Tag: chronic pain

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05/10, Ĉano – Part II (TBA Readalong)

Hello! We’re reading The Butterfly Assassin together, following the calendar of the book, and discussing the worldbuilding and writing process. Jump to 17/09, Eraro to start from the beginning, or join us wherever you like!

On the 5th of October, Isabel continues to have a shitty day. She’s sufficiently unwell – and visibly so – that Ashvin sends her home rather than let her do her paper round, and she doesn’t make it to school. While she’s trying to remember how to think in a straight line, Daragh calls her, and gives her the results of her latest blood tests. They’re not good. You always know it’s not good when doctors start using words like “prognosis” and “palliative care”. But Isabel hasn’t given up, and she asks Daragh for Grace’s number.

It’s another brief one – though we get about a page and a half today, rather than yesterday’s scant handful of lines – and the focus is still on pain and illness. Some reviewers aren’t fans of that, finding it frustrating that Isabel spends so much of the book suffering. To which I can say two things: first, trust me, this was even more pronounced in the early drafts, and second, yeah, being in pain all the time sucks and is boring, I agree.

Sorry, did that sound bitter? If it is, it’s not because I’m annoyed at the reviewers (they’re well within their rights to dislike the book for any and all reasons they might mention, and it is in fact none of my business unless they tag me in it! Although sometimes they do tag me in it. Alas). The bitterness is because chronic illness and pain do suck… but also because it’s so rare to find characters who have those experiences and, in part, it’s because there’s a belief (perhaps justified) that nobody wants to read about being in pain all the time. For those of us for whom this is our lives, though, this basically just tells us we’ll never be the  main characters of our own stories, and that’s… kind of a bummer?

In a previous draft, the AMM rewrite, this scene was another in-person appointment with Daragh, and Emma had come with Isabel for moral support, so it was Emma who gave Isabel Grace’s number:

“I’m sorry,” Daragh says, “but this is bad.” And what she hears is, You’re losing.

But she will not die like this. Nor will she go to her father and beg him to save her, which seems to be the only rope anyone can throw her as she drowns day by day in the encroaching blackness of the poison. Never mind that he’s missing, that she might not be able to find him even if she tries – she will not try. She refuses to give him the satisfaction of seeing her come crawling back to him.

And she won’t go begging at Ronan’s door, either.

She looks from Daragh to Emma and back at the test results on the doctor’s desk. “Emma,” she says, “do you have Grace’s number?”

As with many of the changes to this middle section of the book, it was largely for pacing reasons that I cut this appointment, combined several days into a single chapter, and made this a phonecall. And, of course, in the earliest drafts, Isabel would have been in hospital by then. Although she suggested they asked Grace for help, it wasn’t an active decision that she made as part of her attempts to solve this herself – it was, instead, part of her relying on others to fix things. I was very keen to push Isabel to be as active a participant in the plot as possible, and that was one of the main changes in the AMM rewrite: Isabel tries to save herself, and asking Grace for help is part of that.

We’ll see more of that in tomorrow’s post, in which you’ll get to learn about the chapter that required the most research of anything in the book. In the meantime, I want to hear your thoughts – anything and everything evoked by this chapter. Drop them in the comments and I’ll see you tomorrow!

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02/10, Kulpo (TBA Readalong)

On the 2nd of October, Grace gives Isabel the antidote to the memory suppressant. They talk a little about Mortimer, and whether or not he poses a threat, and Isabel wonders exactly how deep in Grace’s debt she’s going to be.

Since the previous chapter didn’t exist in any of the early drafts, neither did this scene, although Isabel did, at one point in the first draft, discuss Mortimer with Graham:

“Mortimer’s more perceptive than most people.”

“Yeah, he is.”

“You shouldn’t trust him.”

“I don’t. I don’t trust you either. That doesn’t mean I won’t accept your help.”

(A classic taste of how much of the first draft was pure dialogue with no dialogue tags. This is often the case with my first drafts, but when you take a scene out of context, it makes it very hard to figure out who is speaking. This one is Graham – Isabel – Graham – Isabel, ftr.)

There’s a slightly more readable version of this in Draft IV:

“Oh.” Warily, Isabel allows Grace to take her arm again, and they make slow progress down the corridor towards the medical room. “Mortimer knows about you, you know.”

“You told him?”

“He already knew. He says you’re bad at hiding it.”

“Mortimer’s more perceptive than most people.” A moment of silence. “You shouldn’t trust him.”

“I don’t.”

She thinks Grace probably smiles at that, but she can’t see her face from this angle. “I’m sorry this has happened to you, Isabel,” says the librarian eventually, and Isabel has no idea how to respond to that.

We can see that Grace and Mortimer are on friendlier terms in the late drafts than they were earlier on, but that’s mostly because I gave them actual characterisation, and also because Grace is no longer affiliated with Hummingbird the way that Graham was. Mortimer isn’t aware that Grace is a freelance poisoner, but if he was, the fact that she specialises in antidotes and nonlethals would probably reconcile him to that information, even if it would initially be a shock. On the whole, though, he’d struggle to be friendly with a guild member – Isabel becoming a notable exception to that. His suspicion that Grace was/had been a poisoner in the early drafts was a big part of the tension between the pair of them.

Come Draft VI, Grace was a poisoner, Mortimer didn’t know but suspected, and we were creeping towards a recognisable version of this scene, but we still didn’t have my favourite moment, a version of which showed up in 2020:

“He doesn’t know I’ve been poisoned. Or that I was trained as a child. But the rest…” She shrugs, trying to hide her discomfort. “I don’t know what he’ll do with that information. I don’t think he’s planning to do anything yet, but I can’t be sure.”

