HELLO! It really has LOL it's wild, like I looked up and went, "Oh. Wow yeah, I don't even know where I've been, but it's just like 2025 right?" NOPE.
Let's see...five things that have been happening with Paper:
Changed jobs. Which is kind of one of those 'uh huh who cares' things but my job before that was draining me and keeping me really busy. This one is a lot better.
We got a new puppy earlier this year. A corgi. My evolution to True Millenial Weeb has been completed.
I'm working on a novel. It took a year to write the first draft, and so far it's taken a year to edit it, and I'm still working on it.
I miss fandom. Like, a lot. Only the good things though. I'm just generally not on social media the way I was because it was devouring my soul but I miss seeing fics and art and enjoying fun fandom things. January it's going to be 10 years since I came back to fandom with OPM and that's blowing my mind.
Recently I read "Goodnight Punpun" and I read it way too quickly and it has haunted me ever since.
I hope everybody is having a good time, whether it's in the "happy holidays" way or the "hey it's December" way.
The manuscripts in our collection can be written on a variety of materials; most common are paper and parchment. But what is paper? In today's #ManuscriptBasics, curator Dot Porter @leoba will tell all about it! If you have a question, ask, and maybe we'll make a video to answer!
So I've been slow to talk about this here, and for a while I didn't know why but now I realize it's because this is the only platform where I've been told to kill myself lol the possibility of getting messages like that hits different now.
Anyway, it's been a hell of a month.
(cw medical trauma, hospitals, not graphic)
In August I was hospitalized for a pulmonary embolism (an extensive bilateral pulmonary embolism, more accurately). I had been feeling very short of breath for a couple of days and I thought it was allergies and then medication I started on when suddenly my blood pressure was really bad and even if I went up and down my stairs it was like walking around the block with how much I was breathing.
So I went to urgent care. They did some blood work. And proceeded to tell me that my stats were the kind they see in people with heart failure ("Not to freak you out!" Narrator's voice: it was too late). I got sent to the hospital in an ambulance, put in the ER, got a CT scan and...yeah, clots in my lungs.
I got admitted for several days. They did an echo of my heart, which was really good, and my lungs were good as well. It was honestly because my stats were so solid once I got put on blood thinners that I didn't end up in the ICU.
They've pretty much figured it was my birth control, although I'm going to a hematologist tomorrow to fork over a whole vampire banquet's worth of blood and they'll check for anything else.
It's hard to describe how traumatic the experience has been. I've never been kept in a hospital before. I haven't been to an emergency room since I was a kid. I've never had a CT scan, or been in an ambulance, or even had an IV. And because of covid, I didn't have anyone there (it was dangerous enough if I was exposed, which thank God I wasn't).
When people ask me how I am, I tend to say, "Physically, I'm really good." Because I am. Since I've been on blood thinners, I've genuinely been feeling so much better. Within a week I was back to living normally. When I had a call with my doctor, she said, "If I didn't know better, I would never guess you had a pulmonary embolism, you look great!"
And thank God, okay. Thank God it wasn't worse. Thank God I didn't have a heart attack, or a stroke, and that part of my lungs didn't die, and I didn't just fucking die suddenly. I replay all those possibilities on a near-daily basis, because there was a period of time I was terrified of getting a blood clot because of my birth control and then it happened, and I know it's "bad luck" (literally what they told me at the hospital at one point) but fuck.
An existential crisis becomes very different when you come out of a situation in which you actually could have stopped existing.
And it feels better in some ways - I've put a lot of things in perspective. I've made concentrated efforts to better myself. I've also recognized certain things that are absolutely meaningless. Internet drama that had been a thing I was invested in a week before was suddenly less than nothing. And that's not to say I don't care about the impact it has on others, I still believe those same things, but like, for me? I've written more in the past couple of weeks than I think I had throughout the year and it's literally just what I have wanted to write. I could not care less if people don't like it.
So in some ways it's good.
In other ways, though, I keep having to reframe life around trauma, I have to say, when I start disassociating or freaking out, that this is normal because I am one month out of dealing with a major crisis and I need to let myself adjust (not to say anything about the changes in hormones since I am no longer taking medication I was on for 18 years). I need to give myself a break. I can't just bounce back and it's not fair for me to expect that from myself.
Yeah. It's been A Lot. And if you've gotten this far reading this, I appreciate it, because I had to talk about it more and I had to talk about it somewhere I could just get out all these very, very complicated and frightening feelings. I might talk about it some more. I don't know yet.
So! I started a Patreon this month and it’s pretty exciting, if I do say so myself.
There are six different tiers that include access to exclusive SFW and NSFW Patreon pieces, serialized chapters of an original story, your own monthly drabble and more!
Last week, I read the entirety of Chainsaw Man. I am very excited to write some things for it. But it’s funny when you’re about to get into a new fandom and you have thoughts about How Things Should Be but you’re not sure exactly how things already are in that fandom. So instead of looking into it and potentially ruining your enjoyment, you just kind of want to go...
