Saying goodbye when it’s impossible

We have often joked that Atticus is a grumpy old man. It’s true: he’s an old soul and has been an old man at heart since he left puppyhood at 18 months old. There’s a cliche that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and we learned that the hardest way this week.

We are both so emo in this picture, I love it.

My twenties were made up of some good years (I married my life partner, I completed a master’s program I really liked) and some lost, aimless ones. When I left university I was often un-or-underemployed, depressed and not sure what I was meant to be doing. Atticus would sit with me when I was home alone crying in my bed, sit his fat rump right up against me and just be there with me. I was often living far away from my family, and if Callum was at work or school, Atticus was the constant presence by my side.

I didn’t grow up with pets, so I didn’t know what it meant to have an animal be your best friend until I was an adult in my twenties. It was a sudden realization for me: as soon as I held this little pup with giant soft ears, I was hooked.  

The most insane eyes I’ve ever had in a photo. This is what falling madly in love looks like.

Atticus had us to himself for a full decade before we had a baby. He has always had separation anxiety – Callum and I were his pack and he loved us so much he couldn’t bear to have us leave. Due to my up and down employment and schooling, I was often home with him for months at a time.

He’s been getting more anxious and weird as he gets older. We tried so hard to have patience with his weirdness – I always remind myself of those times he sat silently and concerned beside me, cuddled up as I cried. A few times this past summer he even sat on my head while the fireworks went off up at the lake, while I was laying there trying to sleep. I was so frustrated with him then, because all I could think about was how I needed to sleep for the baby, and how I was worried the baby would wake up. But still, I held him while he shook. He smelled terrible. His fear panting made his stinky breath fill the room.

Why you gotta sit on my head though?

We never did figure out how to soothe his fear and his anxiety. We recently tried medication, and it didn’t work. We’ve tried so much over the years: thunder shirts, scents, training, medication.

One of the hardest parts of this for me (and there are so many hard parts) is that I don’t know if he knows how much I love him. All he does is show us how much he loves us, as annoying as it can be sometimes. He lives to love us, love food, and other adults he meets. He could never find a way to love other dogs and little humans. He liked the other dogs in our family, but he didn’t have that insane, howling love for them that he had for his people. We had hoped he’d learn to love Malcolm. Malcolm loves him so much. The first thing he asks for when he’s getting ready to leave daycare is “Atty? Atty?” 

I’ll miss his loud snoring. I’ll miss even his most vile farts. I’ll miss his ridiculous reverse sneezing/snorting. 

Atticus, I hope wherever you’re going you’ll have all the blankets, the comfiest beds, the best treats; I just wish you didn’t have to go there without us.

Sleep well, old friend.

 

This is gorgeous…

I’m reading a book about writing that features great selections from all kinds of different books. Here’s one from Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us:

When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal – each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.

I’m pretty much swooning out of my chair.

Losing and finding Lucy Maud Montgomery

I just finished the Lucy Maud Montgomery biography by Mary Henley Rubio, and it broke my heart over and over again. There’s so much I didn’t know about her, and what I mostly didn’t know was how bad it was: her life was hard. She struggled with her own mental illness, in addition to her husband and son’s. I’m certainly not the first person to assume that the person who invented Anne Shirley had a happy childhood and generally contented life.

Beyond her personal family struggles, the critics turned on Maud in the 1920s; this devastated her. Rubio writes:

In the mid-1920s, the growing cadre of men who panned her books included influential newsmen, university professors, and writers in Canada, and they all knew each other. In 1926, one of Canada’s powerful newspaper critics led the attach, labelling her books the nadir of Canadian fiction. A much respected professor of literature termed her books ‘naive’ with an ‘innocence’ that suggested ‘ignorance of life.’… In the face of such attacks, even the critics who had previously lauded her writing started being careful to temper their praise.

Nevertheless, all these men were impressed (and annoyed) by her sales and success. While some allowed that her large readership might speak to some undefined cultural need, others have felt that her popularity merely proved her ‘lowbrow’ quality. These detractors spoke with such a powerful voice in Canada between the mid-1920s and her death in 1942 that her work fell into disfavour… By the 1970s, the general wisdom was that Montgomery was a sentimental writer who appealed to the uncultured and masses of undiscriminating women and children, and still in the 1980s expressing an admiration for Maud’s books was rather risky. She was relegated strictly to the category of ‘children’s writer,’ and was judged by her weakest books, not her best.

