Stuff

I was going through old blog notes and found a letter. "Dear Mr Writer, I would like to write to you about how much I admire you, but your beard intimidates me". I don't generally find beards intimidating, unless they're bushy enough to look like there's some small animals living in them.

I've been really sluggish this month. It's been hard to get anything done. Haven't worked on the thesis at all. I've made some progress rewriting the novel and am now roughly halfway through it, which is - not really as far into it as I was hoping. When I started working on it, I was thinking I'd already be done with the 10th draft by now. I'm starting to feel better now though, and am trying to get back to my writing routine and to get restarted on the thesis. I guess much of what I felt or didn't feel this month was be cause of the thyroid shit, and maybe the meds are finally fixing me up properly.

I got a letter from a publisher again, a rejection. There's some strange emotions associated with these letters. On the one hand you just try to be very noble about it and think "well, not everyone likes everything ... and you already got someone interested", but on the other hand you kind of begin to doubt yourself.

All you need for getting published is to get one person interested in the manuscript, and I've got that one person. All I need to do now is to show that I can learn from the advice I've been given and work hard and make the novel better. But still there's this tiny voice in my head doubting me. What if I'm really just so bad that no one will ever like my stories, what if I'm dreaming, what I'm no good at all, at anything, what if I'm wasting my time and energy, what if everyone who has ever complimented on or been interested in my stuff just has really bad taste. What if, WHAT IF.

And all you really can do is to take all that, put it aside, sit down and get to work. What if I'm good for nothing, what if - I don't know. But I guess it's better to do and see than give up now. Better to try and fail rather than never do anything. But damn how much effort it takes to hold up such iron trust in yourself.

About the thyroid stuff, then, last week's blood tests showed that everything seems to be alright. For my own future reference: my TSH was 2.2 and T3v 4, both of which fall comfortably in the middle of the standard reference range.

Oh. And I'm drinking coffee again. It appears to be essential in keeping me awake during the day. And related or not, I don't know, I think I'm grinding my teeth in the night. It's been going on for a long while now, while on coffee and without it. I wake up many times in the night clenching my teeth hard. I don't really know if it's something I instinctively do right after waking up for some other reason or if I really do grind my teeth while asleep, because well, I don't know much about anything I do when I am asleep. There was also one night when I had a constant headache. I should probably go to the dentist, but ahhh -

Whine

Hitting a massive writing low. I've felt a bit shitty for a few days now, and it's making me really unhappy. I want to do so much and have so little energy for anything. My head aches all the time. I'm awake in the morning and start to fall asleep after noon. I start writing only to realize my head doesn't work at all. I can't think, and I feel stupider by the day. I just want to curl up and cease to exist. Whine, whine.

Two down

Got a reply from another publisher. This is the first unsigned form rejection I've ever received for anything, which is surprising, because I've mailed out some serious crap before. And I mean stuff that makes Eragon look like a masterpiece. I don't blame them for the rejection per se, because I can see how the story would leave a lot of people feeling uncomfortable and/or wtf. Some people can deal with it, and others will want to torch it. Big deal, haters gonna hate, but it is quite rude to mail unsigned letters.

Actually, I just remembered, a worse rejection than that was from the publisher who didn't even reply. If I hadn't later on realized that the manuscript was actually 400 pages of boring nonsense, I might have asked if they even received it, but by the time I realized they weren't going to reply, I just didn't have the balls anymore. I'm still a bit bitter about it though and won't be mailing them anything more unless everyone else turns me down. And even then, I'm not sure. Childish, I know, but I need to have some epic struggle in my life to romanticize the boring reality of writing.

Faster, faster!

I've been sleeping well. I'm still waking up a few times every night, but it doesn't stress me the least bit and I'm actually capable of falling back asleep. I've been getting up early, feeling bright and happy, which is completely unlike me. I used to be that person who felt physical pain at the sheer thought of getting up from the bed before noon and after that I felt groggy all day. I love my life. Today I experienced briefly something I haven't felt for ages - excitement!

It's November and I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo again. And not only that, I'm also committed to finishing it! If you don't know yet, NaNo is about writing a 50k word novel in 30 days, and it's organized every November. I took part in it once a long time ago, but didn't finish and only now I feel motivated enough to try again and actually do it. Yesterday I found myself writing some sort of young adult supernatural horror angst piece (with absolutely no vampires, werewolves or paranormal romance). In English. God, it's so crap and I love it. Feels really awkward to write stories in English though. I've never done that unless you count the school compositions, but it's been good fun and practice so far.