“Want me to poison him for you?” says Grace.

Isabel looks up, shocked. “No,” she says instantly. “No, of course not, that would – wait, was that a joke?”

The librarian pulls a face. “Not exactly. I mean, I’d rather not. Despite his many flaws, I do actually like Mortimer. But if you’d asked, I’d have considered it. Something nasty but nonlethal.”

Want me to poison him for you? I love Grace in this moment. This is the moment we realise she’s switched from a threat to Isabel to a genuine ally: somebody who will protect her. And Isabel has few enough of those.

There’s not much else to discuss in this chapter, so I’m going to be slightly cheeky and slip into the 3rd October, because I have a couple of sections to cover there. Since the first of them happens at 04:23am, it’s still kind of the 2nd, especially as it’s not quite dawn.

In this scene, Isabel wakes from a dream, triggered by the memory suppressant breaking down, in which she remembers creating the poison for her father. She wakes before she can remember the formula, horrified to realise she’s been, in part, the architect of her own suffering. Michael, suffering his own nightmares, calls her, and the two have a late-night call, solidarity in the face of mutual trauma.

There are two things I want to say about this section.

Firstly, that it was important to me that Isabel was at least partially implicated in her own suffering. It’s pretty clear that the poison wasn’t her idea, and nobody else would hold her responsible for creating it, or think that she deserved to suffer as a result – but Isabel does, to a certain extent, see it that way. She doesn’t consider herself blameless, and this moment creates ambiguity (to her) about the extent to which she’s a victim.

When I temporarily lost the use of my hands at seventeen, a lot of it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t design my own genetics and give myself hypermobility syndrome. I wasn’t the one who gave me bad medical advice and worsened what might otherwise have been a smaller issue. I didn’t create the school system that pushed me to try and overachieve.

I did, however, write 700,000 words of fiction in eight months while doing my AS Levels, writing for three blogs, preparing for grade eight flute and violin, and playing in half a dozen musical ensembles. Repetitive Strain Injury was, as it seemed everybody wanted to tell me at the beginning, my fault.

For most people, RSI would have been temporary, if possibly recurring; for me, I became disabled, at first quite significantly. And it was my fault. I believed that. I’d overdone it, I hadn’t listened to warnings, I’d had bad posture, I’d pushed too hard, I’d done this to myself and therefore I deserved it. Did this mindset contribute to the pain sensitisation that trapped me in a cycle of chronic pain? I don’t know. But it sure didn’t help, because believing I deserved it also meant, on a deep subconscious level, that I didn’t truly believe I deserved to get better. Or that I was allowed to get better.

And then, when I got diagnosed with coeliac disease, it was after a year in which I had more or less exclusively lived on bread and pasta. (I was a first-year undergrad with limited kitchen facilities; it happens.) In other words, I’d spent a year poisoning myself. Did I know? No, of course I didn’t know. Did it make it worse? In the long term, probably not; in the short term, yes, it was the reason my antibody count was through the roof and my general health was so poor.

What mattered, though, at the time, was that I was not the blameless disabled person who had done everything right and still got sick, and was therefore worthy of sympathy. I had done everything wrong, and I had made myself sick.

In the years since then, I’ve learned two things: first, it doesn’t matter if you do everything right. This is an awful thing to have to learn, because it makes you realise that no matter how hard you try, you can’t actually protect yourself from illness, because illness is not a moral punishment and sometimes it Just Happens. Yes, even if you were good, even if you took all of your vitamins, even if you exercised, even if you rested – we are not, in the end, in control of our health, and we cannot protect ourselves from illness and injury and pain. And recognising that also doesn’t wholly take away the guilt and sense of responsibility. But it helps a little.

The second thing I learned is that it wouldn’t matter if I was fully, 100% responsible for all of my health issues: I still deserved help. I still deserved to get better.

That is, frequently, the point I am making here. Isabel is not blameless – in so many ways, she has been the cause of suffering. She is not perfect, not innocent, not untouched by her parents’ teachings. She still deserves better. She still deserves help, she still deserves to be safe, she still deserves medicine and care and friends. Because those are not conditional.

I said I wasn’t going to over-explain my motivations and thematic intentions because I want the book to stand alone, but I couldn’t help myself with this one, because this matters to me. It matters to me that Isabel isn’t innocent, and it matters to me that she still deserves better – and this is the first chapter where we really get a sense of that.

The second thing I want to say about this chapter is, you’ll be pleased to know, a little lighter in tone.

When Isabel is on the phone with Michael, he tells her that he can’t sleep because one of his roommates in the hostel where he’s staying is snoring like a rowing machine. This is drawn directly from my own personal experiences of staying in a hostel in Leeds in 2018, on my way to a job interview with the British Library in Boston Spa. Somebody in my dorm snored exactly like this: a long, noisy drag in, and then a sudden whoosh out. I had Green Day playing at top volume through my headphones and I could still hear them.

I may have hit them with a pillow. More than once. You can’t prove it. I’ll deny everything.

By the time I woke up at 7am to catch the bus out to my interview, I had not slept very much, and I was not very happy. I was also wildly unqualified for the job and, frankly, I don’t know why they interviewed me; needless to say, it didn’t work out, which is why I still live in Cambridge with its extortionate house prices, and not in Yorkshire, where less of my monthly income would go on rent. But the experience taught me something vital, and that is that some people snore like rowing machines.

I’m sorry, Michael. Nobody deserves to go through that.

