Alexandra, The Dorky Writer: Chapter 9

A terrible curse had fallen in the kingdom where Alexandra, The Dorky Writer, lived. Everyone had to stay home, otherwise, people could fall ill and even die. Even though The Dorky Writer loved to stay away from adventures, she started to feel anxious because her look-alike angels started to look more like little devils who didn't know what to do with their lives while being trapped. Days passed and she received an owl-delivered letter. It was a tiny ad from her Dragon friend. A mean to escape while staying home. A new kind of adventure. She sent her answer. And that's how it began.

My beloved friend/Facebook daughter, Priscila Dragón, decided to open a writing workshop during this quarantine and invited people from everywhere. I actually didn't think about it twice and asked her if I could participate. I got in. This is one of the best decisions I've ever made.

I admit it, logging in every Tuesday and Thursday still gives me the bad chills, part of the anxiety, I suppose, but things flow in a way that is so natural, that, little by little, such anxiety goes away... until our next session, ha, or until I have to read what I wrote, of course. When sharing out loud I'm always feeling as if I'm going to be attacked somehow, and this is where it becomes magical. There are not attacks, not bad intentions. The LETRASIS group is well-intentioned, their criticism is incredibly constructive, our (I'm including myself here this time) reactions are pure and priceless. And the support! The encouragement is neverending!

I've felt braver when it comes to sharing. I've published one of the things I've enjoyed the most in here, as Sin pólvora, pero con tinta, and I also have a queue already for the other projects. 

Catharsis has been humongous, both when it comes to writing and still recent heartbreak. And, I haven't told this to them but LETRASIS is one of the things that are helping me coming back to the writing world for real, to the point I'm going to share my unfinished novel(s) for the first time (I'm dying inside a little, stupid anxiety), and thanks to them and Anny's advice, I even decided to go back to my Master's Degree classes (I feel I'm not going to finish all homework because my mind is in a bad learning state, but the point is that I'm back, bitches!)

This is where I fear I am in a maniac mood, the top of the rollercoaster, because my brain is in such fire I've been trying to to do everything at the same time: the reading, the writing, everything related to the world I'm familiar and that I love since forever. So I really hope it's not! I'm beginning to use my bullet journal properly!

I've had some trouble with the Master's, but talking about LETRASIS, my writing family, makes me not want to talk about that now.

Thank you Priscila, 313, Missael, Karla, and Juan Carlos!

End of Chapter 9.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 8

Alexandra, The Dorky Writer hadn't been able to move for months. For almost a couple of years. She hadn't fallen into a sleeping course, but that would've been so much better. She had lost herself in every way possible. Her handsome wizard boyfriend had left her with no true explanation, she had given up the encounter against the Mighty Thesis; she hurt herself in that thorny forest, she drank her feelings and then let them out to have something to drink again. Her environment was consuming her. 

She didn't understand how, but three angel-like people found her right on time. They took her to a healer, where she liked to keep flowers of all kinds: some wittered, some fully bloomed, but all of them well taken care of. The path to recovery was tricky. Even though new tools were given to her to recover her way again, she kept going back to the forest to see if she could die, if she could recover what she once thought was hers, feeling unworthy and unwanted even though those four helpers always told her she was indeed worthy, someone worth fighting for. She couldn't comprehend. The language they spoke became unnatural and there was no interpreter. There was no other remedy but to give her strength and courage potions. These made her feel sick of herself even more, not because of their effectiveness but because they made her see herself and made her ask herself how she had fallen so down.

So, yeah. My boyfriend, now ex, broke up with me with arguments that, with the passing of the months, seem weaker and weaker. Seems to me he wanted to get rid of me from a long time ago but didn't know how. I'll just say he did it in one of the most cowardly ways possible, the moment I needed him the most. But I don't want to talk about him here, I already have enough with a lot of unsent messages I have for him and all the times I have to talk about it with my therapist and psychiatrist. 

I am being treated now for depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and, to make it more awesome, cyclothymia. I am under medication since December 2019, although the therapies started back in October. I was reluctant to take pills again, it felt like I was going back to a path I had already taken. Also, I didn't mind if I died at all. I wanted it... needed it. I had lost so much: John, my Master's Degree classes, my will.

