Getting Back On The Horse

Tomorrow will mark one month since my last shift at the restaurant. It’s been a relaxing month, but also a bit of a frustrating one. At first I was happy to have the time to relax, then I came down with a flu, and now I’m starting to feel cabin fever. This whole month has been a lot of lying around the house and not doing a whole lot of anything, and after a while that gets boring. The frustrating thing about being down is that I’m not so unwell that I can’t do anything – but when I do things, I get easily overtired. I can go to the bar, but after one beer I start to feel overstimulated. I can go for a walk, but that doesn’t feel especially productive. I can try to write, but after an hour I feel like I just want to lie down.

Last week, I finally got in to see a physiotherapist and then a psychologist to discuss the best way to go about getting back to normal. The physio in particular said some interesting things about how my brain is working. He described it as a car engine that’s worn down and isn’t getting enough gas. It still gets you where you need, but the performance isn’t optimal – when you slam on the gas pedal, it doesn’t reach top speed. He did some tests on me and concluded that while I’m over the worst of things physically, my brain is still a tick slow when it comes to processing, and the extra energy I’m expending is probably tiring me out.

Although he advised me not to dive back into work, in my boredom I’ve begun to putter around with writing a little bit more once again. I’m still not ready to tell any of my editors I can get back to the grind – or tackle this book project in its entirety – but I’ve at least sent out a few stories again. My thinking is that the best way to ramp up to full speed is to start small, with jobs that don’t have specific deadlines or come with a lot of pressure. When the inevitable rejections come back, I can simply file them away in an email folder and forget about them.

It’s productive, but it’s also disorienting. Sometimes hustling as a writer can feel like swimming in the middle of the ocean and searching for land. You know there’s eventually going to be land in almost any direction, but you have no idea where the closest patch of land is – or the best. There might be a tiny island just out of eyesight on one side, but an entire continent a mile in the opposite direction. Firing off stories and pitches for rejection, I’m casting about searching for my identity. Do I make my name in fiction? Sports? Does writing content anonymously for money help get this book published? (Probably not, but it might keep my bank account full until we can.)

None of the doctors I’ve consulted have told me to rush back to work. They say I need to focus on myself and how to get myself in the best place possible to be functional going forward. I agree in theory, but in practice it’s hard. I find myself growing bored and agitated. I don’t have a lot of discipline. I’m not really supposed to be drinking or playing sports, but I want to go out and shoot hoops and muck it up at the bar – just to do something. I’m understanding more and more those scenes in movies where the cancer patient breaks out of the hospital because, damn the doctor, he just wants to have fun again.

But at the same time, I have to find a way to step back and think about how to get better. I want to be able to write and work for a lot of years going forward. I have to figure out a way to throw all my energy into making this book the best book it can possibly be. And I know that actually focusing on things like diet and exercise is what will get me back to normal sooner. But old habits die hard…

On that note, I’m off to see the physio for a follow-up appointment.

-Simon

Learning About Leaps: How An App Saved My Sanity

This week has been one of my hardest yet as a mother. My partner had to leave for work for 4 days and I was left to take care of the baby mostly on my own (though my mother did come over and help me out for one of the days - thank God!). Teo was crying a lot all week and feeding and changing him didn’t seem to be soothing him at all. He wanted to be held all the time and he was eating A LOT. I had to be feeding him almost every hour, day or night, which meant that I wasn’t getting any sleep at all myself. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. It was so stressful and I started to feel like I was failing as a mom. He was just so fussy!

When my partner would call to check in on me I’d be in shambles, feeling like I just didn’t know what to do next. But thank God for one of my friends who gave birth three weeks before me. I finally messaged her to ask her if she’d gone through anything similar to what I was going through with Teo. She told me that it sounded like Teo was going through a leap and it was totally normal. Then she turned me on to an app which helps new mothers understand what’s going on with their newborns.

The app is called The Wonder Weeks and it’s based on a book by a doctor named Frans Plooij. There are apparently ten major leaps that take place in the first 20 months of birth as the baby grows and develops. Teo was going through the leap that takes place around week 5, when babies begin to see greater distances and develop a greater awareness of the world around them. Because of that mental development, he got crankier, started to eat more, and needed to be held more.

I entered Teo’s birth date in the app, and it gave me a sense of how long I should expect this leap to last and when to expect the next big leap for Teo. It has a calendar I can sync up with Teo’s next expected developmental step. It also showed me some cool videos so that I could better understand exactly what Teo was going through. The app also gave me some tips on how to manage Teo and some stimulating exercises that are best suited to a child going through that specific leap. It’s only been a few days and already the app has been heaven-sent.

I no longer feel like I’m failing as a mom. The app was only $3.99 and so far it’s been totally worth it! My partner came back and I felt like I could tell him I’d been successful as a parent while he was gone. I do have to say, though – there are a lot of apps out there which are just meant to take advantage of desperate and sleep-deprived new parents. They try to make a few quick bucks without offering anything of value. So far, I’ve only used apps which have been recommended to me by other girlfriends of mine with new kids, and so far, so good. This app has really helped to give me peace of mind!

-Sarah

Living The Single Life vs Settling Down With A Family

Hitting “Play” On Life (And Writing)

Rest is a dangerous thing. Everyone needs it, but how much do they really need it? At what point does “I’m resting” stop being a statement of fact and start being an excuse?

