A Bottom--Where From Here?

There have been many beautiful and challenging and post-worthy things since I last wrote, but I haven't been present to write them down.
People talk about hitting bottom; I always say, based on my experience, there is no bottom, only bottoms, one and then another, at different times.
Right now, I'm in/on/surrounded by a bottom. And sharing what I'm sharing here may shove me down even deeper.

I'm in the hospital with acute kidney failure.

I crashed my friend's truck, who had given me so much wonderful hospitality and such shared time and visiting and general loveliness and friendship that I wished to cherish and continue--and this is my reciprocal. And I want so badly to make it right...

but I'm in the hospital with kidney failure.

and here comes of course it affects my car insurance which is still joint with Phil's, and my far-from-flawless record is impacting Phil's flawless record--
poor Phil buried in letters from the health insurance from my various hospital stays because I'm still on his health insurance too, that I haven't been able to take care of because

I'm in the hospital with kidney failure.
This is what I give to those around me. I am frightful to be around--a bad-luck curse, an evil eye.
It's like I've made a huge mess using other people's resources and equipment, and have no idea how to clean it up all on my own taking finally some responsibility.
No pity party here--I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for me. This is what I see when I face myself.
This is what I came to right off the plane from my bright-hued residency trip literally near-comatose; this is what I see more clearly today when my brain is beginning to function more normally.

So, what does a writer girl do at such a soul-achingly deep bottom? Surely she writes, right? No, at first, she doesn't--brain still hurts too much, but more she's afraid of writing again, anything at all. I tell her, write. It's all hopelessly messed up, and I have no idea how to make it okay. But please, write. And that is what I must do.

Writing Residency and Body Image/Food

About the Residency and some frank talk about me, since it is my blog. Speaking of blog: You would have thought I'd have an effective comments system well worked out by now, especially considering what a desideratum it has long been for me. I apologize for the continued woes. WordPress did not offer what I was hoping for, and the plugin I installed hoping to solve the problem has made it worse if anything. I will work on it but please bear with me, because I'm at...

The Rainier Writing Workshop's 2013 Residency--a week of intense learning, sharing, co-teaching, interacting...basically a time when even if you're an introvert you can enjoy going out at night. Morning talks crystal sharp and pealing with laughter in informal atmosphere...

Surrounded by people who also think this (picture) is hysterically funny and also took a photo of it:

...and, most of the time, we're in intimate workshops and seminars in which the most acute of critiquing or seminar-ing is compounded with the loveliest congeniality.

There have been a few times I've felt critiquing hasn't been sharp enough from certain quarters. On the other hand, my work came up for workshop yesterday and one of the two faculty leaders expressed some very serious reservations about it, the vocabulary becoming stronger as the workshop went on. But there was no gall, neither given nor taken--this was objective, if passionate, discussion of work being taken seriously. Truthfully, though, I could feel that were it not for my meds I'd have been in pieces. But I could balance that faculty member's interpretations with many thoughtful readings from other faculty and students that gave me a more hopeful picture. Any one opinion is just one opinion. Even better: knowing that my own fragile ego might have exaggerated some parts of what I heard and minimized something positive, I checked in with one of my cohorts who had been in the same workshop. She reminded me of some very positive things the faculty member had also said and that I had not paid attention to. Somehow it's easy to ignore what you're good at and only focus on the points of criticism.

I've already met with my mentor for the thesis year. She is a phenomenal writer of both poetry and nonfiction and also happens to be a great teacher. Several conceptual aspects of my work for this year fell into place so naturally at our meeting that it felt very auspicious for what's to come. 

Oh, and we both have big hair.

An epiphany that came for me today: the traditional line people draw of "fact and/or/versus fiction" is vicious both for fiction writing (cannot reflect facts) and for creative nonfiction writing (can only be the facts). So, I propose we disband fact and fiction and allow other dichotomies to emerge.

Okay. Now to Ela, Food, and Body. Last night and this morning, small groups of lovely people, it felt fine (although my guts reminded me afterwards that it wasn't fine). I confess, the food and body thing is torture. One sad thing is how similar it has been each year, although this year may be the worst for various reasons. I need to look like I'm eating but I'm mortified if I look like I'm eating. I don't want to eat anything but I need to stay functional.

We're all self conscious in some way. So. My thighs look gigantic, my belly bloated, my chin doubled. How can I even appear in public?

My belly is a beast of unnatural and prodigious appetites.

I was warned I might have unusual cravings as my body seeks iron after recent massive blood loss. And so. I have no appetite, but I'm afraid of what I start when I start eating. And I'm craving salt, which I never usually eat or desire. One day, I snuck to the cafeteria and bought a small bag of chips, as self consciously as a teenager buying condoms for the first time. Back in my room, I shook them out onto a napkin and made three piles, so that each transgression would only be about 50 calories. I put one pile back in the foil pouch and one into an old oatmeal packet, clamped the crimped edges under a book. I ate a luxurious few of the third pile just as they were, and crumbled the rest into applesauce, to dilute the craved salt.

Most of my favorite foods don't taste good. I have a metallic taste in my mouth. If I eat, it gets worse. If I don't eat, it gets worse. 

