[july 2023] seasonality & the mental marketplace
or: some good news, some better news, and my new approach to self-accommodation
hello and happy summer! this month i’ve got some really good news to share and an essay about self seasons, a concept that has changed my outlook on my life, my work, and the way i care for myself.
OFIC Mag Issue #6 is here!
(art by idanoj on instagram)
i can’t tell you how excited i am about this issue. we have some fantastic work here that i think represents the range of what we accept while still maintaining a clear thematic thread. i’m really awed by all of these pieces, and i hope you enjoy them too. digital copies of issue #6 are available now!
i got into another artist residency!
this fall i’ll be attending the Millay Arts residency! i’m beyond shocked; Millay is one of the top writing residencies and i never imagined i’d get into it. i’m very surprised and honored, and i’m excited to spend october at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s estate working on my next novel.
i say next novel because…
i finished my first (publishable) novel!
Skinless is DONE. even though this is my fifth completed manuscript, this is the first novel that i honestly feel is publishable. and by publishable, i mean 1) it fits in the current market, and 2) it’s representative of my best work and the aesthetic interests that are important to me. for some reason the venn diagram overlap between those two things seems impossibly thin, but i’m hoping i threaded the needle with this one.
i’m collecting early reader feedback and waiting for my agent’s thoughts on it, then hopefully it’ll go out on submission. i hesitate to say “later this year” but i’m crossing my fingers. i’ve been posting newsletters every 2-3 months so hopefully by my next issue i’ll have more to say about it, for better or worse.
if you’re interested, i posted a short excerpt on my blog.
update on the Fanauthor Workshop
the spring 2023 session was a big success, and i had a great time running it. we had six very productive weeks of phenomenal writing and insightful feedback. i always end up learning so much, not to mention i get exposed to so many new fandoms and communities. we had a fantastic mix of fanfiction and original work—from One Piece to Twilight, from short stories to promising first chapters. it was really a phenomenal session, and i’m so excited to run another this fall.
applications for the fall session will be open from july 20 to september 20, with a delayed start date of november 3. usually i would start mid-october to avoid running into thanksgiving, but i’ll be at my residency. the workshop will be 5-7 weeks depending on the number of participants, and we’ll probably skip the friday after thanksgiving.
unfortunately i won’t be able to run a spring 2024 session (i’m teaching a couple classes that semester), but as of right now i do intend to resume in fall 2024, pending residencies or other teaching opportunities that arise.
be sure to bookmark our submittable where applications will open again later this month!
seasonality & the mental marketplace: a practice in self-accommodation
i used to work in a bridal store doing gown alterations. i started by pressing the dresses. dress pressing involved hanging the dress up on a sturdy chain, fanning out the train, and using a hand-held steamer to get all the wrinkles out. no one really taught me how to do it. my boss pointed to the dress rack and told me to get started. and so i would hang each dress up and go around it, running the steamer over every inch of it. i would have to kneel down on the hard floor to get the hem, and reach up on my toes to get the bodice. it took forever—and that was a bad thing, because we were assessed based on our productivity. you were allotted one hour to press each dress, and after every shift you had to have at least 100% productivity.
one of my coworkers saw me pressing a gown and said, “what are you doing?” i told her i was trying to get the wrinkles out. she took the steamer from me and said, “you do it like this.” she stood there in one spot, aggressively manhandling the dress, this beautiful, expensive thing being touched like a demolition crew cleans up rubble. she shoved the steamer beneath it to get the wrinkles out, not on top. the chain clattered loudly. the dress swung into the things around it—the ironing boards, the serger, the rack where we kept all our pin cushions. she finished in about ten minutes, and it was perfect. she handed back the steamer, hung up the next dress, and said, “now you try.”
i planted my feet. i took up the train. i let the chain clatter so loudly that i couldn’t hear the soft rock radio station playing hits from the 80s, 90s, and today. i let the dress swing and spin and hit stuff. putting the steamer under the dress meant the steam came back and hit my forearm, and i burned myself badly. but i didn’t move around the dress. the dress moved around me.
