My website, I’m aware, hasn’t been working for a few… years? It’s hard for me to tell, exactly. Something I’ve known about myself for a long time is that my ability to both write, and to manage my presence in the world as a writer (and sometimes, in the past, as a publisher) dwindles down to basically nothing when I’m in a crisis. When I’m in a crisis all the time – which has been the case for most of my adult life – things have a tendency to fall away and not come back.
I’m starting the long process of digging myself out of that hole now. There’s a lot to do, and I’m guessing that, many years down the road, I’ll still be excavating the wreckage. Deciding to start this process is an uncommonly optimistic move on my part, since I know it’s just as likely to be interrupted by another series of crises and fall by the wayside yet again.
I’ve rearranged my life to prevent the rolling crises from cropping up. I sold my condo in the Denver metro area and now live in a camper van, writing full time, so that I’m not subject to the utter chaos of trying to maintain housing and full-time employment in the US in the modern day. I’m actively refusing to get involved in any kind of enmeshed romantic relationship (I’m aro anyway), to avoid chaos from that corner as well. I’m completely off all social media, which is as good as poisonous to me at this point. And believe me, the irony of the fact that I have chosen to become a homeless monk (in the words of a friend of mine) in order to prevent instability in my life is not at all lost on me.
And yet, it just keeps coming. Last week I learned that my best friend has cancer for the second time in their life at the age of 42. They and I are two people who have worked unspeakably hard just to be able to live our own damn lives. The shittiness of the diagnosis is compounded by what a stark reminder it is of the fact that all that hard work can be undone at the drop of a hat by things we have no control over, that can fall out of the sky at any moment. My own genetic illness, Cadasil Syndrome, could pop up and seriously disable or kill me with a stroke at any time, and that’s just what it is. All that’s left is to keep trying, crisis or no.
The thing is, I’m actually great in a crisis. Or so people keep telling me. When the shit hits the fan, my twin personality traits of extreme cleverness and extreme stubbornness come into play, resulting in the kind of person whom you really, really want on your side in a bar fight. The fact that I know how to fight and have very little in the way of fear also helps. If this weren’t the case, I would absolutely not have survived my life up to this point, and it’s still kind of a miracle that I have. I’ve hat a gun pointed at my head by someone who told me, “I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ brains out,” and all I did was look him in the eye and say, “Yeah? Then what’ll you do?”
This helps me get through things, but not to recover from them. Recovery is an art that I have only begun perfecting as a mature adult, it having been seriously neglected throughout my life, beginning in young childhood. Wounds have to be healed, or they fester. Nowhere is this more evident than in US politics, where the “get things back to normal” party can never seem to get much of a foothold against the “cause as much damage as possible” party. When you’ve been through trauma, just getting things back to normal isn’t actually an option. You can’t bypass healing. The more you try, the more those unaddressed wounds keep dragging you down.
(Hell, I wrote a short story about this. “Go with the Flow” is about a handyman whose strategy of “ignore my on-the-job injury until it goes away” results in the amputation of his arm due to Acute Compression Syndrome, a very real medical condition whereby scar tissue crushes the nerves and blood vessels in a limb, causing it to die and eventually necrotize. It’s most often seen in advanced Diabetes cases, but can also result from refusal to seek treatment for blunt force trauma, like having a heavy object dropped on the limb.)
This is really what’s behind my decision to adopt the lifestyle I have. Homelessness, chronic unemployment and loneliness are rife with hardship, but it’s a hardship that I can reliably keep out of crisis. Back in May, the van’s coolant pump kicked the bucket on the highway, leaving me stranded in Lumberton, NC (yes, the one from Blue Velvet) until I could track down a replacement. I was camping in a towing company’s parking lot (with their permission) the whole time, without water or power hookups – and it was fine.
Really, it ended up being a fun little time. Despite its small size, Lumberton (a majority-minority city, where only 33% of the population is White) has a healthy arts scene, a very healthy farmers’ market, and a social atmosphere where people from all walks of life are comfortable speaking frankly to each other. I had a 300Wh solar battery and a few places nearby to get bottled water, and there’s a coffee shop (which is also an antique store, show venue, and rentable conference room) where I finished a draft of a new novella. They even let my cat come in with me.
There was a time when being stranded in this way would have caused major problems in my life. In this case, once the initial worry died down, I realized that this was why I had rearranged my life in the way I had: so that things like this could happen, and I’d keep right on cruising along.
All this in the name of giving myself the space to finally devote enough attention to the necessary work of healing that I might actually get a few years of relatively stable life before I die. My Cadasil Syndrome outlook being what it is, I’m not all that likely to see the other side of 50, although nothing is certain. I can’t have kids (never could, it turns out, even before I transitioned), and I probably won’t ever have a household again that extends beyond myself and Mutiny the Adventure Cat. So I’m seeing as much of the world as I can (and reconciling myself to how little that’s turned out to be), keeping the crises off my back, and writing the books that I want the world to have, while those are things I can do.
And I’m rebuilding my website. I know it doesn’t look great. Apparently even WordPress sucks now, especially if you’re not willing to paste up a bunch of AI slop and call it a day, but I’m working on it. Little by little. Routines help. I’ll see you on the blog, and on the page.