This ... is long overdue

I don't even know what I'm writing here. Let's find out together.

“Madness Royal”. Photo by David J Stang. Used under CCA-4.0

It has been almost 2 months since my last substantive post here. The first 6 weeks of that were mental health and then just as I was getting ready to post again I had a bad fall - my regular joint problems lead to occasional falls, but this one I landed horribly wrong. I broke my humerus just an inch from my shoulder, too high to immobilize without wrapping my entire torso and threatening me with reconstructive surgery.

I narrowly escaped having my arm bolted back together but the consulting surgeon was adamant I stop moving so much, even typing. I have, of course, been ignoring the poor guy and typing small amounts at a time anyway, but never much and certainly never much at a time. I’m not good at following rules, but I was afraid of ending up in a Catholic hospital’s surgery unit. (Not even for the cyborg cred do I want to go through that.)

The arm will continue to get better and so will my psyche. I have plenty to offer my subscribers still. The one thing that I can’t really offer is an explanation. But for what it’s worth, I’m going to try.

Mental health has come a long way during my decades alive. Postpartum depression, for instance. It’s a thing, and we’re destigmatizing it, and recognize that it comes in degrees and we generally know, as a society, that mental illness is something you can have and get through. It can be temporary or it can be mild or it can be moderate but well addressed via medication. And because of the way that statistics work there are many more people who need some help than people that are entirely non-functional —in at least the capitalist sense.

So we, as a society, have this idea that we know what mental illness looks like and it sucks but it’s also mostly okay, like having asthma but you carry an inhaler and you don’t play soccer anymore. So except for missing out on a few more physically demanding things and taking 3 hours to mow the lawn so you can have some breaks, you’ve managed to paint a cover over your life that makes it look like something normal.

And then there are people whose mental illnesses are scary and out of control, the people who talk to themselves about entities and events that only make sense within the confines of a single skull. We experience these people mostly as tragic or sometimes villainous figures in fanciful stories on the page or screen.

And then there’s me. I can’t tell you why I can function socially online (mostly) and not in person. I mean, I could describe what happens when I’m out and about interacting with people. I could tell you that I have become a good actor and that you would never know that inside my brain is sending ever more desperate signals that I must be fucking everything up, that I’ve probably committed a horrible social offence and just don’t know it because everyone around me is too mortified to bring it up. I could tell you that the worst part isn’t even being in public for an hour or two, but coming home and spending three days with my brain telling me that no matter how normal that grocery store checkout action seemed, I clearly offended everyone near me and that the only solution to my invisible social gaffes is suicide.

I could tell you but you really wouldn’t believe me. It wouldn’t make sense because it doesn’t make sense. It never has made sense and never will make sense.

Worse, the more I care about people, the harder it is for me to reconnect because injuring the people you care about is even worse than that social stupidity in the grocery store in front of people you will never see again. And I care about you, each and every one of you who reads me here or who read me on Wonkette. And I keep thinking that maybe an hour from now I’ll have the strength and insight to write something worth reading so I don’t have to put up a placeholder post letting folks know I’m not doing well but will be back when I can. And then things go long enough that just not putting up a placeholder post when I have people who actually subscribe to me because they trust that I will write things of value to them, that itself becomes another failure for which I have to apologize and for which I probably deserve to be axemurdered or dismembered by dingos or something.

I go through this more or less every day. Without meaning to, I shout out loud, trying to drown out the loud thoughts in my brain. It’s disconcerting to the people around me, and it’s why I never was able to work as a lawyer.

But also, the last few months aren’t completely normal either. Not even for me, I mean. I’m never normal enough to trust myself, it’s not like I’m ever cured, but not every period of my life is as bad as February, March, and April have been for me this year. The last time things were this bad was 2018 or so. But even when things get better, another episode like this is always waiting to pounce. I have had the best doctors, truly world class experts trying truly extreme measures and though so far I have always come out the other side, this isn’t just depression or just social anxiety. This isn’t mental asthma controlled with inhalers and moderating my activities. I can tell you some of what it’s like, but I can’t encapsulate the true experience of having a creative brain with something to offer the world one month and the next being hospitalized with no clue what went wrong or how to make it better.

This can’t just be blamed on Trump and his all out assault on trans people. Yes, I know that had to be a factor in what has happened the last few months. Swimming through an ocean of threats is traumatizing and exhausting, but that’s not the really realsy reason. What happened is that I’m insane, and sometimes I’m just entirely broken. Without a combination of your timely support in December (and ongoing since) plus the great good fortune I have being born to a family who can provide some rent support, I’d be on the street right now.

And, again, not because I have nothing to offer the world, but because I am literally insane. There is no drug or fancy implant or cognitive behavioural therapy that can make me better. I can provide intelligent analysis and rare insight one day and spend the next three unable to eat because a phone rang and I didn’t answer it.

None of this makes sense, because if it made sense I could plan around it, I could tell people I was about to lose it and schedule exactly 17 days off. But instead I am insane. Literally, fully, you can’t ever really appreciate what it means because I’ve lived it and I can’t appreciate what it means insane.

I don’t mean this as an excuse. I’m sure some people have stopped their subscriptions while I’ve been gone and some of them may never restart. Money is scarce, and as valuable as what I say might be to some of you sometimes, pledging to be more reliable with your debit payments than I can be in my writing isn’t for everyone. For anyone who doesn’t want to subscribe for free because I’m ridiculously insane, do what you gotta. For anyone who doesn’t want to subscribe for money because I’m ridiculously insane, more power to you.

I am all about consent and this isn’t here to guilt trip anyone or to make me make sense to anyone. This is… this is the writing I need to do to acknowledge that I’ve failed people that I love and to tell you that I’m coming back.

My goal is to end this year having written enough that even with this hiatus I still average one solid, valuable post every 3-7 days for calendar 2025. I’m going to make this a little easier on myself by working up a couple posts based on things I said on BlueSky while I wasn’t writing for PJ, but the point is that I fully intend to put in the work to meet the expectations that I set, the promises that I made.

I can’t ever fully explain why I’ve been gone, but I’m doing my best to be back, and you all should know that I’ve missed you terribly.

Let’s chat again, shall we?

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If you want to try to see me write essays in 299 character blobs, you could join the thousand plus people amused at my inability to understand the “micro” in “microblogging” over on BlueSky.