Chloe Stowe's Blog: The Words and Madness of Chloe Stowe - Posts Tagged "dalliance-with-sanity"

And so it begins.

An introduction seems appropriate. For all who have followed my career previously, please excuse the redundancy. Feel free to look away for a few moments while I get my rather shredded laundry out on the line.

I’ll make this as quick and painless as possible.

I’m a little mad. Really. I’ve got the psych drugs in my blood to prove it. For the last twenty two years, I’ve been battling chronic panic attacks. And we’re not talking just a little anxiety here, folks. We’re talking bad ones, completely debilitating ones that at their worst lasts for days... 48 to 72 hours of relentless fright.

Imagine walking down a sidewalk. Everything is fine. The weather is good. The day is happy. Your steps are even and without thought -

Right… left… right… left… right… suddenly, the earth is gone. Your left foot has nowhere to land. It simply falls taking you with it.

Your heart drops a million times faster than your body begins to do. You flail backwards, throwing all of your weight backwards, terrified of falling, knowing without a doubt that you will die if you stop struggling for an instant.

Now imagine that split-second of panicked teetering between life and death, sanity and madness stretching out for minutes, hours, days. There is no relief, either physically or mentally. The strain is constant, crippling. You don’t know which will shatter first, your body or your mind.

Imagine twenty-two years of it.

Voila! You’ve just imagined me.

It’s better now. The medication is brawny and relentless; it keeps my steps steady for the most part. Unfortunately, the meds are not all-healing.

I cannot work.

I can, however, write.

With fourteen novels published, I can even justify the thought that I write pretty damned well.

Now, it’s time to scrape out a living of it.

With my fifteenth novel, The Sun and the Sand Cat, I take “a step forward in faith” (as my mother says). I enter the mainstream romance market!

My goals are not extreme, though they sound rather ridiculous. Ready for a sad laugh? I want to earn enough money to owe income tax. Yes, silly, but there is a point.

Most people plan for retirement. I plan for losing my mind.

Mental illness is hardly a reliable sort of disease. There is no prognosis, either good or bad. At this point I’ve accepted that I’ll never be fully well, but I fear, quite rationally, that I will get worse. Social security may, one dark day, become my only hope of not becoming a burden to my family. Income tax births social security, hence my rather “silly” goal.

And there you have it. My condition in a blog-encrusted nutshell.

I doubt I will mention this goal again. I am aware it is particularly pitiful and I try very hard not to dwell on it.

I’m a woman who tries to always dance in whatever sunshine I can find… even if it’s under a construction paper sun tacked haphazardly to my bedroom ceiling.

Chapter Four of The Sun and the Sand Cat calls. You can track the story’s progress on the aptly named “Sun & Sand Cat” page on my new website: www.coradouglassands.com

I do hope you will return again. I’d enjoy the company.

Sincerely,
Cora Douglas Sands, twirling under her bright paper sun