Author name: Sandra Tayler

Quiet Saturday

/ / 2 Comments

I hear the sound of rain outside my window. It is a friendly sound, one that I like. Though it is strange to be hearing it while looking at pictures from friends who are buried in snow today. All of our snow has melted. It is possible we’ll get more, but right now we have rain.

It was a quiet Saturday. The kids occupied themselves. I did too, splitting my time between relaxing and working on Planet Mercenary. I never even got dressed, just changed from one set of uber comfortable pajamas into another set when I got out of the shower. A part of me thinks I should have spent my day differently. Mostly though, I’m fine with it.

Tomorrow I’ll have to leave the house. We have church in the morning. In the evening I’ll go fetch Howard from the airport and I’ll get to hear stories from his convention trip this weekend. I’ve bee twitter lurking and he appears to have had a good time. Sometimes when Howard is at a convention, I’ll feel sad that I’m missing the fun. I do feel a bit sad when I see pictures of people I know who I would like to be with. But over all, I’m glad to be at home this weekend. Routine is very attractive to me just now. I would like a bunch of it all in a row so that I can catch up on all the projects that have fallen behind schedule.

Quiet Saturday Read More »

Not Like Me

/ / 1 Comment

Any time I go outside my house there is a subconscious portion of my brain that is devoted to threat assessment. It keeps watch on everything, asking the question “Am I safe?” If the answer is not a clear yes, the process jumps into my conscious thoughts and I start paying attention to the thing which tugged at my subconscious. Usually the thing is another person. I then have to look and evaluate how that person makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes I don’t like the answers because they are based on racist or classist assumptions that Not Like Me = Dangerous.

I was pushing my cart toward the exit of the grocery store, past the floral display. A man was there, he was a bit scruffy with skin much darker than mine. His clothes might have indicated homelessness, or perhaps just a very low paying manual labor job. His hand was reached out to touch one of the plants. It was an almost reverent touch. He caught my eye because that subconscious assessment said “Not Like Me. Possible Risk” My more conscious assessment reminded me I was in a public place, surrounded by people. There was no actual risk here. So I did a thing which I have been working on doing more often. I smiled at him in greeting. Treating him with human respect rather than allowing the “Not Like Me” fear to make me look away and pretend he was not there.

His face lit up in an answering smile. “They’re so pretty.” He said in heavily accented English.

“Yes.” I agreed, slowing my cart down. I love flowers and plants. This man did too. It was a small point of connection.

“I’m from Guam. There are so many flowers there. Big. Everywhere. My wife, she would make a” His hands gestured making a crown shape on his head while he searched for the word
“Leiei. She plant so many flowers everywhere. All around the house.”

My cart was fully stopped now. “How wonderful.” I answered.

“Yes.” He sighed. “I miss the flowers. I come here to think of them.”

In that moment I had a sense of how very far away this man was from the home of his heart. It also seemed like he’d been away a long time. His clothes did not indicate someone who had the income necessary for international travel. I also know that international travel is much more complicated for people who will be scrutinized by customs officials. I wondered if his wife was still in Guam far away from him.

We shared one more smile and parted, me to my car, him to stand in the floral section missing his home. I don’t know any more of his story than that brief piece. I don’t know what brought him here, his immigration status, or his life goals. Yet for a moment “Not Like Me” vanished and I could see a homesick fellow human who likely gets ignored and cold shouldered every day.

It is a small thing to meet a person’s eyes and smile or nod, but the accumulation of small things matters. Giving someone a moment of being seen, instead of being invisible, is important. Particularly for those among us who become invisible because they make others uncomfortable for reasons that they can’t control, whether it be skin color, disability, communication issues, or not being able to afford clean clothes. I can’t smile and nod everywhere. Sadly the world is filled with situations where doing so actually would increase my risk of being harassed in some way. But the places where I can out number the places where I can’t. I’m trying to be better about doing it and about re-training the risk filter in my brain to recognize that just because a person makes me uncomfortable does not give me leave to treat them as if they are less than human.

Not Like Me Read More »

Starfish Story

/ / 3 Comments

I’ve been thinking about starfish. The thoughts started when I read this article
about how to keep writing when no one cares. Halfway through reading the article, after a litany of evidence that people don’t care (for which I had all too much sympathy), before she got to the part where she explains why she writes anyway, I began to think of that story about starfish.

You know the one. A quick google search brings up a hundred versions. The beach covered in starfish and a single person throwing them back into the ocean one by one. When someone asks why the person bothers, what difference does it make? The person throws one more starfish and says “I made a difference to that one.”