Again, I have to say, I have a soft spot for the Michael we meet in this chapter. It’s clear he understands Isabel in a way that nobody else does; they’re alike, and they have shared experiences that nobody else has. This scene was another late addition to the book (really, this whole section was) – it showed up in 2020, and then almost got cut again in my autumn edits that year, but I decided the character moment was worth keeping. I’m glad I did. I think it was worth it.

What about you? Any thoughts on this chapter? How did it make you feel to realise that Isabel had helped make the poison – did it change how you viewed her and her illness? And, to keep things light, who’s the worst snorer you’ve ever had the misfortune to share a room with?

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Control And Recovery

You would think, after eight years in a perpetual yo-yo of decline and recovery, that I would know how to write about recovery. I don’t. On this occasion, recovering from top surgery and a knee injury and pandemic-induced inactivity simultaneously, there’s plenty of material. But some of it’s gross, and some of it’s boring. Some of it is a story of anxiety (“Is this healing correctly? Should it look like that?”), and some of it is a story of determination (daily walks getting slowly longer as I test my ability to walk without a cane). Sometimes, it’s staring into a mirror wondering whether I’ve always been this wonky, or whether I need to go back to the osteopath because my spine’s gone twisty again. None of it makes for a tidy narrative or an inspirational story.

Here’s the part that’s a story: three years on the NHS gender clinic waiting list and no sign of a first appointment, so I went private for top surgery, because selling The Butterfly Assassin gave me the money to do it. And that’s narratively significant and tidy, because The Butterfly Assassin is a story about struggling for control over your body and your life, and this was a form of taking back some of that control. It’s also a book I first wrote during the summer of 2014, around the same time I was having my initial gender crisis. These facts are probably not a coincidence.

The rest is messier. The rest is about balancing my squeamishness, my fear of being visibly trans in an increasingly hostile world, and the fact that surgery cost two-thirds of my yearly income with the fact that I needed to feel at home in my own skin, in an urgent way that wasn’t compatible with the absurd NHS waiting lists. The rest is private: my choices, my anxiety, my body. No matter how the media likes to pretend that trans lives must be endlessly subjected to public debate and examination.

The knee injury, though, I can talk about that. I hurt it in October, and since then my walking has been limited to what I can manage with a cane. My reliance on it has gradually reduced — initially I could hardly walk at all — but I was still using the cane when I travelled for surgery, and my inability to lean on it without aggravating my chest afterwards forced me to focus on rehabilitating the knee. There’s a lot of that, when you have hypermobile joints that perpetually injure themselves. Decline and recovery, decline and recovery, a constant process of rebuilding and relearning and reshaping.

So I’ve been going for walks, because they’re the only exercise I can manage. The unseasonably warm spring weather has helped, making it easier to motivate myself to leave the house, although there are still days where I’m tempted to stay in bed all day. But I force myself out. Sometimes, the walks are short: up the park, a quick circuit of the Pokéstops, taking over the gyms again if somebody’s kicked me out, and then home to recover. Sometimes they’re longer, not always intentionally, as I go a street or two beyond my usual circuit and then drawn further afield by curiosity to see what I’ll find.

Two things have made these walks bearable, even at the beginning when they were brief and slow and required frequent rest-breaks. The first is that I’m living in a new area, and so even a circuit of the streets will bring me sights I’ve never seen before, rather than the dreary familiarity of an area where I’ve lived for years. Novelty creates excitement, even when the novelty is just a different block of flats and row of shops. Since I’m due to move again next month (I’ve begun to feel like I will never not be moving house), there won’t be time for this area to become drearily familiar, and instead I have a sense of urgency, like I need to make the most of it while I’m here.

The other is Pokémon Go. I know: it’s 2022, not 2016. But in 2016, downloading Pokémon Go did wonders for my fitness, prompting me to take that extra digression on the way home just to loop in a couple of extra Pokéstops, rather than always taking the shortest route. It helped me build my stamina and strength, something that’s essential to managing my hypermobility. I stopped playing a while back, but last year downloaded it again to try and motivate myself to leave the house more often. It didn’t work very well then — it helped a little, but then I hurt my knee, so I couldn’t go out — but now it’s coming into its own.

Walking slowly, pausing often, and sticking only to familiar routes where I won’t accidentally find myself too far from home are boring limitations on an ordinary walk. But Pokémon Go makes them easier to bear. I walk slowly, so that gives me time to catch the Pokémon I pass. I’ll pause at a gym to reclaim control of it, giving myself a chance to rest and lower my heartrate before I continue. And I’m always looking at a map of the area, so it’s easier to find my way back when I stray off course.

It has become — in a strange kind of way — an accessibility aid. This game, which was not designed for me, and which favours those who can walk significant distances and regularly, is helping me to manage my disabilities and rehabilitate an injury that has plagued me for months. It makes it worth putting my shoes on just to manage a 15-minute walk, because at least that’ll help maintain my streak of visiting Pokéstops. It has, unexpectedly, gamified recovery.

The game has its challenges and problems. The repetitive movements aren’t great for my hands, and staring down at my phone probably isn’t doing great things for my neck either. But my knee is improving. The other day, I managed to walk for ninety minutes, which I haven’t done in months. My mind feels clearer for it, too: an hour each day away from Twitter and the endless news cycle of doom and despair, the rising cost of living and the spread of virulent transphobia and the war in Ukraine and the perpetually growing COVID figures…

It’s frustrating, when people turn out to be right that fresh air and exercise help. Partly because I’m a creature of the indoors at the best of times, and partly because I don’t always have a choice about my ability to experience those things. For months my knee has kept me trapped, unable to walk further than 10 minutes from home in case I can’t get back again, and no matter how much I wanted to go out and exercise, I couldn’t. Anxiety quickly begins to close in when you feel you’ve lost all sense of control over how you manage it.

