In 2023, I went to bed.
Every year, I struggle with finding the right title or phrase that fits the year. Not this year. In 2023, I went to bed and stayed there. I ate most of my meals in bed. My son visited me… in bed. I got out of bed long enough to shower and sometimes leave the bedroom. But then I went back to bed.
These year-end summaries have been a part of my life since I was thirteen. I didn’t always publish them. I didn’t keep them. Sometimes, I didn’t even write them down. But, on New Year’s Eve, I pause to reflect on how the year went and what I could have done better.
It’s not an exercise in blame. It’s all about personal growth. What could I have done differently? Where did I stray from who I want to be? No one’s perfect, but we each evolve throughout our lives. I want to embrace that growth and acknowledge that change. It’s a process.
This year, more than any other, I will struggle with NOT blaming myself for the mess I made.
Because, for the first time in my adult life, I failed. Yes, I know the proper way to think about it is, “I tried.” But still.
I failed.
There. I said it. It’s a thing. I’m not proud of it. But it’s the truth, and I’ll own it.
Let’s back up.
When I got pregnant in 2015, I was 36 years old with cerebral palsy and a spinal injury. None of us, including my doctors, knew what to expect. So, we agreed to take it as it came. They tested me for all the things. The tests came back good. At about 18 weeks, I started tipping over at random as my leg went numb. That was fine. The doctor put me on modified bed rest, which just meant I’d work the rest of my pregnancy from home and go to regular physical therapy.
There were signs of anxiety throughout the pregnancy. The nursery had to be DONE by 26 weeks. We had to be ready. I was born at 28 weeks. The baby might come when we weren’t ready. (Just to be clear: There is no getting ready for a first child. I understand this now.) Then we had false alarms. I sneezed. Did I pee myself, or did my water break? I didn’t feel the baby move. Did I just miss it, or is he in danger?
At 38 weeks, Steve and I met friends for dinner. Sitting in the booth, I kept shifting as my back cramped. I drank more water over the course of dinner. When we got home, I had some weird muscle spasms. I took a warm shower and drank more water. There was no horrible pain, no water gushing down my leg, no blinking sign that said “YOU’RE IN LABOR.” None of that. Just muscle spasms.
I have spastic CP. Muscle spasms are part of my normal life. Of all the things I was paranoid about during pregnancy, muscle spasms weren’t one of them.
Around 2:30 AM, I realized that “contractions” might just be muscle spasms under another name. I started timing them. Three minutes apart. Great.
The doctor on call was, unfortunately, the one doctor in the medical practice I had not met before. He clearly thought I was a moron.
“You’re supposed to call at five minutes apart.”
“I know. I’m sorry. They were just cramps. I didn’t realize…”
“Go to the hospital now.”
“Yeah, okay.”
<click>
I woke up Steve, and we went to the hospital.
“You’re not screaming in pain,” Steve noted.
“It just feels like cramps,” I replied.
By that point, I was scared and excited and overwhelmed… What if I messed up and the baby was in distress? Did I fail my baby?
But no. Everything was fine. Contractions were close together, but I wasn’t in hard labor. (I don’t know what hard labor is supposed to be, but I imagine it’s more of the screaming and swearing type of thing.)
This was good news. I was not supposed to go into labor for a variety of reasons, so we all breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn’t that dumb.
A few hours later, I was holding my perfectly healthy baby delivered by c-section. My pregnancy, which was wait-and-see high-risk, was done without any major issues. I did it. I had a baby.
I napped. The baby napped. We worked on breastfeeding. Grandparents showed up. It was a great day.
That evening I woke up thinking. My son was asleep in his little hospital crib on the side of my bed. I looked at him, thinking that I had achieved the biggest dream I’d ever had—the dream so big I was afraid to say it out loud. I had a loving, devoted husband and a baby. And we were all fine. I’d done it. This was now my family.
Then my brain tore itself to pieces during what would be the first of thousands of panic attacks.
I had it all. Everything I wanted. I just knew I would lose them. Something horrible would happen to ruin it.
It went downhill from there. I couldn’t put the baby down. He’d stop breathing if I put him down. I couldn’t sleep. If I went to sleep and wasn’t watching, the baby would choke. I couldn’t leave the house. No one could leave the house. A car accident would ruin our lives. I couldn’t go back to work. I couldn’t get off the train in the city because I’d fall and get run over.