For the group meals, the catering's awareness of gluten free and nondairy has improved exponentially. Which means fewer excuses for me not to eat, or to bring my safe foods to eat. Still, every time I let them feed me it's a scary act of surrender and I always don't feel well afterwards--there's always something that doesn't agree. On the other hand, I brought so much of my own food here, but even feeding myself a lot of the time, that heap is diminishing so imperceptibly...and I thought I'd calculated it fairly well. 

Calories counting in my head all the time, the bestial belly reprimanded all the time. Grapes taste so good now, but they do not satisfy the hunger urge and meanwhile they add and add to the calorie count. Which means, help my guts to be more roilsome and noisome than any in the history of humanity.

My question for you writers out there: what could I do to the above litany of complaints so that people would be laughing along? Or are you laughing already?

If I could just be a bee enjoying the late clover...

Fragility and Friends

Welcome to the third year of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at PLU in Tacoma. Here we are, all together again. There is such a euphoria to seeing all these people again, many of them people we haven't seen in a year, although a lot of sharing goes on via Facebook.

My flight was a red-eye, so between that and my meds I was falling off my chair for the opening night readings, which killed me as both faculty readers are wonderful writers as well as great readers of their work.

Staying in the dorm rooms, and this time we're back in the dorm of our first year, which is conveniently located half way between the places we mostly frequent. Last year it was being renovated--seems like there's always some renovation going on here--and we were in a dorm so far away from everything that you either had to sprint a lot or pack everything for the whole day.

I don't know how the students manage two to one of these rooms all year. I'm using the second bed for my wardrobe, shown above. That random scatter of clothes is quite evocative of how I'm feeling. Put together but in bits. Put together on top of something shattered. A lot of the time I'm managing to be my old excited insightful self of these residencies. But then I have to go hide for a while.

Friends, I am fragile. And buoyed and sustained by my wonderful friends in Anchorage with whom I stayed for the days before I left. They reminded me of life and life's affirmations. They shared with me the makings of good salads and the rightness of food in the belly. They took care of me.

I am fragile. The definition--true definition--of lost is as the opposite of find--. of findable, even. If you know where you last saw something, even if you never find it, it's not truly lost. Well, during the days in Anchorage, moving back and forth between people's houses, I lost my phone.My iPhone, with everything on it. At first I was in disbelief. The old Ela never lost things, let alone something as important as an iPhone. But there it was, or rather, there it wasn't. No denying that, and I lacked the very faintest notion of how I might have lost it. I remembered pulling it out to share pictures. I don't remember putting it back in its very own pocket of my vest, but the latter is such a reflex action (to avoid losing it) that I could have done so on autopilot. And it's not at that house. We looked intensely. Not a clue. But there it was--no phone, on the verge of a trip. A new iPhone was out of the question by over $600. So I'm now learning my way around an Android. I'm not especially techie and I don't want to talk about that on here because I think many of my readers also are not techie. Just that's the story. Later the same day, I became convinced I'd lost my car keys. I turned my purse inside out several times, we scoured the very short distance between my having them and not; finally Phil, who was there, scoured my purse again and there they were in the back pocket (which I hadn't checked) where I'd put them for safekeeping.

It feels a lot like how I've heard the aging process (in people's 60s/70s/80s) described...it is the aging process, just thirty years too early. I cannot trust myself. When I'm out of comfort zone, living out of car and visiting with friends for a couple nights, moving from one thing to another, I can't trust myself with the most basic of things. And I panic. I didn't with the phone, it was just too bizarre. Panic I did with the keys, though. And there's always more travel in my future. I seem to live from trip to trip.

Sorry if this sounds like a bit of a "dear diary" blog post. I just wanted to be real about fragility and how it comes to us or presents itself within us when we're not expecting it.

Explanations

Well, that was quite the irresponsible-bloggerly behavior, wasn't it! Disappearing unannounced for a month, then reappearing with a book review and scarcely a word of explanation, then disappearing again! What on earth? Partly, I haven't known what to say. Implausible as it may sound that I be at a loss for words, I've been really struggling with the question of how much to reveal on my blog; whether it's inadvisable to be as transparent here as I aim to be in real life.

So, let's try this: I'll play it a little coy on here, and if you want to know more, contact me directly and I'll share. Basically, if you're still there, dear reader, you may have guessed--my health situation had gotten very very serious, to the point that I ended up at the place of no shoelaces, and having to be there for a good long period of time. Sliding over that long period--it was intense, infuriating, full of learning, lonesome, sociable, and many other contrasts. Even more intense is getting out of there all newborn and vulnerable, and having just barely a week to get ready to go down to Tacoma for my MFA program residency, the key residency as I go into my thesis year. Settling back in just in time to go away again.

So. Lessons? Life is hard and life is precious, like this jewel of a dragonfly whom I was only able to photograph because he was dying:

And life is funny--what's wrong with this picture??

That was fun to be stuck behind at a traffic light.

Okay. I'm heading down to Tacoma pretty soon, and I'm feeling in love with words but a little at a loss for them. So we'll see what I manage to say. I promise my intention is to be a more dedicated blogger again (reading as well as writing, sorry guys). I've even installed some plugins and they may even stop the thousands and tens of thousand spam comments. And if I'm really good, you guys might leave me some real comments, and I might finally have an automated way to comment back! And then life will be good ;>

Another good life thing: literally best summer ever (over 30 years at least, apparently) in AK. Nice to be out of the hospital so I can be out in it before going away again. This whole blog post has been written outside and the hardest thing has been seeing the screen!