Limbo

If I had to describe the one main feeling that I have at the moment it would be the overwhelming sense of ‘limbo’ that I feel. I don’t seem to be in one camp or the other about anything. A couple of examples of this are below:

The list and my health

This seems to be the biggest source for limbo at the moment. There is the big question of ‘Will I get put on the list or not?’ As I am unsure of the whole process of how this decision is reached I feel powerless – I am really one of those people who needs to know as much as they can about something that impacts their life.

I was very ill for four months. I was very yellow and I couldn’t eat without wanting to vomit. I got very tired very easily and I was incredibly itchy (although the itch was controlled by some medication). Now, I am still ill, but not to the same extent. I am only yellow in the very corners of my eyes now and can eat without feeling like I want to puke. However I still have bouts of feeling itchy – for example, this morning it was driving me nuts – and I still get very tired. There is also now this constant pain coming from my liver, like something inside me trying to push its way out.

Now, will the doctors look at me and go, ‘Right now you aren’t as bad as you were, therefore you don’t need to be on the list’. Or will they look at me and go, ‘While right not you aren’t as bad as you were, we know that it is impacting your life – you can’t work full-time and so on – and we have some very lovely pictures of your insides which show how bad they are. We’ll put you on the list now as from this point on, you will only get worse.’

I just don’t know.

From my personal point of view, I think I would rather be on the list, even if I was put on at the very bottom. That way if there is a liver that would suit me and no one else it would at least go to me rather than get incinerated. This year has been mostly horrible because of my stupid liver. I haven’t been able to go on my honeymoon, I have had to miss lots of work, I have had to rely on the other half to keep us afloat financially, I have been so ill and so on and so on – and the list does go on. I want a new start and I can’t see that happening when most days I get tired very early and all day every day I have this pain in my back where my liver sits.

Work

I like working. I like being around people. I want to go back to work.

While I know that a full-time job would be out of the question, I think that I could work part-time. Maybe starting with a couple of days a week and seeing where we can go from there. But, I don’t know for certain that I would be okay. This is a guess. This is something that I will have to test out with support from my workplace.

So not only am I in limbo on how much work I can actually take on, I know that I can’t go back to my old role. My old role was a line manager of an editorial team. At the moment, they have an acting manager who is doing a brilliant job. I can’t do this role part time. No one can. So, there is a limbo feeling about what I would be doing if I returned to work.

There is also another limbo feeling around what would happen if my health started to get even worse. Working part time would probably allow me to stay working longer than if I were working full time as I would be able to rest longer between stints in work. But I am also really bad at taking time off work when I need it. I know there were times before I went on long term sick where I should have been at home but I went in anyway.

And then there is the element of what projects I could work on. It would need to be something that could be dropped or handed over to someone else at short notice – which is generally not why I am employed. My skills centre around social media, web accessibility, usability and production organisation and management. These are skills that are very rarely located in more than one person at an organisation. Companies don’t tend to have a ‘web and production optimisation’ team.

So there is a triple limbo feeling here: Am I able to return to work, what would I do at work if I went there, what would happen if my health started to get worse?

My writing

I love my writing. Those who know me should know that I like to write – generally funny things but I also have a soft spot for sci-fi. If you follow me on Twitter – or even in real life – you will know that I already have issues with self-confidence when it comes to my writing (possibly even self-confidence in general – but that is a whole other blog post).

Being off work ill has allowed me to spend some time on my writing. I have rediscovered how much I really do love it. So much so that it is all I really want to do – well, maybe that’s a slight lie. It’s something that I really want to be paid to do.

The limbo comes in here that before getting paid to write you have to put in a lot of unpaid hours, get noticed, work for free, do well and then work for very little. If you manage to go through all those stages you may end up as the very very small percentage that get paid a decent wad of cash to write. I am still in the very early stages of this. Writing for free.

If I get better (spontaneously – ha ha – or through having a transplant) I would rather spend my time writing than working the normal 9-5.

I guess, either way – me staying very ill and writing or me going back to work and writing in my spare time – I have to generate interest in what I am doing. So here it goes, if you didn’t know, I have created an online podcasted sitcom. It is 8 episodes long and very funny. I produced and edited the show and wrote two of the episodes. The other 6 episodes were written by some very funny friends of mine and it was all acted by some amazingly talented people. Why not give it a listen?

You can listen to it through:

• iTunes
• The In Ear Entertainment blog (The panel on the right will take you to the episode of your choice)
• SoundCloud

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