it took a long time to figure out how to stop burning myself. that’s the thing about learning how to make things move around you—it hurts at first. in trying to do something better, you’re capable of injuring yourself. but that’s the risk of a much greater reward.
there are plenty of people who are like this naturally. who know how to take up space. who feel entitled. whose major life realization has to be the opposite: the world does not revolve around them. but for other people, people who grew up in homes where their needs weren’t met or prioritized, where their mothers lived their lives serving their husband and caring for children without taking much for themselves, where they were told to sit down and shut up and get their homework done—it’s pretty huge to realize you can shape your own environment. you can accommodate yourself, and you can put those needs above all other things.
this essay begins what i hope is a series of discoveries i’ve made on my journey of self-accommodation. in january i was diagnosed with schizotypy (STPD) which shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. STPD is like diet coke schizophrenia—hallucinations that are only kind of irritating, delusions that you know are fucking ridiculous. when you google schizotypal famous people you get an array of whimsical fictional characters amid tyrants and serial killers. Willy Wonka, strangely enough, is kind of a textbook case of STPD. possibly the most nuanced portrayal i could find (but still not a flattering one) was Robert de Niro’s character in Taxi Driver, the only Scorsese film i’ve ever liked.
i also picked up Van Gogh’s biography which has taken me months to read and, as you might imagine, is not a particularly uplifting story. even though historians can’t make this claim and i probably shouldn’t either, Van Gogh very much fits the STPD mold. i’ve highlighted every STPD symptom in the entire book and according to my kindle, i have 1,275 highlights. in the book there are 83 instances of the word “delusion,” 36 of “paranoid,” 61 of “lonely,” and 65 of “isolated.” for those who don’t know, Van Gogh died without ever having sold a painting, and the only person he ever felt close to was his brother Theo, who was also his caretaker.
Van Gogh will probably get his own essay in this series and maybe also a whole-ass novel, because i have a lot to say and my only means of communicating it is through fiction. which is all to say, there is not a lot of information on STPD or portrayals thereof, and what’s there is abysmal. i still have a lot of research to do and i hope to god some of it is positive, not all “low quality of life outcomes,” and “increased rates of suicide,” and “inability to feel pleasure or intimacy.” like nearly all mental disorders, the symptoms most widely known are the ones involving interaction with people who don’t share that disorder, and very little of it is about the inner experience, because western diagnostic psychology is predicated on the idea that mental health is defined by the relationship between self and other. the only positive thing i can find refers to those with STPD as having “enhanced creative abilities in both divergent and convergent thinking, relating to enhanced ability to generate original ideas, and explore alternative solutions to problems.” so at least there’s that.
for me, this year has been one of acceptance—accepting that i’m disabled; accepting that i won’t be able to live the life i thought i would, or become the person i thought i would be; accepting that i will never have adequate healthcare; accepting that i am smaller in ways i thought i was big, and bigger in ways i thought i was small.
when i left my PhD program, i was left with this huge question: if i had been granted disability accommodations, could i have stayed in the program? but beneath that, there was a bigger question: what reasonable accommodations could i have requested?
ironically, in my PhD program i took a couple disability studies courses. in disability studies, the first thing i learned was that the etymology of the word “normal” and the entire field of statistics is steeped in eugenics. trying to be normal means adopting an ideal that one should conform to the greatest average of any given trait or behavior. prior to the concept of normal, the ideal was the divine—something that cannot be attained. people don’t go around achieving divinity. but people do go around trying to be normal. the second thing i learned in disability studies is that being abled is always temporary. we are born disabled, needing the assistance and accommodations of others to help us meet our needs; and we die disabled, needing the assistance and accommodations of others to help us meet our needs. the only difference between us is the duration and extent of our ability in our individual environments.
everyone on this earth has needed, needs, and will one day need accommodations. there is no environment perfectly suited to you. accommodations are as simple as turning on a light at night so you can see. as human beings, a large part of our work on this earth is accommodating ourselves and each other as well as we can.
