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Chapter 6: Blood, Sweat, and Fears

(I wrote this post two months ago but I was nervous about posting it. Here it is anyway.)

I’ve spent the last four years, two months and five days pouring myself into something that I didn’t love.

In retrospect, that seems like a lot of time. In the grand scheme of things, maybe not so much. Still, I’ve always dreamed bigger, wanted more. But all my life I’ve been too afraid to change course. Change is scary. Better to stay on the path you know and tolerate than to leap into the unknown.

I had to prove that I was strong, that I could stay the course set beneath my feet, stretching on and on before me. Twisting it in my head so that staying wasn’t about fear, wasn’t about the million anxieties needling in every decision. There was strength in staying.

That’s what I’d tell myself crying in the bathroom when life was too overwhelming even though it wasn’t supposed to be. Life was supposed to be the path, and the path was supposed to be safe.

That’s what I’d tell myself driving home and wondering if I could crash the car just right to put me out of commission for a few months so I’d have time to just breathe. There was no space for breathing on the path.

That’s what I’d tell myself when weekends stretched into endless periods of dread and depression, and it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed. But I did, because this was the path, and the path was security.

That’s what I’d tell myself when the doctors did tests and said there was nothing wrong so the logical conclusion was that the pain was just in my head but I knew for a fact that my chest was about to rip open with how much it hurt every morning. This was the path, though, and the path was comfortably familiar underneath the pain.

Until it wasn’t anymore.

I wish there was some sweeping, cinematic moment that I decided this, something with lightning sparking in the background and the wind blowing through my hair. But there wasn’t. It just happened. One day, the path wasn’t enough for me anymore. I’d given literal blood, sweat, and tears to something I didn’t love for the last four years, two months, and five days, and suddenly, that was unbearable.

I used to think there was strength in staying where I was supposed to.

But now I know the strength is in leaving.

Chapter 5: Panic

Have you ever felt like you were dying?

And not the “it’s so miserably hot outside,” or “I totally embarrassed myself in front of everyone I know” metaphorical kinds of dying.

Have you ever felt your chest hurting so bad that you think you’re having a heart attack? That no matter what you do you can’t alleviate the pain? That you scour your medicine cabinets for even a single expired painkiller? That when you can’t find any you try to go to sleep, only to realize you can’t sleep because how can you sleep when something is stabbing you repeatedly in the chest?

So when all else fails, you decide that you should go to the emergency room, because maybe you really are having a heart attack and you don’t want to drop dead in front of your confused dog. You drive yourself, even though you’re not really supposed to, because even through the pain and fear you’re thinking about the cost of an ambulance ride.

When you arrive at the ER, there’s conveniently nobody else there. Front of the line! So of course you promptly break down crying in front of the admin trying to take down your information.

Once you’ve sobbed your way through your birthday and medical history, they rush you back because chest pain is no joke. You’re in a room with three nurses, who bustle around you asking questions and prepping equipment and for some reason that really opens the floodgates. You thought you were panicked before. But the joke’s on you, because now there’s snot dripping from your nose as you hyperventilate, all while the nurse is taking your temperature and asking you to change into a hospital gown.

This isn’t your first rodeo. Chest pain means getting an EKG. EKG means a bunch of thingamabobs stuck all over your chest and arms and legs. Now they’ll find the problem, you think to yourself. Once they can actually get the EKG to work. Because you’re shaking too much to get a good reading. The nurses joke with you, smile, encourage you like you’re ten years old again. You start to take deep meditation breaths like your life depends on it. Maybe it does.

Four attempts later, one of the nurses whisks the results off to the doctor. Another sticks you for blood. Normally, you hate needles, but you can barely feel it through the still throbbing pain in your chest, and the panic still teetering on the verge of hyperventilating again. But then your partner walks in and you can see the concern written on his face and you didn’t think you had more tears in you but here they come again and oh, do you think you can give a urine sample?

Finally, after all of these tests, here comes the good part. They give you something to calm you down (probably because they’re sick of seeing you sob), and something for the pain. When the painkiller kicks in, the sudden absence of pain leaves a weird achy hole in your chest. That must mean it’s real. The medicine works. So there’s something there. Something to fix. Slap a band-aid on me and send me home, doc. You giggle at the thought of a giant band-aid over the top of a giant stab wound in your heart and maybe the Ativan is kicking in now, too.

The doctor does, in fact, come in at this point. You’re calm, ready to find out what part of your body is trying to kill you.

He says that all of your tests are normal.

Come again?

Normal. No heart attack. No irregularities. Just…normal.

And you think to yourself, well, that can’t possibly be right because an hour ago I was dying.

And he mentions that “A” word, the one you didn’t want to hear because there is no big band-aid for it and that this was all in your head.

Anxiety.

 

 

 

So you had a panic attack.

A really bad panic attack.

A panic attack with physical pain and palpable fear and red eyes and snot bubbles and partial nakedness.

Maybe it wasn’t in front of everyone you know, but you still feel pretty damn embarrassed.

That’s anxiety. There’s no magic band-aid. No quick fix. You fight it every day. Some days are good. And some days you end up in the ER with sensors hooked up to your underboob.

