It’s been a long time since I came here, a long time since I bothered to write about my life in either prose or poetry. Part of that has been my health, of course, but it’s also true that my fiction has taken over the vast majority of my free time. But mostly, I didn’t feel like I had much to say. I certainly didn’t feel like I truly needed to say anything, the way I so often needed to express the turmoil in my heart during my first decade of disability and chronic illness.

But the last few years have been absolutely shattering in many ways–and not just because of the pandemic, political unrest, and other global problems that have affected everyone. There’s been a lot of personal upheaval as well, and even though a fair bit of it is many months in the past, I’m still reeling from it. It’s the kind of upheaval that leaves wounds that are slow to heal, and even once they have scarred over, they can split open again all too easily.

That’s where I am now: battered, scarred, my heart still too tender and ready to bleed at the slightest touch. But blogging has always been cathartic for me, a way of coming to terms with and healing from all the things that I would not otherwise be able to bear.

And there’s something else I’m hoping to overcome through blogging: I have a tendency to shut down parts of myself if they don’t seem to fit in with the people I’m around or the activities I’m currently involved in. In 2006-2015, when my blogging was most prolific, I hid the quirkier aspects of myself for a long time. I didn’t write fiction, never talked about the geeky fandoms I love, and concentrated instead on cultivating a particular image of myself as a soft-spoken, Nature-loving poet and photographer. And even though all those things were–and still are–true about me, they’re not the complete picture.

Over time, I started to feel more comfortable revealing other pieces of myself. I occasionally talked about my creative endeavors and eventually returned to writing fiction, which then supplanted blogging all together. I joined some writing groups online and plunged headfirst back into all the things I’d been suppressing for years: my love for fantasy books, all those fandoms, the whole nine yards.

At first, it felt wonderful. It felt like coming home, like being myself again. But without realizing it, I dropped the poetry and the blogging, and even though I still took photos, I rarely did anything with them. I became exclusively a fantasy writer, even though that is not the whole of who I am either.

Now, after so many years of paring myself down to neat, prepackaged versions designed to fit in with one set of people or another, I want to simply be. Be who I truly am, all of myself, despite how messy and often paradoxical that self is.

Yes, I’m a quiet person who loves to soak up the peace and beauty of Nature at every opportunity. I think deeply, love deeply, seek beauty in the everyday things that others tend to overlook. But the same woman who would happily spend all afternoon stretched out on a giant trampoline communing with the birds and clouds drifting overhead is the very same woman who adores seductive villains, plays bloodthirsty pirate RPGs, and writes dark fantasy–and, as if that isn’t contradictory enough, also writes silly adventure stories for kids.

Many times, I’ve thought about how to keep all these aspects of myself separate from one another, at least in public. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are a number of authors who publish under different pen names for each genre they write in. It prevents kids from accidentally buying a book intended for adults just because their favorite author wrote it, for example. So yes, when the time comes, I’ll probably have a pseudonym or two to keep the branding for all my creative endeavors distinct and separate.

But that’s worlds apart from actually shutting down or hiding pieces of myself, and sadly that’s been my tendency over the past 16 years. I didn’t mean to do that, but it happened anyway… and now I’m done with it.

I can blog about the slow and painful healing of my heart at the same time that I write my dark and twisted fairy tale series. I can share photos of mountain vistas and forgotten cemeteries, then sit down with my husband to play Skull Tales. I can send a friend a care package to let them know they’re loved and still cackle like a madwoman when my favorite onscreen villain does something deliciously evil.

Because I do do all these things, and more. They are all part of who I am, sweet and wicked, weird and wonderful, and I’m finally ready to claim that.

So hello, world, here I am again. I’m finally back, and this time I’m going to stick around for a while.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

Last summer, my husband saved a man and his five year-old boy from drowning in Lake Pend Oreille. The little boy was scared to swim, so his father Tony coaxed him out into the water by carrying him on his shoulders. When Tony reached the buoys that marked the end of the swimming area, he kept going, unaware that the lake bottom drops out sharply at that point. At first, he was able to stay afloat, so he continued carrying his son into deeper and deeper water, oblivious to the danger. Soon, however, the boy’s weight grew too much for him and he started to go under.

Our first clue that Tony was drowning came when the boy started to scream. Steve, my husband, quickly handed me his shoes and dove into the water. By the time he reached them, Tony had slipped beneath the water three times, struggling more each time to hold his son’s flailing body above him.

Steve grabbed the boy, almost drowning himself when his swimming trunks came loose and tangled around his ankles. But he managed to kick them off and haul the boy to the closest buoy, where Tony’s wife was waiting frantically. As soon as the boy was safe, Steve swam back for Tony, who had gone under yet again. When Steve got Tony back to the buoy, they both clung to it for a long time, panting for breath.

Paramedics from the closest town were called in once Tony finally made it to shore, where they gave him oxygen and expelled water from his lungs. The little boy was unhurt–a little bit terrified, of course, but completely unaware of how close he and his father had come to dying.

Truthfully, even Tony never knew what a close call it was. Steve and I weren’t supposed to be at Oden Bay that afternoon. We wanted to go to another campground with better facilities, but decided to change our plans at the last minute for no discernible reason. You could call it luck, I suppose, but I have come to believe that we went to Oden Bay because we were meant to go there. There was no voice from God or vague inner sense that directed us to the right place at the right time, and yet we ended up there anyway.

If we had gone to Trestle Creek like we planned, there is no question that Tony and his son would have died. All of the other people at the beach were too far away to reach them in time, and several of them didn’t even notice what was going on until it was almost over. By the time Tony’s wife swam out to the buoy, her family would have been gone, swallowed beneath the cold water.

I’ve thought about that a lot in the past year, as I’ve struggled with where life has taken me recently. Last December, my back pain was so crazy that I lay on the couch for almost three weeks, unable to even read or watch TV because that strained my neck too much.

And then there was the trauma of losing my last job, which started out so promising but plummeted me back toward suicide for the first time in four years. So even as I have fought to win back my physical strength, it has been tempting to believe that my life has stagnated.  Even now, eight months since I started my new physical therapy, my body is capable of far less than it was at the beginning of the year; and after almost ten years of blogging, I felt compelled to shut down my original site to protect myself from an online stalker.

But I think of the day Steve saved Tony at the lake, and how easily it could have gone the other way. How we were meant to be there, meant to save that man and his son, and how this is the way God works. And so I know that even though I can’t see it right now, this is exactly where I am meant to be.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain