kewpie

When I was a kid, I wrote constantly. I would write for hours every day on several novels at once. I’d have a fantasy novel and two or three romance novels going on at the same time. I had a typewriter and I taught myself to touch type so I could get as much out on paper as possible. When I didn’t have access to my typewriter, I would write all my novels out by hand. Whether I typed or wrote, I would always leave a large margin at the bottom of the page and illustrate my stories.

I recently found a huge stash of old novels I wrote at my grandmother’s house. I could not believe the sheer volume. I would carefully glue the typed pages into blank journals and there were several boxes of journals. It blew my mind.

I read it. It was terrible. but obviously fun for me to write. I didn’t care about logic or realism. I was broad sweeping and melodramatic to the extreme. The characters were very shallow and either painfully cliched or so deliberately random that their actions made no sense at all.

At some point, I realized that my writing wasn’t as good as the books I read. How could I ever hope to be a professional writer if I thought it wasn’t worth reading what I wrote?

I was too impatient to edit my work. My few editing attempts were stymied by over-thinking myself into a corner. Gradually I just gave up writing all together. For almost two decades, I’ve wanted to write but couldn’t get started. I would only procrastinate and sigh heavily. Writing conferences depressed me. I totally removed myself from the craft.

I wanted to get back into writing, but my mental block stopped me. I was so terrified of writing stories that were barely mediocre. So in order to start writing again, I had to radically change my goals.

So I’ve started a “suck” blog. I am going out of my way to write the most awful junk ever put to paper. It will be cliched, over dramatic and have giant plot holes. The dialog will be as stilted as possible. The plot will randomly stall and wander off in pointless directions.

I will write copious amounts of absolutely dreadful, eye-wateringly bad stories. But I will do it for at least 10 minutes a day, every day. Once I get a good enough habit that I can reliably write 4 terrible short pieces a week, I will make the blog public and share my horrible writing with the world.

I am not waiting for National Novel Writing Month. I have begun the Ugly American Novel.

I posted somewhere else, but I’ll give a quick rundown.

Several years ago, I started rapidly gaining weight and getting sleepy all the time. My mood plummeted, my hair got brittle and my skin got scaly. My doctor said I had all the symptoms of thyroid disease so he ran some tests. He said my thyroid levels were normal so I was totally fine. This made no sense at all to me, but I toughed it out for a while.

I finally read that most doctors only read TSH levels to diagnose, and there are several other tests to run to really get a good look at it. My doctor refused to do the tests, so I found another doctor.

This new doctor did the complete run of tests, and it turned out my T3 levels were very low. My T4 levels were only slightly low, but my TSH levels were totally normal. This is a bit unusual, so it was no surprise that it wasn’t detected the first time.

For reasons I don’t understand, my doctor at that time put me on Synthroid. It did nothing at all to help. She would constantly fiddle with the dosage, but I couldn’t tell any difference at all. She said it would take me a year to notice anything so I just waited it out. I ended up getting pregnant and my OB refused to mess around with my thyroid medication – lots of drama about that but basically I had to pick an OB at the last minute and I got one of those TSH only doctors who refused to check T3 and T4 even though my medical records showed an abnormality.

After doing some research after giving birth, I discovered it was because Synthoid only works with T4. After changing doctors every few months after my doc was born, I finally found a doctor who was a GP, but specifically worked with people with endocrine disorders.

She switched me to Armour thyroid. The change was almost instant. I have energy back and I am confident that things will get better. She also wants to check for other possible endocrine disorders—but she can’t do that until I finish nursing. She says T3 hypothyroid is usually a symptom of other endocrine disorders. Most people with T3 only imbalances have adrenal or pituitary problems that make the thyroid go out of whack in unusual ways.

I feel relieved to FINALLY after almost a decade have a diagnosis that makes sense and is starting to work, but I’m kind of angry that I got ignored for so many years and suffered with doctors who made cookie cutter diagnoses and doled out medication in a cookie cutter fashion. But I am finally grateful that I have energy for the first time as well. It will take a while to lose the 110 pounds I gained and get my life back. But it’s working for the first time in a long long time.

considering you earn like 50 cents an hour max.