in employment, “reasonable” accommodations are ones that don’t alter the foundational functions of the job. for example, if you apply to a job where you have to pick up heavy boxes and take them from point A to B, and you can’t lift more than a few pounds, then there’s no accommodation that can be made for that particular job. however, if you work in an office and get migraines from florescent lights, it’s a reasonable accommodation for an employer to give you somewhere to work where you can control the lighting of the space. the lights don’t affect the job.
i don’t think there were any reasonable accommodations i could have requested of my program. the last full-time job i worked, i only lasted a month. that was without accommodations, but even with them i wouldn’t have made it. my brain breaks at a certain point of stress and as i get older, that limbo bar is getting lower. last year i had a breakdown while getting my oil changed. i have such an intense startle response that i scream when doors shut too loudly.
since leaving the PhD program, my primary occupation has been advocating for my mental health. that meant finding a good psychiatrist (done), pursuing a diagnosis (done), getting the right meds (done), and biggest of all, figuring out how i want to live my life, how i can live my life. i feel like i’ve spent most of my life without any hope for myself. i developed major depression at 7 years old, and for the next 20 years i was convinced misery and perpetual dread was the default state of existence. i refuse to live without hope anymore. i refuse to deny myself the pursuit of my own happiness.
and that means i have to accommodate myself.
self-accommodations are easier said than done. i take a backpack with me everywhere that basically holds an “avoiding a public breakdown at all costs” kit. i recently went to a baseball game where backpacks weren’t allowed in the stadium. i didn’t want to have to divulge my health information to the ticket guy, but neither did i want to have to leave when i’d already bought a ticket. thankfully after a brief back and forth he let me in, but it did bring to light that there are many places even seemingly simple accommodations aren’t accepted.
recently i met with an astrologist. she used a system called human design which seems to be a combination of a lot of different esoteric practices. i have no personal stake in any sort of mysticism or religion. i am neither a believer nor a skeptic; i’m a neutral observer who respects the faith of others. things beyond reality may exist, but they’re not my business.
which is all to say, i gave this woman my birth information and she sent me a 20-page report on who i am as a person that was both accurate and insightful. we met to go over the report. i’ve been to a lot of therapists over the years, but i can safely say this was one of the best therapy sessions i’ve had. it was very validating and encouraging, and it was nice not to have to weather the riptide of wrong assumptions that most therapists have about me. she had a whole report stating the kinds of things that take me weeks or months to drill into the heads of mediocre, jaded therapists.
she told me that my mind is like a marketplace, in that there are always many things to choose from and those things are limited by seasonality. what she meant is that seasons are bigger than you. you adapt to them; they don’t adapt to you. when it’s cold, you need a coat. when it’s raining, you need an umbrella. and at the marketplace, seasonality affects the produce you buy, and therefore what you eat. seasons affect everything about your day to day life. we can’t control them. we can only prepare for them.
the marketplace is also about options. in my meeting notes, i wrote down “be picky” multiple times, because that was her advice to me. don’t settle. i have a habit of choosing the cheapest, easiest things for myself, the things i think i deserve, and not what i truly want.
initially i found the idea of seasons counterintuitive: if i’m always flowing with the seasons, what about things like exercising? her answer: find ways to exercise that serve the season. what about socializing? her answer: invite your friends to do things that serve the season. the marketplace has many options. be picky.
at the time, what i felt she was saying was to give into hedonism. i have a lot of self-destructive instincts and so i’m always analyzing the things i want to see if they’re bad for me. my immediate reaction was something like, “i can’t order doordash every night,” to which she said, “why not?” and i said, “i’ll run out of money,” and she said, “will you?”
yes! i wanted to tell her. but i didn’t. because the truth is that i won’t run out of money from ordering delivery every night, not because i make a lot of money, but because eventually, inevitably, cooking a meal or two will serve the season. there will be evenings where i have leftovers, evenings where i eat a frozen meal or cereal or something shitty, evenings where i actually cook something good for me because i want to eat a homecooked meal, and the only one who can give me what i want is me.
