personal — Page 2

February 16, 2016 By Skyla Dawn Cameron 1 Comment

Becoming

This has been my week of Doing Scary Things, this blog post included.

One of the things I’m drawn to in stories, both the ones I write and ones I consume, involve characters having to become someone else in order to survive. The most literal example in my work would be Zara Lain.

Exhumed contained three flashbacks: the first follows newly-turned Ana as she hunts the living humans in her old home, ending up at last in the bedroom where her husband (and betrayer) sleeps with his new wife. The final flashback is when Ana has fully embraced being Zara Lai(ghea)n in 1739, no longer the broken woman she was but now the heroine we (really awesome people with excellent taste) all know and love.

The middle flashback, though, was her turning point, after she slaughtered everyone and had her revenge but knows she’s lost everything she once was:

Ana is gone and I don’t know who I am. What I am, beyond a monster.

But something lingers under my skin, pushing, pushing. Something urges my eyes open, forces my head to lift. I look at the canopy of trees, at the stripe of black that is the night sky. My heart is torn, chest ripped in two, hurting so badly that it surprises me the times I glance down and see it still looking whole. A sob wracks me, anguished cry tearing up to my lips, and my hands clutch my smooth belly, where a babe once grew before being snuffed out.

I could die. It would make no difference to anyone. But still, something is there, a thread so deep I can scarce comprehend it that simply says: No.

No, you will not die here.

It is no god. No devil. No spirit. Perhaps it is my own insanity, but still, it whispers to me.

No.

And then the rain comes.

It patters down, beating leaves and striking my face, rolling down my forehead and into my closed eyes, tickling my parted lips. I let it wash over me, soak me, weigh down my bloody clothes like I’m drowning in it.

I am lost. I am tiny and broken and I can’t imagine a world in which I don’t hurt so deeply, so constantly. I am a weak girl, not yet eighteen, who let herself be betrayed, who could not fight off a vampire when he descended upon her, who relied on her husband and believed the only life she would ever have was as his wife.

But the whispering continues, faint in the darkness. I can no longer be Ana. I can no longer be this demon. I can no longer be a damaged little girl nursing her wounds and contemplating death.

I have to be more than that. And while I do not yet know my name, I know who I need to become.

Although she’s my polar opposite in many ways, this is why Zara’s always meant so much to me. Her ability to become someone else in order to save herself helped save me when I needed it.

We adapt and we change all the time to better exist in this world–we’re forced to, interacting with people, learning to navigate life. This is one of the reasons the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot appealed to me so much, to play Lara as she realizes she won’t escape Yamatai and save her best friend unless she becomes someone else–someone less squeamish, more brutal, more daring; a believer and a killer:

In our darkest moments, when life flashes before us, we find something. Something that keeps us going. Something that pushes us. When all seemed lost, I found a truth.

Some wounds leave us scarred but able to continue on. But other times, other traumas, cleave too deep. When you lose your future, part of your identity–when you have no other way of continuing on–you sometimes have to become someone else.

I realized a few months ago that I wasn’t going to survive.

We talk about depression as a chemical imbalance, which it is, but it also has triggers. And when you’ve lost everything you’ve ever wanted, and your life is over, what the chemicals are doing in your head is irrelevant; no amount of drugs, even if I was inclined to take them, was going to fix that. I had no hope, no aspirations (I still don’t). For eight months I spent 80% of my waking hours in tears, every day. I didn’t want to get out of bed, or wake up, or breathe; I didn’t want to be alive.

I knew time was running out and depression was going to win. I wasn’t going to survive because there was no part of me left that wanted to.

Several years ago, I was nothing. Literally. Someone spent a decade taking me apart piece by piece until I was a half-person, unrecognizable, and so deeply broken after a trauma that I had to become someone else (like Zara).