For over 50 years, even during the hardest times, even when her family was coming apart at the seams, L.M. Montgomery kept writing. I can’t imagine what that drive is like – part of it was motivated by financial worries, since the publisher of her early books, especially the cash cow Anne of Green Gables, screwed her out of royalties. A lot of her drive came from being an ambitious hard worker at a time and place (turn of the century PEI) where being ambitious was not something a woman should be.

I feel closer to Maud now that I ever have. There’s something very sad about her, but something inspiring too.

Nurses’ Week

I’m so ashamed to say that I once (internally) judged some of my high school friends for going into nursing programs at university. I thought they were all so smart and talented that they should have been doctors instead. I think back on this now and cringe.  They may have confronted this opinion elsewhere, maybe from teachers or even parents.

I now know how wrong I was for two reasons. One, because I spent the last 15 years since high school ended submerging deep into all kinds of strains of feminist thought. Nursing continues to be a feminized profession in most cultures, and therefore taken less seriously by many of us. And two, because I had a baby in a hospital where I was attended almost entirely by nurses and midwives, and that baby needed a 72-hour stay in the neonatal intensive care (for a fairly minor issue, thankfully). I wish I could go back and slap my stupid teenage self.

The NICU nurses were beyond impressive. I don’t know how they do what they do, how they continue to do what they do day in and day out. Cliches get thrown around a lot, and some of it is condescending and maudlin, but nurses are super heroes. We should take some of that rah-rah spirit we as a country are constantly expected to show to our military, and bestow it on nurses. (This is not zero sum, and clearly there are many nurses in our military, and I don’t mean to disrespect them). This is the level of recognition I’m proposing. We are so lucky as a country that so many of the best and brightest women in my high school class went into nursing. These people save lives every single day.

NICU nurses have incredibly specialized skills. I witnessed in it during my time there. They can insert IVs and needles in the tiniest veins. They can perceive something is wrong with the tiniest changes in impossibly little bodies. I asked my friend Micheline, a nurse who spent five years working in the NICU at the only children’s hospital in the Maritimes, now studying to become a neonatal nurse practitioner to shed some light on just how NICU nurses do it:

She said: “Babies can’t tell you if something is wrong. Assessment skills are a NICU nurse’s biggest asset. You have to continually assess your patient through the day and know what their baseline was at the start of your shift or over the days of caring for them. When babies get sick in the NICU it can be very subtle. Maybe their stomach is a little more distended than before, maybe their heart rate is up a  little higher for no notable reason- those tiny little things that in the adult world would be ignored could mean a baby has an overwhelming infection.”

And about the tiny IVs: “Those are skills that are gained over years of experience, we use the smallest IVs and the hardest things with babies is that the veins are fragile so they don’t last as long as you would like. Everything is small. Even isolating heart sounds with a stethoscope or listening to all the lung fields can be difficult because a chest is so tiny. The NICU is full of lots of technical skills that although they may not be specific to the area ( like said iv) they require different procedures, policy and techniques to perform safely and successfully on a baby.”

Mich is now working as an air transport nurse for critically ill babies, children and pregnant women, bringing them to the IWK. So picture doing all that in a loud helicopter in the air:

“I can tell you without my experience in NICU I would never be able to do my job . My assessment skills are key when I am in a helicopter that is too loud to use a stethoscope. They also help us decide what to do first when we get to the patient and they are in a critical condition. Also to safely transport a patient we have a policy that they must have two working IVs- it’s harder to put one back in when you are in the air and your patient is secured in an incubator or on a stretcher. Without my nicu experience two IVs on a tiny baby would be close to impossible.”

