V. H. King's Ink

I expected the fatigue and exhaustion to pile on, after my surgery.  For someone who routinely doesn’t get much in the way of refreshing sleep and is worn out after 3 hours of being awake, I had a feeling that actual brain surgery was going to knock me out for a while. I also had a feeling that my insides would side-eye anything that approximated solid food.  Digestive problems have been an unfortunate symptom that I’ve experienced (with greater frequency) over the past five years.  (Yikes, has it really been that long?! No, actually…it’s been longer.)

What didn’t I expect?

Well, lots of things, actually.  I’ll spare you a long list—but one of the scariest things has been the difficulties of writing.  Physically speaking, my handwriting more resembles that of a kindergartener.  There’s definitely a difference between my handwriting pre- and post-surgery.  Writing by hand now requires about 80-90% of my full concentration.  Everything from holding a pen to remembering the shapes of letters, from correctly spelling words to forming a coherent thought—I feel like I’m working my way through complex equations, not letting words naturally spill across the page. 

So why don’t I just write on my laptop? Or, as I was more often wont to do, before surgery—tap out something on my phone and then email it to myself?  Whatever scenes or snippets that got stuck in my head, my thumbs often busied themselves on my notes app or my email inbox.  I assure you, there were no shortage of typos and completely incoherent words on those drafts!  But they did the work of getting the gist of what I wanted to convey out of my head.  I could tweak and fine-tune things later. 

After surgery, there are a few things that have made my fiction writing far more difficult than it was before.  Remember how I said writing by hand felt like solving the most difficult equation ever encountered?  Well, that wasn’t just because of my (decrease in) dexterity.  My brain literally does not work…the way it did before.  I struggled with recognizing words and processing their correct order prior to surgery, thanks to a bit of acquired dyslexia from at least a decade of cognitive burnout.  It used to come and go, flaring like many of the rest of my symptoms when my pain and fatigue decided to ramp up.  Now, it’s pretty much the norm.  I struggle to form a complete thought, regardless of the genre or format I’m trying to work in. 

The majority of my fiction writing is a process of writing the scenes I see and hear in my head.  I think of it as trying to relay a movie on paper—sounds, settings, movements, tones.  Scents, textures, sights.  I often worry that I’m not doing my characters justice in trying to convey their thoughts, fears, worries, hopes, and desires.  I always hope to tell their stories in ways that honors their truths.  What’s most terrifying right now…is that my imagination seems to be offline. 

I can’t quite bring to mind scenes like I used to.  I’m not in the room, watching it all happen.  It’s more like remembering a dream that was vivid a few months ago, but has muddled with time.  I desperately hope my dream of sharing stories has not literally muddled.  I’m struggling with the worry, the uncertainty, that all my stories will be left in their various unfinished states.  I’m scared that stories will never resonate with me the way they used to.  My characters are their own people, healing from hurt and searching for hope and struggling to make sense of themselves in an ever-shifting world.  I want to be there with them, through all of that.

Stories aren’t just a hobby or a helpful coping mechanism for me. 

Writing is how I make sense of the world and my place in it. 

Words are how I live and breathe.  Speaking has never been my forte, but I have always sensed the power of words.  And for most of my life, I felt a natural connection to how words could flow onto the page.  I don’t know if that connection has been interrupted for the time being, or if it’s completely gone.  So yeah—I’m scared.  I’m also hoping to find my way through…whatever comes next.  Perhaps it’s not something that can be put into words.

Yet.