I wish I knew who first wrote that starfish story. I wonder if that writer was in a place of pain, trying to convince herself to keep going when the effort seemed futile. It seems likely to me that she was. Only a person who has struggled with futility could understand why helping even one matters. I’ve heard this story since I was very young. It has been around forever, attributed to everyone and no one. It is likely that the original writer is long gone. Did she have any idea how far her words would go, carried on the currents of an internet she probably never imagined? Perhaps this starfish story also seemed like a futile cry into the void.

That gives me hope. It is not only when I’m alive and chucking starfish that my actions or words can make a difference. The good things I put out into the world can spread out far beyond my reach. They can last longer than my life. They can change and transform so that no one will every be able to trace them back to me. I may never get full credit for them, but credit is not the point. It never was, even though our egos want it to be. We don’t expect the starfish to come back and say thank you. It is the throwing that matters, the attempt to use action to help another.

Time for me to get to work putting good things out into the world. That is how the world becomes better.

Starfish Story Read More »

Report on Projects in Process

/ / 1 Comment

I have been very project focused in the past few days. At least I have been when I was able to focus. Unfortunately I spent some of this week dealing with brain zaps, which are a known side effect of discontinuing some SSRI medications. Some people never get them, others do even when they taper off the medicines slowly, as I did. This experience has me convinced I should never ever end one of these medicines abruptly. You’d think that having a new anti-depressant would reduce the effects of stopping the old one, but apparently not. Fortunately they seem to be subsiding, which is good because I have lots of work to do.

The Planet Mercenary project is the biggest thing on my desk. There is a massive amount of work that needs to be done to get it ready for print in March. On the other hand, some of the work is being really fun. Yesterday I was finishing up the latest iteration of the playing cards and they were making me snicker out loud. I love that they have little stories and that I can picture how they will work to make a game more enjoyable.

Force Multiplication is the next Schlock book, and it too needs to head off to print as fast as we can get it there. Fans have been waiting for it. Also I wrote the bonus story and I’m excited for it to see print.

I have the usual January accounting load. I’ve done most of it, but I still need to create 1099s for all of the contractors that we use through the year. This time the count has more than doubled because of all the art we’ve purchased for the Planet Mercenary book. There is quite a bit of set up work associated with this.

The 70 Maxims book also needs to go to print in March. This one will move more quickly than the Planet Mercenary book. It has a lot fewer words, no index, and very few images to manage.

I think the parenting project has (finally, after 3 years) hit a lull where I’m not having to do diagnosis or crisis management for any of my kids. I’m a little reluctant to say this because there is a superstitious piece of my brain that thinks saying it out loud will jinx it.

One of my current projects is teaching Link to be a good work assistant. We’ve put him on the corporate payroll and are paying him a bit over minimum wage for the hours he works. This means teaching him how to be willing to work on my schedule instead of his. He’ll also be learning about tax withholding and basic money management. I think he has the potential to be an excellent assistant. This will become critically important when we hit May, June, and July when we’ll be shipping out all the projects that we’ve been spending the last six months (and the next three months) creating. Fortunately Kiki will also be home to help, so I’ll have two trained assistants.

Organizing the house is a constant project. There is always something to sort or to clean.

As I’ve been feeling better, writing is coming back to me. The process is slow because so much of my available creative energy is being poured into Planet Mercenary. I’m actually doing a significant amount of writing for that project. I’ll be getting writer credit as well as editorial credit. I’ve been blogging more, which makes me happy. It is a measure of my escape from depression and anxiety. My novel in progress is still waiting in the wings for me to have time to open it up again. I know it is there, but haven’t yet decided to put my effort into it.

I’ve been reading more, which is another measure of the escape from depression. I pick reading over binge watching Netflix. Right now I’m trying to (finally) finish reading the last three books of The Wheel of Time series. Then I’ve got Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, Sister Mine, by Nalo Hopkinson, and half a dozen other books in my stack of things to read. I want to fill my head with stories and ideas.

I know I have other projects sitting around and waiting, but at this moment I can’t think of them. Which is fine, because I really need to do all of the above first.

Report on Projects in Process Read More »

Success and Failure

/

Sometimes success looks like a failure to those who misunderstand the journey you’re on.

I’ve thought about this frequently as I watch Link take the reins of his own life and forge an educational path which diverges from the majority of his peers. I thought about it when I helped Kiki cancel a freelance contract. I’ve thought about it each time I have to advocate for Gleek and explain that drawing in class represents a triumph over the the other coping strategies that we’ve managed to extinguish. I thought about it when I gave Patch a high five when he managed to pull a D out of a failing grade. Each of these things was a personal triumph though they might look like failure from the outside.

