Reflections
Occassional musings on the art, craft & life of writing.
by Joy Renee

Daydream Believer Redux

My dream continued to take a pummeling after the posting of the Daydream Believer Reflections essay in 1998. Among them, more phone and electricity disconnections, another computer crash and a monitor that died a slow death which made it difficult for me to use for nearly a month before it faded to black altogether.. And my husband with a growing portfolio of html work online had gotten very busy with a job hunt and wasn�t able to attend to teaching me webmistressing. And the biggest blow of all was a crash in my mood. I didn�t mention in that essay that the friend who asked me to imagine I could create a world exactly how I wanted was the founder and moderator of the Depression & Anxiety support group I had been attending. I had been resisting the use of drugs because I�d had a bad experience with them when they had been prescribed a few years earlier. But finally the group helped me conclude I needed to try again. Partly because there had been such a variety of experience with them among the group and I saw many success stories. Some of whom had also had a bad experience with a prescription before finding the right one. So I was very busy over the first half of 1999 going to counseling and support group and getting my meds adjusted.

I knew the meds were working when we lost our electricity for three weeks in September. No computer, no lights, no heat in the fast cooling September of Southwest Washington, no laundry, no hot water, no stove, no refrigerator. I had to read and write by window light or bundled up under the sky during the day and under the halogen lamp belonging to the store parking lot next door to us after dark.  And yet I remained serene and competent and was even able to support my husband�s fragile mood and thus be one less burden for him that month. Finally, towards the end of September, on or very near my husband�s birthday, our light bill was paid. And the very next day my husband got the phone call which led to the job offer which led to us moving to Sunnyvale, California. My husband left the first week of October and I had to pack up the house and prepare to join him in November. Something I would not have been able to do before the meds.

So we went from almost abject poverty to an income that reflected entry-level high-tech in the Silicon Valley in 1999, including those famous stock options which promised to make us millionaires if and when the company went public. Which was supposed to be about the time my husband would vest. Which was supposed to be after the 2000 election. But everyone knows that story. My husband lost his job, we lost our wonderful doublewide mobile home which had seemed like a mansion compared to anything we had lived in before. We spent six months in a motel with our two cats followed by two weeks on the streets of Santa Clara County. All our stuff went into storage. We could have left town if not for that stuff but there was such a flood of people leaving there were no U-hauls available and we used up our money waiting for one. We finally had no choice and hopped a bus to Medford, Oregon to move in with my husband�s parents. My meds ran out three weeks after we got there--the week the twin towers fell.

The loss of my meds and counseling, the loss of my home, the loss of my privacy, the loss of much of my autonomy, the loss of my computer and files both paper and virtual (all my journals, rough-drafts, notes), the loss of my personal library, the loss of many of the favorite things that gave me comfort--all of this coinciding with the felling of the twin towers followed by the manifestation of a national mood disorder very much resembling my own--panic/anxiety/depression with occasional manic moments.

It seemed also the felling of my dream. But 9/11 also helped put my own losses in perspective so I refused to let myself wallow. I continued to keep my daily journal by hand, as I had even while homeless though it raised a blister on my finger and cramped my hand and made my arm ache to my neck. I got a library card and made vigorous use of it as I have every where I�ve ever lived. I watched endless TV news, documentaries, old and new movies and re-runs of series that I�d missed the first time around. It was a studied attempt to fill some of the huge holes in my popular culture education as much of this had been denied to me the first 20 years of my life and I�d not had an opportunity like the one I had then to feast on the many stories most of my peers take for granted. There was a TV hooked up to cable in my room--the guest room at my in-law�s house.

One glaring hole in my routine though was any attempt at writing other than my daily journaling. It felt like a hole in my soul and yet I could not seem to access the source of all those ideas or the spirit to search for it. My spirit had been crushed by the losses but especially the losses of all my files. Thousands of pages of notes from fifteen years of research in non-fiction and the building of half a dozen fictional worlds for novels in progress. All I had left was about 150 pages of manuscript which I had considered �worthy� of the ink and paper to print hard-copy. And 20 or so of those were poems. Another 20 book reviews. Not only could I not add new material to any of these project, I could not face starting new ones. Nor could I face reading my manuscripts. For the first time since they existed, I left them untouched for over a year.

I was briefly excited when my in-laws got their first computer over Christmas of 2001. I thought that might be what I needed to get back to my serious work again. But the computer was a disappointment. It was second hand and had few amenities packaged onto it. The word processor was clunky and I was unable to adjust the font sizes on the menus and tool bars for my visual impairment. It was a relief to start journaling by keyboard again though and the games were fun. And I was able to e-mail but surfing the web was too much strain on the eyes. And the thing kept crashing. So I wouldn�t have trusted it with my serious work anyway. Then two years later my in-laws got a new computer with a bigger screen and better resolution and accessibility options. I made a New Year�s resolution for 2004 to revive the dream.

Mindful of Dr. Phil�s advice that the difference between a dream and a goal was a plan broken down into doable steps, I made vigorous use of the task manager that was packaged with this Microsoft Works. My use of the computer was and is mostly confined to the hours between 10 PM and 5 AM while everyone else is asleep. This gives me the privacy and the quiet that is essential for my work. But it seems I am just getting started when I have to wrap up every morning. I long for my own computer again. But I continue to be grateful for the one that is available. And show my gratitude by making vigorous use of it.

The first order of business last January was the retyping of all my manuscripts which took about three months. The process--the re-reading, the retyping, the re-editing--served to prime the tap for new creative work. Also helping in that regard was my research and reading online, especially my discovery of blogs. Over the first six months I was lurking on blogs and other writer�s sites, I watched several writer�s get major career breaks and this encouraged me to believe again that my dream was achievable if I worked for it. The part about building an interactive community may have to be put aside until I have access to more time on the computer, more time online, more bandwidth, a better WYSIWYG and more experience in HTML, more online storage and a more stable domain. Meanwhile there is the reachable goal of getting my work displayed online in a manner that will not shame it or me and then promoting it in the hopes that a way to support my dream financially by its very own fruits will present itself in due time.