5/12/24
Dealing with the Incurable
This is number sixty-one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THIS IS PROBABLY not as dire a blog post as the title sounds. No one I know is dealing with an incurable disease at the moment. At least not one you’d recognize readily. That’s because a lot of chronic conditions aren’t easily seen by other people.
I have a friend who deals with chronic pain that would cripple me every single day, but people talking to her or interacting in public don’t have a clue she’s in pain. I have a friend whose depression manifests itself in anger and sleep. People who aren’t aware might call her lazy because she sleeps an entire day or two days or more at a time. Since writing about my heart condition and procedures, several people have written to me to describe similar conditions and how it sapped the energy from them.
The simple truth is we don’t know what is bothering other people. So, when we encounter a person who says she is depressed, a typical response is “What do you have to be depressed about?” As if depression requires a cause and it can be cured by just being happy.
I have heard—even received email—about homeless people just needing to get a job and shape up. A few years in prison would wake them up. But not one person is willing to give a job to a homeless person who has no address, hasn’t had a bath in weeks, has only the clothes on his back, and drinks a little too much wine. That latter, by the way, is something you can get by with if you are clean, have a change of clothes, and have an address. Then you just like to party.
I’ve dealt with homelessness in several of my stories. Model Student book 5, The Odalisque, has scenes in a Tent City in Seattle. It drew horrendous venom from some readers who genuinely felt those people should not have what little they do have. “Throw them all in jail for a year or two. They won’t be living on the streets after that.” Really? How many former convicts are living on the street? For that matter, how many Vietnam veterans?
In my Nathan Everett book, The Volunteer, I wrote about a chronically homeless man, trapped in his own mind as he wanders from handout to handout. The good, forward-thinking Unitarian congregation, who were devoted to a movement to end homelessness in King County in ten years, were appalled when I noted that since they’d started their campaign, homelessness had been on the increase and that there were many people on the street who would never not be homeless.
In Devon Layne’s Not This Time, the main character launches her own campaign to help the homeless. Her first endeavor was to give them an address. It might surprise you to know that without a permanent street address, you cannot get a driver’s license, collect social security, get health insurance, vote, get a passport, or get a job. But we still jump up and down and say the freeloaders should just get a job.
My theory is that we seldom know and understand what is needed in order to improve our own lives, and other people never know how to improve our lives.
I seldom talk about works in progress in this blog, but I’m quite pleased with my current work, The Strongman. In this story, a 98-pound weakling who is picked on and ridiculed in school, is a social pariah who girls consider “just a stinky boy,” determines that what he needs is to get big and strong, like the athletes in his school. Then he will be free of bullying and girls will like him.
Of course, achieving his goal of being big and strong helps nothing in the long run. He appears to have stopped the bullying, but it simply changes forms. He becomes a cheerleader to be with all the cutest girls, but they are all stand-offish and perhaps a little frightened by his strength. He gets a lover, but even she proves to be temporary and not the answer he was looking for. What he needed was not being physically big and strong, but finding strength inside himself that would enable him to reach out to others and become a friend.
My Sausage Grinder tier patrons ($10 per month) are reading The Strongman as I write it, even when development seems to be going slowly with just a chapter or two a week. Nonetheless, you can also read the story as it develops by joining my Patreon Sausage Grinders.
Of course, I started this post talking about incurable illness. When I first started writing erotica, my daughter was in severe depression. She had never been fully engaged in school. She hated the college she chose. I picked her up at her dormitory on multiple occasions—literally carrying her—to go to the emergency room because she was in such severe muscle spasms that she could not get up off the floor.
I decided to write a story about a depressed college student at a similar arts college, and thus began the Model Student series. I learned in a most painful and direct way about some of the serious aspects of depression. I passed those on to my readers.
Unlike the premise of other literary works, especially of erotica, I found that you cannot just cure depression. You can treat it. You can mitigate some of the problems. You can control it with drugs to some extent. But it is always lurking in the background, ready to spring forward with the slightest trigger. In some stories, the person suffering from depression has sex for the first time and is suddenly cured! Not so in Model Student.
Oh, sex is great! Don’t get me wrong. It brings with it a kind of euphoria, and feeling of well-being with the release of endorphins. That lasts for an hour or two. Then depression may be aggravated by guilt, pressure, expectation, and exhaustion. If that is the only way the depression is being treated, it may eventually seem that sex is just another chore to endure and there is no joy in it.
Authors and readers: You cannot cure depression by ‘making the character happy.’ Your character may have all the appearances of being happy and still be depressed. You may put your homeless character in a shelter and he is still homeless. You may make a strongman out of a 98-pound weakling and still have him weak where it counts.
And when you acknowledge the difficulty, realize there is such a thing as ‘not having enough spoons’ to get out of bed, understand that tears may always be a heartbeat away for what seems to be no reason, then your writing may be not only sensual and erotic, but comforting and encouraging at the same time.
This all sounds terribly ‘woke,’ doesn’t it? Well, good. That’s a start, but it is by no means the end of things. Next week: “What It Means to be a Woke Author.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