But now the winter is coming to an end. The days are getting longer, and the air is getting warmer, and I, like the flowers, am slowly coming back to life again. Slowly getting some colour back, and raising my head to the sun. One gentle walk at a time.

I’m beginning to feel hopeful now that when I’m allowed to dance again, once the post-surgery restriction on cardio has been lifted, I might actually be able to. I’m beginning to look forward to choreographing, to having space to dance in a way that I haven’t since the start of the pandemic. Getting my rhythm back. Expressing myself in a way that doesn’t need words. This time, without having to strap myself into a painful, over-tight sports bra before I start.

With every day that passes, as I get stronger and as my chest heals, I begin to feel that little bit more at home in my own skin. And it’s not body positivity per se. My body and I will always have our wars, particularly over its inability to digest anything I might actually want to eat. But it’s body neutrality. It’s recognition of the self. It’s glancing in the mirror and going, “Oh, yeah, that’s me.” Flaws and all. Rather than feeling caught in a trap, caged in by something I don’t have control over and can’t relate to.

The Butterfly Assassin is a book about struggling for control over your body and your life. About wanting autonomy when you’re losing even the ability to function on a day-to-day basis. About trying to find a balance between surrender and stubbornness: when to ask for help, and when to go it alone. In the eight years since I first drafted it, I’ve lived that over and over, through different periods of decline and their subsequent eras of recovery, and I know that recovery will never be ‘final’, but always an ongoing process. That’s what chronic means. It’s never just one injury, one surgery: it’s a dozen small things and all their effects.

Still, I feel hopeful now that when the book comes out, in two months, it’ll be a much stronger version of me who is there to greet it. Not the hermit-like winter me, kept trapped by pain, but the version of me that takes a slightly longer walk every day, and feels my body remembering what it feels like to do what I want it to do.

Maybe I’ve learned to write about recovery after all. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing you relearn every time, the way I relearn how to walk, the way I regain my strength. An endless cycle. A perpetual process of becoming myself, and claiming my own body.

The Butterfly Assassin will be released on the 26th of May. You can pre-order it now.

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Letters From The Past

The first email I got this year was from myself.

I’d written it in July 2012, addressed to the Me of 2022, and scheduled it to arrive in the future. It didn’t come as a complete surprise: I knew I’d written the letter, because I’d been wondering, recently, where I’d saved it. There were a few of them in total, written between 2012 and 2015, all to be read in 2022 (because it was ten years after the first, not because the year was special). But I wasn’t expecting the email, and I suppose on that front, my past self is lucky that I never deactivated my old email addresses despite changing my name.

In this first letter, my sixteen-year-old self speculated about what I might have done in the past ten years, and also tried to give me some advice. This had the weird effect of feeling like I was being patronised by myself, although at least younger me was self-aware enough to know that there was no way I’d be taking any advice from a teenage version of myself. Still, it was a snapshot of my expectations for my future, and one that managed to surprise me despite thinking I knew my past self quite well.

It was funny to see the kind of things I wasn’t sure if I’d remember. I made a reference to Brave New World, then wondered if I’d get it, and supposed that if I did, it was either because I hadn’t read many more books, or because I’d reread it recently. Well, I’ve probably read well over a thousand books since I wrote that letter, and I absolutely couldn’t tell you when I last read Brave New World, but I still remember the helicopters, so sixteen-year-old me needn’t have worried on that front.

Some of my teenage self’s expectations were predictable. “Published? I really hope so. If not, I wonder what happened. Did you stop writing? Give up on your dreams?” I want to say: not yet, give me a few months, come back to me in June and I’ll have a different answer for you, I never stopped, I didn’t give up. I want to tell my younger self that sometimes things take much, much longer than you were expecting. I had high expectations for myself as a teen writer; I was convinced I’d be published before I was twenty, or at least not long afterwards. (You can imagine the crisis I had on my twentieth birthday when I realised that definitely wasn’t going to happen.)

Then my younger self gives me some advice that reminds me exactly how young sixteen really is. “You know, scrapping teenage fantasy doesn’t mean giving up on everything you ever wanted to do, it just means being realistic about it. If you’re still writing, but you have a day job and you’re struggling to find the time, remember – if you really want something, really really, then you’ll get it. Eventually.”

If only the world actually worked like that. If only wanting was all you needed to ensure success. I know what I meant: I know I was trying to encourage myself not to give up, even if things didn’t take the path I was hoping they would. But I was writing this from the point of view of a mostly able-bodied, mentally stable teenager. Becoming disabled and grappling with my mental health has left me with a very different perspective — that sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you want something or how hard you work, because it will be taken from you. The hardest lesson I ever learned as a teenager was that determination and willpower aren’t enough and you can’t actually overcome every barrier in life just by trying hard enough.

The same naivety is visible later in the letter: “I hope you’re still writing. And dancing. Whether or not you’re a dancer or a dance teacher – and if you’re not, DON’T think of that as failure! – I hope you’re still using that gift somehow.” It’s funny: my sixteen-year-old self had such high expectations for me as a dancer, despite the fact that I’d only recently returned to classes. I really thought I might be able to do vocational training one day, or become a teacher. These days, I’m trying to gradually rebuild enough strength to even do a barre, after being kept out of the studio for the best part of two years by the pandemic and a cascading series of injuries.

