I rarely write such updates, and I am writing this one purely to get the word out about my current condition, which has become more difficult in recent years. Please do not respond on any of my social media walls with remote diagnoses, remedies, or medical advice (unless you are an actual doctor who can show up to help). I have listed a few different ways you can help me, at the end, should you choose or are able to.
About twenty years ago, I suffered a knee injury that twisted my left leg to the side for a long time. Lacking anything resembling decent healthcare, I resorted to the medical advice and informal care of doctor friends, knee braces, chiropractor and acupuncture sessions (paid for by friends), and sheer grit. Eventually, I was able to walk around with the continued use of braces. Over time, that became harder and I resorted to a cane. Today, the knee is much worse and I spend most of my days in various states of pain ranging from moderate to so severe that I sometimes miss entire days in what resemble blackout sessions, and I have to use a cane even indoors. Recently, I mistook Wednesday for Tuesday and realised I’d missed much of a day because of the intense pain. I sometimes spend all night with an aching leg, which makes sleep very hard, and I wake up tired. My body, which appears to have Protestant origins in some long-ago ancestral past, never lets me “sleep in” past 7 a.m, so I’m always up early, ready to milk the cows and feed the chickens against my will. I often struggle to keep up with the day (when I can, I try to take a nap from the ordeal of waking up, which seems quite ridiculous, but is a help). For the last two decades, I have spent every day in some form of pain or, at best, great discomfort, even doing interviews and assignments all the while. I have not worked through the pain, but with it as a constant presence.
I am fortunate to have a network of friends and supporters of all kinds who make sure I am safe and warm, so this is not a call for funds, yet. (Given the state of the world, I fear I am always on the precipice of doom.) But even many of my friends have no idea how bad things have become and my subscribers have to be wondering what might be going on. I am writing this because it is the quickest way to let my friends, supporters, and subscribers know why I have not been in communication very much, and why I’ve snatched a brief respite from work while I sort out the best way to move forward.
I’ve taken several measures to help me keep working, among them:
I asked my darling friend M. to work with me as, in effect, a writing doula. With the constant pain a persistent force in my life, I was finding it hard to keep working on essays and book projects at a steady pace. For instance, I would be halfway done with an essay, be struck by pain, and then emerge facing a hard deadline for another assignment, which meant putting the first project on hold for a bit, then turn to work on something else that required attention, and so on. Often, work would just spiral into an infinite set of “To Do” tasks. Now, every Wednesday, I send M. a list of work to be done, and then we meet on the phone on Saturdays to discuss my progress: what was done, what needs to be done, what can be shunted temporarily and taken up again. This is how I was able to bring a large project to the finish line.
I took a brief break from writing shorter essays, and instead focused on the major book project about which I hope to post great news soon. I’m working on finishing another book, and will get back to completing several shorter essays in my docket. As I wrote in “Delayed by Exhaustion,” I have not had anything resembling a full break in two decades, and I desperately need to find some time “off” — something that no freelancer these days can really afford to do without a lot of advance work slated and scheduled to go up even while on “break.” There is the additional blight of social media, where I am compelled to appear regularly: I actually like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, very much, but I loathe the fact that unaffiliated rat bastards like me cannot afford to completely disengage for fear of complete invisibility. Too many people think I’m on the payroll of Current Affairs as an editor at large: the position, at a magazine I care about deeply, is an unpaid and honorary one. The problem is that my physical health is threatened by the relentless schedule of writing, and I have to find ways to let my body and mind breathe a bit: part of the pain problem is the constant stress of a never-ending grind. I have found that taking time off on the weekends can still help me stay on schedule (with the help of M.), and I actually get more work done. None of this is easy for freelancers: John Morris’s “Life as a Freelancer” explains why in some detail.
Moving forward: I will be returning to my regular posting schedule soon, but this time schedule more writing breaks, with posts scheduled to go up during intervals (such as, the end of the year, starting around Thanksgiving). I will not be travelling for conferences or presentations and will only start thinking about (Zoom) presentations in the new year. I’m mentally and physically wrung out, and I have to find ways to catch a break every now and then.
I wrote this to let my friends and supporters know what is going on: I am deeply, deeply grateful to my subscribers, many of whom have stuck with me for more than a couple of decades, through many crises. I have been reluctant to be open about my long-term health problems for the most obvious reason, that it might impede my publishing career. When I brought it up with a friend, he laughed, “Oh, no, probably the opposite, they’ll want you to write for them, even more so now, but they may want you to only write about your pain.” This is probably true, but I do not plan on writing about my health again, unless forced to for some reason: my pain is not my identity, it is simply a fact of life that I have to navigate around, like an annoying roommate who will not move out. As my regular readers are aware, I am deeply critical of trauma narratives and I am not going to use my condition to shield myself from any real critiques of my work: there will be no variations of “How could you possibly say I’m wrong, when I am in pain?” If anything, I wish people would at least engage my work more, even critically, instead of effectively Voldemorting me — but that is a whole other topic, to be explored more thoroughly in several upcoming pieces on plagiarism. (My work on the topic is listed at the end of “On Plagiarism.”)
I will add: a number of people, including many of those who have plagiarised my work (or tried) — and who spend a lot of time online blueskying and tweeting about my supposed massive privilege — have been privy to the knowledge about my years of hardship and pain. That they have chosen to mutter lies despite knowing the truth says a lot about their vicious toxicity and their Mean Girl-ness. Ironically — or, perhaps fittingly — these are among the same people who have lifted entire sections of my considerable work on trauma, but I will be writing about that later.
There is lots more to come, in the shapes of several projects, and I am still, despite the intense pain involved even in writing this, the writer whose work you have helped to keep alive all these years. The pain has not softened me one bit.
Onwards.
If you would like to support me in any way: Subscribing or donating to my work helps to keep it going. Otherwise (funds are low, for everyone, these days), I would be delighted to get anything from my wishlist. I have recently taken to several hobbies like collage, colouring, and jewellery making, all of which help to soothe me — using my hands to physically sort paper images and beads and to colour in pictures has been really helpful. If you have old jewellery, or any illustration-heavy magazines and children’s books lying around, I’d be happy to take them off your hands. (Please first check sites like Ebay and Etsy, or with qualified experts, to make sure that a piece of jewellery or a book isn’t a valuable collectible.)
Many thanks to K. and S. for reading a draft of this.
Image: Hans Hartung, Untitled, 1955.