before but on a subject close to my heart (mental illness and mental learning difficulties and brain injuries) – hope this won’t turn against me?

I am so used to London benefit offices that I worry about every visit.  Unfortunately my husband is unemployed since the National Wildlife Trust could no longer afford him and made him redundant, this is unfortunate because I’ve always had health problems which have made problems with me keeping a job down (auto-immune problems, operations, and rheumatoid arthritis, vertigo and anemia problems as well as panic attacks), needless to say as soon as he became unemployed we had no choice but to go on benefits and they wouldn’t allow him to go on it and support the family I have to go for the interviews too.  Unfortunately even voluntary placements get funny if you have too much time off (even if you’re known to be sick), so I don’t have much of a life as far as social commitments go.

On the positive note my husband is doing home-based voluntary work for seismologists, if at the end of a 9 month period they feel he knows what he is doing he could get employed by them – hopefully the job center will be considerate about this, meanwhile he is trying hard to find work in other places but being aged 57 he is struggling to find anyone who’ll take him seriously, despite his educational and employment history being, Naval engineer, art tutor, customer services, photographer, and having an ecological degree with engineering.

I think my health problems are one of the main contributors to why I am afraid of being published, I cannot commit to anything because of it and really will publishers sympathize with a sick/disabled writer, even if they seem extremely good at what they’re doing?  I doubt it, but I hope I am proven wrong in time.