Happy Birthday to Me
Today is my 36th birthday.
Every year here, I acknowledge my birthday at Sketching Details. I’m not the biggest on celebrating my birthday in real life, but it still feels like something worth bringing up here.
The past year has been one of the hardest and most rewarding of my life. The pandemic still pushes a strain on day to day life, and my life is no exception.
My day job is teaching. I stepped away from working in the traditional k-12 public school framework about nine months before the quarantine hit and I don’t regret it. However, I am still teaching through theatres and after school programs. I’ll leave this at I’m incredibly privileged to work in a school environment that’s actually taking COVID-19 seriously.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t been affected.
I’m not 100% ready to share my story yet. I don’t know if I ever will be. Most of that is a sense of respect for other people’s privacy and autonomy—it’s not my place or my job to share their lives without their consent. A small part is the sincerely held belief, created in chaos and brewed in trauma, that I will not be believed and will be harassed and threatened for having the audacity to live my life. Yes, I’m referring to the long ago where a website decided my online presence as a media critic and performer meant it was their mission to destroy me as entertainment (contacting potential employers, getting me fired from websites for false rumors, hacking my PayPal account and draining my funds, etc.).
I digress.
I took a break about two weeks ago now because of a death in my family. My 90 year old grandmother passed away during a hospital stay. What I have not discussed before is her role in my life. You might recognize bits and pieces, but there’s a gap in your knowledge that I left out of respect to her privacy.
Yes, my grandmother is the woman who convinced me to do my first play. She saw every show I worked on unless she physically could not make it to the theatre. She encouraged me to pursue art and music and acting because she believed I was actually talented. She also never spoke down to me about working in horror because even though she didn’t like it, she knew it made me happy.
Around 14 years ago, I moved into her house. She was not doing well after other deaths in the family and needed companionship. It became my job to keep her company. She was still largely capable of taking care of herself, but hated being alone.
Over time, she became less capable of being fully independent. It was suddenly my job to help her with all of that. I stepped away from traveling for my writing and performance work because I had to care for her.
When COVID-19 hit, I was quarantined with her. The outside help I could fight for was no longer readily available because of social distancing and mask mandates. I had to stay at home to minimize the risk of her getting sick. I was lucky to be able to start teaching virtually a few weeks later and return to part time in-person work over the summer, but that has taken a significant toll on my mental wellness. My OCD became dangerous to myself again not because of the pandemic but because of the new fears of being responsible for spreading it to her. I’m not going into all the rituals I picked up and I’ve been working with professionals to slowly unpack them all and regain some stability.
Around January, when I was finally starting to make some extra money by streaming (filling in the gaps I couldn’t pick up for in-person events and performing), my grandmother had to return to the hospital. By this point, she was very hard of hearing and scared because of all the news. No one in my family could visit her during her week’s stay in the hospital. When she returned, she was not the same. It took weeks to make her feel safe in her own home again and months for her to start showing her personality.
I’ll point out again that, even with a prescription for home health services after a stay in the hospital to help with rehabilitation and monitoring her health, she was visited three times before someone cancelled the services and said she was fine. She was not fine, but the resources were spread too thin because of the pandemic’s drain on healthcare in the US to actually help her.
Still I stayed with her and helped her. More of my family, mercifully, became actively involved at this point. They didn’t realize how bad it had gotten in almost 14 years and thanked me for helping her.
When she went back to the hospital a few weeks ago, we were optimistic. Her vitals were fine. All the emergency workers and nurses and doctors said she looked great for her age and should be home soon. And then she was gone.
So as I sit here in my newly empty house, I’m starting the long work of putting my own life back together and making myself a priority. You can already see where this started to happen in the past year.
There are things to celebrate. I released my first non-fiction collection, #31Days: A Collection of Horror Essays, Vol. 1. I published my musical version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” called Tick. I relaunched my online art and design store, built a surprisingly strong following for being a media critic on TikTok, and even started my free quarterly journal SD Media Digest. I’ve even made large strides in my own role of creating more accessible media with audio versions of every article I publish on this site and edited captions on every video I release.
More is coming, too. I’m putting the finishing touches on Haunted: A Slip Story, my first interactive weird fiction collection game. That also leads to my second weird fiction collection called Haunted, coming out on the same day, 25 October. The new #31Daysof Horror challenge starts this Friday, 1 October, and will lead to the second #31Days collection. I have a novella that might sneak its way out by December, but Q1 2022 seems more likely now. I’ll be making my return to in-person conventions as press with NYCC from the 7-10 October, complete with cosplays, because press is more fun when you dress up and join in. Y’all are not ready for what I have planned this year. The theme is officially horror and the choices have never been more niche. It pays in unexpected ways to run a design/print on demand business.
I’m trying to keep a more positive outlook today. It’s been a challenging and rewarding year. I will be working harder than ever to make the most of my talents. I’m also working on apologizing less for taking up space in the world and acknowledging my own worth. That’s probably the best gift I can give myself this year.
