It’s been a while! Health took a bit of a dip and I had to unfortunately take a break from books and reading, but what better way to pick things back up again with a not-meme book from an author that I know almost entirely from the memes, Chuck Tingle! Although I think his erotica might have been a bit easier on the brain… (Not an insult, my brain is just part of the health struggles)
We follow Misha, a horror writer whose television series is going to culminate in a finale where the two female leads are going to make their relationship explicit at last, and for them to be happy. Unfortunately, the studio demands that ending change to either a tragedy or make them straight. When Misha refuses, the monsters he created in the past begin appearing and coming for him.
As an author, the first chapter hit especially hard for me. Woven into the themes of limited queer representation in media is also this element of algorithm-based media and replacing humans with AIs that will be able to make the perfect media based on what will be the most profitable. I believe this was written before OpenAI and Deepseek, but their existence certainly made that part of the narrative resonate with me a hell of a lot more.
I did admittedly spend a lot of the story thinking that some elements could have been collapsed together or various elements could be tightened up right up until the end. A lot of things came together and, well, asexuality as a plot point is a favourite underutilized thing I love to see.
Overall it was just a really fun book. My expectations were probably too low going into it, and I think I would have loved it just as much if I were expecting a lot more. I don’t think the heavy-handedness of the narrative takes away from the story, and I just really enjoyed it. If it sounds remotely interesting to you, check it out!
It is Long Covid Awareness Day and my original post was making me mad so I thought something a little lighter was in order: How a debilitating chronic illness cured my corporate burnout. This post was written while properly pacing, which means in 5 minute sprints over the course of over a week, so expect some disjointedness.
The job
For those who aren’t familiar with me as a 9-5 employee, I was a tech worker from 2008 to 2023 working primarily in B2B software. I started out developing websites and, as the tech stacks became more complex and segmented, I was pushed further and further into the front end. Nearer to the end I moved over into the product side of things, eventually settling into a senior product design role. Skills-wise this was a good fit. I like research, numbers, and trying to make things better for the people who are actually using the products I’m working on. I also tend to think longer term and bigger picture, and I felt like over on the product side of things that was something I could do.
Happiness-wise, this turned out to be awful because none of those things I liked or felt were ever prioritized. In broad strokes, quick wins were more important than making sure we weren’t making more tech debt and things that made money now were much more important than making sure the users were able to do their jobs. I also had trouble saying no to things and believed my boss when I was told this workload was only temporary (Lie), so I ended up overworked. When I did finally start saying no it was too late. I had set the expectation and just kept getting more and more work with less and less impact.
Add in office politics, my projects getting randomly canceled after I had put in a ton of work, general work chaos (Layoffs and changing plans every couple months is great for your employees), and the part where the company said they prioritized one thing and did something completely different and burnout was inevitable.
The coping mechanisms
Writing has always been an outlet for me. While I was working, I also wrote, rewrote, edited, and published at least 3 books a year. Looking back on it now, I can recognize that this output was largely a result of needing both a way to relieve the stress of the day job and to have a place where I felt like I did have some feeling of control. I was not creating things for a business or for profit, but because it was personally fulfilling. It also made me very happy, but there was also the escapism and the fact that I could put in the work and see the results.
This did also mean that I never really had any downtime. I considered all of the writing to be my down time because I felt better after I worked on those projects, but it was still work. A lot of work. I have been publishing since 2012 and writing for even longer, so I spent a lot of years never really resting.
Cue Long Covid
I got Covid in May of 2022. By June, I knew something was wrong. It took a very long time for me to get a doctor agree with me enough to check that I met the criteria for Long Covid, and even longer before a different doctor agreed to send me for testing for it to confirm.
I won’t go into the diagnosis process and whatnot at this point. The important part for right now is that it’s a big chronic illness with a wide variety of possible symptoms. For me, this presents primarily as ME/CFS with PEM, as well as POTS. I also get out of breath a lot, and have have a small collection of other miscellaneous other things that come and go or that I haven’t found a proper name for yet. I haven’t quite been able to explain “my blood feels weird” to a doctor yet, but that’s also probably not important for this topic.
It has, however, meant that I am unable to work any longer. Trying to work and maintain my workload was making my condition even worse so I have been off of work for a while now as I try to recover.
But what does that look like?
As much as I’d love all the medical terms to explain it, it’s really confusing to understand what has practically changed about life as a result of it. My world is much smaller now and I am physically very limited in ways I can’t quite describe, but this is as close as I think I’m going to get with my brain how it is now.