And hey, I’m not supposed to think of it as a failure that I didn’t achieve my dreams in that regard. Which, well, I wasn’t, but I appreciate the reassurance anyway — and maybe my younger self would have been proud of some of the performances I’ve done in the intervening years, even if they wouldn’t quite be able to fathom how it feels to have a left knee determined to stop me dancing. I know they can’t imagine that, because of the way sixteen-year-old me went on to tell me I couldn’t give it up now, and should start classes again if I’d quit. Again with the assumption that all anything requires is determination.

It’s strange, to be reminded that once upon a time I trusted my body to still be able to do what I wanted it to in the future. It never even occurred to me in 2012 that it might be my health, not my choices, that changed my plans.

At least there’s one regard in which I wouldn’t have disappointed my past self: “I wonder what you did at uni. Was it ASNaC? Or did you go a bit more normal and do, like, English or something? Please don’t say you did something normal. I’m disappointed in you if you did.” With a BA in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and an MA in Early and Medieval Irish, I can definitely promise my younger self that I didn’t do something normal at university.

This anxiety about abandoning my teenage weirdness pervades these letters. Letters plural, because although I did go looking for the file containing the others, I didn’t need to: the 2013 letter showed up in my inbox this morning.

The 2013 letter is an interesting one, written maybe two weeks before I injured my wrists and temporarily lost the use of my hands, developing chronic pain that still plagues me to this day. I’m much harder on myself in that one: rather than simply wondering whether I’d managed to get anything published yet, I told myself, “I’m disappointed if you haven’t made it to successful author status yet. You better have published a few novels though. I mean, I’m seventeen and I’ve completed 12 first drafts and written Watching nine times, so you legitimately have no excuse for not doing anything. You can just dig them out and edit them, right?”

Harsh. But I get it, I really do. Seventeen-year-old me had spent the year writing intensively, averaging about 90k a month. I never stopped. Every time I finished a book I’d start another one, barely resting in between, and I had half a dozen more lined up in my head to work on. It was like I couldn’t stop, until the moment my hands went caput and I was forced to. Of course I wanted to know it was worth something, that it went somewhere, that I wasn’t wasting my time. I was sacrificing my time — and my health — at the altar of writing, and I wanted an answer.

This letter, written two weeks before my injury, shows again that hubris of able-bodied youth: “you legitimately have no excuse”. Would I have said the same if I knew I was going to spend the next year using voice recognition because I couldn’t type? That I would be having to reconstruct my entire sense of self because I lost a huge chunk of my personality, social life, and dreams when I lost the ability to play music?

No excuse. What a letter to leave for your future self. Again, I leap to defensiveness: come back to me in a few months, I’m trying, I didn’t give up. But I know it isn’t this me that past me is talking to, really. It’s that me. It’s the version of me that I was pushing and pushing until the moment I snapped.

Throughout the letter, there are references to fandom and nerdiness (I was really into Hannibal at the time, apparently), bookended by speculation about whether I’d get the references, whether I’d know what I was talking about. It’s like I thought nine years would be long enough to forget everything about my adolescence. And that’s what I mean about the anxiety about losing my weirdness. I think the fact that most of the adults I knew weren’t interested in these things made me think that as an adult, I wouldn’t be either.

I was seventeen, and at seventeen you’re in this weird, nebulous, liminal state where nobody can decide whether to treat you like a child or an adult. You’re an adult when they want you to make choices and take responsibility; a child when they don’t want to have to listen to you. In this letter, I can see those pressures weighing on me, this fear that if I wanted to be ‘grown up’ I would have to let go of all the things that made me, well, me. The bizarre hopes and dreams, the niche interests, the nonconformity… I was even worried whether future me would still be queer, or whether that would genuinely have turned out to be a phase.

(It has not.)

“Please tell me you followed through with SOMETHING you wanted to do as a teenager,” I begged my future self, because apparently nothing scared me like the idea of becoming a “straight, married, normal person with an office job”. And while in hindsight it is hilarious that both of these letters, 2012 and 2013, wonder if 2022!me is married, I can’t help but feel sad for my younger self, who didn’t have a roadmap for their future. I didn’t know how to imagine me as an Adult Who Stayed Weird, because I didn’t know anyone like me. Just as I didn’t really know what a queer future would look like, because I didn’t know any older queer people who might offer me alternative paths to follow.

Both of these emails were scheduled on the same day, in early July 2013, which means I don’t think my 2014 and 2015 letters will be showing up in my inbox over the next couple of days. But I dug them out anyway, and the mood there is very different.

The 2014 letter was written in January of that year, so it’s only a few months later. Still, that version of me feels much older. Much sadder, too: midway through one of the hardest years of my life, grappling with pain and new limitations on my body and my hopes for the future. Maybe that’s what made my eighteen-year-old self so much kinder than their younger counterpart. Eighteen-year-old me had learned that the pressure to live up to your younger self’s expectations could be crushing, and they didn’t want that for me.

They wrote, “I think what I want really though is for you to be you. I’ve spent a lot of time clinging on to dreams that were broken and worthless instead of finding new ones and I don’t want you to do the same thing so, if you can, just be you. Write books if that’s what you do (and I hope it is), but don’t feel like you have to because your eighteen-year-old self would be disappointed if you didn’t.”

Eighteen-year-old me had learned that you can’t keep clinging to something that’s no longer what you want, just because you wanted it for a very long time in the past. They’d learned that sometimes plans change, and it’s not within your control, but if you keep trying to stick to the original map once the road has been redirected, you’re going to end up stuck in a bog somewhere.

