One thing you realize as you get older is how very often it is that life doesn't go the way you expect it to.

As I discussed last week, when I hit my "new norm" for life as a chronically ill person, I became quite unhappy. This unhappiness continued, at a significant and disruptive level, for a number of weeks. As I was working through things on my own, I realized that a lot of the problem was that I wasn't just unhappy with my present; I was also unhappy with the future I was facing.

When I decided to apply for online graduate school, to get my Master's in Library and Information Science, my thought was that jobs as a librarian would be easier to find than jobs as an editor, which had been my original plan for a day job. I also thought that librarianship would be a more stable field overall. I thought it would be disabled-friendly. (I also liked the thought of working with teens, since YA is really my passion.)

Though I was already very sick, I hadn't yet come to the point of comprehension. I didn't yet understand that my level of illness meant I was very disabled now. I didn't yet understand that I now had multiple incurable conditions. I didn't know that my level of disability might not be something I could fix. That point of comprehension hit pretty quickly, however. And once I was well enough to continue my Master's degree again, I started thinking that it might not be worth it.

It was a fleeting thought at first. I worried about the high cost of the classes and the amount of energy I had to expend on them. I worried that, because of my level of disability, I would never be able to do the job I was spending all this time and money on. And, to be honest, though I'd discovered that I have a decent handful of skills that are library-friendly, I wasn't enjoying my classes very much. (Though, since they were beginning-level classes, I figured that didn't mean a whole lot.) But since my health was improving, I held to the possibility that I could still get well enough for librarianship. My mom also encouraged me by pointing out that education in and of itself is valuable, even if it doesn't end up applying to a job.

This is the second of two parts (thus far) of my "official" story about living with chronic illness. Read part one, "Fibromyalgia: My Story" here. This also acts as a part two to my mental illness story, "Obsessive-Compulsive: My Story," which can be found here.

*Contains discussion of suicidal thoughts*

​Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also referred to as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), is a medical condition characterized by long-term fatigue and other long-term symptoms that limit a person's ability to carry out ordinary daily activities.

Interstitial cystitis (IC), also known as bladder pain syndrome (BPS), is a type of chronic pain that affects the bladder. Symptoms include feeling the need to urinate right away, needing to urinate often, and pain with sex. IC/BPS is associated with depression and lower quality of life.

Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) is a condition in which a change from lying to standing causes an abnormally large increase in heart rate. This occurs with symptoms that may include lightheadedness, trouble thinking, blurry vision, or weakness.

-- via Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As of next month, it will have been four years since CUCUY (originally titled SAMMI), the most recent original novel I've written, first came into being.

All right, welcome to October! Today I'm sharing the 25 funniest posts (plus one video) that I've seen during this past quarter of the year. ​

As I said in my What's In My Memory Box post, I've already done a post looking at what's in my makeup bag. But the contents of said bag (and the bag itself) have changed since then. I feel like I spent all of my teens trying to figure out what makeup I liked and what products to use and what worked best for me--and now that I'm in my twenties, I've figured most of it out. So here are the products that really do work for me, taken from my makeup bag.

Dear Kira,

I've written letters here before addressed to my past selves: my sixteen-year-old self and my six-year-old self. But I haven't ever written a letter to my future self, at least not here. (I know I wrote one in a church group when I was twelve or so that was addressed to me the night before my wedding. I gave to my mom to keep for me until then. I think it's quite likely she's lost it by now, but in any case, wedding me is still in the future.)

So this letter is for a very future self: my elderly self. According to the Internet, senior discounts usually start with age 65, so, in line with my previous letters, we'll assume this letter is about my 66-year-old-self. That means I, in 2018, am talking to the person I will be in 2060.

So how is it in 2060? I know it's unlikely that any major technological breakthroughs like the ones I talk about here have happened, but it's always possible. I'm most interested, of course, in what your health situation is like. Do they have better treatments for our conditions? Do they have cures? Did our disabilities get better over time, or did they get worse? (Are you dead already? That's a possibility, in which case, hello, me in heaven. What's it like over there?)

