I finally received my ACCESS identity card that will enable me to schedule rides in easily accessible vehicles to get to my doctor’s appointments, art seminars, or whatever. As the office had indicated, it took until late February to arrive, but now that I have it in hand, I can start thinking about leaving the house.

Lately, though, I haven’t been motivated to do that…or anything else (like write for this blog!). I feel like I’m in a depression-induced holding pattern in which I do nothing, think nothing, plan nothing…I’m basically prepping two or three meals a day, reading a little, scrolling social media, playing Words with Friends with friends, and watching a lot of television. Like, a LOT. I occasionally finish a book and then write a review for my Book Adept blog, and I’m managing about one painting a week, a far cry from the 176 I painted in 2020. I’m happy while painting, and happy with the paintings, but other than that…not.

Meanwhile, my legs have unbelievably grown even larger and more unwieldy—especially the basketball-shaped outer thighs and the lobes of hardened fat hanging behind my knees—and the lipoedema is branching out now into my upper arms. This condition is such a Catch 22 nightmare—the less you do, the worse it gets, and the worse it gets, the less you are able to do. I need to snap out of my gridlock and push through difficulty and discomfort to get myself right again, but every morning I wake up and think, Why?

There are a few concrete reasons for depression. The first is that I had to quit my job at UCLA, and ironically it’s because I was too considerate. I was up for a review this year, following which I would have received a three-year contract; up until now, I’ve been year-to-year, but we part-time lecturers have our own union now, and the union negotiated such things as longer contracts, a minimum number of classes per year, raises, and so on. I say “would have,” because I hadn’t yet had the review when it occurred to me that I needed to back out of teaching this spring in order to pursue treatment and/or surgery for my condition. Being conscientious about how long it might take someone else to get up to speed to teach the class, I let the head of the department know, in late November, that I might not be able to teach in April. He said, Come back to me the first week in January to confirm, so that’s what I did—but I still hadn’t had my review. This proved significant because my current contract ends in June.

Because I didn’t have a new contract, the university wouldn’t give me a leave of absence without my supplying specific dates when I would be leaving and coming back again; and I couldn’t do that. Surgery for lipoedema is tricky to get covered by most insurance companies (not to mention Medicare, don’t get me started), so the process for most of us is to apply for coverage, get turned down, hire a lawyer and sic them on our insurance company, apply again, maybe get approved, and then find a surgeon, schedule the surgery, and recover from it. This could take three months, or it could take a year, depending. Because I didn’t have a lawyer yet, let alone a surgeon, I couldn’t supply the doctor’s note with the potential return date that they required; so my only choices were to teach the class (not happening in my current state) or resign.

While I was told that I was free to reapply if/when I was able to teach again, I would be doing so as a new lecturer, with no guarantee they would rehire me. And while I feel like I’m done with YA Lit, I really wanted to continue teaching Readers’ Advisory, since that is my longtime passion for which I love training next-gen librarians. But the university has the option to find someone internal to take the class, or to hire someone else or, alternatively, to simply not offer the class any longer. I don’t feel, at this point, that my chances are great to be rehired. Ironically, if I had just waited another couple of months before telling them I couldn’t teach, I probably would have had the three-year contract and could have had the leave of absence. But I thought it would be bad behavior not to tell them until a month before class started, so…no. Nice loophole, eh?

Perhaps this is just a moment when I need to realize that a certain chapter of life is over and I’m moving on to something else. If therapies or surgeries significantly improve my poor mobility then I could certainly start up my independent readers’ advisory consulting business again; it never really got off the ground, since I started it in late 2019 and then Covid promptly closed it down. I still have my art workshops that I teach for Los Angeles Public Library, and can still manage those even in my current state, if they’re not too far away from home; and my hope is ongoing that my portraits will begin to sell, although my current performance on Etsy is beyond sad. But it’s hard to let go of something that was a feel-good occupation with positive repercussions.

I saw this on a friend’s Facebook page recently, and thought yeah, this is something I needed to see/hear.

With that in mind, I made a few decisions this week and started implementing them: First off, I applied for Social Security instead of waiting for age 70, because a friend made me realize that it would take 13 years of payments before I would start “losing money” from taking it early and forfeiting the extra little bit I would receive by waiting. In the intervening 19 months between now and 70, I can use those funds to pay for things like MLD massage, the mobile vet, more visits from my home organizer and the cleaning lady, monthly supplies related to my illness and yeah, okay, home-delivered groceries and the occasional splurge of an order from DoorDash (and maybe a good therapist?). Health insurance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to mobility issues, and expenses will only grow, so essentially doubling my retirement income is quite appealing!

Second, I sat myself down, said “STOP AVOIDING,” and made a list with subtitles such as “Daily Shit,” “Stuff to do to support daily shit,” “Short-term necessities,” “Longer-term but priority projects,” “Big house projects,” and “Business stuff.” I did the list pretty much stream-of-consciousness, then went back and divided it into categories, prioritized the major divisions, then prioritized the actions within those divisions, with the result that now I have an idea of the stuff I need to do.

It’s not that I didn’t before, but with my brain in the shape it’s in, the individual items would drift in and out at random at odd times of the day or night on alternate Tuesdays and I would think, “Oh, yeah, I meant to do that,” and then promptly forget it or think “later” or “I don’t want to” or “but first I have to…” and not think of it again for another week or two. Now it’s on paper, printed out, and in my face. Which still doesn’t guarantee I’ll do the stuff, but I’m counting on the fact that I absolutely love to cross items off a list to get me to choose to do them sooner than later!

Meanwhile, yet another day has passed with a meal, a little art dabbling, some reading, some Words with Friends, and a lot of inane scrolling. So I decided to write this, and now I’m going to go wash my hair.