She says the job has incredible rewards and heartbreaking challenges:

“The NICU is a complex environment; it takes a lot of people, skills and technology to make it buzz. One of the best parts of working in NICU compared to maybe some other nursing areas is the multidisciplinary teamwork. RT’s, RN’s, NPs, pharmacy, physician’s, residents, OT, physio, surgery, social work and even house keeping all work together towards the common goal of optimizing a baby’s condition, empowering their family and helping them get home to live their very best life with the very best future they are able to have. Teamwork like that doesn’t always exist in healthcare. I love that. I also like being able to advocate for babies and their loved ones, especially because they are often unable to do so for themselves. I think that is a very important job considering the extremely vulnerable population. It is a challenging place to work; no baby is the same, no NICU stay mimics another. It is unpredictable, fast paced and high intensity at times but it is also filled with many special moments. I think the very best aspects of the job are those moments. Watching a new dad see his baby for the first time or helping a new mom finally have a snuggle when maybe their baby was too sick to be moved for weeks can be extraordinary experiences. Witnessing the babies and the families you have cared for reach their goals and meet their milestones is also at the top of the list. Whether it is drinking a full bottle, finally latching well during a breastfeed, having a surgery or procedure go well, having their IV taken out, breathing without assistance from a machine or even something as basic as finally having a poop after days of waiting for one- they are all things to be celebrated. At the very top of the list is seeing your patient finally going home with their family. It doesn’t matter if it was a baby who was in NICU for 2 days or 200, it is special every time. The neonatal unit is a very rewarding place to work.

The technology is impressive and not a day goes by where I am not amazed at the things we are capable of because of continued research and advancements in practice (especially considering neonatal medicine is considered relatively new medicine). That said, some of the hardest aspects of the job surround when technology fails or when it isn’t sufficient enough for a baby regardless of the advancements that have been made. For all the special and wonderful moments, there are still devastatingly hard ones. Watching a parent learn their baby may not live or that their child likely won’t function in the same ways as their peers as they grow up is very hard. Helping a parent say good-bye to child is always gut-wrenching and never gets easier. It stays with you. Luckily, those moments are far less frequent than the good ones. It is also sometimes hard watching babies experience pain, endure procedures, disrupted sleep and all of the negative things often associated with an intensive care unit. We do everything we can to keep our patients comfortable, prevent and treat pain and optimize their development but some things are unavoidable no matter how hard you try.

Honestly, I could list one hundred more things that are incredible about the job but I guess in the end, NICU is a very privileged place to work. As a nurse you share in the very best and the very worst days of people’s lives and I feel that it is truly an honor to be able to do so.”

I also discovered that some NICU nurses are experts at dealing with the fragility of brand new mothers, especially the nurses who work on the night shift. I would shuffle over the NICU in the middle of the night, careful not to aggravate my C-section incision, and feed my son while he was hooked up to the machines. The third night after having a baby is a notoriously difficult night: the vast amounts of hormones that were required for labour and childbirth now have nowhere to go, and they flood around your body making you extremely emotional. This made me cry/laugh almost in hysterics for four straight hours for no discernible reason. I couldn’t stop crying no matter how hard I tried,but when I shuffled down to the NICU for the 5am feeding, my favourite night nurse was there. She could tell I was totally overwhelmed and while I fed my baby she and I talked about everything but babies – mostly our dogs. Hers part-beagle, mine full-beagle. She showed me pictures of her dog on her phone. I showed her mine. She intuited that I just needed a mental break from the whole vast terrifying exhilarating process of becoming a mother to just look at pictures of cute dogs. An hour with her in the early morning hours was more mentally restorative than anything else at the time. I left her a thank you card when we were finally discharged.

So don’t just thank a nurse this week, although do that too: please try to fully appreciate how specialized their skills are, how they keep us alive, how they put us back together again when we are so, so fragile. It seems like the most vital work there is. 

Sometimes it feels like I will scrub berry stains out of little shirts forever….

…and fold tiny clothes. I both love and hate folding the little clothes.

You’re never through with surprises til you’re dead…

I’ve been reading up on Lucy Maud Montgomery lately for a piece I’m writing. I’ve learned a few sad, surprising, and interesting things.

One, she didn’t write Anne until she was 30-years old. Her first novel (AGG) wasn’t published until she was 33-years old. This makes me feel like slightly less of a loser.

