Man, I am bad at updating this website. I mean, I have low expectations of myself, but even then I am limboing under them like a champ.

Anyway. In brief, for posterity:

Life continues to happen

Both kids are now home ed, in what we're pitching as an experiment in "what if kids could grow up without anxiety?" Gods know I still have exam-stress-nightmares, 20 years later. It'll be interesting to see what you can achieve when your childhood is grounded in acceptance of your needs and unique nature rather than keeping you firmly on a conveyor belt of exam results designed primarily to make the education system look good and make job recruitment a simple filter based on grades. After 15 years working in the state school system, I have strong opinions on carts being before horses. Anyway.

My brain really does brain differently

I wasn't sure if I'd mentioned this at all on here, but looks like I did say about waiting for diagnoses last time, so: the autism and ADHD are both real, and were there all along, and explain so very much. The process of absorbing, accepting and integrating this knowledge will be, I suspect, lifelong, but so far has generally allowed for more self-forgiveness, more self-understanding and more self-management, and in general has been an A+++ decision would undergo again.

Getting medication to manage the ADHD continues to be an exercise in frustration--honestly, the entire process is pretty much a Monty Python Witch Trial, wherein if you can navigate the bureaucracy you can't actually have ADHD, and if you have got ADHD the bureaucracy is near-impossible to navigate; ergo, no-one can ever get diagnosed, perfect!--but in the meantime, enormous quantities of caffeine and slowly learning to work with my brain rather than against it are better than nothing.

Life continues to happen, but writing does not

Still, all this is exhausting and overwhelming and I have been out the game long enough now that I don't even know what markets are open when and the couple of stories I ought to be submitting are just sitting instead and I miss it, I miss it so much, but there is only so much time, and so much brain, and I don't know if I'm willing to continue sacrificing both when I should be devoting them to my family instead. I 'unno. Maybe once there's meds I will discover that these things are possible. I live in hope.

But Glasgow!

HOWEVER: I'm still turning up to Worldcon '24! Tickets are booked, hotel is booked, all I gotta do is drive, I and other lovely PodCastle folks will be there and goodness me I hope we get on the shortlist again, and goodness me it will be nice to talk to some of you again, it's been too heckin' long. See you there, maybe? I'll be the tall overdressed twat in the waistcoat.

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