You get the idea.
I quickly modified my life so I didn’t have to leave the house. I got a remote job. Steve was a stay-at-home dad. We would all be together and safe.
I did all the things you’re supposed to do with crippling anxiety and panic. The therapy was a mess. My c-section was my twelfth surgery. I had a lot of childhood trauma, and I flat-out refuse to blame anyone for it. Therapy got stuck on that over and over.
The medication made me just functional enough to not be a shut-in. So, I reorganized my life into something I could tolerate. Over the years, I just assumed this was the life of a parent and the anxiety was a part of who I was.
Fast forward. In 2019, we packed up my in-laws and moved to San Antonio. My job was fully remote and my parents live in the southern tip of Texas. San Antonio was the closest major city. Moving let Steve’s dad retire and gave all the grandparents time with the kiddo.
I woke up in a panic attack at 3:13 AM on New Year’s Day 2020. After checking on my family, I went into my home office to sob it out and journal. The panic kept growing, so I stopped journaling and instead started writing The Call.
A pandemic, the sudden loss of my father-in-law, and a natural disaster later, I had nine published books and a hobby that made me feel better. It was a step outside of reality that let me exercise my mind in new, non-panicy ways.
In the fall of 2021, it became obvious my employer would need to let people go. Up until that point, I was living a double life. Unless you were a very close friend or family member, you didn’t know I wrote books. But I had a decision to make.
I was making better money off the books than I was in the day job. Did I keep the day job and watch someone else get laid off? Or did I own up to my side gig and volunteer to go when the time is right?
I told my boss about the books in October 2021 and volunteered to go when the company was ready for me to go. After that stressful conversation, I really didn’t feel like writing that night. Or the next morning. Or the next…
I wrote A Very Merry Mishap at the end of 2021 with a specific goal in mind
But, Time Walker’s Journal? Ech. I would work on that when I was free and clear from the day job. I’d have all the time in the world to write. The last few months at work were super stressful. I didn’t need to add more pressure. Sam could wait.
The day job ended on May 31, 2022. Hurrah! But, I didn’t have to write the book right then. I could take some time and breathe.
Five days after the day job ended, I got sick. At first, we thought it was food poisoning, then some sort of intestinal parasite. But no. After four months of debilitating sickness, we found out I had lymphocytic colitis. I needed to go off all SSRIs (which I took for anxiety) and NSAIDs (which were part of my pain management routine.) And oh, by the way, I have a brain tumor they found quite unexpectedly.
2022 was a mess. I called it the tortoise year. I spent a lot of time in my shell. I tried to write on the good days, but when I read it later, it was gibberish. I should have just gone back to sleep.
It was fine. We were financially fine. The books already written kept making money. I could pick up the writing when I was better.
And this is where we went off the rails…
My primary care doctor took me off my anxiety meds… and didn’t replace them. By the time I was fully tapered off them in December 2022, I was back to being afraid of everything. I had trouble even leaving my bedroom.
By February, I was just done with myself. I knew I was riding the crazy train and sought out other help. I found TalkSpace. It showed that it was fully covered by my insurance, so I started therapy, and I saw a psychiatrist for the first time.
Friends, if you’re dealing with mental illness, please go see a specialist. When you screw up your knee, you go to an orthopedic. When you have a brain tumor, you see a neurosurgeon. When your mind is not right, please see a psychiatrist. There is no shame in it.
The psychiatrist put me on a different type of medication, and it was AMAZING. A-MA-ZING. The anxiety switch in my head flipped off. I felt like I did before I was pregnant. I was myself again.
Then I took a bad fall, gave myself a concussion, and spent three weeks in bed recovering. Minor Mishap.
And it turned out my insurance wouldn’t pay for TalkSpace. It all got applied to the huge deductible.
But I was up again! Up and moving. My PCP had no problem prescribing the medication that worked so well.
I returned to my book and rewrote just about all of Time Walker’s Journal, along with starting a few new projects. As that happened, people were looking for omnibus “boxed set” versions of the print books. I fiddled with that and thought we were on the road to book happiness again.
And thank goodness. Book sales were down; ads weren’t helping as much.
