Stationary

How long has it been? Months? I’ve been away since my last post. By away, I mean an out of body experience that carried me to some deeper place from which I now seem to be just emerging.

In June, I was doing a summer semester to repeat classes in order to update my Associates degree, making it easier for it to transfer to a four year university. It was a simple class but I took the one with the insane teacher who used the weird online book and publisher developed assignments that came with the horrible user interface which only worked in theory. Four weeks of that and I was ready to explode.

On the close of that stressful class, I had a massive emotional flashback which just seemed to push me over an edge I didn’t realize I was so close to. So I allowed myself to decompress through movement one weekend, between Summer semester one and the beginning of Summer two.

I partied all by myself! I walked a lot. Over a three day weekend, I did close to 50k steps! I was on a roll! I realized at some point that I was tired. Worn out first by the school work and lots of sitting which had frustrated me to the extreme. Overwhelmed by this flashback which had been all emotion and little else, which for me feels much worse than a flashback involving images. This was me burning all of that off, frustrations and any other emotions which I might be feeling but not acknowledging just then. At the end of that weekend of walking, I decided to try and dance to some old favorite songs! What a wonderful experience that could have been!

The x-ray showed nothing is broken. However, there was numerous indicators first that there was indeed a deep joint injury. I was tired on top of the dancing and horribly sprained my entire left leg (wildly jumping up and down is not for me) and did something terrible to my left knee. I sat down for a couple of weeks and worked on my second semester. Then, feeling better, I got back up and resumed my life, unfortunately including the dancing.

That led to the second sprain. I hadn’t let it heal. So I sat down again and finished the second summer semester. Managed to pull an A and a B from those two short, intensive, slightly horrifying semesters. There was one week between the last summer semester and the start of fall semester. During that week, I should have poured all my effort into Dorian two. I should have. Didn’t.

Instead, I started another book and poured all of the stirred-up remembrances from that horrible flashback and my frustration of being forced to be stationary when I most needed to process things through movement! This book was fraught with all the feelings I’d recovered in the flashback and was fueled by much music (usually the same songs every single day) and when I looked back over it some weeks later, I discovered it was horrible but I had gotten all of the ideas down on paper.

Both summer semesters were online. The Fall semester was not, which forced me to start walking six blocks to class and six back to my car twice a week. Three weeks into the Fall semester, my left knee locked up. Thus the x-ray. I just love the phrase “age-related decline” but there were other terms in there too, like osteoarthritis and voids, and bursas. In simple terms, I’d injured then reinjured myself like three times and my muscles just got to the point where they were not working at all. I’ve been on forced rest for quite some time. I’ve been able to recover some of the use of my left leg but it’s nowhere near the movement I was accustomed to before the original injury at the end of June.

Stationary is not a word I like. I can’t ride a bike inside the house. That hurts too much. I can barely walk some days. But time, the doctor assured me, would cure all ills. And at some point, I’ll potentially start therapy to recover what I can. I started glucosamine and turmeric to deal with the joint injury and age-related issues plus the inflammation. All those things I was supposed to be doing in the house which I had ignored, I can’t do them now. I’m forced to rest and slow down and focus on things I was really running away from.

One of those is Dorian two. I’m still going over what is wrong for me to be stuck on an edit. I’m stuck on an edit! I’ve written seven hundred pages with this other book and am rewriting some of it now. So it’s not that I’ve got writer’s block. There is some issue in the continuation of Dorian’s story which is causing my brain to say nope when I try to edit it. I believe I’ve discovered what it may be and I’ve made a note on the manuscript while I’m letting it stew in the back of my mind. Meanwhile, I’m working on a manuscript of a fish with visions of being fast and furious.

As I sit here, late on a Saturday night, my left leg is aching. I’ve never appreciated a heating pad and a comfortable sofa so much before now. I’ve come to the point where I realize just how mysterious and frankly aggravating the whole writing process can be. As an author with a blog who wants to put the best foot forward and show myself being productive and all wordy, at the end of every day, there is a strange rhythm to how my writing works and I don’t always understand it.

I hadn’t even realized so much time had passed by until I realized there are only eight more weeks of the Fall semester left! Time is hurrying by me while I elevate and heal. Joanna is still on my heart and always will be. She’s so me but I’ve come to realize Dorian was another part of myself I hadn’t even been aware of. A different part of me is in the fast and furious fish who is taking up all my free time now. His struggle contains so much of what was included in that flashback in June. Joanna and her friends contained earlier flashbacks because that’s how I learned to process trauma. I write it out. Still writing. Just wishing I could be like those authors who seem to have reins which direct their skills and keep it focused. Mine seems to be as wild and uncanny as I am with my bum knee.