I need to remember this when I look at my own projects and get ready to feel like a failure. Success can be redefined en route and it may look nothing like what I pictured when the project began.

Success and Failure Read More »

Correlation is Not Causation

/ / 2 Comments

I ran across yet another article that confuses correlation with causation. This time it is KSL saying Why You Should Rethink Your Netflix Binge There was a study done that noticed a strong correlation between people who watched a lot of television and those who had less cognitive function later in life. The trouble is the study has no way to show that the television watching caused the lower cognitive function. It could just as easily be true that people who have lower cognitive function are more likely to watch lots of television. I know that for me one of the biggest signs of depression is that I binge watch Netflix. When the depression backs off, I’m just not interested in watching that much. I’d rather be doing other things. For me it is definitely the depression that causes the binge watching not the other way around. One anecdotal example is not proof of anything, yet it may lead to a line of inquiry. What if we treated habitual binge watching television as a symptom? What if when we saw it in a person’s life and sought out where else they might need help or healing? Symptoms vanish without any work if the core condition is healed.

Correlation is Not Causation Read More »

Riding the Currents in My Brain

/ / 1 Comment

It was a great week, full of productivity and success, so I didn’t know why I woke up discouraged on Sunday morning, but I did. The feelings of discouragement were followed by significant grouchiness. I don’t think the grouchiness spilled outside my head much. I was pretty good at containing it, but it colored my whole day.

This morning the discouragement has ebbed because I’ve figured out what was causing it, and the grouchiness, and the dizziness which has been a plague since the middle of last week. These are all symptoms of discontinuing the medicine sertraline. I had been blaming the new medicine buprorion, and that may also be having an effect, but discontinuation is the more likely issue, even though I followed doctor’s instructions about tapering off.

This means my best course of action is to proceed as if everything is normal. I take my doctor prescribed meds on the schedule I’ve been given, and wait for my body to adapt to the new balance. Having to wait makes me feel a bit grouchy. I can’t tell if the grouchy is mine or just the result of out-of-balance brain chemicals. That makes me angry. It forces me to face the fact that so much of what I think of as me and my emotions are influenced by chemicals that I don’t really have control over. Thinking about all of that leads to more angry. In fact I’m angry with all mental illness, anxiety, depression, OCD for existing and making my life more complicated.

On the other hand, I had a great week last week, which seems to indicate that the medicine switch is likely to be beneficial in the long run. I just need to hang on until I stop feeling mad about it. So my job for today is to look at the dizziness and angry that are residing in my head and to tell them “I’ll attend to you later if you haven’t gone away. For right now, I have other things I need to do.”

Riding the Currents in My Brain Read More »

Foreigner

/ / 1 Comment

I was at the grocery store and the Asian couple in front of me spoke to the cashier in broken English. I watched as the gray haired lady said “I pay you with coin?” holding out a pile of coins in her hand. There was something about the way that she held out the money that made me realize that she didn’t fully comprehend American money. She was just handing over a pile and trusting the cashier to give her the correct change. She turned to me and nod smiled, an apology because she and her coins were taking a long time. I smiled back to let her know that I did not mind.

I’ve only visited foreign countries where the primary language is English, but even there I have felt baffled by local customs and currency. As the woman walked away with her husband I realized how brave they both are. I don’t know where they came from, nor what decisions caused them to leave their native home and come here. I do know that everywhere they go, they are different. Every conversation they have is a struggle to be understood. Often they must be met with anger, frustration, and offense from people who are impatient with broken English. Every time they are out in public, they are vulnerable, easily picked on, easily taken advantage of. Yet the woman smiled. She was friendly, even in her slight confusions over words and coins.

Courage comes in many forms. I saw bravery today and I should pause to recognize it.

Foreigner Read More »

Thinking About Health, Weight, and Society’s Obsessions

/ / 3 Comments

Of late I’ve been paying quite a bit of attention to American society’s relationship to body weight, especially on women. I’ve read articles on body positivity. I’ve seen Whitney Way Thore’s “Fat Girl Dancing” videos, she’s amazing. I’ve seen “Fat Girl Yoga” with another woman who can do things that I’m not currently capable of doing despite my smaller size. I’ve also read some articles that express concerns about the effect that body positivity will have on national health. I skipped all the articles that wanted to teach me one cool trick to lose weight.