So I did. Bit by bit I made a new person. It’s a surprisingly powerful position to be in (regardless of the Hindu accuracy of that post, it’s an excellent point), when you are nothing and have nothing and get to decide who you become. I picked traits of mine I’d always thought–been told–were negatives and learned how to twist them into virtues (with Aunt Judy’s help). I became someone I liked.

But things happened last year that this girl I liked wasn’t going to make it through. And she has to go away now.

I still don’t want to say goodbye to her, or to her hopes and dreams even if they’re all dead now. I mourn her. I’ll miss her. Others will too, and those not super close to me will likely drift away as they don’t find the same Skyla they used to know. But I hit the Depression Event Horizon, and she wasn’t coming back from that.

So I’m becoming someone else. Rebuilding piece by piece, deciding what characteristics might fit and what to discard, picking the qualities that will let me survive and deciding who I want to be. It’s an uncomfortable process, like my skin doesn’t fit right; a physical process as much as it is a mental one. I’m a little colder, a little more distant, a little less patient while I work out becoming the girl who will live through this.

The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. So it’s okay, if you ever find yourself in a position like that, to become someone else to survive. The thing you have to realize, the thing I keep reminding myself of when I have no hope, is that you never know how your story is going to end. I look at the things in my life I never in a million years believed would happen–most recently, that I spent the holidays with family who only learned I existed less than two years ago and who have welcomed me as part of their pack–and I am entirely certain, I can promise you, that you just can never know.

But you have to be here to see it.

It’s okay to change and adapt. It’s okay to become someone else. It’s okay to mourn who you were.

It’s okay to survive.

I don’t know yet what I’m becoming, but I think at least I’ll be here to find out–and that’s more than I had a few months ago.

Tomb Raider We Become 1 Tomb Raider We Become 2 Tomb Raider We Become 3

February 2, 2016 By Skyla Dawn Cameron Leave a Comment

Every Step Matters: The MS Walk & Who I Walk For

A couple of years ago I did the MS Walk (I think I raised about $700 or so?). I didn’t the following year as that was when my own illness hit, and didn’t last year because everyone died and it was very stressful, but I’m committed again for the 2016 one.

You might remember this picture from the 2013 walk:

MS Walk Shirt — There are my boobs front and center for you. You’re welcome.

I blurred that out to protect her privacy because other than to a handful of people, she’s never come out before publicly. This is something she’s lived with for ten years and she didn’t want to be treated any differently because of it, so I remained silent and I crossed my fingers in the hope that saying “hey, help my nameless friend” would be enough to get the support of others.

She has dealt with multiple sclerosis for a decade. Not just the progressively fewer spoons but the knowledge that one day there will be none left (although she’ll always have knives). Through example, she has taught me how to be stronger, better, braver, and how to face terrible truths not because of a lack of fear but in spite of it.

For a myriad of reasons, she’s finally come out now in a post I urge you to read and consider.

One of those reasons is because the way this disease operates, chipping away at her bit by bit, there is a clock ticking over her head. As it progresses, she’ll reach a point in the future where she won’t be able write that post and say what she wants to say–hell, MS might even cut the signal from her brain to her lungs and she’ll stop breathing suddenly and without warning.

The thing is, I want to stop that clock.

I firmly and totally believe I can stop that clock.

There are huge strides being made right now with regards to MS research. Seriously. Every single day we’re that much closer to the cure. Canada has the highest rates of multiple sclerosis of any country, and research being done in this very country with money raised by MS Walks hold the promise of not only stopping the clock over Dina’s head but maybe reversing it.

It’s her fight, but I’m in her corner, now and for always (because she’s my Platonic Murder Wife). This year’s goal is $500. Every dollar counts, so please support me in my walk to cure MS.

Dina James is the only person who has given me hope in the past year when I was at my worst and had nothing–now I want to give that back to her. She has saved my life before.

I believe together we can save hers.