Action
Before
After
Number of “functional” hours in a day
12-14
1-2
How many times I need to stop and catch my breath going up the stairs
0
2
How long I can hold a conversation before a headache starts
Multiple hours
5 minutes
How long I can sit in a chair before getting dizzy or start developing a headache
Multiple hours
5-10 minutes
How long I lie in bed resting because I can’t do much else
Did not do this
6 – 8 hours
How long I can write (Or concentrate on any singular thing, really) before my brain goes fuzzy
So many hours
5 minutes
How long I need to lie down and zone out after a 5 minute writing session
Never happened
At least 30 minutes
How much I could walk before I start to get out of breath
Could walk for an hour continuously with good shoes
End of the block if I go slowly
How long it takes before I can get out of bed and do things after I go get coffee with a friend for an hour
No time at all
3 days
How Long Covid cured burnout
Long Covid is a condition that requires rest. It’s not really that new as I understand it–Plenty of other things trigger similar conditions. It’s just not a sexy enough condition that we’ll fund the research, and so self management is really all we have. And self management means rest and to a certain extent it also means removing yourself from society to unlearn all of the things that modern society values because society and western work culture despises rest. You need to focus a lot on getting your body to get into and stay in rest mode so that it can recover from the chronic stressors on your body caused by chronic inflammation and other things that we’re still learning about.
That just happens to also be how you recover from burnout.
I take breaks now
The first thing you learn about managing chronic fatigue is that you have to rest. I thought resting was just not moving and I could do that very well. True rest, though, means letting your mind be quiet, letting your emotions be still, and letting your body stop for a while.
No longer being in a chaotic work environment (Because I am physically unable to work) completely removed my emotional stress. I no longer had anxiety and I was suddenly able to handle all of the other things in my life with ease.
Quieting the brain was a lot harder and took more work. My brain is naturally very busy. When it’s not being filled with stress thoughts about my job, it is thinking about story ideas, plans for ways to change up my house, thinking about new recipes that I could try, or any number of other things that I’ve become spontaneously curious about at any given moment. I love losing myself in a book or long form content of some kind or researching random things, and it turned out that this continues to be the biggest drain on my energy.
Now, though, I physically can’t do that anymore. If I concentrate for more than five minutes on anything, I start having a very hard time focusing on it. If I push to continue to concentrate on it, I will develop a headache. If I push through the headache, no matter how much medication I take, it will turn into a migraine. This means that I cannot think too much about anything. My body has trained me to let my brain go quiet, or at least to maintain my attention on much lighter matters.
I can’t dwell on things
In the same way that I cannot focus on anything positive or fun, I also cannot dwell on any of the negative things either. My old habit of spiraling has been trained almost entirely out of me at this point because, again, my brain goes fuzzy and then reacts with pain. On top of that, negative emotions are very draining on my limited energy, so I’ve had to work to let a lot of things go because these things are now very much not worth spending the energy on.
On the other hand
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that I cannot get too happy about things either. This hasn’t just been being trained out of negative emotions, but out of extreme emotions in both directions. I just had a lot more negative ones as a result of burnout.
I’m much more confident
My confidence had been completely stripped via my day job. I didn’t feel incompetent, to be clear. I knew how to do the job and what I was doing just fine. I struggled instead with trying to understand and keep track of the changes that were happening with the company, which priorities I was supposed to keep in mind while I was making decisions, and told over and over again that what I had been told was never actually told to me. I asked for clear, direct communication and attempted to create a paper trail a few times only to be met with meetings and being told that I should need to be hand held and should be able to figure this out for myself. Do that enough and I felt like I was constantly questioning myself.
With the onset of Long Covid and all the general cognitive issues that comes with it, you’d think this would get worse. Instead, I found that when I turned to trying to navigate the medical sphere in trying to get a diagnosis and treatment I was doing just fine. Yes, I struggled to clearly state what was happening. I tried and failed with doctors to get them to let me communicate in a way that would allow me to be clear. I was told over and over again that I was dealing with anxiety and depression and other psychiatric issues and had to work hard to get someone to agree to let me go in for tests to prove I was physically impaired.
But I eventually got those tests. And time and time again, I was right.
I realized throughout this that I am fine. When put in an environment where there is a clear objective (My health improving) and procedures that can show which way to move forward, I am just fine. I had comparable obstacles in both situations, but in one where I arguably am much less experienced I was able to handle it just fine. I just don’t do well in environments with obscure goals and processes.
I have been removed from corporate life for the foreseeable future
As a result of getting sick, I am unable to work and have been more or less forcibly removed from the chaos and stress of corporate life. I no longer have to be worried every day about job security and if the things I’ve been so focused on are going to suddenly be completely irrelevant. Not being in that environment day after day and having that be the central focus of my whole life has been probably the key thing I needed to recover from burnout.
Leaving the environment causing the issue tends to resolve the issue. Surprise!
I have to acknowledge that I am in a very privileged position currently. I got sick while employed and so I have been able to rely on my job’s long term medical leave health insurance to cover my bills. My housing costs are lower than other people in my area and I have my mom come by once a week to help me with the household chores and cooking that I am not able to keep up with any longer. I’m only just starting to have to deal with government assistance because I’ve been sick for so long and should I ever have to rely on it 100% I will probably end up dead.
I also have to mention that I am not someone who ever really identified with my job. I was a person who did the job, the job was never part of my identity. It was something I learned to socially introduce myself with, but if anything I have always identified more with my hobbies than my career, which also made this a lot easier for me than it might for other people.
Some other perks
It’s not just developing some skills and new perspective that it’s helped. While I’m still trying to put a positive spin on not being able to leave bed most days, I can come up with some other positives.
I got an ADHD diagnosis
I’ve known since around 2017 that I probably had ADHD, but was told by me doctor that if I didn’t get that diagnosis as a kid, it wasn’t ADHD but anxiety. In the process of trying to convince them that I was dealing with a physical health issue I ended up getting not one but two medical professionals including a specialist to agree that yep, it’s definitely ADHD. I can’t do stimulants as a result of the Long Covid, but it’s been great to have that validation and the ability to understand why certain things are harder for me, as well as figuring out how to change my life around so that it works better for my brain instead of continuing to try and force myself to do things the “normal” way.
Which was, as it turns out, was huge drain on the limited energy reserves. If your brain doesn’t work that way, I’ve become a big fan of finding a way to work with your brain rather than against it.
I’m okay with sounding dumb
One of the final books I managed to write and publish before I got sick was Fredrika, about a woman who speaks with a valley girl accent due to an accident in her childhood. She is sure that people can’t understand her and speaks quickly when she speaks at all, though it’s more that they are caught off guard by the language and she just speaks so quickly that they don’t always follow. She can speak like everyone else, but it takes a lot of concentration and gives her horrible headaches.
As it turns out, this is a very apt metaphor for how I felt when I talked at the start of all of this. The brain fog made it hard to find the right words at the right time and I spoke even faster than I did before because I could feel the thought leaving my head when I started speaking. Concentrating and focusing on what I was saying to try and make it sound right gave me headaches and made all of my other symptoms worse. I was certain that only nonsense was coming out of my mouth and it was incredibly frustrating.
But unlike Red, I learned to accept that I don’t sound the same and don’t care anymore. I am, in fact, a little annoyed that people understand me so well because from my perspective it is just gibberish coming out that has somehow escaped my mouth as a coherent thought that I have quite frequently forgotten by the time my lips stop moving. It is now simply the strange way in which I communicate and if the people around me seem to understand me fine, then I am no longer going to stress about the word choice being the most correct, or even making sense. If I’m not then it’s on them to ask me again.
I’m re-prioritizing life
Because I have a lot more time and my brain doesn’t really let me dwell or spiral on the negatives any longer, I can really focus on figuring out life. Not being able to do most things in life really shows what things I miss the most and what I want to spend my limited energy on. The things that bring me joy and satisfaction are things like telling stories and being creative. The friends who check in have become so much more important. I also still really like figuring things out and telling people all about the things I figured out.
Making super awesome features for B2B SaaS products is pretty low on the priorities list now.
Will these things always be important? Who knows. Some day I will probably have to return to work, health issues or no. I am smart and capable, and that will be a concern for when it comes up. Right now, I’m just focusing on my health and taking it one day at a time for the first time since I started working. The future is unpredictable and, for the first time in a long time, I’m okay with that.
Now that I am elderly myself (In internet years) I am really enjoying these stories that have older people with health issues going on adventures, and couldn’t resist a chosen one story with a little old lady at the helm.
