I’m ba~ack.
I’ve been quiet lately – a bit of an oddity for me, I’ll admit. Since Christmas, a lot has happened and my writing has had to take a backseat to life’s curveballs.
Yeah, it’s a football. Technicality
I live in Alberta, Canada in the major Oil & Gas city of the west – Calgary. My area of specialty is waste processing in the midstream market (delivering oil and gas to the pipelines to be taken to the refineries). Even though I technically work in environmental services, our main stream of business comes from the Oil & Gas sector. And with the price of a barrel of oil similar to the cost of milk in the grocery store, no one’s completing projects that need the magic wand of environmental services.
To that, add my own health issues, health issues with my family, and even health issues with my cat, Meow Mix. To quote the vernacular, the beginning of the year sucked.
I won’t bore you with my family’s health issues as they’re more nuisances than threats to well-being or life, but I’ll highlight the others.
First off, my cat. Poor Meow Mix had 14 teeth pulled. She’s a Maine Coon, and her breed has a tendency towards a genetic oddity where her immune system will start to reabsorb her teeth. She’s no longer the ferocious hunter of birds outside the glass windows of the sanctuary that is our home. She now stalks cooked ground chicken and canned cat food. Poor, expensive girl.
And then there’s me. And perhaps I’ll go into everything in a separate post, but for now I’ll just highlight. Given the poor economy and the hit oil-rich Alberta is taking, life has been stressful, needless to say. And all that stress brought to the surface a condition that runs in my family: depression.
I was diagnosed with secondary insomnia brought on by generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder. On the surface, you may think anxiety is the opposite of depression, but they are in fact closely related. Both are the result of low feel-good enzymes in the brain called serotonin. In some, abnormal serotonin results in depression, in some like me, the serotonin imbalance equates to troubles making decisions on how to deal with the simplest things. To put it perspective, my anxiety got so bad I was having panic attacks when the meeting reminder popped up on my compute,r and I could no longer drive a car.
I joke about it openly with friends – I say “I always thought I was crazy” but this is in fact a serious issue if left untreated. I was on the road to ulcers (I already had terrible stomach pains and had troubles eating), I clenched my teeth all the time which resulted in fracturing a few teeth, and there were a couple times I had to pull my car of the road because I just couldn’t breathe. I knew something was wrong but I just didn’t know what. I did know depression ran in my family, but I thought “I’m not depressed – I don’t feel down or hopeless, I don’t feel like the world has given up on me. I just can’t sleep because I’m worrying about stupid little things, and I can’t get through the day without panicking over something.
So without going into too much details in this post, I’ll end the personal update there for now. I’m getting back into the swing of things and writing again. The Rose Cross Academy Book 2 – Grimms and Garms, is a hair’s breath away from a completed draft of which I can send off to my editor. The draft is over 100,000 words, yikes! Risers and Dreamers just eeked over the finish line with 83,000 words. To add to that I’ve been thinking up a couple other stories and writing bits and pieces of those, as well as dusting off some previous work’s I’ve written. I have my NaNoWriMo 2015 project – a collection of short stories in the horror genre – which I’d like to put up on Wattpad or someplace so others can read them. The stories need some serious TLC before they’re publicly consumable.
Me vs. Book
I’m slowly trying to get back into the swing of things. I’ve been posting on Instagram and that’s been all I can focus on lately. Hopefully once I get over this speedbump in life, things will get back to normal and I’ll be able to get back into the social media swing. I published in December and pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth: not the greatest marketing strategy when you’re trying to sell books, right!
So everyone take care, in the mean time!
– Rissa
You must be logged in to post a comment.