In her fabulous initial Zine, Jen Lemen reminded us that it’s a good plan to write a mondo beyond list for the universe to take care of. Here’s my list of stuff that I need less of, but which someone other than me is going to have to manage.

Magpie Girl’s Top Ten List of Things The Universe Needs to Help Me Have Less Of

10. rain
9. religious conflict
8. car alarms
7. people who “come & go”
6. conflicting health advice
5. medications
4. options overload
3. commerical stimulus
2. distractions
1. pain

On how pain shapes an artist.

I have two friends who are women, and artists, and who live with pretty serious bipolar disorders. We often talk together about how similar their illness and my illness are.

When we are sick, it feels as though we are staving off depression with one hand, wielding a sword which is overly large and quickly grows too heavy. Our work stops, because what we were working at had a joy in it we can no longer access. Or it begins again, filled with sorrow and melancholy and creeping along in progress at a glacial pace because our health allows us to work in only the smallest of bursts.

When we are well, the repressed tidal wave of creative energy that is unloosed threatens to drown us in its enthusiasm and power. For my friends, the mania of the bipolar highs can be quite disturbing, even frightening. I have a similar experience when the pain finally abates–for a day or for a season–and all the pent up creativity comes spilling out in a rush of ideas and inspirations. It’s not frightening, but it is overpowering. When a particularly bad streak of migraines passes, I am overly energetic, ridiculously optimistic. I buy supplies for projects I shouldn’t start because I got sick mid-process on the last round of ideas and haven’t yet finished those. I lose sleep, pacing the house at night awake with ideas – and consequently worrying that the lack of sleep will in turn trigger more migraines. I flit from project to project without finishing much.

Up until recently I’ve tried to tame that feast-or-famine cycle, especially the rush of creative ideas. I’ve tried to be a disciplined person, to put my nose to the grind stone, and finish what I’ve started. But now, I’m wondering, maybe I should just embrace the flibbertigibbet that emerges when the pain subsides. Maybe I should allow myself to get distracted by sparkly things. Maybe there’s fruit there. Maybe there’s finishing, or finishing enough for today. Maybe the artist that is being carved out by my pain doesn’t have to be so focused, so well honed. Maybe she can have her fingers in a half-a-dozen pies and still be real, be serious, be authentically an artist. Maybe she can sell vintage clothes because they are one of a kind, beautiful and made by hand, not in sweatshops. Maybe she can string prayer beads and write new rites. Maybe she can try her hand at writing a book, and learn to put together presentation packages with her agent. Maybe she can collage notebooks and make shrines and knit up cute and fuzzy bunnies. Maybe she can. Maybe she can.

On pain and identity

The thing is, I have migraines. Not the occasional, “I have to go home from work early and lie in a dark room” kind of migraines, but chronic daily unrelenting migraines. My stitch-n-bitch pal Mel once announced to the knitting circle, “I’ve had a headache since 1990.” I didn’t even miss a beat in my stitching and just nodded matter of factly. That’s how you know a fellow migraneur –they don’t even try with the solutions. They just nod and move on, nod and move on. That’s what you have to do when you are sick, when you are nearly always in pain.

I have had this condition for roughly four years now, and the longer I live with it the more I come to uncover the complexity of it. Chronic pain is infinitely layered, and labyrinthine. Chronic pain demands attentions, lots of attention, and it takes over a much larger piece of your life’s pie chart than you want it to. If you let it, pain will eat the whole pie, become your entire identity. When I think of who “I” am, I come up with a short list: Writer. Artist. Mother. Community Builder. Chronic Pain Suffer. I try to keep the pain towards the end of my list of identifiers. But on days like today, when the barometric pressure shifts and I watch the 24hours of relief I’ve recently experienced lapse with the incoming clouds, it threatens to become THE defining part of me.

I don’t want to write too much about pain, or give it too big of a voice in my life. It’s a drag. Plus, how many people want to read that your head hurts everyday? I don’t even want to read about that everyday, and I’m the one I’m writing about. Still, I recognize that there are a lot of us out there – especially women—who suffer from physical conditions the medical industry cannot or will not treat. Fibromialgia. Endometriosis. Chronic Fatigue. Hormonal Depression. It’s actually quite a political issue, which I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that we shouldn’t not write about it either. I don’t want to remain silent about my condition, writing only about sparkly things and tripping through daisies ever so la-la-la when really, pain lurks. So both “me’s” find a voice here: the suffering nearly 40 year-old woman who mourns her youth as it fades rapidly with every attack; and the hopeful 30something girl still looking forward with hope and imagination at what is yet to come.
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More on life, pain, and sparkly things coming soon….

