It’s been three years since I’ve written here, but I have not been idle. I want to tell you about my latest writing project and bring you up to date on my life.
Just as I was beginning to get momentum with my writing—back in 2014 and 2015—something was happening that I kept secret on this website.
In March of 2014, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic autoimmune disease of unknown cause that strikes the colon. The diagnosis was devastating and my symptoms were severe. It all upended my life, my health, and my perception of myself.
As I struggled with my new disease, I began living a split life: an authentic one with my friends and family, where I revealed my struggles and earnestly sought their support; and an incomplete one online, where I hid my new disease from my Facebook friends and blog followers.
I felt desperate to cling to the momentum I had gained with my writing projects. I was afraid my disease would take it all away from me, and afraid to even mention it here. I thought I needed to still appear strong and capable.
But capable I was not. Not physically capable, that is—not capable of maintaining the same pace and life I had lived till getting sick.
By 2015, I had worked my way into remission, and I gratefully finished another draft or two of my book about Dad. That summer, I got a wonderful new job at a local watershed council here in Portland, my first full-time job in a few years.
But I couldn’t juggle work and writing and my ongoing health needs. By summer 2016, my health crashed catastrophically, landing me in the hospital for a month and nearly killing me.
At last, my lesson was learned. I had to make significant changes in what I expected of myself.
By 2017, Ron and I had made some big decisions that allowed us to revamp our lives. We will not have children, at least for now. (And likely not ever, considering we’re almost 40.) We just don’t have the energy. I’ve quit my wonderful but demanding watershed council job in order to rest more and take good care of myself.
And because I’m at home, I now have time, again, to write.
This is what has emerged through all my struggles with illness: the understanding that writing books is more important to me than any other endeavor in my life.
For some reason I can’t explain, my desire to write memoirs is stronger than my desire to have children, stronger than my desire to travel and live abroad, stronger than my desire to participate in the regular working world. Twice in the last several years, I’ve dreamed I was given a terminal diagnosis, and both times my thoughts in the dream were the same: terror of leaving my loved ones, and terror of not finishing my books.
I must write my books.
So, for the past year, I have been writing. And it makes me so very, very happy. I am writing about my disease—my life is split no longer. I have a website called Katie’s Colitis Journal [2020 update: that website has since been merged with this one, as the Gut Feelings blog!] and a Facebook page to match it. I post once a week and you can follow me there.
Eventually, the colitis blog posts will turn into a book, the sequel to the book about my dad, which I will also finish.
And once those are done, I’ll return at last to my original project: the book about my life in Africa with the Peace Corps.
Pole pole, as they say in Swahili: “POH-lay POH-lay.” Slowly, slowly. Have patience.
I wanted to bring you up to speed here, too, on this trusty writing blog I have neglected. I will try to write here, too, again, regularly if not frequently. Nowadays, my online brand embraces the fact that I live with a chronic illness. I love that—the authenticity of it.
In writing, as in life, I am working my way steadily towards wholeness.
