Looking back at Crush...what would I do differently?

What lead to me writing "Crush"? Well, it's hard to say. Millions of things, really. From 1993 to 2009, I enjoyed a fulfilling nursing career, made really decent money, spent a lot of my spare time either sleeping or watching movies. As early as 2000 I began to notice my health beginning to change. I suffered strange falls at work. Once I was running around with a unit of red blood cells in one hand and the paperwork in another, and I suddenly just fell. I didn't black out or faint...I just fell THUD! I began to notice fatigue, muscle weakness and horrible migraines that had me calling off work.

I remember an emotional change too, a severe bout of depression following a family dispute, and later that year, worsening in the aftermath of 9/11. It became so that if I wasn't at work, I was asleep, desperately hoping to recuperate for my next shift. In spite of several antidepressants, my depression worsened until I began to loathe the very idea of leaving the house for any reason. I came to hate the very career I worked so hard to attain. In 2005, after a 27 hour hospice shift, I fell down a flight of stairs, sustaining leg and spinal injuries that, while not severe enough to paralyze me, were enough to leave me in chronic pain. Still, I kept on, until April of 2009, when I fell on duty at a hospice patients house, injuring both knees and shoulders. I tried to work for another month after that, and found it impossible.

A year later my financial difficulties forced me to relinquish my independence, and I moved in with family, certain that this was the beginning of the end for me. I felt worthless, and my efforts to get any kind of workman's comp, disability or even government assistance to help pay for medical bills were in vain.

About 4 months after my move, I began to write a story, and at first, it was quite a dark and depressing "redux" on a novel I had written years prior. From 1990 to 2003, I had written a novel called "Unspoken Request", about 2 abused children who fall in love, but that book was lost forever when my computer crashed. I tried to retrieve the book, but the disk was also lost. When I began to write again in August 2010, the new story was completely unlike the novel I'd lost. I don't know why I began writing, but I just had to write. It must have been some kind of therapeutic need I had.

At first, the story that would eventually become "Crush" was quite short, a story of 2 men who meet and fall in love. Again, it was very grim, and when the crime occured, the outcome was far less uplifting. I had no concrete intentions to publish this story, then titled "Touch The Spindle", but as I kept writing, I kept adding, and I kept building on the characters until I had something that made me say, "I need to publish this." The ending was changed drastically, because I felt a change occuring within myself, a change from bleak and negative to bright and positive.

Before penning "Crush", I had been reading gay erotica and remembering 2 gay men in Idaho who I'd taken care of during my hospice career. One of them was dying of bone cancer, and his family was very hateful and ostracizing of the man's lover. In spite of this, both men refused to kowtow to the family's protests, and remained together until the patient died. It was my first real-life look at homophobia, and at resilience.

In the nearly 2 years since I first began to write "Crush", I have gone through tremendous changes within. Admittedly, my education about the LGBT communities was rather limited (to what I'd seen on Queer As Folk, Noah's Arc, and the like) at the beginning of this journey. I was a "layman" and my writing reflects this. It's almost as if, in writing this book, I was hoping to reach out beyond the "choir" and touch the hearts of those who believe homosexuality is a sin, that gay marriage is against God's will, and that those who don't fit into hetero "normal" parameters are unfit to have basic civil rights, families, or the right to just walk down the road without being harassed, bashed or murdered. I believed that the language of the layman might be an advantage to those who might be willing to open their hearts and learn. Such naivete. As I told a new friend, there are very few supporters of DOMA and NOM, very few advocates of hate mongerers like Fred Phelps and Rev. Worley who will READ my book, much less get something from it. When I began to talk about my new book and my plans to publish, my own Aunt treated me to homophobic fire and brimstone condemnation.

My nursing career must have left me so exhausted that I just didn't have the time or the ability to look at the world around me and learn from it. I've since become a sponge, readily absorbing everything. Only after the production and publication of "Crush" have I learned the meanings of the words, "demisexual" "pansexual" "asexual" "aromantic" "lithromantic" "neutrois" "agender" "trigender" and many more. I have made my share of booboos. Once I commented on a youtube video about Sheldon Cooper of THE BIG BANG THEORY that asexuals can be attracted to people too, even sexually. What I should have said, of course, is "romantically" not "sexually". I am learning the differences between sexual attraction and romantic/aesthetic attraction, and the importance of NOT generalizing and assuming something about someone based on what community they are part of. I am learning about sexual orientation vs. gender identity.

I am learning lots of things. And it's good to learn. I like being a person who wants to learn about the world I live in. How sad it is to be a person so narrow minded and dependent on a set of regimented beliefs and man-made morals that they don't feel confident enough to use the brain they were given, by "God", by evolution, by whatever, to use their common sense.

What would I do different if I had the opportunity to write "Crush" over? Not much. I think of Crush as part of my own personal journey to who I am now. It's OK that I didn't fill it with all those great words that I now know. Why? Because like myself, "Tammy" and "Jamie" were not truly familiar with themselves or the community they would one day call their own. They were both "green", struggling with fear, doubt, shame and all the things they'd been force fed in church about how their feelings for each other were "sinful." Their journey has been my journey.

I do regret one thing. In the back of the book, I had listed resources for LGBT, queer and questioning youth. And because of the animal rights plot in "Crush", I also listed several of those organizations. I forgot one very important group, children affected by sexual and other abuse. I didn't mean to exclude the children, and now my CreateSpace paperback has those organizations listed.

Other than that, I wouldn't change Crush for the world. It's elementary language and viewpoints are sincere, which makes it all the more sad that those who will not open their hearts/minds and learn that love is better than hate will never read it. And I know that no matter what my intentions are, there will always be the risk that someone will "take" Crush the wrong way, or find it offensive in some way. I have a very thin skin still yet, and sometimes I've felt so stupid, like I never should have written/published it. I'm sure many writers/authors have had days where they feel like they should have remained silent.

But if we keep silence, our stories will not be told, and there are so many stories that need to be told to the world today. We're living in a very important era. No matter who may or may not like what I write, we need positive stories. I wrote Crush with nothing but the best intentions and a sincere empathy in my heart for all who are persecuted for not conforming to the standards of the "moral" majority.

I am glad I wrote "Crush" and grateful...I can say without any dramatics that it literally changed my life. It saved my life.

This was a long one, wasn't it? :)