Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

You know that thing I’ve been doing over the last nine months? No — not that sort of nine month thing, I mean, this course.

Well, as of last Monday, it finished.

Nine months of hair pulling, word block­ing, self-doubting and some­times get­ting up at Stu­pid O’ Clock in the poxy morn­ing when the house was dead and my brain was still dream­ing, because for a short time, that was the only time I could write. I’m prone to hefty bouts of fatigue (it’s well-documented that tasks can con­sume upto 5 or 6 times more energy for those with CP), but for weeks I was per­petu­ally knackered, hit­ting a wall at 10pm and just break­ing down, sob­bing in the bath­room because I could no longer even man­age to co-ordinate my body to dress for bed. Some nights I didn’t even remem­ber actu­ally going to sleep, I think I must just have blacked-out from exhaus­tion as I just woke the next day and was com­pletely con­fused as to how I got there.

And that was before I’d had a drink.

These last few weeks have been crazy. The last couple of tutor-marked assess­ments were really close together and were then fol­lowed almost imme­di­ately by the ACTUAL EXAM. I wrote like a mad thing, for­cibly push­ing through the reoc­cur­ring ‘blocks’, hop­ing that some­thing would come, a story, a char­ac­ter, just some­thing. Half way through writ­ing my exam with just days to go before the sub­mis­sion, I actu­ally for­got my Protagonist’s. Name.

Yes, that’s right, I FOR–GOT. That’s how out of it I was in terms of my involve­ment with the story. I have no idea how this is going to pan out. This last story was so hard to write; so hard to stay involved in. I think I was just com­pletely burned out and lit­er­ally had a fort­night, at best, to pull a story from scratch out of my arse. We were for­bid­den from using and/or rework­ing past char­ac­ters or storylines from our pre­vi­ous work, so I couldn’t even beg, bor­row and steal from other pieces I’d been happy with. I just had a blank page and not a clue where to start.

In the end, the chapter turned out bet­ter than I had ori­gin­ally envis­aged des­pite hav­ing to resort to using a shift­ing, third-person lim­ited omni­scient view­point in order to get enough char­ac­ter devel­op­ment in. I nor­mally don’t like to shift view­points mid-chapter as I think the con­stant ‘swap­ping of heads’ can make for a rather awk­ward read­ing exper­i­ence, but I ran the risk of ren­der­ing the other main char­ac­ter totally flat and life­less if I didn’t, so hope­fully the gamble will pay off.

The Hor­ror Story fared well on the mark­ing front, though not well enough for me to still be in the run­ning for a Dis­tinc­tion, sadly. (Hey, who was I kid­ding, any­way?) Fin­gers crossed that I can still hope for a decent final mark.

Hav­ing pos­ted my final fic­tion pro­ject off to the exam­iners on Monday, this week was spent recu­per­at­ing. Not least because K bought new pil­lows for the bed on Tues­day. Evil pil­lows. Medi­eval tor­ture devices in cushion’s cloth­ing, they were. I woke up the next morn­ing feel­ing like someone had tried to unscrew my head from my neck in the night and then, when they hadn’t quite suc­ceeded, booted me in the back wear­ing a steel toe-capped pair of size nines.

Wed­nes­day was spent cry­ing. Lots.

Thursday was mar­gin­ally bet­ter, though I still had to endure look­ing like a Worzel Gum­mage body double as my back and shoulders were still too sore to cope with wield­ing a hairdryer.

Talk­ing of my hair, remem­ber how it was sold to me as a low-maintenance, “Scrunch N’ Go” affair?

Dirty. Rot­ten. Lies.

Lies, I tell you, all lies. Never in all my life have I spent so much of nearly every day curs­ing every mor­tal atom from beneath a fuck­ing hairdryer. This loose perm lark is an Offi­cial Pain In The Arse. And it’s fuck­ing dropped. And I mean really dropped. Now it takes at least an hour or more of pon­cing and half a can of mousse before it even looks some­thing close to curly. (No, I can’t just wear it straight: because of the perm in it, its nat­ural state is now set to uber-frizz.)

And I tipped very gen­er­ously. Bastard.

I’m going to give my hair a few weeks to recover, then I’ll have a tighter perm. I won’t be so cau­tious next time and now I know what I look like curly (and how much perms drop/settle), I’m pre­pared to be braver and go for a tighter/long-lasting style. I like being curly. For years I was never brave enough to take the plunge and I think it’s the fact that I actu­ally like being curly that has led me to being pissed off about how much this first attempt has dropped out.

Typ­ical.