January 31, 2016 By Skyla Dawn Cameron Leave a Comment

Forty-Year-Old Heartbreak

One day, when you’re receiving the deceased’s personal effects, dismantling a life box by box, you’re handed a pile of stuffed manila envelopes to do with what you will. Letters, cards, and photos of old lovers. One stands out, marked with “Memories – R. <3” and, at first glance, yes, the contents seem to be from someone named “R____”

But it’s something else that catches your eye.

An old-fashioned cardstock framed photo, the school class kind, and this doesn’t look like the “R” from the rest of the photos and letters. With the pictures are old newspaper cartoon cutouts about love along with three letters in envelopes.

It’s voyeuristic to look, but it was left in your care, so you give it a quick once over.

The first two envelopes and letters are old but smooth, dated July ’73. Nothing overtly personal, just catching up over the summer, but end with a boy promising his love forever.

Then there’s the third.

The envelope and letter within have been crumpled, probably repeatedly, and only smooth and crisp now because they’ve been tucked away for forty years between two flat surfaces. It’s a brief letter dated Aug ’73, tone shifted from friendly to short, revealing it will be the last one because the writer has gotten engaged to another girl.

The final line is “I know I’ve been unfaithful and I hope someday you may forgive me.”

The pieces slide together then–you remember this story of the boy she loved, who couldn’t wait when they were apart for a few months and cheated on her, and how that betrayal changed everything. She relayed it when you couldn’t see through the cloud of grief and rage at having been betrayed by a boy yourself, a moment of understanding.

And now you hold a tangible piece of that, forty-year-old heartbreak.

I talk a lot about death now (I’m really fun at parties).

Unsurprising, I guess, not only because I write about death a lot, but I’m a very depressed person for whom suicidal thoughts have been a recurrence for twenty years. But losing people you’ve grown up, whose constant support has always been there, drives one’s mortality home even after living with it for all these years.

Especially when you’re holding a piece of someone’s life in your hands, even in the form of a crumpled letter. Something that was cried over, hated, probably tossed out, but later retrieved and kept. For forty-two years.

The same time I was writing this blog post, I was messaging with a writer friend who knew Aunt Judy. She mentioned how she ended up with her friend’s old journals when the woman passed, and how periodically she’d have dreams about her. Each time she’d pull out a journal, stop when she felt compelled to, and what she read left her feeling like her friend was there speaking to her again.

Maybe it’s the benzos talking, but I felt something, holding this little pile of tucked away treasures no one other than their owner held for many years. Some resonance, some message even if it hasn’t quite clicked yet. People break our hearts, and part of us holds onto that for the remainder of our lives, and then we’re gone and someone else is left pondering the pieces remaining.

In the movie version, this is when the music swells and the heroine has her epiphany, rushes outside, and runs to the hero’s house–probably in the rain although her makeup is still pristine–and “Something I Need” plays along with her confession about how life is short and this is what she wants, then they kiss and the credits roll–

Except in real life, the heroine has only spoken to the hero for ten minutes and is pretty sure he doesn’t remember her name, and if she heads out in this weather, she’ll probably freeze to death anyway. There’s no movie, no soundtrack, no sudden chill as if a message is being passed between the living and the dead, no meaning but what I bring to it.

I wish I could ask her if she ever did forgive him.

July 23, 2015 By Skyla Dawn Cameron 4 Comments

The Stories We’ll Never Tell

This posted the day of Aunt Judy’s funeral. It was during the light luncheon afterward that I spoke to her brother and he said her intellectual property rights–her legacy–would go to me. Then came the tracking down her publishers, the signed copyright transfer, the taking stock of things and formulating a plan as to how best keep her work alive. And yes, that is yet another post, one that I will write for the Evil League of Evil Writers in a few months, because IP rights and inheritance is an important consideration for writers.