Eighteen-year-old me was also less focused only on what I might personally have achieved. They were thinking about the world: “I hope the world is a better place for you. I hope there’s a better Minister for Education than Gove, and not everything is about straight white dudebros, and that the world isn’t so cissexist and heteronormative…” It’s interesting to see these glimpses of my political concerns from early 2014, but it’s tough to imagine writing back to my younger self and telling them how much worse so many things have got.

Not everything is about straight white dudebros, at least: books especially are far, far more diverse than they were in 2014, particularly in YA, and my current self has access to stories than 2014!me couldn’t even imagine picking up from a mainstream bookshop. But the world is a darker place, overshadowed by the pandemic and the government’s perpetual mixture of incompetence and corruption, dogged by climate change, and punctuated by widespread mainstream transphobia in the media. How can I tell my eighteen-year-old self that? How can I take away their hope that the future would be a better place?

I can’t, of course, but it’s a sobering thought.

And finally, we come to my last letter. 2015. “I’m Finn, sometimes, you know,” it begins, because nineteen-year-old me wasn’t sure how to address the letter or how to sign it off, caught in the grips of an ongoing identity crisis. It goes on to wonder why I’m writing, when I have enough journal entries and poems to give my future self a pretty good picture of who I used to be, but then says, “I still kind of want to write these letters. I always think about who I’m going to be. I think it’s because I’m not so sure about who I am now.”

I can understand that. I know myself better in 2022 than I did in 2015, and certainly better than in 2012, but I still perpetually wonder about my future self. If I sat down to write a similar letter to me in 2032, what would I say? I can’t fathom a version of me who is in their mid-30s. It seems impossible. Absurd, even, and any letter I write now would surely feel as childish and far removed from myself in 2032 as the letter from 2012 does now. I know people who have 3-year, 5-year, 10-year plans for their futures, but I don’t have a strong enough sense of what I want to do that: I can’t work towards a goal I can’t visualise.

That’s something I have in common with my nineteen-year-old self, I suppose, but not with my seventeen-year-old self, who thought the biggest risk to my dreams was me abandoning them, and not life getting in the way.

When I wrote this letter in 2015, I had just been told I might have coeliac disease, and was grappling with the idea of yet another health issue to work around. I hoped future me would “beat” my disabilities, but I said I’d understand if I didn’t. If it all got too much, and I took to my bed. Well, I haven’t given up on anything much. But I do spend a lot of time in my bed, and I guess at nineteen I understood that. The fatigue was beginning to close in already.

There’s one thing, however, that really stands out from that letter: “I’m working on the Moth Trilogy at the moment. Book one is proving more difficult than ever, but I drew a new map of Espera today, and I’m pretty proud of it. I hope you’ve done something with these books, because they are taking up a lot of my thought power and energy. If you haven’t, though, I can only hope it’s because you’ve found something else worthwhile to work on.”

The Moth Trilogy became The Butterfly Assassin. The professionally-designed map that will be in the final book is based on the one I drew the day I wrote this letter. Book one may have been “proving more difficult than ever”, and it may have taken another six years to wrangle it into shape, but I got there.

I got there, I want to write back, it was worth the thought power and energy, it was worth the time, it was worth all the other books I wrote and abandoned, you were right.

2015 is the last of these letters, and the one most open to the possibility of changing. I was a self in flux, and I knew I would continue to change. I asked myself whether I’d ever followed through on some of my plans. If I hadn’t, was it because I was too scared, or because I’d found a different path that made me happier? It echoed the post I wrote a few weeks ago, about trying to make my choices based on love, not fear. It seems I’ve understood this tension for longer than I realised — and that I knew sometimes I need a reminder to consider why I’m actually doing or avoiding something.

From my sixteen-year-old self, who couldn’t really imagine giving up on any of my current writing projects, to my nineteen-year-old self, who had accepted that I might move on but really hoped they’d go somewhere, I can see a shift in how my teenage selves perceived future me, and what that says about how they perceived themselves.

Two weeks after writing 2013’s letter, I was forced to face the fact that we cannot predict our future. That sometimes our bodies let us down, and our plans become impossible, and it doesn’t matter how much we want it, that doesn’t mean we can have it. 2014 and 2015’s letters reflect that knowledge. They make fewer demands of my future, but they offer soft hopes: that I won’t have given up or abandoned my dreams, but found better ones. That I’ll have moved on, rather than walked away.

What I learned between sixteen and nineteen was that you don’t always get a choice about which of your dreams you’re able to keep pursuing. Sometimes, things fall by the wayside because of circumstances outside of your control. But sometimes, you move on because you’ve found something better. You set aside an old dream, and create a new one; you shelve a book, and write another. And that’s okay. Good, even. Because you can’t always be trying to live up to the expectations of your younger self, who didn’t know what you know now, who wasn’t who you are now.

But sometimes, your younger self really is the foundation on whom your adult self is built. And all of them, all these past selves, were hoping I would keep writing, and that I would be published by the time I read their letters. January 2022 still sees me in the pre-publication void, but I’m close. So close. By July, the ten-year anniversary of writing the first of these letters, I’ll be able to honestly say, Yes. I did it. I did what you wanted. I did what we wanted.

Even despite the year spent dictating because my hands didn’t work. Even despite abandoning all the novels my teenage self had high hopes for. Even despite not “beating” my health issues. Even despite the challenges of the publishing industry being greater than I ever imagined.

I did it. It’s my debut year. The Butterfly Assassin comes out in May.

I’m pretty proud of it, said nineteen-year-old me, and honestly? So am I.

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Lowering The Barre

The mantelpiece makes a poor barre.

