Wise Words: It Makes Me Ill

The Defense Department is in me, but don’t think it isn’t a menace on the outside as well. Someone, somewhere wants to be free and independent. Our Defense Department launches an offensive. It makes me ill. Someone wants to make an exorbitant profit and it affects my health. Someone puts something in my food which makes me ill. Someone puts something in the air which makes me ill. Someone puts something in the water which makes me ill. Someone radiates the soil which makes me ill. Someone builds weapons, the research and the manufacture of them alone, before their use, makes me ill. Someone defends these actions. A defense system, but it isn’t mine. Someone turns a deaf ear, which makes me ill. Someone says, “I will never listen to women.” It makes me ill. The system by and of and for these someones has made me ill.

(Deena Metzger, from Tree, in The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them and Tree (two works in one volume), Wingbow Press: Berkley, California, 1978, 1981, pp. 145–146)

An Unlikely Heroine

I have some rather good news. Another of my stories is to be published in the next Heroines anthology, due out in September.

This is both wonderful and sad, for I wrote the story nearly three years ago, back when I was still able to write. 

I am unable to write stories now.

I began writing creatively at the beginning of 2014, starting tentatively, not knowing how, yet gradually being drawn more and more to create characters and settings, and to see where they led me. I experienced, from 2013 to 2017, a time of wonder. I had increased (though still limited) energy, and this is what made it possible, yet it was the newness of what I was learning and experiencing that drove me onwards. It was a time of profusion. The possibilities of my life expanded, my imagination flourished, and I felt like I had found not only what I wanted to do, but something that I could do, despite having CFS.

Perhaps I was naive. Maybe things went to my head. I forgot that nothing is certain when chronic illness is involved. 

So, there are mixed feelings about the impending publication of my story. There is a sense of hope. If my story can be selected (again!) from more than 100 submissions, then surely that means I can write well, given the right circumstances. But there is also a sense of defeat, for I am not in control of the circumstances. I do not know when I will be able to write again.

I’m trapped in a great tangle of possibilities and limitations, trying to make sense of it all, and not having much success at present.

It’s hard work being the heroine of my own life, but I must trust that I will find a way to save myself, to keep on living as best I can, whether I can write or not.