Update: Where I’ve been/What I’ve been up to

Hello everyone! As you might have noticed, I haven’t been updating The Diversity of Classic Rock as much as I used to. I’ve mentioned in a recent blog post that it’s because I’ve gotten a day job and I don’t have the time I used to have to write blog posts and create content like I used to. I want to talk more in detail about that and kinda share my journey. So get ready for this really long ramble/storytime.

Content Warning: Discussion of eating disorders and a brief mention of a suicide attempt, but no detail on that.

“Luckily I was unemployed”

A lot of people are impressed at how quickly I wrote my book, Crime of the Century. It took me about two years to write that book and in total it’s over 100,000 words. It’s longer than my husband’s PhD thesis and it took him over 4 years to write it. There are more citations in my book than in my husband’s PhD thesis, just to put it into perspective how seriously I took my writing and research. How did I manage this? Well, to quote one of my favourite actors, Cillian Murphy, “luckily I was unemployed”.

Except in my case I’m not some actor making millions and can live off of that money in between jobs. No, rather I was living under the poverty line in a country with a high cost of living. We were just scraping by on my husband’s very low PhD salary and rent kept going up and eventually we had to move in with my husband’s parents, and we were lucky that it was possible to do that. Ireland is to the UK what Canada is to the US and what I mean by that is that it’s more expensive even though a lot of the products are the exact same, you can get British TV channels in Ireland if you have Sky, and it’s a smaller country so that means fewer opportunities. If you live near the border with Northern Ireland, it’s very common to do your weekly shop across the border to save money.

I’ve written about my challenges in finding a job after graduating from university in an older blog post and there were a lot of things working against me. Like I said in the previous paragraph, Ireland is a small country and there’s fewer job opportunities there than here in the UK or in the US, where I’m originally from. A lot of competition for a handful of jobs, so that means some people are gonna fall behind. Capitalism needs unemployed people to point to when workers ask for a raise or better benefits – “you don’t wanna end up like them!”, unemployed people are the metaphorical whip to keep workers in line. The reality is there is no shortage of work. Look around you, potholes in the road, rubbish all over the city, crumbling infrastructure, understaffed shops and restaurants, classroom sizes are too big because there’s not enough teachers, shortage of nurses, you get it.

I graduated from my MA in 2018 and I could not find a job for the life of me. I studied journalism and a lot of those jobs require you to be a local and be familiar with the area. Jobs don’t train people or take a chance on people like they used to and that’s why you see so many entry level jobs demanding you have experience, but pay barely above minimum wage. No one in the industry believed in me. No one liked my writing style. No one liked my views on politics. Not surprising because newspapers are all very pro-establishment and can’t anger their advertisers because that’s how they make money. This video by James Rehwald explains how the mainstream media sucks better than I ever could – basically this was my communications BA in a TikTok. When I was looking for jobs back then I was a socdem flirting with socialism and rejection after rejection made me a full-blown socialist, which made me even less employable in journalism, a negative feedback loop on top of the “you don’t have a job so you don’t have experience but you need experience to get a job” feedback loop, but one that made me empathise even more with those who got the short end of the stick. You never hear anti-capitalist voices in the mainstream media. This situation made me incredibly depressed. We were struggling with money and I couldn’t get a job at all and on top of that I couldn’t go on welfare because if I did that would jeopardise my chances of getting Irish citizenship. My mental health has never been good and things got worse and worse for me in that regard every year. A couple of times there I attempted suicide after being rejected for a job. I know it sounds pathetic and weak to most people, but man, you try being on Dead End Street for years with no light at the end of the tunnel. Ever watch Trading Places? Great movie.

I had no choice but to write and that’s why this blog went strong and why I wrote a whole book. I had literally nothing else to do and no money to study something else that would make me more employable. Sure, I had freelance jobs here and there and occasional ad revenue and donations from generous fans, but I was making nothing and unable to go on disability because no one takes mental health seriously. I’m in this weird place where I’m too obviously autistic to pass as normal, but too “normal” to actually get help for having autism. It’s torture because I’m very aware of how much better life would be if I were normal and I know the differences between me and normal people. It was like being trapped in a cage, and that wasn’t the only cage I was trapped in. I had become chronically ill.