It’s Thursday morning, and I’m wearing my ballet shoes — a rare occasion these days, even if today they’re paired with faded black leggings, laddered in one thigh, and an oversized My Chemical Romance t-shirt I bought myself as a gift for hitting a writing milestone. I’d love to say I got up early to start the day with a barre, but my knees don’t actually bend when I first get up, let alone the rest of me, so it’s almost noon by the time I press play on the familiar piano music.

I’m in my living room, which is a mediocre studio at best, barely half a dozen paces diagonally, made narrow by the sofa. The mantelpiece is slightly too high for a barre and, being a solid block of wood, leaves me with nowhere to put my thumb, but it’s my best option; the stools by the breakfast bar are too low and unstable to be a viable alternative, and there’s no space for other furniture here. Still, it could be worse — at least I’ve something to hold onto.

I told myself when I moved in that I’d do this. The first time I saw pictures of the flat on Daft.ie, I saw the living room and thought, “Oh, I could do a barre in there!” Its laminate flooring seemed a step up from the carpet in my old house in Cambridge, even if it’s a fraction of the size, and having anything to hold onto that wasn’t a dining chair was exciting. I pictured myself doing a barre each day, or at least a few times a week, building up my strength in anticipation of studios re-opening.

I didn’t.

Dance has been the main casualty of lockdown for me, with studios closed and classes cancelled and every space to small to jump in. Combined with the loss of motivation, I plummeted from dancing five days a week in preparation for a show to dancing maybe once a month, and my fitness has gone with it.

But now, in quarantine and twitchy with energy I don’t have space to walk off, I’m trying again. I’ve told myself I have to do twenty minutes. After twenty minutes I can stop, but not before. It’s a useful rule, because sixteen minutes in to what would once have been only the first third of a class, my FitBit informs me that my heartrate is well into the peak range and I’m sweating enough to have to prop open the front door (there are no windows in the living room).

I make it through my twenty minutes. I manage thirty, if you include stretches — which I do, because the cage of protective muscles around my injured hip that was plaguing me a year ago has tightened into a knot and my flexibility has suffered. My legs are shaking a little with exertion, and I suspect I’ll need a nap this afternoon.

It’s a start.

On Friday, I don’t dance, not because I’ve chosen inactivity but because I’ve decided that a better use of my restless energy is to reorganise all of the furniture in my bedroom. This is easier said than done, since the room isn’t large enough to allow for manouevring, and furniture has to be disassembled and reassembled in its new location. I spend so much of the afternoon taking objects up and down the stairs that I end up hitting my 8,000 step count for the day without leaving the flat, despite it being barely ten paces from one end to the other.

On Saturday, I wake feeling like I’ve been beaten up.

This is not unexpected, but still, the double-whammy of the aches from Thursday’s barre and Friday’s furniture-wrangling leaves every muscle in my body aching. Some are easily identified: my hamstrings are protesting the stretches, my quads the pliés. Others are a mystery: why are my forearms so sore? I spend the day in bed and it’s only in the evening that any energy returns, but when I attempt a plié it feels like my thighs are screaming, so I decide to give the barre a miss.

This is how it always goes: a day where I dance, three more where I don’t. I know from past experience that there’s little to be done for the aches but to push through them, and eventually they’ll recede, but those first few weeks of trying to remember how to move are fraught with the pain of readjustment, and it’s hard to endure it long enough to come out the other side. And my fatigue doesn’t help, with the uncompromising way it fells me when I dare to overstep.

Sometimes it feels like I’ll never dance again.

I remind myself regularly that this is not the case. Past experience is proof enough that interruptions don’t have to be final. Two years without Irish dance has nothing on the six years I previously took away from it; a year without a ballet class is not without precedent and always, always I’ve come back. Slowly. But I’ve come back.

Do I resent those interruptions? Sometimes. Sometimes I wonder what I could have become if my eleven-year-old self hadn’t walked away from ballet and sometimes I’m grateful that I did, before the toxic studio environment could warp my self-image at a formative time of my life. Sometimes I wonder whether I’d be a champion if I’d stayed with my original Irish dance school and sometimes I’m relieved I never found out whether or not that was the case.

But however I feel about stopping, the restart is always a perpetual state of recovery, trying to remember how to be somebody from my past and how to relearn what they once knew within the context of my present self. To constantly start again is a step backwards, a step away from the chance to grow and improve — in some ways. In others it’s its own opportunity. And it isn’t worthless.

I tell myself this a lot, when I’m resenting the process of re-learning, when I’m watching videos of my past self doing effortlessly what my stiff joints won’t allow today. I pretend to believe it. I’m told the power of positive thinking is life-changing, but most of the time it feels like strategically lying to myself, both in the promises I make and in the illusion of believing them.

This isn’t worthless. This simple barre, which exhausts me and highlights all the weaknesses of my body, isn’t worthless. It’s a process of reclamation, taking back a control and a power I used to have. It’s in defiance of the small space and the temptation towards inertia. It’s a step away from a screen, from social media, from the world, and back into mapping out the contours of myself.

Even when I’m not happy with the picture they paint.

The mantelpiece makes a poor barre. But I swap my bedroom slippers for ballet shoes, plug the little speaker into my phone, and begin.

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Dancer In Recovery

I am trying to remember how my body works.

No, that’s not quite right. I know how it works. I know the stiffness of my knees in the morning, the strain of that early cycle into work. I know the clicks and clunks of my spine as I shift in an uncomfortable chair, the way my head feels too heavy for my spine, the threat of a headache that will linger for weeks.