Two, she likely died by suicide, 75 years ago today. I remember when this news came out back around the Anne centennial in 2008 but I had put it out of my mind. Her life in Ontario seems quite lonely and full of hardships, mostly domestic.

Three, her archives are at the University of Guelph, 45 minutes from my door. I must pay a visit.

And four, the Emily series, my absolute favourite, was her most autobiographical work. Emily was a dark little weirdo writer I always strongly identified with as a young person. I recently re-read the whole series for the first time in 20 years and loved it just as much.

Thanks, Maud, you strange little Island weirdo, who made millions of us feel less alone.

What kind of worries are these?

At first I was worried that all the good motherhood stuff has been already written. But then I realized, just like every person writes about childhood differently – think David Sedaris vs Dorothy Allison – everyone can write about parenthood differently. There are a million ways be a child. Yes, there are shared responsibilities that link most parents across the board (the non-negligent ones, anyway), there are also a million ways to be a parent, and a million and a half feelings you can encounter along the way.

The question is, why I have internalized it any differently? Clearly when society devalues mothers they devalue their stories. Are fatherhood stories dismissed the same way? Unlikely.

This is why I should stop worrying and start writing.

I did something hard this week

and potentially foolish, but I did it for him, and my own sanity.  We need to eventually talk about how expensive it can be to do the right thing, and how terrifying it can be to live a happy life.

And if a nice White lady writer from Nashville can be called dangerous…

The way Ann Patchett wrote about Lucy: I, and many others, loved it.

Some people very much didn’t like it. In an essay called “The Love Between Two Women Is Not Normal” from This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Patchett writes about the backlash she received when Truth and Beauty was assigned to incoming freshmen. A protest was planned.

My friends from New York offered to go with me to South Carolina, expecting a gladiatorial match I would surely win. My friends from home read drafts of my speech and howled over the ever-growing stack of newspaper clippings. My friend from Mississippi told me not to go. “Cancel,” she said. “Cancel, cancel, cancel.” Mississippians tend not to be cavalier about the dangers of bigotry in the Deep South.

And why the fuss? It doesn’t surprise me:

“The love between the two women is not normal.” The reporter and the seventeen-year-old had finally come out and said the thing that no one else had had the nerve to mention: Lucy and I must have been having sex with each other. That was the only explanation for our loyalty, love, and devotion. Sex was the payoff for a difficult relationship, and without the sex the whole thing made no sense.

She went, she gave her speech with a bodyguard there, and she notes there wasn’t much protest. She admits to spending a huge amount of time on her speech, hoping it would persuade young hearts and minds to avoid censorship, but ultimately doesn’t think she changed many minds, which is indeed a topic for another day.

In my better moments, I tell myself what happened was a noble battle between freedom and oppression, but I knot it is equally possible that nothing so lofty occurred. Some people find sex and suffering and deep friendship between women unpalatable subjects, and seeing these subjects bearing down on their children, they no doubt felt they had to try and stop it. They didn’t succeed, but I seriously doubt that anyone was harmed by completing the assignment. If I am the worst thing the students of Clemson have to fear, then their lives will be very beautiful indeed.

 

Oh Ann Patchett can soothe the soul…

I mentioned in the last post how vital and beautiful Ann Patchett’s writing about female friendship is. It’s also unique, as Erin Wunker pointed out. When Ann met Lucy:

When I turned around the say hello, she shot through the door with a howl. In a second she was in my arms, leaping up onto me, her arms locked around my neck, her legs wrapped around my waist, ninety-five pounds that felt no more than thirty. She was crying into my hair. She squeezed her legs tighter. It was not a greeting so much as it was a claim: she was staking out this spot on my chest as her own and I was to hold her for as long as she wanted to stay….

I do not remember our love unfolding, that we got to know one another and in time became friends. I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first. I felt I had been chosen by Lucy and I was thrilled. I was twenty-one years old and very strong. She had a habit of pitching herself into my arms like a softball without any notice. She liked to be carried.

I’ve read Truth and Beauty: A Friendship at least six times. That bolded line has always, and will always stick with me. It is one of the best books I have ever read about beauty, and about  love. It is a memoir about two women best friends.