I cannot say I feel like new now, I still feel so damn bad sometimes, as if I'm going back to the beginning but I'm actually different. The pain for everything is there, every day, not every minute of the day, though. BUT the biggest problem is there when the bad days come: I don't want to get better. This is not just make an effort, Ale, as everyone loves to say, this is about me not wanting to do it. Fortunately, if I can say it, just this month, my psychiatrist has finally found the right medication for me. That process has been so damn difficult! Apparently cyclothymia isn't as easy to identify as bipolar disorder. 

Currently, my mind is right on the top of the roller coaster. I fear this might be a maniac phase. But that's an issue for another chapter.

End of Chapter 8

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Book Review: "Eighteen Inches: The Distance Between the Heart and Mind" by Mirtha Michelle Castro Mármol

TW: Anxiety, depression, death, rape, sex, abortion.

"I am a woman who lives and does everything passionately. When I love, I love hard; when I hurt, hurt badly."

It was difficult to read this book. Difficult to the point I considered stopping. It made me cry since the beginning and made me remember things I thought I was ready to let go. So, pay attention to the back cover's warning and mine: "this book might make you cry..." Even so, I regained courage and continued. Yes, I kept crying, but less this last time. The other part of the warning is also true, by the way: "{this book might] fill you with nostalgia, empower you, or even give you hope."

It's both sad and comforting to know that we are not alone when it comes to heartbreaks, even if it seems that way. Castro Mármol writes down feelings of pain and longing that we might not know how to express through letters and poems, which might seem familiar from other poets nowadays, but that have the precise words to connect directly to you, even if you are not experiencing any of these feelings.

"Eighteen Inches" is an inch-by-inch journey that shows us that love might come and go and that it can be also found again, even if it comes in a different way. I don't feel empowered or hopeful after reading it but I think it's because I'm not there yet, not because this book fails in its purpose. I'm sure that it can be just right for someone else. 

I'm eternally grateful to Mirtha, who decided to share a part of her soul to us.

I could read this book thanks to NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing ;)

MIRTHA MICHELLE CASTRO MÁRMOL is a Dominican born actress and poet. At the age of five, her family migrated to Miami, Florida. She wrote her first poem at the age of six and since then cultivated a passion for poetry. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California. “Letters, to The Men I Have Loved” is her debut as an author. It consists of profound letters and poems directed to various men during different milestones in her life. Her work expresses loss, love, pain, growth, and hope.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 6

The Dorky Writer took the path the fairies had suggested, but none of them told her that the bushes would have long and thorny arms that they would try to stop her. One of them grabbed her by the ankle and made her stumble:

"Grab that silly map of yours and look for answers in another damn forest. The way you move, the way you walk suggests you don't even know the final destination. A good explorer would know basic survival skills, but you know nothing." 

The Dorky Writer deserved it, she already knew she was too naïve and immature, but that was a painful reminder... or maybe that the sign she needed to forget about the Mighty Thesis. Yet, how many times hadn't she given up already and how many times she had picked up her books, quills, and ink? 

I have the feeling this will be long and about a lot of things that might not be related with the first part of this chapter. I don't know how many times I wrote and rewrote this and all of those possible chapters were completely different compared to this final result, they were about my music tastes while writing or about my inability for decision making regarding the thesis. And do you know what  made me write in a more 'coherent' way? I'm supposed to be writing something else and I'm prone to procrastinate... I'm starting to see a pattern there and that's not good, no, no, no, no, no.

We've been learning about different types of research in the last month at school. I've felt so lost and overwhelmed with new information and vocabulary, which has made me walk in circles through the dark woods. There's some soft moonlight that manages to illuminate the path, though: The teacher has been giving us some exercises that are related to them, so we can differentiate and understand them better. The first exercise was alright. It was about Grounded Theory and we had to make a comparative table that appeared in the book. I tried to apply the problem I want to write on my thesis, so it wasn't so bad (maybe I'll use that theory!), but then we learned about Biographies and Memoirs as an investigation method as well, and the low confidence I had disappeared. The teacher asked us to explain a problem through a personal perspective; it could've been about someone we knew or about ourselves. My first thought was about explain anxiety or writer's block, something I already have in here (OK, now  I'm suddenly realizing I express better about myself and my issues better in English, what's happening?) 

I couldn't stop thinking about that problem... I still can't... BUT I couldn't write about it so I ended up with this. Curious thing is that I think this could work too! I'm explaining my situation, my issue, using my 'experience.' The thing that could not work would be that they'd need background for this but maybe not for Chapter 2, for example, which explains what I wanted to write about in the first place... CAN YOU READ THE ANXIETY HERE? I'm writing this in my class... I'm anxious, I need help! I can't run away. DAMMIT!! If you can't understand this tiny part, I'm sorry! But I need to vent!

