Big Thoughts

Posts where I grapple with topics such as feminism, politics, life in general, and other complex ideas

Coping

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It’s a dreary kind of morning here in Brisbane and 2015 is almost done, ready to be laid to rest with singing and dancing and libations with friends. Unless you’re me. I shall celebrate the end of the year in the same way I wish to kick of 2016: lying in my bed, notebook on my lap, scribbling words and pondering what will come my way in the future.

For once, I find myself very fond of the passing year. It’s been forever since I looked back over twelve months and felt myself at peace with everything that happened – usually, at this time of year, I am waging desperate war with an internal monologue of frustration and horror about the lack of…well, everything. Playing endless games of if only I had done this better and if only hadn’t fucked that up. 

I spent my life incredibly angry.

I am probably understating this a little. My greatest fantasy, for the last five or six years, was giving up the illusion that I was coping. Being free to lash out at the world and give voice to the enormous, yawning heart of frustration that hollowed me out and ready to just fuck shit up. I could conceive of no response to the world that did not involve screaming or punching. They were my go-to response to any problem, big or small.

Fight Club made a whole lot of sense to me. If you had told me there was a place I could go where someone would beat the crap out of me, I would have bought in. In a fucking heart beat.

But you cannot go through live screaming and punching things in a civilized world, so I taught myself not to. And because I could not express my rage at the outside world, I turned it against myself. If I could just stop pretending everything was okay, I told myself. If I could stop pretending to cope. If I could just lay down and let the world beat one me, everything would be okay.

Anger turned inward is a pretty shitty way to live your life. It’s the kind of response to problems that basically creates new problems. It’s a slippery goddamn slope, is what I’m saying, and I slid.

But I coped. Or pretended to cope. I’m not sure there’s a difference between the two, when you get right down to it. And perhaps I didn’t cope as well as I assumed, based on conversations I’ve had with people in recent months, but I coped well enough for horseshoes. I came off as an angry person, rather than someone who was basically looking for an excuse to flip out and start swinging at everyone in my immediate vicinity like a mad fucker.

I tried things to fix it. Went to doctor’s with symptoms. Went to psychologist. Wrote things, ’cause in my head, writing things is pretty much the solution to everything. Threw myself into the day job and took what self-esteem I could from what I was doing there.

None of it really worked, not for more than a few weeks. It’s hard to offload that level of anger, once it’s become your constant companion, because the anger is all that’s getting you through.

And the fear of not-coping kept me moving and kept a façade of sanity in place. I knew there was no amount of anger that could fix things, regardless of where I directed it, because I couldn’t articulate the problems. So I grit my teeth and coaxed myself into action and – incredibly – managed to convince myself that this is how every single person in the world lived their life. That we were all just pretending to cope because that was what is expected of us, while secretly falling apart inside.

We were all malfunctioning machines that no-one bothered fixing.

And despite the fact that I know better, there is a part of me that just assumed this is what I deserved ’cause I had the temerity to say, well, I want to be a writer. Anger makes you stupid in so many ways, and I was stupid in all of them.

In this respect, 2015 has been an enormous relief, because it turns out I actually am an a malfunctioning machine. Five or six years of sleep apnea symptoms finally added up to a diagnosis and the beginning of treatment, and it’s incredible how that’s affected my outlook in the last six months of the year.

Yes, the apnea is a thing that’s going to be with me for…well, ever, to some extent. Yes, there is still frustration and disappointments and things I wish I had done better. Yes, there is still end of year malaise and weeks where I do nothing and anger, so much goddamn anger, but they aren’t all-consuming. They are parts of my life, not the entirety of it.

In 2015, I stopped coping. There is no better thing that could have happened in my year.

And yet, I am surrounded by people for whom this year has been horrible. Kick in the teeth after kick in the teeth. The kind of year that sounds, by all accounts, exactly like the kind of year I’ve had for the last five or six.

If I had a wish for the coming year, it’s this: may you find people who understand what’s going on with you. May you find people who make the coping easier. May you find the thing that helps you feel a little less broken. May people appreciate you for the brave, bad-ass mother-fucker you are for just keeping on every goddamn day and resisting the urge to harm or be harmed.

May the things that have the potential to pass, pass. May you find tools for dealing with the things that are going to stay with you, regardless of what they are.

May there be music and books and art that soothes your soul, and friends who are there to hold you up when you cannot stand on your own.

May things get better, if they can, and may they get no worse if better is not an option.

Happy new year, you beautiful mother-fuckers. See you all tomorrow.

