About yesterday…
If I never understood the term “it was the best of times, it was the worst of time, I do now. Yesterday should have been the best of times for me. I had a new reader who just finished Peter the Wolf who wanted to buy all the rest of my books in one lump, and even after I offered a 20% discount, they paid full price, plus a $5 tip. (Or for those of you who hate math problems, that’s $100 in sales from one reader, basically.) I got a pay statement from Lightning Source and had my dad check my account to find that I had $213. Lightning Source only sells ebooks for the Campaign trilogy and print copies of Redemption Lost, and I make a LOT of money of that first series. Even rounding down, I realized Wendy has sold over 2,000 copies at this point.
That’s a good day, right?
Well emotionally, I wasn’t doing so good, because something in the air triggered my MS. I didn’t notice the physical symptoms first. I became agitated and went on Twitter to complain about the difference in sales between the Campaign trilogy and the Peter the Wolf series, pointing out how Wendy’s first book was about a serial killer slaughtering kids, and that was okay for readers. But they wouldn’t read Peter’s book because of one molested girl? I declared that I would never understand people as long as I lived. While this is true, I’d no sooner wrote it when I started asking why I was so upset. After all, I was having a great day.
It was perhaps twenty minutes after this that I noticed the tingling in my skin, followed by pain in my hands and difficulty sitting still. I decided to disengage slightly from Twitter, instead just retweeting links for others with the occasional pasted links for my own books. While I waited out the attack, I shook like a leaf caught in a breeze, and every time I turned my head, it was with an exaggerated snapping motion. Things at the corners of my vision made me jumpy, and I couldn’t suppress my need to be snappy. Then as suddenly as it arrived, the feeling was gone.
This is what I can’t get others to understand about me, about my precarious mental state. I lose a lot of people because they’re on the wrong end of one of my snapping fits, or because they see something I said while having an episode and decide that I’m just being selfish. This is why I can’t have a real publisher, because publishers scan people’s social media to look for “crazy talk,” and they don’t care to look and see if this is a real mental illness. Even if it is, they unrealistically expect people with mental illnesses to only talk when they’re in a good mood. And putting it bluntly, I never shut up. Good times or bad, I have to keep talking. That’s why I have over 100,000 tweets, yo.
Yesterday was my best sales day ever. I made enough money to cover the cost of a new bike (did I forget to mention someone stole my bicycle last week? Yeah, someone stole my bike last week. Now you know.) and I confirmed that my first series is still selling like hotcakes without me having to do anything. But yesterday was also one of the worst days I’ve had all week because my MS triggered me into a agitated mental state, and I was stuck on the roller coaster with no way to calm down. And thinking on it now, I only wish the people I’ve pissed off or sent off would read this and understand, often it’s not you or something you said that started me in my snit. Often, I’m triggered by the weather, or just by a change in the barometric pressure.
Or if this is TL;DR already, I’m sorry that I offend you for being crazy. If I could keep myself under control, I would. But very often, I’m not the pilot in this body. I’m just a passenger watching an inevitable crash. If you expect me to self-censor like a sane person, then I’m sorry, but you don’t know me or want to understand what’s gone wrong in my head after roughly half a dozen brain injuries and another half dozen MS scars making holes up in there. I’m sorry if this post upsets you, but this is what’s wrong with me, and none of this is my fault. I can apologize for causing offense, but I can’t apologize for being crazy. I’ve done it way too often, and I’m tired of people blowing me off and saying “Oh, you’re not really crazy.” Yes, I am. I only wish you people could understand that and stop walking away from me just because I snapped and acted out. Cause this isolation technique? Not really healing the damage in my head, nor is it convincing me to behave better. If I could do that, I would.
