Write for your life

Sometimes it's really hard not to shout "I have fibromyalgia" from the rooftops. Especially when you've been in and out of "fibro fog" for days and when in them your mind can't focus on anything else because it just plain can't focus on anything. Sometimes you'll run across a good movie or get hooked on a television series, and that will take your mind off your flu-like symptoms and fuzzy head that feels like it's going to explode. Sometimes you'll have a good talk with a friend, or even better, you'll get out of the fog for a few minutes. But for the most part it's just you and It, and the only way to get over It is not not fight It, but just wait for It to pass.

As the months go by and I plod along with my school work and wait for an online teaching job, I become increasingly aware with each fog-induced day that I am in fact ill no matter how hard I try to deny it. I flew all the way across the country in the face of illness to obtain higher education -- but that education was acquired only by mounds and mounds of exceptions being made on my account and my inability to work the way my peers did. Today, with a book in the works but no agent, a screenplay to sell but no buyer, and three job applications with no bites yet, I'm realizing that it may be time to jump back on the disability benefits band wagon.

I tried the wagon about three years ago, before I was diagnosed and when my doctor at the time wanted to diagnose me with somatization, against even his better judgment. Three years later I have a correct and socially acceptable diagnosis, but despite the plethora of pills I take every day I still can't even sit on jury duty because I could get a flareup at any time and would have to leave the room in the middle of the trial. As it is I've had to leave movie theaters, jazz concerts, birthday parties and restaurants -- I can never be anywhere for 8 hours at a time unless it's my own bedroom. I can never get up in the morning, go to a job, sit in a chair, do work, and then go home. What can I do? Write.

Writing is the one thing I can do no matter how awful I feel. As long as I have the strength to press the keys my creative juices stay flowing. I wrote a screenplay in a flareup, I am writing a book in a flareup, and write the majority of these blogs in a flareup. But what happens in between writing and making it a lucrative career? How can I turn the one thing I can do into a paycheck? I have no doubt in my mind that a paycheck will eventually come from my writing, but the question is how to live until that happens. How do I pay my rent? How do I buy groceries? What happens when my last teaching paycheck and tax refund ends and a new teaching job hasn't begun? How can anyone, in these uncertain economic times, make a living for themselves when there is only one thing in the entire world that they are well enough to do?

Therefore, as Kathleen Kelly says (via Joe Fox, via the Godfather), I must go to the mattresses and fight for the accommodation that I hoped I wouldn't need. Well, boyfriend-to-be... What do I tell you when you ask what I do for a living? Lie and pretend I get tons of money from the pro bono book reviews I write? Pretend I've acquired some sort of family inheritance? After all, isn't the first question on a date, "So what do you do?" I'm a person who lives every day fighting for a happy and fulfilled life in the face of an illness. That's what I do, and I do it 100%.