I’ll admit that some of my interest has been due to the fact that the last time I weighed as much as I do right now, I was nine months pregnant. Back then my body was carrying around a tiny human being and lots of extra water. Now all that weight is stored in fat cells. I’m still not obese. In fact many people would look at me and say I look fine. Yet I have more fat on my body than I have ever had before in my life. I look at myself in the mirror and work to think body positive thoughts, which is good. Bodies change as they age. I can’t expect my body at 42 to be shaped the same as it was at 22, or even 32. Things soften, years write their stories on my skin in scars, freckles, and wrinkles. I don’t mind the wrinkles, but the rapidity of the weight gain is of concern. It indicates that something is out of balance in my body and it is time for me to find a new balance.

This morning I came across yet another article talking about weight loss and gain. The writer had finally recognized the weight loss industry as a racket where companies who sell weight loss programs actually profit when their clients fail. People come back again and again. I read it and thought “Why is gaining weight a failure?” Weight fluctuations are the natural response to changes in lifestyle. If a person wants to be a particular weight, then they need to be willing to live the life that induces their body to be that weight. Of course all of that leaves out medical and genetic factors which play a huge role in how our bodies gain or lose weight. Some people can attain a weight that makes them happy with work. Others are not able to do so no matter how much willpower they apply to the problem. This is not fair. Life is not fair.

I am very aware that as a person who has spent most of her life in the socially acceptable weight range, I do not understand all of the nuances that factor in to how people feel about their bodies. Part of me feels like this might be an area where I should listen more than I speak. Yet this conversation belongs to everyone. We all have to come to terms with the bodies we have. I don’t think that naturally thin people have it all easy either. This topic is so complex and so emotionally charged that part of me wanted to file my thoughts away in my folder of things I don’t post to the internet.

It is a tricky balance between accepting my body as it is, and striving for better health, which requires making changes that will affect my body shape. In order to reconcile these, I’m approaching it all as an experiment. What happens if I eat mostly vegetarian for a month? What happens if I count calories and teach myself more about the caloric content of foods? Where does my weight stabilize? Do I feel different when I eat differently? How does exercise affect my mood? Do I notice a difference in my depression and anxiety? Is what I’m doing sustainable over a long period of time?

The goal is to find a combination that includes happy, healthy, and sustainable. Note that while being thinner is the likely result of my experiments, it is not my primary goal. I do feel cliché making changes to my eating and exercise at the beginning of January. Yet it feels like the right time for me to do this. My head is clearer than it has been for a long time. It is time to experiment.

Thinking About Health, Weight, and Society’s Obsessions Read More »

Today is a Good Place

/

I’m on the second school morning of the new year…and it is going really smoothly. Usually we hit the second day and it is hard because we’re tired and feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the things we’d forgotten we ought to be doing over the holidays. Except that yesterday Link was like a different person than the one I’ve been dealing with. He was up and focused, ready to work. He put in several hours as my assistant and also reviewed the school work he needs to be doing. It seems that finding a dream makes a huge difference in what he is capable of doing in a day. I’ve seen this forward-momentum version of Link before, but not for at least two years. Two long, depressed, emotionally difficult years. I’m not yet certain that the forward momentum will last past the first goal, but maybe it will. For now, I’ll be grateful for every day we get to have it.

Last night I had a conversation with Patch about his (giant) pile of missing and overdue assignments. The term ends on Friday and he has to hustle this week in order to pass a couple of his classes. For the first time in a long time, Patch was able to talk with me calmly about what needs to be done. For the past year or more, any discussion of incomplete work triggered anxiety and sometimes a full panic attack. He was able to acknowledge that while he doesn’t want to have to do the assignments, he really does want them to be complete. We made a plan for working on things. The plan included a reward and consequence structure that Patch thought through himself. He’s learning how to motivate himself in good ways. We also discussed the possible failure points of our plan, one or both of us may forget to follow through. We’ll see how it goes this afternoon. He was pretty tired this morning.

Gleek has continued her habits of getting herself ready for school and out the door. She’s always prepared for class and gets grades that make all the adults around her pleased. Over the last week or two it became clear that the same thing that makes it so I don’t have to manage her academic life, also causes difficulties in other areas. So Gleek will be getting more attention in the coming weeks. I’m fine with that. I like spending time with Gleek, she makes me laugh.

Kiki is off at college, doing college things. Her classes start on Wednesday. Howard has thus far experienced the regular ups and downs of daily creative work. Though having the quiet hours when the kids are out of the house makes it easier for us to settle in to working. All in all, it has been a really good start to the new year. I’m feeling happy and hopeful, which is a nice change. I’m not going to try to project trends or make predictions about what is coming for us this year. Instead I’m just going to recognize that yesterday was a really good day for me, and I’m going to try to make today be good as well.

Today is a Good Place Read More »