I did Lucy and myself a great disservice our second year at Iowa and left the house on Governor Street to move in with my boyfriend, who lived in a small cottage behind a larger house a mile away. This act of packing up an leaving home set in motion a much larger mistake that would take years to correct. At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was doing something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all. Wasn’t it more important to live with a man, a man who was certain to wake up one day and be happy because I was there with all my good intentions sleeping beside him? Wasn’t that more valuable than staying with a friend who made me laugh, who made me think about everything, but was, in the end, just a girl?

Ann Patchett has this language that Erin Wunker seeks, but is one of the few.

 

Finding a book at the right time…

A feminist book which addresses mothering, among other things. I just read and loved Notes From a Feminist Killjoy by Erin Wunker. She`s a feminist academic, blogger, activist and mother. She also, like me, loves Sara Ahmed.

She has a section of friendship that I love:

I hate most of the words used to describe friendship among women.

What is it about female friendship that inspires such insipid descriptors? I struggle to find a collective noun that fits my friends without itching in it’s not-quite-right fit. My girls (too infantilizing). My crew (I don’t row, so…). My gal pals (sounds like a condition. My tribe (too new age-appropriative). My bitches (just no). ….

I’ve been looking for the language to describe friendship among women to myself, but I haven’t found it yet.

Why is that?

What do we resist when we resist finding or forging this language? What do we lose when we don’t have the language to name the communities of care that hold our heads above water and bring us back to ourselves?“

I’m thinking so much about communities of care lately, partly because of my new job. Now I’m re-reading Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, which describes a female friendship in the best way, in the most unique and beautiful way. Ann Patchett found the language that so few have. I still have to digest this book, and will have more to say later…

The First Day…..

I only cried a tiny bit. Little MB is having the time of his life with his new friends, two humans, two cats and a dog. I rerouted my brain from constant interruptions to focused, consistent working ability fairly quickly. My baby brain still has weird lurches to catch up to the rest of the world every once in awhile, but so far, so good. 2017, you’re alright.

The truism that is my life right now…

How can time go by so fast? Time didn’t move so quickly before I had a child. In fact, it was often excruciatingly slow. I was underemployed, or unemployed, and time just stretched out in front of me – I wasted so much of it, just waiting for things to happen to me.

Also, my pregnancy was such a slog and seemed interminable. Forty weeks and two days stretched out like a nine-year limbo, full of seasickness, insomnia and boredom.

But now. These 11 months have gone by in a heartbeat. I’ll miss every second of it, even the tedium.

How fast we went from this:

To this:

 

“A birth story is a bit like… a war story”

“A birth story is a bit like the female version of a war story – an endlessly repeatable, endlessly compelling ritual form. We know its contours, its rhythms, its stakes. We know that our hero makes it out alive – they’re here to testify to what they’ve seen. All that may feel familiar. But what opportunities for unexpected newness would get missed if we avoided the familiar, the conventional, the universal?”

–Molly Fischer, in her review of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson.

Thinking on this. Working on this.

Almost constant disbelief…

I can’t believe he will walk soon. I can’t believe how fast it goes. He was just a thought, and then a growing bean, and then limbs and a face, and then wiggling motion, and then he was here, and in my arms constantly, and now he is a creature that almost, almost walks away from me.

Shifting gears

From how-to, nut-and-bolts, what-to-do-when-the-baby-won’t-sleep books, to more literary takes on mothering a baby. There are less of these books than you might think.

I recently read Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Both of these books are made up of fragments. This is no coincidence. Our brains are fractured now, the time we get to ourselves is measured in seconds or minutes, not hours and definitely not days.

Rivka Galchen says, summing it up so perfectly: “In late August a baby was born, or, as it seemed to me, a puma moved into my apartment, a near-mute force, and then I noticed it was December…”

And: “My life with this very young human resembles those romantic comedies in which two people who don’t speak the same language still somehow fall in love”.

And: “A baby is a goldmine”.

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a doozy. It’s about motherhood, step-motherhood, queer familymaking, and gender fluidity, all suffused with poetry and theory. I was mesmerized by it.