We talked often about our writing and I knew she had books in progress and outlines, and those files will be coming to me with her computer. Depending on what stage of development they were in, there is a chance that eventually I could finish and release them posthumously for her. This is something, intellectually, I’ve realized since she passed, and while it struck with a sad little pang, they were feelings I could tuck aside, proud that at least I was in a position to do something positive with her work.

Last night I was poking around at cover art for some stories of hers I’ll eventually re-release, and doing some light copyediting on them. I ran across one I vividly remember her writing in 2005 or 2006–we were at the cottage (my favourite place in the world), and she was on the front deck, the story flowing through her like water. It was wonderfully dark and we’d talked about her making it into a novel.

The light bulb went off over my head and I remembered there was a draft of that book I’d talked her into doing one NaNao, but that was three computers ago and I no longer have the file. I went through a very old email account of mine and found the email from her still there, dated February 2007, and was able to download the file and glance through it again.

I dislike how grief is called a “process”–it is not. Sometimes processing is part of grief, but that deep sense of loss and coping with it is not a process you go through and come out the other side of. It is something always there, like the ocean at your back, and sometimes out of the blue a tidal wave of it will crash down, knocking you to the ground, soaking you to your bones, and leaving you shivering and weeping in its wake.

There were her words, so vibrant. The memory of her saying the dark bits made her squeamish, and me insisting that was where the power was and to run for it. The story was unfinished, with 35 000 words written and notes at the end of the doc for the novel’s beautiful heartbreaking conclusion that she never finished.

I am, at present, the only living person who has seen this book.

That tidal wave of grief hit me really hard. Because I miss her, even though I still hear her daily. Because I want people to read this story, and to know that even though her work was always light, her talents were tremendous and could go dark as well.

And because we all die with stories left to tell.

Joss Whedon recently spoke at SDCC and gave the meaning of life. Most of the time, I roll my eyes at that sort of thing, but I’ll read any quote of Whedon’s that might speak about craft and storytelling because truth always echoes there for me.

“You think I’m not going to, but I’m going to answer that. The world is a random and meaningless terrifying place and then we all—spoiler alert—die. Most critters are designed not to know that. We are designed, uniquely, to transcend that, and to understand that—I can quote myself—a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”

Whedon added that “the main function of the human brain, the primary instinct, is storytelling. Memory is storytelling. If we all remembered everything, we would be Rain Man, and would not be socially active at all. We learn to forget and to distort, but we [also] learn to tell a story about ourselves.”

“My idea is that stories that we then hear and see and internalize—and wear hats from and come to conventions about… We all come here to celebrate only exactly that: storytelling, and the shared experience of what that gives us.” The shared experience of storytelling gives us strength and peace, Whedon added. You understand your story and everyone else’s story, and that “it can be controlled by us.” This is something we can survive, “because unlike me, you all are the hero of your story.”

When I was sick last year, my prevailing fear was that I was dying and wouldn’t get to finish my stories. That you’ll never know how Oblivion ends, about Ryann’s return to the church, about when Zara’s dying and Nate journeys to hell and back to save her. That you’ll never meet Livi and West (my dear, manipulative, pretty West), or my psychic Asha and plucky group of survivors navigating the zombie invasion of my old hometown of Bowmanville. And I despair, just a little, at how much of my time is spent on writing I do for pay–which, honestly, I don’t hate all of the time, even if it doesn’t have my heart–because I can’t afford to divert my attention to the projects I truly love.

Last night I ran into an old email from Aunt Judy pleading for the fifth and final book of an unpubbed YA paranormal series she’d read the first four books of, dated over two years ago. She never got to see the bittersweet, epic ending because it only exists in my head, and while I don’t think thoughts of it kept her up at night, I know it will always bother me that I didn’t get to share the end with her. And I thought of how Sara Baptiste and her fellow spies in futuristic Nairobi will swirl around in my brain forever because the story seems too big, too scary, and too hard for me to attempt to write, so I keep setting it aside. And, again, of the vast world of characters I want to share–even if only a couple of people read them–but that I don’t play with because I haven’t the spoons left at the end of the day after trying to financially stay afloat.

