I did some writing today. Not quite my usual thousand words, but I'm going again. I remember how this goes. I wake up early, I spend some time with Kelly and have breakfast, and then I sit down and write. I miss my coffee, I must admit. It isn't really that hard. The hard part is believing that what I've written has merit. Still, I looked back at the previous chapters, and I liked them. The last book was so much about self-sufficiency, and this one is so much about inter-dependence. I didn't set out to write it that way, you know, it's just sort of...happened.

What really kicked me into starting again today was money trouble. I have to laugh, but why does it take that particular thing to make me work? I was thinking about how I should look for a job. It's ridiculous. I'm barely making it through my days now, and I know this. So I told Kelly, and told him that I thought it was insane, and he said 'Work when you're ready'. When we got home I explained that I wasn't talking about writing, and he laughed at me. *chuckles* Add to that the fact that he and I had some wonderful, useful conversation about his new project, and when I got home, I just opened up Word and went.

It didn't feel easy. It did feel good. And the words were all just there, waiting for me to pluck them out of the air and set them in the right order. I don't know exactly what happens next, but neither do my characters, so I suppose we'll all find out together. It's faith in the process that I've lost, somewhere. Not faith in my story or my ability, but in the spinning of the story. As I recall, I only came by that faith by repetition. Success is making the effort, I think. Money troubles will sort themselves, or not. The stories in my head want out. That's the important bit right now.

Oh my. What a few months this has been. I've been diagnosed with IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I had a stomach flu, and first it just didn't get better, then slowly got much, much worse. I ended up in Emergency a couple of times, on doctor's orders that if it got worse, I was to go back. The final time, they admitted me. All I knew was that something was writing lines of fire across my insides, and I really wanted it to stop. They tested my blood, cleaned out my insides to scope me, then filled me with barium for x-rays. I'm not going to go in any greater detail, except to say that this has been one of the most invasive responses to illness that I've ever had. It's left me feeling a little vulnerable, as has the pain. I ate almost normally yesterday for the first time in over a month, and so ended up in terrible pain in the middle of the night. I have medication, but now I need to learn to cope with the condition. IBS is essentially a diagnosis of  'yes it hurts, but we don't know why'. They ruled out all sorts of illnesses, and what it comes down to is managing my stress, eating well, and generally taking care of myself.

I wanted desperately to ask the universe 'why me'. I really, really did. But the lesson is too implicit for me to ignore. I'm supposed to learn how to take care of myself better. Or perhaps to remember skills I've forgotten to use. I know what helps me manage my stress, and I know I've not been managing it well. I've not been writing, and perhaps that emotional block was bound to show up in the physical. How could it possibly have been described better than by the gut of me, the core of me; a system that has the most nerve-endings of anywhere in my body?

So here I am, at the keyboard, reaching in to my worded soul, reaching out to a blank page. It feels like I am poised on the brink of something life-altering. Something beyond physical wellness, perhaps. How peculiar.

Welcome to my blog. I use Facebook a lot, but I've almost always got more to say than will fit in 400 characters. I'm a stroke survivor, and I seem to end up writing about that, and about life with a brain injury. Writing helps me sort my thoughts, so I can sift out the important ones. I write poetry and I published my first novel last year. I've fallen out of the habit of writing regularly, and I hope to re-insert the habit into my life, starting here.