Hey everybody! Today I wanted to talk about social media, which is one of my favorite things. I spend a lot of time on social media websites, and although there are drawbacks (as with any technology), I feel like on the whole it really enhances my life. When people get all negative about it, it hurts my soul a little bit.

After all, social media allows me, as a disabled person, to have a richer social life. It allows me to stay in contact with people who have moved away. It connects me to other people with disabilities and illnesses like mine, which is useful both for treatment and lifestyle help and just for commiseration.

Social media also grants me access to a lot of information about the world. Honestly, my favorite thing about social media isn't posting things myself, it's reading other people's posts. I've learned so much from the people I follow online. My Ravenclaw self is thrilled by the way social media and the Internet as a whole allow us to access and share knowledge!

So here are the social media tools that I use along with the ways that I use each one.

Facebook
​Facebook has become something of a "staple" in the social media world. If you want to be accessible to the people in your life, you need to have one, but it's not very new or exciting anymore.

On Facebook, I have a personal profile where I'm friends with people I know IRL, along with a few trusted Internet friends. I also like a lot of pages about topics I'm interested in As such, each day as I go through my feed, I see a wide variety of information about all kinds of things. I don't post very much on my personal profile anymore, but every once in a while I'll share an article or a quiz that I liked or a personal update.

My personal profile isn't widely accessible. However, ​I also have a Facebook page where I post links to all my blog posts as well as various book recommendations. This page is open for anyone to like!

Welcome to September, everyone!

Teleportation​
Many disabled people are unable to drive. Many more struggle to endure long distance travel. Others have mobility issues that make walking difficult. All of these things are true for me at this point in time, and so one of the sci-fi technologies I most look forward to is teleportation. 

Many sci-fi worlds possess the ability to instantaneously teleport across various distances. Star Trek, for example, has transporters that can move people (and objects) across feet or across thousands of miles. Many fantasy worlds also have this power, such as Harry Potter's Apparation.

In the past, I've shared What's In My Makeup Bag, What's In My Jewelry Box, and What's In My Purse. Today, I thought I'd share something more personal than any of those: my memory box.

In my church, family history is considered pretty important. Family ties are a key part of our religion, so of course the names and stories of our ancestors matter to us. When I was younger, I had no idea where to begin with this, but in the past couple of years, thanks to FamilySearch, I've gotten into doing family history. Here are a few things that I've learned:

1) FamilySearch is a mess. This is probably true of any family history site that can be edited by the public. For a while, I was trying to clean up my family lines, to see how far back they could be traced. In doing so I discovered that there are about 100000 duplicate entries for anyone with a title (Lord, Duke, King, etc.). And no matter how much work you do to merge them together, new entries will constantly appear. Everyone wants to be related to royalty, and apparently a lot of them don't know how to find the existing entry. This also means that a lot of false claims of heritage come up. As such, I gave up on that project. Now I just focus on adding sources and untangling the more recent family lines.
​
2) There are a lot of fictional people once you get far enough back. I don't know if FamilySearch members don't realize that these people are likely fictional, or if they're going off of the theory that even these fictional people have a grain of truth to their existence. I'm comfortable working off of that last one personally--after all, once you get far enough back, stories are really all the record you have. But it was interesting to see how, in my lines at least, Christian figures and ancient Anglo-Saxon gods collide to create a strangely cobbled-together pedigree.

It's time for another life update as told through this list of "-ing" verbs! Here we go.

Eating: nothing, since it's after dinner, but I'm craving more Nilla wafers
Drinking: water (what did you expect?)
Wearing: a black dress, cuz it's easy to put on
Smelling: the fact that I need to do the kitty litter, which will probably not happen for another week
Reading: Carrie by Stephen King
Writing: this blog post!
Editing: CUCUY, where I can in between class projects (ergh)
Making: hardboiled eggs every week so I can eat more protein
Listening: to lots of different songs as I try to figure out what my jam is right now
Watching: Lost in Space with my brother a couple episodes at a time 
Bookmarking: Global Voices, most recently
Playing: Dungeons & Dragons and "the creepy house game" at church young adult game nights

In December, I posted a five month update about all the progress I'd made with my chronic illnesses since going to Mayo Clinic at the end of July/beginning of August 2017. It's now been a full year since Mayo Clinic, and it seems appropriate to post another chronic illness update. So here's what's changed since then.