Canadian copyright lasts for the life of the author plus fifty years, which means I control Aunt Judy’s work for another half century here.

Realistically, I won’t be alive that long. One day either my brain will succeed in its constant attempts to kill me or my body will continue attacking itself until I can’t stave it off. And I will leave this place–probably gladly–sooner or later, and the stories that make up the chaos of my mind will go with me. This has left me wondering what of mine you’ll read and what you won’t, where you’ll be left hanging, what secrets I know that no one else will. I don’t write notes or outlines, so whatever is unwritten won’t be picked up again by someone–or, at least, not the tale I had planned.

And maybe, even though I’m really stressed and tired, I don’t need to watch that hour of TV all the time. Maybe I don’t need to play that game to unwind tonight. Maybe the dishes can wait a little longer, and I can remember that whatever doubts or reasons there are for not doing something, they don’t hit the pause button on the clock that’s running out. Maybe I’ll remind myself that a told story that is flawed still adds more to the world than a story that dies untold.

And when the waves roll back again, I won’t dry myself of the grief soaking into my skin, but instead settle into the ground and write something in the sand for a while.

photo credit: Heart via photopin (license)

April 24, 2015 By Skyla Dawn Cameron 5 Comments

Caboose

Yesterday I lost my twelve-year-old bunny.

The ex got her for my birthday all those years ago, when she was four months old. She hated me pretty much from day one.

“Skyla, you’re a crazy cat lady! All animals love you!”

No, not this one.

I spent years reading up on rabbit behavior trying to get her to like me. Eventually she reached the point where she’d take a treat from me, but that was it. She was territorial and stomped when I came near her, and often growled and tried to bite if I had my hand in the cage to clean it for any reason. And really, it was JUST me. She responded well to other humans and all other animals.

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Maybe it’s because originally we thought she was a boy and she didn’t like this.

The pet store said she was male and as she wouldn’t let me check, I assumed they were correct (they weren’t). Initially I wanted a bunny named Othello but once I got her, it became apparent that wasn’t her name. I went with Caboose from Red vs Blue, because he is one of the greatest characters ever, and I found myself calling “Caboose!” with an exasperated sigh every time she thumped at me. (Plus I was pretty sure she’d kill me with a tank if she got the chance.)

While she hated me, she LOVED the cats.

When she was little, I had a young cat who used to play with her all the time. They’d chase each other around a chair in the living room and when Caboose went back in her cage, she’d lie against the side of it and Malory would lie on the other side so they’d be back to back. Now, even in her later years, her BFF was my kitty the Doombuggy, who would curl up in the cage with her all the time.

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Even as a senior, when you’d think she’d be mellow, she never grew to like me very well, but she tolerated my presence as long as I gave her strawberry yogurt treats (and god help me if I didn’t). She was crotchety and tolerated no bullshit; if the cats got playing around her cage, she’d thump at them as if banging her cane on the floor to say “GET OFF MY LAWN.” Basically, she is what I plan to be when I’m an old lady.

The most Caboose-like moment I will ever remember is from several years ago.

It was summer and we lived in a townhouse with a small fenced-in backyard. I let Caboose out to play in the grass, and Sophie and the kitties were out as well. My ex had a young (not quite a year old) kitty who was a barn cat and an absolutely little terror.

The grass was long and I watched the kitten stalking through it, body low to the ground, heading after Caboose. Unlike some of my other cats and dog, I had no doubt the kitten would attack her–he just had that wild streak in him. I started to rise from the patio chair, ready to yell at him, as Caboose had her back to him and she’d never see him coming.

Just as he bolted through the grass, Caboose turned and darted toward him.

She ran several feet and bit him; the cat yelped, spun, and hightailed it up the fence where he stared down warily.

Caboose went back to eating grass. The kitten never went near her again.

That’s my girl.