More Musings, More Thoughts for Thursday, July 20, 2023, or: On Writing, Stress, Grief, Stormy Weather, and Stark Realities

Evening, Thursday, July 20, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, again, Dear Reader. It’s still light outside – sunset is about an hour or so away – as I begin writing this second post of the day. And after a batch of thunderstorms passed through the area between 5 and 6 PM Eastern Daylight Time, the skies outside are mostly cloudy. Despite the rain, the temperature is 87°F/30°C, with a “feels-like” temperature of 104°F/30°C.

I managed to do some work on the Reunion: Coda manuscript before lightning strikes started to fall in the general vicinity of the house I live in. And, as I predicted in Musings & Thoughts for Thursday, July 20, 2023, or: Grief, Stress, and Writing, I focused on edits and revisions in the stuff I wrote earlier this week (especially the bits I wrote yesterday) instead of writing fresh “copy.”

I did that for part of the afternoon, and although I could have tinkered with Chapter 10, Scene Two some more, the bad weather and fatigue forced me to postpone further work on Reunion: Coda till tomorrow.

During my “rest break,” I also went to Kindle Create and made a couple of minor cosmetic adjustments to Reunion: A Story. Not major enough for anyone who orders the paperback edition to worry that the book won’t be the “official” version after the updates settle in over on Kindle Direct Publishing; I removed an extra space before an apostrophe in one paragraph but left the rest of the main text alone.   

I also went to Reunion’s title page and added (Book 1 of the Reunion Duology) to the novella’s subtitle. A minor, and perhaps even unnecessary, tweak, but it is accurate…and a definite commitment (on my part, anyway) to follow through with Reunion: Coda.

An Unwanted Bit of Downtime

“Right after her funeral I felt the way you feel when it suddenly starts raining hard, and you look around and find no place to take shelter.” ― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

I had hoped that the forecast for today would be accurate – even though I suspected that it would not be – and that July 20, 2023 would “just” be hot and humid and not hot, humid, and stormy. But this is Florida in summer, and we are in the rainy season here in the subtropics, so the forecasters were a bit off with their predictions.

I didn’t want to have to shut down my desktop computer and work on my laptop out in the kitchenette. I’m a writer, and even though I can do stuff like read and reply to emails, play games, or even listen to music with other people in the same room, I can’t really write unless I’m in a room with a closed door. And because Reunion: Coda is an important – to me, anyway – project, I must work on it far from prying eyes.

The other reason why I didn’t want to have any weather-related downtime was that I knew if I wasn’t focusing on work, my thoughts would inevitably wander to the topic of Mom’s death eight years ago, my feelings of guilt for letting my antipathy toward my older half-sister keep me from being in my mother’s room when she crossed over to “the undiscovered country,” and the sadness I feel about the schism between Vicky and me.

But the storms did come, I did have to take a weather-related timeout from writing, and I did have too much time to dwell on how and why I got from Miami to the Tampa Bay area. And I wished fervently that things had gone differently…radically so.

Unfortunately, since the cause of the schism is almost assuredly rooted in my half-sister’s long and complicated mental health history, there is absolutely nothing that I could have done between 1987 – the year that my relationship with Vicky started to seriously deteriorate – and July 19, 2015, to avoid this estrangement. I’m not a mental health expert, so I can’t say exactly what ails my half-sister, but there’s a great deal of toxic narcissistic behavior, gaslighting, greed, and dishonesty in her bag of tricks.

“The family bully takes sibling rivalry to a whole new level; sibling abuse. While it’s common for families to have sibling rivalry, what stands out the most with the bully is their intent to hurt others badly, especially the family scapegoat. They can physically harm you. They will mentally torture you. In some cases, they will sexually violate you. They have evil motives to control their family members, manipulate them, and gaslight them.” ― Dana Arcuri, Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma

While Mom was alive – and before I realized that there was no way of “fixing” the situation unless Vicky sought professional help for her issues – I was always the one who tried to make peace and try to get along with my older half-sister. For Mom’s sake more than for Vicky’s or mine (although I’ve learned the hard way that being angry with someone else for long periods hurts me more than it does the other person), but I was almost always the first one to either reach out with a peace offer or an apology (even though I never started the quarrels we had way too often).

And for 28 years, Vicky and I went through an all-too-predictable cycle of bitter emotional warfare followed by reconciliation and promises to be better to each other, only to fall out over some issue or other.  

“But a vague jealousy, one of those dormant jealousies that develop between brothers or sisters almost unnoticed until maturity, only to burst out when one of them marries or has a stroke of good fortune, kept them constantly on the alert in a fraternal, unaggressive hostility. They did love each other, yet they kept an eye on each other.” ― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

The five-year-period of my mother’s last illness should have been like a bag of ice hitting Vicky on the face and waking her up to the reality that once Mom was dead…that would be it, and if she persisted on being Machiavellian, aggressive, and contemptuous toward me, she and I would have to go our separate ways and deal with our mother’s passing…alone.

Alas, no. From the summer of 2010 till the summer of 2015, whatever bonds of sibling affection still remained between Vicky and me became frayed, loosened, and eventually snapped, torn asunder by years of resentment and mutual distrust and dislike.

Yesterday and today, I thought long and hard about this, trying to see how the relationship between Vicky and me could have been repaired so I could have stayed “home.” And even though I did look back at some episodes in that 28-year-long span during which my half-sister became my nemesis and thought, “Maybe I could have handled X situation better then, or maybe I shouldn’t have said Y in 2009…” I still saw that unless Vicky took a long, hard look at how she treats others, and admitted that she needed help, there was no way on Earth that I could have salvaged an unsalvageable situation.

Cos, like I said earlier, for most of my adult life, whenever Vicky and I quarreled, I was the one who tried to make things right, even accepting the blame for fights that I had not started. And that didn’t help much, did it?

So, yeah. That long break in my writing time today was not particularly welcome. Not. One. Damned. Bit.

It’s dark outside now. I’ve spent over two hours on this blog post and I’m tired, but I needed to write it, if for no other reason than to “vent” or explain why I’m so out of sorts at this time of year. So, until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.