But ballet… ballet feels like pouring myself back into an old mould, trying to inhabit the shape of it again. Tracing familiar paths, looking for the routes I remember. It’s familiar; I haven’t been gone so long. It’s unknowable; it is a thousand years since I have spoken this language and the words of it are lost to me.

Pliés are fine, though soundtracked by clicking joints, with the occasional throb of the left foot where I might have a stress fracture. (More likely, it’s a tendon problem. I’m to have an x-ray on Wednesday, just to be sure.) And I am remembering the rhythm of tendus, feeling the stretch of every fondu in calves strung tight by Irish dance, drawing up into a developpé supported by muscles honed more often by cycling than by dance.

It is attitude that poses the problem. Not mine — the step. Raised leg, bent at the knee, body making spirals from the floor on up and up. The hip injury that kept me from Irish dance all of last term makes itself known, reminding me that while I may have redirected some of my focus for the moment, these two disciplines are not so different that ballet is a place where I can escape from my injuries.

Of course I can’t escape from them; letting go of pain has always been my body’s problem. It insists on clinging to it, sounding alarms long after the fire has been put out. More than a quarter of my life has been soundtracked by those alarms, the ache in my hands still a barrier, if a smaller one than it was six and a half years ago.

My hips are tight, that’s the trouble with these attitudes. I am not currently capable of keeping my hips turned out the way they need to be, because after months of not being allowed to stretch, not being able to push too far, not being able to use them, the muscles around my hips are like a tight cage, trying to protect the fragile area.

I have been reading a book about pain, about how to tame it, because this is something I need to learn how to do. The book told me that a dancer who suffers from a foot injury will feel pain more intensely than an office worker with the exact same injury. For the dancer, this injury is a risk to their livelihood, their career, their passion — and so their brain processes the threat as much larger than the officeworker’s brain. And because the brain recognises a threat, it rings the alarm bells louder.

Brains are only trying to protect us, but sometimes, they are so bad at it.

My hip throbs. Except that’s not really what it feels like. It’s more of an… itching, underneath the skin. A scratchy kind of pain, like a low-level electrical current, or steel wool where there should be soft cotton. And with it comes a predictable cycle of thoughts.

You’ve injured your hip again, my brain tells me. You shouldn’t have gone back to dance. You should have waited longer. Now you’re going to have to take more time out. You should drop out of the show. How can you tell them that you have to drop out? You have a soloist role, you’re going to screw everything up for everyone. This isn’t going to go away. You could take the whole term out and as soon as you dance again it will come back. It’s never going to heal fully. You’re going to lose dance the way you lost music. You’re going to have go through all of it again.

Those last two thoughts worm their way beneath my skin, itchy as tendon damage. You’re going to lose dance. It’s a vicious whisper. You’re going to have to go through it all again.

Our brains know our worst fears. How best to frighten us into compliance. My brain remembers 2013, the overwhelming despair of losing the use of my hands, the profound depression when I didn’t know if I would ever write again. My brain remembers feeling like I barely weathered that storm.

My brain knows I’m afraid that if that happened again, I would not survive it.

The book I am reading about pain is very keen on stopping these spirals before they get to that point. It is, after all, very hard to deal with them once they already have, especially when they have such potent fuel as ‘past trauma’ and ‘legitimate anecdotal evidence’ to fan the flames. My brain processes the sensation of pain in my hip, draws its own conclusions based on several months unable to dance last year, compares that to the older injury and subsequent chronic pain and everything that I lost because of it, and concludes that this is the threat level it needs to process.

It says: you are going to lose dance.

The pain intensifies.

In an ideal world, or as ideal a world as one could find where I would still be experiencing the pain in the first place, I would stop my thoughts in their tracks almost immediately.

There is a pain in my hip, says my brain, in this not-quite-ideal world.

I can feel that, I would say in return. That doesn’t mean another injury. I must have overworked it a little today. I need to rest it. Perhaps a heat pack or a hot bath will soothe the muscles, and I can take some painkillers and go to bed. In the morning, it will have eased off. I’ll have to remember that pushing my turnout like that can trigger the pain, and take it slower in the future.

And my brain would say, Okay. I just wanted to make sure you knew about it, and I wouldn’t have an anxiety attack while cycling home, and the pain would lessen.

The things brains do to protect us are sometimes not as helpful as they should be, especially when they learned how to ‘help’ from a traumatic experience that has left them with a skewed understanding of the body. I am learning to acknowledge that. I am learning not to berate my brain for it, but to gently remind it that maybe it is reacting based on instinct, not evidence, and that perhaps this is closer to a PTSD episode than an objective assessment. Not all pain is life-changing, life-ruining, neverending.

But it is hard, when those are the tracks I have walked for so long. More than a quarter of my life. It feels unfathomable. If my seventeen-year-old self had known what my twenty-four-year-old self would be living with, what effect would that have on me? It is better, I’m certain, that I didn’t know. Hope is the only thing that kept me going.

I am not going to lose dance. These days it is less about hope and more about stubbornness. Even if my participation doesn’t always look like this, I have to believe that I will not lose dance. I refuse to consider the possibility of losing it. I have already lost too much, and the grief of that is feeding my fear now. I cannot give it any more fuel.

As I stand at the barre and assess my posture, perhaps it’s not that I need to remember how my body works. It is that I need to teach it all over again. I need to relearn the muscles and the joints, remapping my brain’s understanding until it no longer automatically associates my right hip with pain even in my imagination. I need to start again, from the beginning.

One hand on the barre, first position. Demi-plié. And rise.

Christ’s College Chapel, 20th December 2019

The pain management book I’m reading is A Practical Guide to Chronic Pain Management by David Walton. [NB: This is an affiliate link.]

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