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Layne Copes With her Terrible Health, a diary entry about measuring productivity, how and when to push yourself, and admitting defeat.
This week we& #39;re learning about listening to your god damn body vs. the tiny voice in your head that says work.
This week we& #39;re learning about listening to your god damn body vs. the tiny voice in your head that says work.
This might be a long story. I& #39;ll attempt to abreviate. A few months ago I set out to write a spec for the WB writers program. Two weeks later, covid happened. And weirdly enough, I also got a job. Needless to say said spec took the back burner.
The day or so after the job ended, my good pal @JoeBrukner happened to text me about hopping back on the Spec train himself. It felt a little like a sign from the universe saying: Layne no more excuses you have two weeks until the deadline and a beat sheet already. DO THIS.
So you bet your ass I did. I& #39;m one of those good under pressure, save everything to the deadline people. Always have been. Frankly this seemed like a great way to smash a script down and cut to the chase. Day 1 went AMAZING. I rekindled my love for the project and was READY.
Then I was immediately hit with few nights of pain leading to learning i have a stomach ulcer/acid problem cause by my pain medication for my back . And it was bad news. No coffee being the worst part of the news. Because even when my stomach started feeling better HEADACHE MESS.
Being someone who has 3-4 cups of coffee a day to being someone who has NO coffee a day cold turkey was an alarming shock to the system, met with the fatigue caused by what I was dealing with so two days got knocked off my gameplan FAST.
forgave myself for that. What& #39;s 5 days out of 14? We have plenty more days. I& #39;ll just work extra hard. No excuses. I got this. Well, reader she did not in fact have this. Because what I quickly learned was that when the energy came back, so did the back pain!
Surprising no one but me, when you must stop taking the pain medicine you normally take to fix your terrible horrible back injury, your back starts to hurt again pretty fucking fast. Even if you had to stop taking it to be kind to your stomach. So I ended up in a WORLD of pain.
Re-adjusting my diet and the initial back dilemma cut into my writing big time. I tried. Pushed back my broken outline. Had a few notes calls with a friend, fixed the broken outline, wrote the first act. But all of those things came in spurts surrounded by pain and frustration.
I decided come Sunday, since I& #39;d be able to eat normal-adjacent and even have one cup of coffee a day, I& #39;d make sure to get back to writing. Yesterday I outlined two scenes. It took 6 hours. My back pain was UNREAL. And turns out, so was the emotional turmoil of being in pain.
And now here we are, nearing Monday evening. A monday in which in order to try to stave off the back pain, I am only sitting certain ways, for only a small length of time each, stretching, icing, heating in a cycle, using cannabis. And for one day my pain is MODERATE.
I have felt like I& #39;m in a better mood, I feel a little more mental clarity. The problem is that I can& #39;t use it. So tonight, I& #39;ve hit the wall that I& #39;m sure anyone suffering from a lengthy illness or chronic pain has it, the moment where I have to check in with myself.
I was fucking DETERMINED when I set out to do this. I know my tendency to make excuses and refused -- REFUSED to do that this time. But this is the part where I have to tell myself that all this pain is not an "excuse."
The mental and physical pain and frustration are real. My current inability to work at the speed required for this kind of an undertaking is SERIOUSLY lacking. And yes, this means I& #39;ll miss the deadline, yes this means I& #39;ll let myself down, yes I& #39;ll wait until next year.
In the beginning of this idea, I told myself that I wanted to TRY. That if I at least tried, even if I failed to reach it, that was okay but that I had to good faith try my fucking hardest. I& #39;m a very honest with conscience person so that was an easy promise to uphold.