I also don't know why this genre. I don't like teenagers, I don't know anything about them, I wasn't very interesting teen myself. I also don't read horror novels, because they either bore me to death or make me paranoid for weeks. But I had an idea and November had already started and the NaNo-train was leaving, so I decided to just go with it. I started my project ambitiously by describing landscapes. I can't help it, I love weather and I love talking about it. But got to dash, I've got a ton of fun stuff to do today. Also, if you can't tell, I think my thyroid meds are working!

Shove it, nature

I keep waking up in the middle of the night around 3-3:30. I can't recall having had any dreams or hearing any sounds that might have caused that. I just wake up and there I am, wide awake. The only suspect I have is dry mouth, because I'm worried it will destroy my teeth and I'm already scared of the dentist quite enough without all this.

I don't stress about being awake itself, really. What is, is. I stay in my bed, trying to get back to sleep or at least relax and rest if nothing else. 3 is a silly time to get up unless you're a baker. I usually doze very lightly until 6:30 or so, when I get started with the morning. There's a couple of hours period during which I'm alert and would get stuff done if there wasn't other stuff in the way, such as breakfast and writing.

Then I get tired. At the moment it's 10:30 and I'm ready to have a nap. I keep yawning, my head is fuzzy. Writing this works alright, I can think, but there's some mental resistance. I really don't want to waste my energy on this. Or anything, really. I don't know if I should just take that nap. I don't really know what to do at all. Options are:

1 - Bear with it until I get the thyroid meds. See what happens. (Cons: Feel shitty until then. And how will I pass time when I'm too tired to do anything?)
2 - Start drinking coffee, see if it helps. Maybe it was the coffee that fooled me for a while that I was still functioning like I always did. (Cons: Risk screwing up my system even worse. I'd rather stay off until the meds since caffeine adds yet another strain on the metabolism.)
3 - See if getting up when I wake up in the night does anything. Or alternately, force myself to stay up until midnight and see if I can sleep straight till 6 that way. (Cons: Getting up at 3 = risk losing sleep rhythm entirely. Going to sleep at midnight = how am I going to stay awake that long?!)

It's really eating me that I'm just physically so tired that staring at the screen and editing the novel feels impossible (but screw the thesis until then, I'm not doing shit before I start feeling like a human). Also I should do things like clean a little (very little) and visit the pharmacy and buy something to protect my teeth in the night. And why does it have to be Sunday and the nearest open pharmacy is a kilometer away. I can barely go to the grocery store.

I'm 27. Why do I have to think about this shit? This is like granny stuff. I missed a party because of this, because despite napping I start falling properly asleep around 18, and at 21 I'm nearly comatose. Staying awake past that makes me feel ill and in pain.

Thyroid blew up

I've graduated from the Wikipedia School of Medicine, so don't use this as a reference for medical decisions.

I have a thyroid problem. I had new blood tests last Tuesday and my TSH came back 117. TSH stands for thyroid (or thyrotropin) stimulating hormone and it's produced by the anterior pituitary gland in your brain. Basically the gland is the master and thyroid is the slave, so when your thyroid starts slacking off, the whipping begins. The standard  reference range for TSH is 0.4-4 in Finland, but these numbers vary from country to country. As you can see you can see, my TSH levels are way up there, and my thyroid is apparently doing jackshit. For reference, last time my TSH was measured it  was 0.04.

The person who called me told me she'll write me prescription for pills asap. I asked if I need to start taking them since I don't feel any special symptoms, but she strongly recommended  it. I know a lot of people around here have difficulty getting doctors to believe they have thyroid problems when their worst symptoms are "tired" and "unmotivated" (which describe my whole life) and their thyroid hormone levels are very close to decent, so I was a bit surprised how quickly she decided to prescribe them to me. Then I checked out  the normal values on Google doctor, and damn.

I thought with levels like this I should be feeling, well, nothing much, I should  probably be comatose or at least unable to do anything, whereas recently I've felt more energic than before. That was my own idea of hypothyroidism though. I thought it just  slows you down really badly until you just lose all will to do anything at all. Also  other symptoms. But turns out the symptoms vary from person to person, and people with hypothyroidism can experience symtoms of hyperthyroidism, that is, overactive thyroid. When asked if I had some strange symptoms, I said no, nothing special. But after we were done with the phone call, I started thinking -

There was some strangeness going on earlier this autumn, when it felt like the days were just passing by really fast, when I woke up and suddenly it was evening already and I had managed to do nothing. Almost literally. And lately I've been suffering of dry mouth that wakes me up in the middle of the night because I have to drink something. And last time I visited the doctor I complained about having some pain in my eyes when moving them. And then there's some general eyesight problems (random blurriness, dryness etc.) that I thought were because I read and write a lot. And I've been a bit bloated recently although I've eaten well and carefully stuff that I know shouldn't cause that.

