Did you all miss me? Because I miss posting random things here. It feels more liberating than Facebook and gives me more space than Instagram. But for now, I’m going to just write a bit about life updates.
So, a few years ago now (maybe 2?) I had to have surgery to remove a tumor where they found I had Endometriosis. Since then, I’ve realized that the pain I’ve lived with for my entire life has been unnecessary, yet no one bothered to investigate it further.
Well, thankfully, I have a wonderful husband who pushed me to have it looked at further, and in just a week or so, I go in for a full hysterectomy in the hopes that it will help so many related problems. Not to share gory details, but it will be a major surgery, not laparoscopic, so I’m going to be spending some time in the hospital. Everything inside of me is basically “glued” together, so it hurts all of the time.
Unfortunately, it could only be done around the biggest shopping season of the year, which is just my luck, isn’t it? My Etsy is going to have to go down over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and all that sort of time, and then, since it’s all print on demand, most stuff won’t be able to be guaranteed to get to a customer in time for the holidays after that. Which kinda really blows, but the other option is to live in pain for potentially months more, and I’m not too keen on that.
I’m just hopeful that people are reading my shop announcements and are ordering early, but it is what it is I guess. I’m just flattered that people like my art enough to buy it on things, to be honest. I never expected to have 100 sales, much less over 1,000 (I just checked and I am almost to 1,500 as of writing this OMG). It is… mind blowing, to say the least! I never would have thought it possible – I always just drew as a distraction, or something fun for myself, or to challenge myself, I never thought I could make a career out of this kind of art (which is funny, since I went to college for costuming, so I mean, getting a BFA meant I expected to work in some sort of art field lol).
I’ve been ordering books, too, to have in the hospital, probably too many but is it really possible to have too many books? A few books by Freya Stark in her journeys in the Middle East in the early 1900’s, a biography on Gertrude Bell (the “Queen of the Desert” a la Laurence of Arabia), and a lot of Japanese classics such as “Botchan” and “I am a Cat” by Natsume Soseki. “I am a Cat” is interesting because I got the manga version of it, to help with understanding the time period better (Meiji Restoration Era).
I also ordered “Travels with a Writing Brush,” which is a huge collection of writings, poems, and background history on travel writing from Classical Japan. It is a tome, and a little hard to get through, but really interesting so far. Plus, many of the poems are in English and Japanese (romaji) so I’ve been challenging myself to understand the poem before reading the translation. Which I generally fail miserably at, but hey, it’s a kind of studying, right?
With all that said, I’m counting down the days until I go in to the hospital, and am both terrified of the surgery and optimistic that it will help and I can do things easier again. Simple things like “walk to the grocery store” or “stand and cook dinner,” which have become too painful to do lately. I’ve gained too much weight, too, and it’s really starting to bother me, but that’s another rant for after surgery, no sense in worrying about it now, there’s nothing I can do about it in a week!