The story follows Edna, a woman in a home for the elderly who is visited by a wizard who is very unhappy to tell her that she is the chosen one to stop an evil wizard who controls dragons from continuing to take out the Knights. As we travel the modern magical world with Edna, she assembles her party and slowly comes to realize that not all is what it seems with this quest or the Knights as an organization.
It is such a fun read—Fast paced and it reads very much like a young adult novel despite the elderly protagonist. Edna is lovely and comes in with a wealth of life experiences, and never feels like she is suddenly much younger or more capable than someone her age might be, and it is a lot of fun to watch her both mentor the young people who surround her and find a way around physical challenges using her life experiences.
There is a predictability to the book, though, if you are familiar with the tropes introduced in the story. None of the twists came as a surprise, which was fine by me but if you are a reader that requires surprise you may be disappointed.
Overall, I think this will be one of my favourites for the year. It’s a unique take on an old classic, with a lot of fun world building and a very nontraditional ending for this kind of story. If you’re looking for a light read with some surprisingly heavy themes, this is definitely worth picking up.
I missed reading, but also I was having trouble finding a book. I kept dropping them, bit found something with Faith Hick’s name on it that I hadn’t read yet and, well, I was a comic person for a very long time so might as well!
The story follows two misfits who are sent to a summer camp. Jenna is the outcast in a family of very smart people while Lucas is a delinquent. They are both invited to an exclusive camp that produces geniuses and their parents ship them off. Once they get there, though, they start to notice that something isn’t right about the camp, that people’s personalities disappear when they become suddenly brilliant, and other campers are going missing. Once they learn more, they decide they need to escape.
This was such a fun read for October especially. I love the art, but the story with these two kids is great in that they make mistakes that make sense, make the wrong choices at times, and doesn’t make them mini adults who seem to be wise well beyond their years. It really leans into these kids being kids and approaching this bizarre situation like kids.
I also really loved the ending. Not to spoil anything (For once) but the fact that there are lasting consequences to the story that they are taking advantage of makes the story feel more impactful and that some people in the story face no repercussions is a nice dose of reality, even if it’s a little sad.
Overall, I loved it! Highly recommend if you are looking for a YA graphic novel/comic book. It’s quick, a little spooky, and the secret of what was really happening was genuinely surprising. It was a blast.
Finally, I went into the book having read the blurb so I knew what I was getting into! Unfortunately, the blurb seems to have been written for a different book than the one I read. Maybe the author didn’t get any say in it? Who knows.
This is essentially three different books. In the first, we follow a woman named Boy as she escapes her abusive father and makes a new life for herself in Flax Hill, settling for safety and security over anything that she has any real love for and deciding that this is the way it should be. In the second we follow Bird, who is Boy’s biological daughter as we encounter themes of race and watch as she communicates with the sister that Boy sent away before meeting her and coming to understand why her mother distrusts her even if she’s not sure it’s fair. Finally, the third has us snap back to Boy as she discovers that her father is a traumatized transman and biologically her mother and then decides to bring both of the girls with her on a quest to detransition her father and the story stops before anything more happens.
It’s an incredibly meandering read. Though I found Boy interesting, she doesn’t want anything and this is very much a book where things happen more than a story is told. There’s very little chemistry between characters, and I’m not sure if the flat characterization of so many of the characters is a result of Boy’s indifference to everything or if the depth just wasn’t there.
Also that last part. The book really does stop rather than end, and the last third really does come completely out of nowhere. It’s a very sour end to a dull read. I don’t typically spoil stories like this, or I try not to, but in this instance I think it’s necessary for readers to know what’s coming there.
Overall, I was definitely not the audience for this one. I think it’s literary fiction, which is likely a better fit for someone else.
Today is another lesson in I need to actually read the description. Actually, in this case I need to read the full title because this did not end up being what I expected.
Rest is Resistance reads like someone’s stream of consciousness thoughts connecting naps to black liberation. The writing is very repetitive and felt like it could have been edited down into an essay that was more impactful with how often it revisited the same points in the same ways.
I can fully acknowledge that this book is not for me. Though I am a woman of colour, I am not black. I also don’t have the spiritual context to understand some of the ideas and it seems to be framed in some kind of Christianity. I am very familiar with capitalism and grind culture, but I am not entirely sure what the author means by these concepts as they are repeated over and over again without discussing why they are a problem or even defining what is encompassed in these terms. Outside of the title, I’m not really sure what else I was meant to take from the book.
Overall, not my thing. I was not the audience for this, but maybe you are.