But you keep fighting in the hopes that, eventually, it will get better.

Chapter 3: The Motivation

Yesterday, I received a paycheck. Not a day job paycheck, but a check for writing. It’s not enough to cover the rent. It’s not enough to cover my car payment. I could splurge on a nice dinner with this paycheck. But somebody paid me for something I wrote, and that’s worth more than the number on the check.

It’s almost too pretty to cash. I want to hug the check but that might be weird. I want to laminate it and wear it on my chest. Again, weird. But the check means something to me, something visceral and so important.

See, I wrote this short story. Like every short story I’ve written, I cranked it out like my fingers were on fire, and then immediately hated it when I was done. But I wrote it, so I had to do something with it. I edited it, and submitted it, and got rejected. Over and over, more than a few times. I put a very personal piece of me out into the universe and the universe kept saying “no thank you.”

The first rejection always stings. It washes away the the delusion that the story is so amazing that someone will buy it on the first try, a delusion my brain tries to convince me of every time I submit a story for the first time.  Stupid brain. The subsequent rejections sting less, but feel heavier. Each one in the pile another weight on the scale towards likely failure, away from improbable success. That’s the kicker, though. There is no scale. There are no rules to this. Failure and success are always equally possible, no matter how many rejections you rack up.

Still, after a handful of rejections, I told myself this story wouldn’t sell. It was weird and complicated. It was too personal. Too female. Too ugly. Too other. I was ready to give up on it, let it collect figurative dust on my hard drive while I moved on to something better.

I sent the story out one more time, more as a final hurrah than anything else. I didn’t expect more than the “thanks, but no thanks” messages that fill my inbox. I let myself forget about it in the months after I submitted.

So I’m pretty sure I screamed when I opened up my email to see “Dear Ariane, we are delighted to let you know…”

My dog was very concerned, but in that moment I was so fucking happy.

Because this will be my second published story, and it’s more tangible than the first. One publication could be a fluke, a flash in the pan. Ariane, the one story wonder.

But two published stories means something. Two means everything.

And I have the check to prove it.

 

(If you’re curious about the story I’m writing about, it’ll be available in the upcoming issue of Room Magazine, out by the end of September.  http://roommagazine.com/issues/migration )

Chapter 2: The Objective

I always leave a little bit of soda in the bottom of the can. The last piece of cheese in the fridge will sit unless someone else grabs it. My inbox is filled with reminders for month-long exercise programs I’ve signed up for, followed religiously for four days, and then never looked at again. I started an online introduction to Japanese course that’s been stuck on “Telling Time and Counting!” for several months now. I should go back and finish. But I haven’t.

I have a problem finishing things. I’m not sure when it started. Maybe it’s always been there, another facet of my daily anxieties. My brain doesn’t like to stay focused on one thing for too long, because then the insecurities, the doubts, the worst-case-scenarios come creeping in. Better to move on before they take root. The grass is always greener with the next idea.

On a related note, I have eleven partially written novels on my computer.

Eleven.

Nobody ever made it big with partially written novels.

The pattern is always the same. New idea! Write furiously because this is obviously the next great American novel and nothing’s going to stop me now. Have another story idea, this one shiny and new and ripe for explosive writing. Abandon previous idea because that one was stupid anyway. Rinse. Repeat.

Only, I don’t think any of the ideas are stupid. They just need work. Work I wasn’t willing to put in before. But I’m determined to make it happen this time, shiny new ideas be damned (just kidding please don’t stop popping into my head I’ll just work on you later).

So this blog is to keep me writing. Keep me accountable. Keep me on track because there’s no going back now.

Chapter 1: The Delusion

So you want to be an author.

What you need is an idea. An idea can be anything. Only it can’t be anything someone’s already done. Or maybe it can, only you’ll do it better. Or maybe you’ll do the next Star Wars meets Harry Potter meets Batman and you can already picture the record-breaking movie they’ll make out of it.

And then you’ll throw that idea out and start fresh because that sounds terrible.

Then you’ll need characters. They’ll crawl around your head like maggots, begging to be seen, but still formless, still waiting for you to bring them to life. When you do bring them to life, they’ll keep changing on you. Can’t decided if they want to be butterflies or moths or ninja pirate samurai. You try to force them into boxes but they won’t go, so you carry on in the hopes that they’ll settle down eventually.

When you start to write, it’ll feel like fire from your fingertips. The words will spill out and you’re the next Stephen King and this is your destiny.

Ten thousand words later, you realize everything you’ve written is shit and maybe you should start over, but ten thousand words seems like too much to waste – 10% of the way there! – so you soldier on even though you’re really starting to hate Character B, and subplot #3 doesn’t make sense anymore.

You’ll get halfway through your novel and think: wow, there’s nothing else I can possibly write about this how did I think I could get a full book out of this idea. Simultaneously, you’ll think: wow, there’s so much more that I neglected to think about when I was outlining this thing that the amount I have left to write seems insurmountable. The juxtaposition of the two will drive you a little batty. But that’s OK. Authors are supposed to be quirky, right? Write.

So that’s where I am. Deep in the delusion that I want to be an author.

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