One Can't Write While Sick

The last two years of my life can be summed up with one word: illness.

The last year of my life can also be summed up rather quickly, but in two words this time: abandoned dreams.

I don't write anymore. Like, at all. (That is until right this second, and I'm not sure why I'm doing so except that I'm lonely and frustrated and unfulfilled.)

And it all sounds so very silly because I'm enormously blessed and fortunate. I have a loving husband, I have food to eat and a pretty decent roof over my head. I am no longer stricken by poverty or insane amounts of drama. My old man kitty is still somehow kicking.

But even with all of those things, I have a body that won't heal. A body that prevents me from living life at least 50% of the time, and that has me resigned to existing. To surviving. To sleeping or laying on the couch waiting for the next wave of energy that will allow me to start living once again.

I wonder if I will ever write again, beyond what I have to do in my day job to survive. I gave up on writing books, and on writing poetry, and on maintaining a blog. I gave up on most things if I think about it, even though I've written some good stuff along the way.

Writing takes a lot of energy and one simply cannot write while sick. Or, maybe I just cannot write while sick. I haven't even thought of returning to writing because most of the time I can't think of anything except the following:

• Bills
• Making money to pay bills
• Taking care of people who depend on me for their income
• Maintaining my work commitments
• Keeping myself going physically/emotionally/career-wise
• Picking up the next batch of treatments from my functional medicine doctor
• Wondering if I'll ever have enough financial security to sustain me

So as I sit here and type this up, and remember why I used to write, I struggle to grasp the "thing" that used to draw me to writing to begin with. It's almost like it's vanished into the air and merged with the ether.

I need to work on my metaphors.

So I guess whether I will or will not write again largely depends on if I can ever get over the illnesses that are plaguing my body. And right now I'm just not sure.

And even so, even if I do get over it all and suddenly emerge healthy and triumphant, what the hell can I do with my writing? I've already proven to myself that I cannot write fiction. I've decided that I also don't have much to say in a non-fiction sense, and that writing is such a challenging endeavor that I just don't even want to try most of the time.

For now I'll stick to reading books. So that means I'm going to go cobble some sort of dinner together and pick up the novel I'm working on, which is full of cliches and a less than stellar writing style (my mistake, going straight from Thomas Hardy to a modern pop fiction writer), although that so far is telling a good story.

I don't think I had a point to this post today, except maybe some catharsis. Or some hope for a revelation about what I'm supposed to do next. So far no luck.