Maggie Nelson on pregnancy: “For the years I didn’t want to be pregnant – the years I spent harshly deriding ‘the breeders’ – I secretly felt pregnant women were smug in their complaints. Here they were, sitting on top of the cake of the culture, getting all kinds of kudos for doing exactly what women are supposed to do, yet still they felt unsupported and discriminated against. Then, when I wanted to be pregnant but wasn’t, I felt that pregnant women had the cake I wanted, and were busy bitching about the flavor of the icing. I was wrong on all counts – imprisoned, as I was and still am, by my own hopes and fears. I’m not trying to fix that wrongness here. I’m just trying to let it hang out”.

And more on pregnancy: “Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters ones’s normal state, and occasions a radical intimacy with – and radical alienation from – one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?”

And the most empowering sentence I’ve ever read about a birth. “Here he comes. It feels big but I feel big enough”. Wow.

Go read these books, especially if you’ve had a baby yourself, but even more especially if you haven’t. These stories will not be recognized as literature until people who don’t birth children (typically the tastemakers and gatekeepers of what literature is and isn’t) read them and soak them in.

What a freedom it is, to read again. To take this time for me, to do my most favourite thing.

Reading so much…

about motherhood, and how to write. Claire Vaye Watkins helps me sort it out.

But I do see a lot of newly mothered women who are writing in a much more fragmented, impressionistic, lyrical, language-driven way. For me, when I’m breastfeeding, I can’t think of a 300-page narrative arc and, also, I don’t see the world like that anymore. When I’m waking up every 90 minutes, the world becomes a really fragmented, dream-like, lyrical place, so that aesthetic doesn’t really apply. If I were going to try to write a book like that now, it would be a lie.

and

It’s also this all or nothing thing. It’s an extreme binary—I did it bit earlier myself—between men’s writing or women’s writing; between narrative-driven epic novels and smaller, more fragmented, domestic pieces. Or when I evaluate my own work, I still ask, “Is this art or is this a mom blog?” It would be wonderful if our kids came up in a world where mom blogs were art if they were fucking good enough—if that was the only criteria they had.

Watch me wrestle with this question, and why it even has to be this way: “Is this art or is this a mom blog?”

I’m coming back…

I’ve been busy lately with my little critters. Now a human one, in addition to the furry one. Finding a way out of the postpartum brain fog.

Book reviewsy

Just finished The Perfect Scent: A year in the perfume industry in the Paris and New York by Chandler Burr, and it was completely fascinating. I somehow, inexplicably got into perfumes this year (smelling them, learning about them, certainly not buying them because I’m broke). The perfume industry is a wacky, wacky business. For example: 

Millions are fascinated by the process by which designers like Todd Oldham cut, sew, design, and agonize their fall collections into existence, but the great creative minds at Yves Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gaultier and Dior, with the collective brilliance of a single mollusk at low tide, have intuited that with perfume – No. Here is an industry suffocating itself on the most immense pile of public relations shit human civilization has ever produced, a literal mountain of verbiage about “the noble materials, symbol of eternal feminine beauty, addictive notes of Cocoa Puffs, she can’t wait to taste him like a Hershey’s kiss, Cleopatra wore this, it has notes of distilled wild all-natural Martian fungus harvested by French virgins on the third moon of Pluto”.  The lies pile up on other lies, they generate a poisoned river of vapid crap the marketers try to pass off as ‘information’ and the brands have no clear that their public relations approach is about fifty years out of date. Reading anything they put out on their perfumes is like reading a combination of Kafka, only less creative, and Pravda circa 1985. Zero interest. There is almost no recognition that the enforced lack of knowledge – this gaping void of nothingness about what their products actually are, who makes them, and what’s in the things – is creating boredom and disinterest. The perfume industry is choking itself to death on its vacuum.

Anyway, a fascinating read on an absolutely bizarre word. 

 

A biography of 2014.

Joining a challenge. Two weeks late, but there you go. 

Little blips and blurbs about my year.

Alix reads too much as a crutch, as an excuse to stay as far as possible away from life. And the funny thing is, I got a book for Christmas called The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies. A book to fix my problems! Either the precisely wrong thing, or the exact thing I need. 

Time will tell.