Every time I think I’m improving, I seem to fall back. Which isn’t that bad when you have a read that feels a lot like the author is currently going through the exact same thing.
The book is an autobiographical look at the author’s own journey as she finds herself getting sick and learning to scale back and enter a “wintering” phase of her life. It’s written in a stream of consciousness kind of way, where we move from thought to thought with the themes holding the chapters together.
And right now, the meandering feel of it really worked for me. It seemed like her journey of poor health and recovery was a lot more straightforward and quick than anything I’m going through, but I could find myself relating to a lot of the thoughts and feelings of loss of your old life and having to learn to take it easy when you used to do everything.
I don’t know if this book is for everyone, but it was a nice one for me, especially at this time of my life where I am very much also in a wintering phase. It might be good for you if you are in one, or if you know someone currently having to remove and rest.
Reading may be going very slowly as a result of the heat wave and also just generally being tired, but I have heard such good things about this that I did my best to make sure I could enjoy this one. And hopefully I can start getting back into the swing of things!
We follow a young man who lives in a strange house full of rooms with statues. As far as he knows, this house is the whole world and he is on a quest for knowledge, working with a man who appears for regular meetings twice a week called The Other. Slowly, he realizes that not only is The Other not who he appears, but he is not the person he thinks he might be either.
This is exactly my kind of book. The narrator is unreliable not because he is actively lying but because he is in a perspective that has been manipulated and lied to. There’s a strange other world where the worldbuilding is light and not fully explained, letting a lot of questions and mysteries continue to exist throughout that do not ultimately matter to the plot, but are fun to fill in on your own.
The framing device of the journals is interesting, but it does highlight what I think might be a thing people may have trouble with: The voice of the lead. He does come across innocent and naive, which can be frustrating for some people but I really liked it given the context it was presented in.
Overall, really loved it! If you get the chance to read it, I would highly recommend it. It’s one of the few times I really like an award winning book, but it had to happen again at some point!
I’m slowly getting used to the idea that I cannot devour books like I used to. Then again, sometimes you get a book that is good enough that the crash is worth it.
The book follows three people who are brought to a very special school. Everyone there is an adult who has a singular goal: Murder. Each and every student has someone that they want to eliminate in the world, a person whose death would ultimately make the world a better place and there is no other resolution to their existence. The first half of the book is primarily about the school and how they train people. The second half has us follow three of the students as they carry out the murder.
I loved this book. It took a while to really get into, since the world building was very heavy in the first half. Once we’re out in the world and seeing them apply their skills for their particular target and you see just how terrible their actual targets are to warrant this kind of action, it ends up feeling very cathartic and fun to watch things unfold. Also, Doris is amazing and I loved her.
My main issue was with one of the protagonists. There is a woman who is highly skilled, but not that driven to actually do the murder. Once I saw more of her perspective, I was more annoyed than rooting for her and ultimately didn’t care about what happened. I would much rather read someone who is driven without the skills than skillful without the drive.
It was ultimately a fantastic read. I had so much fun with it and hope that the ending was a fake out because I do not want that one character to meet their end. If you’re in the mood for some 50s style heist-y revenge stories or a school story that’s more college than high school, definitely check it out!
After a surprisingly long time of not being able to read (Yay chronic fatigue and brain fog) I pulled myself together to finally get through my latest library hold before I was put back on a several month long waitlist. Something cute, light, and featuring an octopus.
The story primarily follows Tova, the old woman who cleans the aquarium and is watching as the other elderly people she is friends with move on with their lives and confides in the octopus at the aquarium that she is still struggling with the death of her son from decades ago. Slowly, she learns that her son has not completely vanished from her life and has left behind a secret that she was not expecting to find.
It is a really cute story, and particularly entertaining interspersed with the perspective of an octopus who does not understand why these dumb humans can’t see the obvious right in front of them. The perspective of Marcellus, who is constantly escaping his tank and trying to make the most of his final days of life and captivity is a lot of fun and honestly the best part of this book.
The other perspectives I had a harder time with. I honestly didn’t really care about them as characters. Cameron in particular was a very frustrating read given that most of the misunderstandings in the story revolve around him and many of his problems were self inflicted. When things do eventually turn around for him, it doesn’t feel like it was earned or that he changed, just that it was narratively appropriate for it to happen, which was disappointing.
Overall, though, it was really cute and a fun read. Marcellus is lovely, Tova is endearing, and maybe just skim over Cameron’s chapters if self pitying characters aren’t your thing.