In April and May, things happened. I won’t go into details other than to say I had a payment dispute with my primary vendor. It was horrible. My publishing account was closed without notice. The vendor withheld a huge sum of money and failed to pay me for a month. All of my ads were shut down.
I had at least one panic attack a day for months.
It was a nightmare. I’d heard other authors talk about the same things happening to them and just assumed they caused it. They had to have done sneaky, underhanded things to cause their problems.
I don’t do sneaky, underhanded things. I refused to just accept the wrist slap I’d been given and contested the issue with the vendor. I was being blamed for their error, even though I’d proactively told them I thought it was an error. When they denied my appeal, I took it to the trade organizations. All the while, I watched my book ranks fall and my sales plummet, knowing this was my family’s primary source of income.
I’ll summarize here and say it’s hard to be creative when you don’t know how you’re going to pay rent or feed your family. For the first time in my life, I was depressed, not just anxious. I went to bed because I was just so tired.
By July, I wanted a day job. I wanted to work to provide for my family and go back to the book money being a side benefit from a beloved hobby. I clearly didn’t have the temperament to be a full-time author. After all, my writing slowed to a crawl after I told my job about the books. I got super sick right after leaving the day job. Those things were not coincidences. I needed the security of a full-time job.
A friend recommended me for a job where she worked. I interviewed. They loved me, but not for the job they were filling. Too much experience, too capable. The company called back with another job. They interviewed me. They loved me. But not for the job they were filling. (This is a thing. I have two friends at the company – one interviewed three times, one interviewed four times.) They interviewed me again. Same song and dance.
I started looking for a job without much luck. Another first – I wanted a job and couldn’t find one. I’m a work princess – extremely capable and always in demand. I hadn’t looked for a job since graduating from college. Jobs found me.
But not this time. This time, I spent months slogging through postings, writing resumes, and not hearing back. We couldn’t pay our bills, our savings were gone, and we’d borrowed all we could from family and friends.
I failed. I failed to take care of my family, to bring home the paycheck we needed. My author career was in ruins, making less than a tenth of what it did a year ago.
Failure.
And to make it worse, we tinkered with my medication again. My brain was (and still is) scrambled.
So, there I was. Washed up failure. Creditors calling nonstop.
Here’s the thing about failure: It’s a point in time. It’s the result of an action. It is not a lifelong label. I failed at being a full-time author. There were reasons, and maybe it could have gone differently. But it didn’t. I failed at this attempt. It doesn’t bother me to admit it because things turned around.
I got a call about a job I didn’t want. Beggars cannot be choosers, though. I went through the first interview. Then I got a call about another job. And another. I got three job calls within a week.
Then, I got a call from HR at a former employer. My former mentor saw I was looking for a job. She was making a job I’d be perfect for, and would I be interested in returning?
Yes, I’d love that.
Then it was a three-way race to a job offer and start date. (I rejected the slimy job I didn’t want because I suddenly had options.) I’m now back at a company I know with great benefits and a fantastic mentor. It’s a whole new job with a new team, but I’m gaining traction quickly.
I started work on November 27th, assuming I’d get a paycheck on December 15th for three days of work. I outright sobbed when I logged into my bank on December 15th to find a full paycheck plus three extra days. I do mean sobbed – full-on ugly cried. Steve teared up. My mom cried. My brother and sister cheered. It was a whole thing.
We’re still in bankruptcy, but we have a path forward now—so long as my body can hold up. There is some question of how much work I can tolerate with my gut and my mental health. And physical health. And brain tumor.
Whatever. We’ll figure that out as we go.
Those first three weeks back to work were hard – both physically and mentally. My body had gotten so used to being in bed, sitting and/or standing for eight hours was painful. I got up, worked, and then dropped back into bed to sleep.
But here we are. I’m better than I have been in eighteen months. I will see a psychiatrist on January 3rd to get my meds straight again. I’ll also see a new gastroenterologist and a pain management specialist in January. I’d love to eat real food and NOT run for the bathroom four to seven times daily. Just saying.
I’ll leave the brain tumor thing until February. It’s tiny and non-cancerous. And it’s been there for years – it’s more than half calcified.
As for the writing? Well… look at the length of this post. I thought about editing it down, but meh. The people reading this like my words.
Let’s hope that 2024 is the year I find my stride again.