I’m back to write about writing one more time. In the last post, I veered into ranting about the state of the world right now and how anti-inclusive it currently is (especially in America). I have been fighting this fight for thirty goddamn years, and I’m so tired. I did not realize that electing a black man would create a backlash this severe, but here we are.
I haven’t felt this hopeless in years. Politically, I mean. I don’t know if we as a country can recover from the shit that is happening right now. More to the point, I don’t know if we should. We are not really a country–we are a conglomeration of fifty small nations. A resentful conglomeration.
There is no compromise, by the way. You’re either for inclusivity or you’re not. If you’re the latter, then you’re part of the problem. If you can’t even tolerate people who are different than you, then we have no ground that is common.
Back in the day, many minorities didn’t ilke the word tolerate. They wanted to be accepted as they were. Which, yes, ideally, that would happen. You can’t legislate that, though. You can’t mandate how people feel (though, lord knows,the curret admiistration is trying to do so), but you can dictate how they act. I don’t care if people accept me or not, but goddamn it, they can at least be civil–even if it’s just by a thread.
I include all this in my writing because it’s a part of me. It’s the fabric of my life, and it’s not an affectation. This is what the alt-right doesn’t get–we are not being who we are to spite them: that’s just an added benefit! I’m not agender, queer, and Asian AT them–it’s just who I am. My life experience, and, indeed, my very being, include all those aspects of myself.
The fact that I died (twice!) and came back to life (twice!) has deeply affected me as well. I learned things from that experience that I could not have learned any other way. Unfortunately, it’s not something I can share with many people because it’s so out there. I want to include it in my novel, though, beacuse it’s just that unusual. Will people believe me? Probably not, but that bothers me not.
In my first few attempts at a novel after my medical crisis, I really tried to set it in the hospital. It was such a wild experience; I still haven’t completely digested it yet. At some point, I realized that everything I thought happened while I was in the hospital didn’t. Well, to be more precise, most of what I thought happened did not.
I was as high as a motherfucking kite, and I was delusional/hallucinating the whole time. Some of the things that I thought happened did actually happen, but not in the way I thought. For example, I was so impressed that there were so many people of color on my team. I live in Minnesota, which means the vast majority of people are white. My experience in the hospital was that everyone but a few people were non-white–specifically, they were Asian.
In my delusional state, I thought my main nurse was from the Philippines and looked like one of my Taiji classmates. Several of the assistant nurses were Hmong; several of the interns were Latino, and there were three or four black Muslim people as well. Oh, and one of my doctors was Taiwanese American like me.
I asked my brother about it much later, and he said there was not a person of color on my team. I had already suspected this was true, but I needed him to confirm it.
The week in the hospital (I was in for two weeks, but in a coma for one) was so weird. It feels like a dream, but it wasn’t. I asked my brother about a few things, and they happened. Other things, though, he had no idea what I was talking about. I Googled it much later and found out that hospital psychosis was a thing. Many people have had very traumatic experiences while staying in the hospital for (other) traumatic things. Like, really bad experiences. Mine were mostly weird, but not traumatic.
Well, there were a few that were unpleasant, but not in a traumatic way. Oh, and the food was terrible. That part I remember very clearly. I could not eat much of it because I’m GF/DF, and that menu was very limited. From what I remember, it was mostly very tough to chew meat disks that were the size of my head and very rubbery eggs. Plus some kind of cream of wheat that was not wheat, but was definitely cream of something (no dairy).
I wanted to write about it because it was so wild, but I could not figure out how to write it in a way that was believable, but with a thread of doubt running through it. In other words, I needed to make the main character an unreliable narrotor without making it obvious. I tried and tried, but could not quite figure it out. I may try again in this novel, but I am not setting it in the hospital.
I may have a flashback to it, but I am setting it in relatively current times, whereas the hospital is four years in my rear viewmirror.
Damn.
This year has just flown by. I know, of course, that every year seems to go faster than the one before, but this year really flew by. I can’t believe it’s almost November, 2025 was a mere blink of an eye.
Anyway, one of my issues in writing a novel since my medical crisis is that I can’t make everything gel. I’m used to having disparate parts of a novel and making them fit together smoothly. In my last few tries, I haven’t been able to do that. I’m pretty sure it’s because of the brain damage, but I don’t know what to do about it.
More tomorrow.