Deep Fears and Their Ties to Reality

Long time no see…

It’s been a while since I last wrote! I got over COVID, got one week of feeling recovered but incredibly depressed, and then caught a cold. I hope you can imagine that it didn’t make me feel like writing much. As I mentioned last week, I’ve gotten sick a lot lately and it is demoralizing every. single. time. This was especially fun because it broke my pattern by coming earlier than my other sicknesses have come. I’ve usually gotten 2-3 weeks in between, enough to start to feel normal, but this time I only got one!

So I’ve spent a lot of time this past week thinking about some of my deepest fears and both (a) how realistic they are, and (b) what to do if they come true. Something that keeps coming up is whether or not my pattern of illness will continue forever. It’s incredibly uncomfortable to think or write about, but it’s kind of all I’ve been thinking about lately. Whether it takes me to the hospital at some point down the line or just continues to be an irritating hindrance to my social life, I feel like my body is asking me to change some major aspects of my lifestyle. And what it boils down to is that I don’t want to.

I masked much longer and more religiously than most of my friends, but I gave up about a year ago (other than in airports). I hated nearly every second of it. Anyone who says wearing a mask is easy is lying to you, or at least doesn’t have the same sensory issues as me. And I want to meet new people who are normal and not constantly afraid of getting sick or getting someone else sick!

Something my doctor recently asked me was if I have healthy habits around sleep, food, exercise, and stress. And I just thought: of course I don’t! I just graduated college, how can you expect something like that of me? I feel very petulant about all of this, but it doesn’t seem fair that I have to try so hard to be healthy. Plenty of other people, including my close friends, have worse habits than me regarding sleep, food, exercise, and stress. But I’m the one who seems to be suffering the consequences.

So I guess what I’m scared of is what it always is: change. Which is inevitable and also always already happening. I have started to make some changes in these areas, and hopefully I see results. Or I don’t and then I can go back to this and not feel guilty about resisting change. I don’t really know. I think I wanted to have some broad conclusion here to make us all feel better, but I don’t know if I have one yet. Ask me when it’s been two months since I last got sick.

What I’m Reading

All this illness has definitely slowed my roll on reading. I’ve also been relying more on audiobooks, so I can do fun things like feed my cross stitch addiction while also listening to a fun story. I definitely feel some reader guilt about using audiobooks, but I got off my podcast game and have been getting deeply bored by YouTube and TV shows. (It’s also less about guilt and more that I genuinely enjoy the physical acts of reading and miss out on that when I listen to audiobooks).

I finally got Volume 1 (0.56in) of The Summer Hikaru Died by Mokumokuren (translated by Ajani Oloye) from the library! My main thoughts so far are that the anime was a very faithful adaptation, so I didn’t feel like I was getting any cool secrets… which I guess is how I imagine it usually feels to read a book after watching its adaptation. This is pretty rare for me; I regularly refuse to watch exciting new movies, even if they sound like something I’d love, in favor of adding the original book to my TBR (and then forgetting about it for years). I’d recommend this book to anyone who wants a cutesy romance manga that is also about a bloody eldritch horror.

Before and after devouring Hikaru, I was listening to The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling (0.97in) on audiobook (thanks Libby!). This book had me on edge until the final page. It’s a story about doing dangerous cave diving on an alien planet for your job. I felt a lot of similarities with the game (and now movie!) Iron Lung, which is also about being in the dark (figuratively and literally) on an alien planet, but has a less happy ending. I was a little disappointed in this book for both going too far and not going far enough. The blurb advertised some wrestling with bodily autonomy, as our main character is in a mechanical suit that can be completely controlled by her handler above ground, but it’s pretty much only ever used to keep her from dying. I think more build up to breaking those boundaries would’ve led to a more satisfying/horrifying outcome. On the other hand, the main character nearly dies SO MANY TIMES (I think at least 4?). Once that’s happened twice, it takes away the tension! I know she’s got plot armor now, just move it along without another NDE. I would recommend this book to fans of spec fic, but keep in mind it’s far more sci-fi than horror.

Currently, I’m making my way through Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (1.04in), translated by Moshe Gilula. From cave diving to mountain climbing, I’ve been reading about some ridiculous and extreme sports. Honestly, I mostly chose this book because I kept watching videos about real life mountain climbing disasters and this felt like it’d scratch that itch with an additional cosmic/gothic horror vibe. I’m also a big fan of the way each chapter has subchapters and a different style, AND. They are all titled after famous works of gothic/cosmic horror, including my FAVORITE short story EVER, In the Hills, the Cities by Clive Barker (which I could probably talk about forever but this is getting long, so let me know if y’all want a separate review/discussion). I’m so excited to read more of this book and especially to get to that chapter!

Thanks for reading this belated edition of Weaving in Ends. Hopefully I’ll be recovered for longer this time and will get these out more regularly. Please comment if you have any similar experiences with chronic illness/immunodeficiency, or if you would or have enjoyed these books.