I’ve spent the past week (since my final shift at the burger joint) resting up. That means sleeping in till 1 or 2, rarely leaving the house except to walk around the neighbourhood, and not doing any writing. But it’s not as if I’m spending this time doing nothing. I’m reading some, I’m staying up to date on the latest sports scores, I’m eating. I even went to a baseball game on Tuesday and went out to the bar last night. Is this stuff better or worse for me than working? As I said to a doctor who called me from the concussion clinic earlier this week – “I’m improved and I’m functional – but I’m certainly not normal.” My head still gets a bit foggy if I stare at a screen too long, drink alcohol, or am surrounded by too much action. It’s a subtle thing – something that can be worked around for a while. But it still exhausts me.

The thing is, there are no goalposts. I'm a sports fan, and often over my years of watching sports I've watched as players struggled to return from injury. Someone will sprain a shoulder and the fans will be given a timeline of four-to-six weeks. After six weeks, fans will start clamouring for the player to come back, and then we'll find out that the recovery has stalled, that it's going to be at least another six weeks. And so it goes until the player finally returns months later. People get healthy when they get healthy; there are no hard and fast parameters when it comes to recovery.

So am I ready to start writing again? I certainly don’t feel like I’m able to take on a full slate, but I'm sure I could bang out an article or two if I took it slow. In trying to force myself to rest up, I'm almost compromising my ability to work. I feel like I’m waiting for the day when I’m going to wake up and feel like there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me, and now I’m realizing that that day may be months away. There’s a delicate balance to be struck between productivity and health. If I do nothing but rest, I feel lazy and unproductive. But if I throw myself into work, I feel unhealthy.

I sent an email to one of my editors today assuring her that I would be getting back to work “within the next couple of weeks.” But that’s, at best, a guess. The main thing at this point is that I don’t know whether putting the time and effort into writing every day has the potential to set me back, or whether engaging my mind will actually help me begin to feel more functional. One thing I have noticed is that sometimes going out and getting out of my head seems to be the best thing for me – as if all I need to do is laugh a little and relax and I’ll be fine. Maybe what I’m feeling is the effects of stress and lack of sleep over the past decade as much as it is a direct impact of the blow to the head.

All of which is to say, I don’t know when I’ll get back on the horse and start pushing this book again. My hope is that this month I can get my sleep cycle into rhythm and get back to writing every morning. Once that happens, I can gradually begin adding things to my plate.

Anyway, those are the goalposts - until they move again.

-Simon

The Beginning Of A New Journey

Well, it’s been a spring full of change and news around these parts, with a new baby for Sarah and health issues for me. Since my injury relapsed, I’ve been working but not writing much – partly on doctor’s orders, partly because it strains my brain to stare at a screen for too long and/or put the time into doing research, and partly because I’ve been generally quite lethargic. It hasn’t been a particularly fun couple of months, so I decided it was time to make a real change. Two weeks ago I put in my notice at my restaurant job. I worked my last day yesterday and am now officially free from my wage-slavery. The notion of total freedom is a pleasant one, but it’s also a little bit scary – especially in light of how unwell I’ve been feeling. Without a steady income, I’m going to need to rely on being able to get back on the horse and start writing before too long, and trying to make some money that way.

As much as I hoped that this would be an exciting time turning a new page in my life, as a worked through my last day yesterday I didn’t feel victorious or excited in the way that maybe I thought I would. I have a recollection of quitting my movie theatre job when I was 19 to go off to university and explore bigger and better things and feeling excited and expectant. Maybe it’s being in my thirties, but my last day yesterday had none of that unfettered joy. It was a day like any other – simply a day where I didn’t have to come back in tomorrow. Certainly I was looser and more relaxed than usual, but more than anything the feeling I have today is relief. I cut my chains, but I still need to find a way to make a living, and that’s no easy feat.

I was contacted by a concussion clinic today, so hopefully in the next few weeks I can rest up, learn to manage my symptoms, and begin to write again. I still have a serious article that I was trying to pitch before my symptoms worsened, and I do hope I can finish it up with a second interview of my subject and get it published somewhere notable. And even though I haven’t done any significant writing in at least a month, it’s kind of nice to look back and see how much I feel like I accomplished between November and February. I hope that without a 30-hour-a-week job to slog through, I can soon redouble my efforts on that front without burning myself out again.

I’m hungover and tired today, so my apologies if this post is a little more sombre than the title would suggest. Quitting my job to do what I love is a major step for me, and I’m especially looking forward to enjoying a full, free summer with all the time in the world to enjoy the weather, take in some local baseball games, and tie up all sorts of loose ends that get pushed aside by the daily grind. I look forward to doing some real cooking at home, to dusting off the bike outside and getting the tires fixed. In fact, even without trying, I can already feel a list of dozens of obligations beginning to fill my head. For now, I’m pushing them aside – R and R (and all the other Rs – relaxation, rehabilitation, recuperation) is far more important at this point. I feel like I need to focus on what’s important in life, and think about – and even dream on – the future. And it goes without saying that this book will be a major part of that process once I’m physically and mentally ready to focus my energies on something.

Working is a grind for anyone. But living is more important than working. I looked in the mirror one day and asked if my work-life balance was where I needed it to be – if I was working to live or living to work. And I concluded that I was living to work far too much for someone working at what, fundamentally, is a shitty service job. I had begun to feel trapped in a routine where my workplace had become my personal jail, but I finally realized that there was nothing keeping me cooped in my cell except for a misplaced sense of loyalty and the desire to see my bank account rise at the end of the month. And that simply wasn’t important to me anymore. My hope by freeing myself is that I can learn to live again - whatever that may mean.


-Simon