Since December, I've continued to make progress in many ways. The most significant is with my interstitial cystitis. Since I developed it in 2016, I've been at a constant pelvic pain level of at least a 6 (on the Kira Pain Scale, which I know for a fact is skewed upward from a regular person's pain scale). But in April, I started taking gabapentin. At first it didn't do anything, but once I hit the right dose, my IC pain level dropped dramatically. It's now down to about a 3 or 4, the same general level as the rest of my body. While the gabapentin didn't have any effect on my fibromyalgia pain, despite being approved for that, its effect on my IC was something like a miracle. Gabapentin, basically, is to my IC what antidepressants were to my fibromyalgia.

Since then, I've been able to reduce my bladder instillations from once every other week to once a month. I've been able to start wearing skirts again, instead of just dresses all the time, and yesterday I was able to give loose sweatpants a successful test run. I've also been able to add a few more foods to my diet, and I'm much less afraid of setting off a horrific flare if I eat the wrong thing.

Hey, everyone! It's time for part two of my favorite fictional characters update, about my favorite male characters. If you haven't already, you can check out the list of my favorite female characters here.

*Spoilers ahoy!*

​Vision
Vision is a Marvel superhero who has been in the comics since 1968 and was introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2015.

In the MCU, Vision is a synthetic human (an android, but a little more complex than that) whose body was created with synthetic flesh, a computerized nervous system, and the Mind Gem, which, as I said in part one, is an immensely powerful but little understood Infinity Stone. An evil AI named Ultron created the body to be his own, but the Avengers stole it from him before he could finish uploading himself. Then Tony Stark and Bruce Banner decided to upload Tony's AI assistant and friend, JARVIS, into the body's system. The other Avengers tried to stop them, but Thor Odinson used his lightning powers to bring Vision to life, stating that he had seen him in a vision given to him when Wanda Maximoff manipulated his thoughts and that Vision was a necessary part of the universe's future.

Within the last couple of years, I've posted updates on my favorite romantic relationships, TV shows, poems, movies, writing idols, music artists, and more. But one topic that I haven't updated my readers on for a long time is my favorite fictional characters. Yes, I've talked about fictional parents, favorite side characters, favorite villains, and other such topics, but the one post I've written on my favorite characters overall comes from the first year of my blog, 2012. My interests have changed a lot since then!

Favorite characters are difficult to choose, as I'm sure you all know, and there are so many characters that I love who will not be included on this list. Still, I'm going to update you on which characters I now look up to and love most. Since there are so many, this post is going to be a two-parter, with female characters first and male characters next week.

*Spoilers ahoy!*

Wanda Maximoff
Wanda Maximoff, also known as the Scarlet Witch, is a Marvel superhero (and sometimes, villain). She's been in the comics since 1964, and was introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2015.

Wanda has a troubled past. In the MCU, she and her twin brother, Pietro, were orphaned at the age of 10 in a bomb strike. The bomb was originally created by Stark Industries, the tech company owned by future Avenger Tony Stark. After the bombing, the twins became political protestors for peace in their turmoiled Eastern European home of Sokovia.

​During these protests, when they were in their late teens, Wanda and Pietro were approached by HYDRA, a Nazi group then disguised as the Avengers' support team. HYDRA promised to grant the twins the power they needed to "make things right." So Wanda and Pietro became part of a human experiment using the Mind Gem, an immensely powerful but little understood Infinity Stone. In the end, they were the only survivors of the experiment. Pietro gained superspeed, while Wanda developed energy manipulation powers that include telekinesis, telepathy, and mind control.

As of tomorrow, it will have been six years since I started this blog. Can you believe that? (I know I said that last year, but, like, six is even bigger than five, so.)

Per the usual, to celebrate, I'm sharing a roundup of the best posts I wrote this year. Check it out!

About My Writing
Wordy Wednesday: The Prophecy Keeper 10/11/17