Genre, Gender, and GenreCon

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So, after GenreCon, the inimitable Kat of BookThingo posted this online:

Conference programmers note: This is what an all-women writers’ panel looks like! #aww2015 #GCoz

A photo posted by Kat (@bookthingo) on

The image is from the final plenary of GenreCon the weekend, when we had all seven of our special guests on-stage. It’s a sessions where a question from the audience generated a particularly frank discussion of gender, genre, and the impact of both on a writing career (particularly in SF).

That conversation was cut short, largely because we were running out of time. I hated doing it, but it had to be done due to the constraints of our agreement with the venue, and I apologise to all the people who had follow-up questions they didn’t get to ask.

But it has me brooding on the topic a bit. And I tend to talk about the things I brood about here.

Now, at this point I will acknowledge that I am going to talk about this as a white man chock-full of privilege, which means the statistical odds of saying something stupid on this topic start high and get higher the longer I talk. But, since it came up…

Well, here we go.

I got asked a few times, over the weekend, if we realised we’d assembled seven women as our guests. The official answer from the conference is no, we didn’t. We just assembled some awesome writers and they happened to be female, both because it’s true and because I enjoyed the irony of that logic being deployed in this instance.

But the truth is the conversation did come up in the initial stages of the conference. It went something like this:

Other Person: Do we need a dude on the list somewhere?
Me: No. We do not.

We’ve had the equivalent of that conversation every year that GenreCon’s run, because we strive to be conscious of all manner of representation at the conference and its program. It’s not a question that happens in isolation, either. It’s one of a myriad of such questions we ask ourselves: Do we have the genre balance right? Do we have an adequate balance of experienced authors versus new authors on the program? Are we representing traditional and indie published authors? Do we have representatives from big six publishers and small press? Do we have a mix of digital first and print?

There are a lot of interests at work in the conference and we try to make sure that none of them are under-represented.

Even so, I will be the first to acknowledge that there are some things that bug me, when you look at the history of the conference overall. I am painfully aware that while we’ve had Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books as a guest – and let me stress, she is a fantastic con guest and we were blessed to have her – we’ve never had an international romance author at the conference.

I’m acutely aware that I have blind spots with regards to sub-genres, which means I tend to look for crime-writers who do work in the hard-boiled detective line or authors of regency romance first, since that’s my preferred reading material in those particular genres.

I’m aware that our guest lists have been predominately white, that we’ve got a habit of putting indie/self-published authors on panels that are predominately about indie and self-publishing, and that we had a lot of male international guests in our first two years.

Every time I sit down to assemble a guest list, these things are on my mind. Part of the brief for GenreCon has always been about breaking authors out of the terrain where they keep having the same conversations because of the genre they write in. To combat that tendency for romance authors to be programmed to discuss romance, while the SF writers are over discussing sci-fi and fantasy.

The writers we invite are smart. They have useful things to say to all writers. And it’s absolutely criminal that they are rarely given the option of saying it outside their genre.

It’s why we never deploy genre within the program at all, except as the broad church that unites the disparate genres represented at the conference.

This can be hard to wrap your head around, if you’ve never seen GenreCon up close. We get a lot of panel and workshop pitches from people that revolve around writing the thriller or horror or fantasy, and even when they sound phenomenal, we say no. If it sounds really good, we say  please, pitch something about character or plot or tension, something that will be accessible and useful to everyone, regardless of what they’re writing.

‘Cause if you pitch something genre specific, I have to say no.

Not because I don’t think that people shouldn’t talk about their genres, but because there should be spaces where they can talk about other things instead, and the spaces where you can talk about a particular genre are already kind of plentiful.

Which brings me to the point I’m brooding on, a bit: I’ve taken that approach when it comes to gender as well, despite my belief that it’s an important conversation to have. I’m always thrilled when the inequity of representation in genre comes up in plenaries and keynotes, but its not been on the radar to program a panel about gender and writing.

Within the scope of the conference, I’d rather address the issue of diversity by ensuring a diversity of voices are represented, over and over again, to the best of GenreCon’s ability. I’d rather acknowledge blind-spots as I discover them and find people who can help me navigate them in a meaningful way, rather than just hoping I get it right.

And yet, I feel conflicted about that. Its’ easy to become complicit in silencing discussion, even with the best of intentions.

My gut still tells me the most advantageous thing for the conference to do is have all our representatives talking about writing, not being a female writer, but there are moments I question that logic to make sure we’re adopting it for the right reasons.

The advantage of GenreCon is that there’s a year to puzzle this particular issue out, before we start seriously tackling the issues of what goes on the 2017 program. I’ve already got a master list of topics we’d like to explore that grows, over the next twelve months, as I read and talk to other writers and generally consult with people about ways to tackle the tricky things.