I swear to God, if this headache doesn’t go away soon I’m going to conduct a turn of the century lobotomy and put a hole in my head with the battery operated power drill Paul got at Costco last weekend. Either that, or do an end-run around the addiction thing and join some 12 step group just before imbibing truck loads of controlled substances.

Gin and tonics also work, as long as you never EVER stop drinking them.

Do you have any idea how much is SUCKS to write the really boring “marketing analysis” part of a book proposal when you are on day 13 of a migraine that is rapidly escalating to dark-room-and-ice-pack-stage?

Okay, enough bitching, time for an inspiring quote:

“To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision…”
Isn’t that great? It goes on…

“…one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously. In my experience, the more such ambivalences you can hold in your head, the better off you are, intellectually and emotionally. Categorical statements become meaningless. The saddest stories are shot through with humor. You come to tolerate people, ideas, and circumstances wholly at odds with your dreams and desires.”
- Nancy Mairs, Carnal Acts: Essays

One problem, I don’t think I can hold many more ambivalences in my head. At least, not without the help of that controlled substance….

to do when you’ve been sick a long time and are getting depressed.

1) Take a shower and wash your hair. If it’s long, put it in a ponytail, if it’s short slick it back under a bandana. Put on a clean sweatshirt (not the one you’ve been sleeping in for six days) and call the look “sporty.”

2) While you’re at it brush, floss, moisturize. You’ll feel better.

3) Change your sheets, crack the window, and take all the glasses you’ve accumulated on the beside table to the kitchen. (You don’t have to wash them, just get ‘em to the kitchen.)

4) Consume at least one thing that is not chemical and in the shape of the pill — a tall glass of water, a piece of fruit, a green salad. (It’s okay to have the salad delivered from the pizza guy.)

5) Repeat: “This too shall pass.” (Even if it is a migraine that hasn’t gone away since last Saturday.)

6) Get back in the bed with the very clean sheets. Be kind to yourself if you can.

I had to go to the ER yesterday for a migraine. I’ve only had it get that bad once before, but it’s very very scary. The morphine didn’t actually make the pain go 100% away and I’ve still been achy and in bed all day today. … and did I mention afraid? Definitely struggling with being afriad…as in “what if this doesn’t go away?” afraid.

My neighbor, who makes chocolate among having other amazing and love-worthy traits, Elizabeth, took me to the ER yesterday. She says I have a lot of amazing red priestessy in my head chakra and that there is dark energy trying to hold it back. She says the old days aren’t working any more. She says I need more “F-You’s” in my life and it’s okay to tell people to go away and shut up. She even said I could say F-you to her if what she was saying wasn’t making sense.

It does make sense.

I just don’t know exactly what to do about it.

Anyway, prayers and lighted candles and all manners of helpful energy sent my way would be very VERY much appreciated.

Did I mention I’m scared?

I have not written for many, many days because at least one person in my household has been sick, or in pain, or both, everyday for the past three weeks. Most the time this was me, because my botox wears off two weeks before the FDA will let me have another round and because I got the flu. (Really, there’s no one wimpier in this house than me.) Cate got the flu too, and managed to be cute and flushed for 48 hours before completely recovering. Eden got it twice and on the second round she spent a full four days lying on the couch. And did I mention that it’s mid-winter break, a random week off from school that our district uses to torture working mothers. Arghhhhhh!

Look, February is a hard month, especially in the Northwest, where the sun tends to hide until the end of March. It’s grey and it’s wet and the wind is blowing and you’re definitely sick of the sweater you got for Christmas and you start to think in vain of your every-so-easy flip flops and the sweet little swishy skirt you bought last August on close-out at Old Navy.

When I moved to Washington from California my college orientation leader told us “never change your haircut, your major, or your boyfriend in February.” It’s good advice.

So what can you do during the end of winter dull drums? Here’s my favorite list:

1) Get thee to a tanning booth. No one will judge you if you get a little sun kissed and feel warm for 15 minutes a week.

2) Priceline a hotel. I don’t know about where you live, but in Seattle $80 will get you a five-star hotel with a hot tub, an indoor pool, HBO, a very fluffy bed, and the Sunday paper.

3) Use a lip balm that smells like pina coloadas. I like this one in Coconut Cream“> from Alba.

4) Ditch your regular body lotion for sunscreen. MMMMmmmm smells like Summer!

5) Turn on all the lights in the house whenever you are home. While you’re at it start swapping regular incandescent for full-spectrum light bulbs.

6) Reserve a campsite, yurt or cabin on-line with your state park. Look forward to June! We’re going here in August.

7) And my very favorite….run the tub with lots of Bliss Bubbles“>, put the laptop on the toilet seat, and watch your favorite TV show online. Most of the major stations have streaming video of their top shows. My favorite? Bones at Fox on Demand.

Happy surviving!