EDIT: Ok. I ended up reading my 'live' writing at class... kinda. My out loud reading is crap. My English pronunciation made it more difficult, and I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE I DARED TO READ IN ENGLISH! It was the right idea, though. My brain is melting. We've been around 32°-34° C in the last hours and that didn't help. 

I ended up writing about The Dorky Writer Adventures (silliest name ever but the only one that's on my head right now) as the result of previous anxiety transformed into sentences and vague ideas that have meaning at the end. This time was a little different because I'm not making corrections; I'm not changing a thing. I let my anxiety speak and let it as it was: a mess. I know this isn't my best chapter (I'm not saying the others are good), but I decided to share it as a personal experiment, to reread and evaluate myself later, to see how different I am when I write in an organized way and in an anxious one. 

End of Chapter 6.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 4

Alexandra, The Dorky Writer, thought this time she'd succeed with the delivery of her tasks on time and in perfect conditions, but she was wrong -what a shock. She had a lot of enemies, but this time she didn't face a writer's block but drowsiness. It was like fighting to stay awake against the curse that was cast on the Sleeping Beauty. The problem was that she was no Beauty and there was no member of a royal family near to help her waking up, so... double trouble.

The Dorky Writer was defeated, but it was a sleeping curse and not a death one, so she woke up years later, drank a potion, and then stayed awake for almost 24 hours... which wasn't so good either.

I decided to stop drinking coffee months ago because caffeine makes me more anxious than normal, but yesterday... damn. I had to stop at a convenience store and buy one of those drinks that give you energy. I didn't take the one that has taurine or similar in them but the one that only has caffeine. I have to admit that I felt nervous about it, but it was that or having a car accident on my way to the other place where I work.

I had been trying to read for my homework in the last days and had been failing miserably. I've been tired and in a sad mood, which doesn't help. Anyway, I drank that thing, I didn't have any anxious episode, which was more than perfect, and I could continue with my daily work. But when I got home I had problems again. I grabbed the ebook and tried to reread all I had previously "read", I felt I was going to sleep on it and then BOOM. That beverage made its effect way later and I took advantage of it, I started to read the way I like, fast and making important notes. I felt I was finally going to deliver a good paper, because the last one had been crap. And then... "the following pages aren't available due to copyright." WHAT WAS I EXPECTING? 

I was reading it from the Google Books page. I'd never read a book from there, but one of my classmates said almost the entire book was available, so I decided to give it a shoot instead of looking for it online to order it and wait a lot to get it. I looked for it in a PDF format, on another site, nothing. My last resort was buying the e-book, but my debit card wasn't accepted for a reason I still don't understand. So... no completed homework. It's terrible, because I'm going to go to class and feel like an irresponsible student, even if it wasn't completely my fault... or maybe it is, I don't know. What made me real angry was that I was there, with no book anymore... and completely awake.

I think I felt asleep around 3 am. At least I slept wonderfully because I didn't have to go to work the next day.

The Dorky Writer never drank that potion again.

End of Chapter 4.

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Book Review: "Fangirl" by Rainbow Rowell

Previously posted on Goodreads!¹

I had a lot of unfulfilled expectations, especially after one of my friends started to send me some excerpts BUT ALSO got surprised in some aspects, like FOR REAL!

Apart from being a book that talks about being a fangirl, this book also tell us the part of a life of someone with social anxiety. Maybe, some readers (that don't know the term) just read about a girl being paranoid about everything, so, how did I recognize the term? Because I have it, so I can tell the difference. I felt identified with Cath all the book along, I've also found shelter in my sister and in fandoms, I can count my friends just with my fingers, I find alcohol and drugs repulsive... the list can go on.

Even if you don't feel identified with that, you can also read, and learn, about a MAN with a bipolar disorder, you know that mental disorders are just entitled to women, so this is big; read about early alcoholism... even read about writer's block! (BTW, this is a thing I've been fighting for ages, literally! It was like getting a slap!)

Why 3.5? Its pace and its structure.