More importantly, I’ve got a year of eavesdropping on professional writer’s conversations at festivals and events, listening to what they actually talk about when they get together, which has always been the initial guiding post for topics worth addressing

It’s a luxury few events of this kind get, and I’m bloody grateful it exists, because it allows for the kinds of shifts in thinking that are invaluable. If we were doing GenreCon yearly, I’d need to have a guest list for 2016 ready to go now. I’d be hip-dip in the initial programming thoughts in a matter of weeks, responding fast rather than thinking things through.

I may not get things right, but I’ll be damned if we don’t try.

The Sleep Thing

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Sleep CyborgI run into people, from time to time, and they ask: how is the sleep thing? 

Usually, I tell them the sleep thing is fine. Way better than it was back April, when I was falling asleep in front of the computer. Way better than it was back in May, when the diagnosis of chronic sleep apnea became all kinds of official and they sent me off with a machine that’d stop me from asphyxiating while I slept.

This is not a lie. Compared to the state I was in at the start of the year, life is a magical wonderland full of candy unicorns. I sleep better. I concentrate better. I do not feel like I am messing up every aspect of my existence as a default state. I keep discovering all sorts of secondary problems – shoulder pain, neck pain, teeth grinding – that were basically linked to the apnea and have now cleared up.

The sleep thing is fine.

Except it’s not.

When you start on CPAP they make it very clear that it’s a therapy, not a cure. The apnea isn’t going away just ’cause you’ve hooked attached a mask to your face and let it pressurize your respiratory system so your throat doesn’t close up so easily. There’s a whole bunch of things that can make the therapy less effective, on a given evening.

You can pull the mask off in your sleep, for example, ’cause it’s not the most comfortable of things to wear. You can disrupt the fit of your mask while tossing and turning, you can go to bed with hay-fever. You can travel, and discover that the faint differences in the way water tastes from city to city becomes a major problem when you put it into a humidifier.

Stuff happens, is what I’m saying. More often than you’d want them too, all things considered.

And that means some days you wake up feeling like a normal person, happy and productive and able to interact with the world. And, some days, you revert. Not as bad as you were, right at the beginning, bad bad enough that you notice it and feel the difference. Bad enough that you’re aware of the line between treatment and cure.

And that’s cool, ’cause treated is so much better than the alternative. So much goddamn better, believe me, that it’s insane.

But it means re-learning how to live your life. It means, some days, you need to get comfortable with the idea that you’re not going to have the energy for everything you’d like to do. It means you have to re-learn the difference between just a little tired and feeling vaguely exhausted, ’cause your default state has been exhaustion for so long that it’s hard to tell the difference. It means you learn to check a screen every morning and gauge how bad things are going to be based on the apnea index and leak-rate the machine tracked overnight.

It’s not always bad. For example, you also discover that your tendency to do the introverts retreat after social events was exacerbated by the apnea, that teaching courses or doing a festival requires far less recovery time than they once did. And you can read books in bed again, without falling asleep the moment you open to the first page. That you can write for longer than 500 words at a burst, ’cause your attention span has a setting other than “kitten on speed.”

Eventually it sinks in that the sleep thing is a thing – it doesn’t go away, it just gets managed better.

So you set out to re-evaluate every damn thing in your life.

My current notebook fetish? Motivated by the sleep thing, and the attention that’s getting paid to the research around the effects screens are having on our sleep patterns.

My recent realisation that I probably need to give up drinking? Totally linked to the sleep apnea, since muscle relaxants are pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to experience longer, nastier breathing-related incidents.

My increasingly rigid refusal to stay awake past my designated bed-time? Entirely built around managing the apnea as best I can, ’cause every time I’ve broken that rule to hang with friends or go out, I’ve paid for it the next day, and the day after that.

At the same time that you’re evaluating, you fret about things.

Like the ongoing costs of the therapy, which are not prohibitive but are right up there with car maintenance as a thing you need to worry about, ’cause you’re going to be replacing masks, filters, and such for the foreseeable future.

Like, what happens when the power goes on, in a storm, and how you’ll get through the next day.

Like all those things that you fucked up, quite royally, over the last five years, and whether they could have gone better if you’d discovered the real problem years ago and started treating it then. Some days you play what if? and you find yourself getting angry.

And that’s okay. The sleep thing is a thing. It’s complicated and long-term and way bigger than you were expecting.It’s not on your mind all the time, but it is on your mind. It occupies a chunk of your mental real-estate that used to be devoted to other things. The sleep thing is a thing you’re going to think about, talk about, far more than other people want you too, ’cause it defines your life in so many little ways.

But that’s hard to convey, really, so you learn to stop. To say, yeah, better, when people ask, ’cause that’s what it all boils down to: its better than it was.

Not great, not normal, not cured, but you’re figuring it out.

And in the world of polite conversation, that’s close enough to true to count.