So I've talked a bit about what a long process it's been getting here, and how awesome it feels to finally be moving towards doing something creative with my life again. But I glossed over, at least a little, the reasons why it took so long to get to recording this book and even writing this blog. I thought I'd use this entry to explain a bit about what those reasons are.
My wife always had problems with her feet. They'd ache after a long day shopping or cooking. But it was never serious, until about 8 or 9 years ago. A combination of an exercise program that apparently was over-stressful, and some ill-advised moving of heavy furniture caused her feet to--let's say--"blow up" on her. She developed chronic plantar fasciitis and bursitis in both feet. She went through several surgeries and various therapies (some of which even made them worse), and ended up with the physical problem cured, but chronic nerve pain in her feet. The long and short of it was that she spent a bit over a year practically on bed rest, and even afterwards, her mobility is very limited. She can't be on her feet, or even have them down on the floor (as in sitting) for a very long time without them hurting terribly.
This would be stressful enough, but add to that the fact that we were busy raising my stepson, who is high-functioning autistic. Yeah, there are stories there. About three years ago, things got so hard at home that we had to send him to a treatment program out-of-state for several months. That was a low point for all of us. It ended up making a big difference in his behavior, and we were able to get him moved into an adult placement and living outside our house (he's now 21, so it's not like we sent our tiny kid away, mind you); he has a good shot at establishing a happy adult life. But you can imagine it's made things extra-fun at home.. and we think that stress contributed to my wife coming down with fibromyalgia and arthritis in her hands a little over a year ago.
Now, I love my wife fiercely. We've known each other since our high school days, which means more than half our lives now, and we spent 10 years pining for each other and marrying other folks before we could get together. We've always been the best of friends, and can have more fun just sitting on the couch with each other than I ever had--doing anything--with anyone else. So you might imagine that I wouldn't be terribly happy about her being loaded with all these burdens, and you'd be right.
As my wife's health has deteriorated, more and more of the household duties have fallen to me. I don't mind that as such, but over the last couple of years, work had become more and more stressful as well. I'd become the lead of a development team focused on a payment gateway application that we took over from another team, and that was already deployed in several customer sites. As we found our footing in the new codebase, we had to deal with customer support issues. A customer relationship that somehow ended up become very toxic led to many many late nights and weekends, and was perhaps epitomized by an early morning conference call with a customer VP literally interrupting our troubleshooting attempts to yell at all of us and tell us how he was tired of us "running away" every time there was a problem.
That kind of stuff adds up, leading to things like, oh, I don't know... deciding to become an audiobook narrator. But it also seems to have a nasty way of wearing you down. Right when I was getting things moving in the narration field, I came down with a series of sinus infections, from which it seemed like I just couldn't recover. I got to the point where I felt as though I was constantly swimming through syrup just to get through the day, the fatigue was so bad. After several visits to (basically) urgent care, and several courses of antibiotics, our new doctor finally ordered about four pints (okay, maybe not that much, but...) of blood drawn and a boatload of tests.
Turns out I'd developed some serious vitamin deficiencies, which at least is easily treatable, but it can take months to recover. So just at the point where I felt like I was getting going, my gearshift was stuck in first! Everything just dragged. Even though I'd get energized whenever I did anything voice-related, it was often hard to break the fatigue and inertia long enough to make the long trek upstairs to my studio--leaving my new career to develop at a glacial pace.
Well, that's the short and long of it. Obviously I'm at least a bit recovered, or I wouldn't even be trying to do this. But if you read my last post and thought, "Why did it take you so long to get this going?" then here's your answer. And if it takes me a little longer than I'd like to post updates... now you know why.
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