Most importantly, I'm tired. But that's the weird thing, because most of my life I've been a low-energy person. I just thought I really like sleeping, and that I need a lot of sleep. Or maybe I've been sleeping badly, or maybe the coffee affected my sleep or whatever. The point is, although I'm sometimes alert and getting a lot of stuff done, most of the time I'm tired. For the last few weeks, I've been working surprisingly hard on the novel and thesis, but I've also had to push myself really hard. After quitting coffee I thought this constant brain fog and slight tiredness despite sleeping a lot and well is caused by withdrawal. But I didn't really consider myself an addict, because I've been drinking a maximum of 2 cups of mild coffee per day. Even friend pointed out that I've seemed quite tired lately.

I don't know the exact reason behind my tiredness and everything else. Quitting coffee probably has something to do with it, but then again, my energy levels have fluctuated a lot this summer and autumn. I thought I was recovering from the chemotherapy, and I was, but was it the only reason? Even during the chemo I went up and down all the time. Sometimes I felt better than ever, sometimes all I did was sleep. I don't know what is normal anymore. All I know is that at the moment I feel a bit foggy and I keep having  this slight but annoying headache.

Weirdest thing is that during the last few weeks I've been working tons on the novel and the thesis, but sometimes I really need to push myself and sometimes it feels like I can't think at all and sometimes it feels like I'm not making any progress despite all  the effort. As unhappy as I am about the idea of eating meds for the rest of my life, it's ultimately not that big deal. I'm sort of hoping they'll fix something in me, give me more energy, make me a bit sharper.

I asked if the hypothyroidism is related to the interferon-alpha I'm taking, and the answer was yes, most likely yes, it's one notable side-effect of it. I did forget to ask if my thyroid will ever go back to normal, but somehow I don't think so. The last ultrasound showed some fuckery in my thyroid, so I'm eagerly awaiting for the next one at the start of December to see if there's been any changes.

(My TSH alone is significant enough to diagnose hypothyroidism, but I also had my t3v levels measured. This is one of the several hormones produced by thyroid itself. This round's results came back as 1.3 which is below the standard reference range. For comparison, last time it was measured in September, it was 7.6 which was over the standard. It means that my thyroid really isn't doing much now.)

Tea adventures

Bought some herbal tea yesterday. I wanted to try some mango stuff I had seen online, but of course they didn't carry it. They also didn't have my favorite wild berry tea anymore. I ended up buying a blend called Bengal spice. Made some, it smells like Christmas. Tried it, it's alright, but it still has that annoying round, dull taste about it, no sharpness at all. I was thinking I could maybe use lemon to spice it up a little. I like lemon, but I have bad experiences with it in tea. I'm stuck with the idea that it dries my mouth, although that's likely because I had it with green tea, which causes that as well.

In any case, I wasn't keen on the lemon. Then I thought - ginger! Fresh ginger has an amazingly strong burning, sort of citrus taste to it, plus it supposedly does all kinds of good for the body. I was too lazy to deal with fresh ginger, so I tried some shredded stuff I have for cooking. It wasn't my favorite drink ever, but I felt I could deal with  it. The tea still had its own flavor and some of the roundness, but it left a nice warmth in mouth after drinking. I'm thinking a touch of black pepper or cayenne might  make a nice winter drink.

Surprisingly I don't miss coffee, not even the taste. I really don't have any desire to drink it. But I have to say I'm completely at loss with what to do when I get tired in the middle of the day. I've tried napping, but I don't fall asleep fast enough and just resting didn't help much. Some mornings I feel bright and energetic, but on other days everything just seems to drag on. I keep yawning, I can't think and I'm quite literally unable to keep my eyes open at times. It's not a killing tiredness, but it really gets in the way when all I should be doing, writing and thesis, requires thinking and focusing - and I just can't do it.

Normally I would just have a cup of coffee, and it might work or not. Sometimes it just made me even more tired, but it was something I used to rely on. Maybe I'm just not sleeping enough, though I sometimes feel like I sleep way too much. Maybe I don't sleep well enough. Maybe it will get better. It's only my third day without caffeine, anyway.