For me, it was really slow at the beginning, perfect in the middle, disastrous at the end. Mostly the end. The author was like "oops, I'm gonna reach page 433, I need to finish it now, no matter if it ends with half a statement" (ok, I'm overreacting a bit, but that's how I felt when I read the end). Why include excerpts of Simon Snow's books, and fanfics? I know Simon Snow's are based on Harry Potter's, that made me feel like paying a visit to my childhood-teenage years, but REALLY! It wasn't necessary to read them! Especially the fanfic parts because Cath was supposed to be an AMAZING writer but I didn't believe it.

But I enjoy Rowell's writing in general, I couldn't have read this or Eleanor & Park otherwise. 

RAINBOW ROWELL writes books. Sometimes she writes about adults. Sometimes she writes about teenagers. But she always writes about people who talk a lot. And people who feel like they're screwing up. And people who fall in love. When she's not writing, Rainbow is reading comic books, planning Disney World trips and arguing about things that don't really matter in the big scheme of things. She lives in Nebraska with her husband and two sons.

¹This review was written and originally posted on my Goodreads profile in 2016. It might now present minor changes in structure or corrections but has not changed its intention.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 2

This entry was originally posted on my Goodreads blog on February 2nd.

One evening, the Dorky Writer went to a book presentation of a very good friend of hers, The Dragon Writer. Apart from being absolutely proud of seeing her friend flying up to reach out the stars and come back with not one but two of them, she couldn't help herself to feel nostalgic about writing.

Unfortunately, that nostalgia transformed into a heavy, yet invisible monster: Anxiety.

Some years ago, when I was in high school, one of my teachers asked my class to write a story based on the insecurity the city had in that time. I wrote about a girl that had lost her father because of a confrontation between a drug cartel and police. Very cheesy, very Mexican soap opera.

But the teacher loved it and I got a 100 for that month. He even believed that that story had happened to me, but my dad still lives, and breathes, and works... and not as a policeman.

The thing is that that encouraged me a lot when he asked us again to write another thing. I dared and I wrote an even more stupid thing: a play. He didn't like it, by the way. I don't even remember exactly what the story was about, but I do remember the characters' names because they haunted me long enough to the point I decided to write an original story with them. The story had a lot of changes and turns throughout the years. It started as a contemporary young adult story and at the end it became a fantasy one. And the characters' names? Their personality? Still there.

I wrote snippets of that story, edited them, read, rewrote, for around 7 years. It all ended, as a cataclysm though, when I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix. I discovered that the idea that I thought was original actually had some similar parts in that magnificent show. I couldn't continue. For God's sake! I'd even divided my book series (of course it was a book series) in 5 parts! Water, Earth, Fire, Air, and a still-not-named-book. I thought if someone read it sometime, they would accuse me of plagiarism or would tell me that the story, which didn't have an Aang or a Toph precisely there, wasn't original.

Time passed and I started to rewrite for the 1,000,000,000th time. I had to get rid of a lot of things that reminded me of ATLA. And the story changed completely again. This time, the story was actually getting somewhere and I didn't even think about it as a book series, just a single story, so that was good. The bad part is that it just started to happen in my head and couldn't reach a piece of paper, a Scrivener or Word document.

BOOM: WRITER'S BLOCK.

And it hasn't really left my side.

You could say: "Eh, YOU'RE WRITTING NOW!" But I'm a very stubborn person, so I would say: "I'm not writing what I really want and need to."

All of these memories collided and I ended up having a crisis. I told my boyfriend about this and he gave me very good reasons why I could have this problem: "You're holding down, basically, a full time job, going to school yourself, taking care of the house... none of that is gonna be inspirational, so is not gonna flow and you're not gonna have anything to write because you're busy thinking about the other things you do in life." The thing is that, ok, I do have to worry about all of that now, but back then? And then, of course, he said: "You're one of the most self-critical people I've ever met in my life." Good thing you don't live with me yet, handsome ;)

I didn't take that as bad criticism. It was actually a reminder of what a therapist told me years ago. I NEED TO GET MY SH*T TOGETHER AND DO NOT AIM FOR PERFECTION.

"Don't write a book, write effectively a comic but without the pictures. Write other things and just get your creative juices flowing from something else and maybe that will help you with what you actually want to write about," said the handsome wizard. Of course I'm having a handsome wizard as a boyfriend instead of a prince! Once a Potterhead, forever a Potterhead.

Well, I'm not writing a comic, but I've come back to a blog. Y A Y !

And now I need to stop procrastinating and do my homework.

End of Chapter 2.

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