i was hesitant to approach this mentality, but i tried it. i’m still trying it. i’ve begun giving myself over to the season. if getting immersed in writing a story is winter, when i’m snowed in and can’t go out and do things, that means as soon as the weather breaks, i have to haul ass to prepare for the next major storm. i use the time to reset my sleep schedule if i need to, cook food and freeze it, go to doctor’s appointments, get my oil changed. things i can’t really do when i’m neck deep in a project.
i’m still trying to figure out how to serve the season about some parts of life, but i’ve found that a chain reaction has begun. the first way of serving the season was the easiest: i stopped reading what i thought i should be reading, and started reading what i wanted to read, which means i started seeking out books that i thought related best to the season. reading is something i struggle with because it’s my job and so picking out what to read for funsies can be tedious—not because i get burnt out on reading, but because helping people with their work and editing is so rewarding that picking up a polished, published novel is almost never as fun; the worst work i’ve ever edited is still a more engaging experience than reading the best published fiction—but if i’m always focusing on what’s going to help me most with whatever i’m working on, i’m always invested.
with my head immersed in the long, agonizing tragedy of Van Gogh’s life, i decided to leverage that to tackle something else i’ve always struggled with: exercise. i went on a walk one day and listened to a podcast. but i have an audio processing problem and moreover the talking in my head is always louder than people talking to me, and so in addition to the physical toll exercise takes on my body, i find listening to things absolutely exhausting.
i couldn’t find a podcast to serve the season in a way that would outweigh my listening fatigue, so i had a brilliant idea: read and walk at the same time. it looks a little weird, but that’s the thing about self-accommodating: it gives you permission to be strange in public. i have a kindle, so it’s not too onerous, and i live in near a walking track at a park that’s very smooth so i don’t have to worry about tripping. and my god, what a game changer. for the first time in my life i’m looking forward to going outside and doing things.
i don’t know about you, but i have a lot of shame built up inside me. it’s taken me a long time to untie the the knot between pleasure and guilt; when i find joy in something, my immediate instinct is to feel bad about it. one of the reasons i’ve always sucked at exercising is that i used to harbor this belief that if you do something, you have to keep getting better at it. if you start walking, the goal is to start running, then to run faster and longer, then to sign up for a 5k, a 10k, a half marathon, a marathon.
i was always taught that i have to finish the things i start and that if i don’t, it says something about my character. but that also implies that the value of things is only in their completion, in taking them to the highest level, and that’s not true. knitting half a sweater still occupies your hands for a while even if you never get to wear it. washing half the dishes gets you closer to a cleaner kitchen than not washing any. reading the first chapters of a random book on my shelf is better than scrolling through social media for an hour, even if i’ll never get to the end of it. you never make it to the end of your social media feeds either, but you don’t hear people complaining about that (new twitter post limitations notwithstanding).
to accommodate yourself is to listen to yourself. pay attention to yourself. note your discomforts, your anxieties, your pains. give in to the needs of your season. figuring out your season is a constant balance between “what do i want right now?” and “what do i feel like doing right now?” and “what is good for me right now?” which sometimes all have different answers. the point is that the question i no longer ask myself is, “what should i be doing right now?”
there are always things you should be doing. when you lean too far into your shoulds you end up with, “well i should be saving the world.” the weight of all your shoulds can crush you. i should have my doctorate. i should have a book out. i should make more money. i should be married and have a kid. i should, but i can’t. all i can do is wander the aisles of my marketplace, looking through the ingredients of my season, and make the choice that’s best for me.
coaching & editing services
i feel very grateful to have found a profession that suits me, and to be able to support myself doing work i love and that’s meaningful to me. as a writing coach, i help writers craft accommodations for themselves. i don’t have an “ass in chair every day” mentality toward writing—i think to write your best work and tell the stories that matter most to you, you have to listen to yourself and what you need, and develop processes that work best with the way you write.
for more of my credentials and how i can help you, feel free to click around my website. you can also check out the testimonials from my clients. or you can go ahead and book an initial consultation.