How the Year Tore Off on Broken Feet

Or, Hi, I’m back, and thank you for waiting

Art by Hollie Miller

The last month-and-a-half have been mostly a blurry haze of Too Much, although I have a proclivity for minimizing what’s going on my life until I tell someone about exactly what’s been going on, and then they are often aghast. Someone in my life who has at times not exactly been generous about my oddities, although I find the oddities perfectly normal, recently said to me, “I have no idea how you made it through your childhood intact.” It’s a bit like when you talk to a therapist and their face gets tight, obviously trying to keep from saying, “Dear God.” Every week I update my therapist and a lot of the time she’ll say, “Well, that’s a lot.” I almost never think it’s a lot when I start telling her it’s a lot, but it’s also like being Wile E. Coyote—you’re doing all right until you look down.

As someone who’s made websites and Diarylands and LiveJournals and blogs since the mid-to-late 90s, one of the earliest rules instilled in us was this: never apologize about how long it’s been since you last posted. According to this rule of thumb, you’ll probably be late with a lot of your posts, and no one really notices that you’ve been gone anyhow.

I’m violating this rule by saying that it’s been a while since I’ve regularly posted one of these newsletters, and I’m grateful to you all who have given me grace and the benefit of the doubt. I’ve had an autoresponder up citing health issues for a few weeks now after realizing that I was dealing with health issues, and it was only stressing me out further to feel more and more behind with my email. And now that I’m writing this, all of that time that was swallowed up by crises and brain gremlins feels foggy.

I’ll tentatively say it began when the people around me began to point out that I was talking too fast, making wild claims about things that didn’t matter (that I do, in fact think matter), hypersexual, hyperfocusing on largely meaningless projects, and so forth. My cocktail of psychotropics has been consistently useful in keeping my manic-depressive episodes stable and my psychotic episodes at bay (KNOCK ON WOOD), but for some reason—stress, I think—I’d been depressed for almost half a year, was unexpectedly hypomanic for a few weeks, depressed again, and then borderline hypomanic. A few times, my therapist told me that I was coming close to needing to be hospitalized, but it also felt impossible to stop working because C has cut down on his hours due to his body still in the throes of cancer recovery, and I felt like I had to pull my weight.

Some of you might remember that it was around this time last year that I flew home from Taiwan because C’s white blood cell count mysteriously dropped to zero for no reason that his Stanford team, nor Sloan-Kettering, whom they consulted, nor Harvard, seemed to be able to figure out. I set up a GoFundMe (and thank you all so much to those of you so contributed) so that I could stay near Stanford Hospital with Daphne instead of schlepping from San Francisco to Palo Alto every day. I went to the hospital pretty much every day from November to January; we celebrated Thanksgiving together in the hospital; I brought a little Christmas tree to the hospital and decorated it; we celebrated New Year’s together. The doctors eventually figured out a bizarre treatment to help C—I’m still not totally sure how it works except that rabbits are involved. But that was only the beginning of the year, and C continued to have health issues throughout the year. I called 911 once or twice. He had surgery. He was in the ER and then the ICU. I went to the ER on a full moon when I had a burst ovarian cyst.

I’ve been slogging through the revisions for my current novel. It’s my most honest and difficult book, and I only have myself to blame for deciding to write something that is straining my mental resources. I kept running The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy. I did a few speaking engagements. (Please, please reach out to info@esmewang.com if you have a speaking engagement for which you’d like to consider me. I have a speakers reel at https://www.esmewang.com/speaking.) I’ve been doing an absurd amount of trauma processing, which doubled my therapy bills for a few months (definitely not sustainable) and included attending a retreat for women who’ve experienced child sexual abuse (CSA) and confronting people whom I believe were culprits. I am doing pelvic floor physical therapy (due to the aforementioned CSA), am continuing to try and manage my fourteen chronic illness diagnoses.. Other things happened too, I’m sure, but like I said—I can’t remember them all.

Which is all to say: I’m very sorry that I’ve fallen behind. I plan to get back on the horse starting now. I’m also going to have what I think is a very delightful five-day sale where I’ll be sharing one thing every day (and ONLY for that day) for five days. I hope that you’ll check it out, including being able to purchase both Writing Through Brain Fog, The Cell Method, and an Implementation Kit all together. To sign up to be notified about when this sale starts and what we’ll be offering every day, head on over to https://www.esmewang.com/bulletin.

Another way that you can receive notifications is if you sign up to grab the YOUR WRITING MATTERS desktop wallpaper below. I’m personally very fond of it.

To grab this free wallpaper, go to https://members.esmewang.com/wallpaper/

Onward,

Esmé