“To help classify my disease”

Things got even worse come 2020. New decade, should be something to look forward to, right? Well, not quite. Globally, we were all affected by the pandemic. You remember all of the stories of industrial sized freezers being parked outside of hospitals because they didn’t have enough room to store all of the dead bodies. At the same time as we were getting news of this disease spreading across China and from there to the rest of the globe, I was starting to become chronically ill and not just disabled in my brain, but also disabled in my body. The crazy part is if you saw me, you’d have no idea because I looked “fine”, but I really wasn’t now that I think back to it. At the beginning of 2020 I was the heaviest I’d ever been and I really had no idea why. Prior to that, I’d never been over 9 stone in my life. I was still fitting into my clothes fine, but some of my jeans were a bit tight and my chest was larger than before even though I never really gain weight there. My measurements were an inch or two larger than usual. Sure I was eating a lot, but was it really that bad? I don’t know. I saw my weight at the doctors office even though I’d requested to step on the scale backwards because of my prior history of eating disorders. I went to Target afterwards and I ran straight to the pharmacy section and I picked up some laxatives. I was relapsing. I got my act together and the weight started coming off slowly but surely. I got a gym membership and I got more steps in and started losing the weight I’d put on. I was visiting my parents in America over the Christmas break and when I got back to Ireland, suddenly I started getting cramps and spotting. I hadn’t had a period in about 4 years so this was a completely alien feeling to me. I thought well, these things happen sometimes and my GP was in my husband’s hometown which was 2-3 hours away from where we were living so it would be a pain in the ass to get to the doctors office for an appointment. And you know with women’s health issues, it’s almost never taken seriously.

It’s March of 2020, lockdown spreads across Europe and then across the globe. Fuck. My health issues are getting worse and I’m spotting more often and getting cramps more often and I don’t know why. Doctors are all too busy dealing with covid since that’s an immediate problem and actually deadly. Period cramps suck, but they’re not going to kill me, directly that is. The cramps made me want to die. The pain got worse and worse over time and on top of period cramps, I was getting back pain too at the same time. Arthritis runs in my family and half of my immediate family have scoliosis, but I don’t have either of those things. Is this a normal thing to happen to a 25 year old? That’s what I thought it was because I’d see all the memes about how you’re over the hill at 25 and you start getting aches and pains everywhere. There was no way I could get a job in this physical condition and especially with lockdown. Who’s hiring? With all of these layoffs that means more competition in the jobs market and who is going to hire some chronically ill woman who hasn’t worked a proper job in years when there’s plenty of people who are able-bodied and have work experience? I also have sensory issues around wearing masks because I have autism so I couldn’t go out much. It felt awful when people minimised that and made me out to be the devil for having sensory issues.

And it’s not like I know when I’ll be too ill to work. The pain flareups were unpredictable and would come without warning. I wasn’t a stranger to period cramps. I had really bad cramps since the age of 13. I was forced to go to school in pain and I’d put my head down in class, hoping the teacher wouldn’t yell at me. I’d force myself to pay attention but that left me drained at the end of the day. Eventually I got prescribed a birth control pill that would reduce my periods to 4 times a year and that made things better, but when I’d get my periods I would still be in a lot of pain. Later, I had this bright idea to keep taking the pills and not do the placebo week because I knew I could delay my periods by a week if I wanted to (like if I were going on holiday) and then one autumn day at work at my grandfather’s office I was bleeding like crazy and in a lot of pain and hiding in the bathroom and I didn’t have any pads so I was making do with toilet paper because I wasn’t prepared. I went to the doctor and she prescribed me this pill that would flush out all of the period blood and that was miserable, two weeks of heavy bleeding, clotting, and pain. But then I didn’t have periods for four years, yay! But it wasn’t a permanent solution. I really wanted a hysterectomy so I could end this pain once and for all. I didn’t want children for many reasons: climate change, finances, my mental health, my history of eating disorders, and I get tired really easily (I’ll talk more about this later).

From all of my reading, there was no chance of me getting approved for a hysterectomy. But it didn’t stop me from trying eventually when things started to improve with regards to covid. I even found a way to reduce my pain for the time being. I couldn’t get approved for medical marijuana at the time, but I found that waist training reduced the pain to the point where I could stand and walk with no pain and it helped me lose some weight and hid the bloating. I also liked that it gave me an excuse to get dressed up in nice outfits and feel okay about myself even if I was sick. I think if you’re chronically ill, you need to find something that brings a little bit of happiness into your life. I was embarrassed about weighing more than I used to. I felt like I was losing control and that’s why I relapsed. Eating disorders aren’t about looks, they’re about control. That’s why I get annoyed at these “body-positive” posts about Marilyn Monroe being bloated; she had endometriosis and was not proud of the bloating and she took really good care of her figure! Prior to that, I was stuck in bed all day when I had cramps. Finally we got vaccinated and restrictions eased up and I said now’s my chance. I called the doctor’s office and told them everything that had happened to me in the past couple of years and I got referred for a scan and a consultation with a gynaecologist.

“Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before”

Finally, we got the ball rolling. I had to pay for private healthcare because I couldn’t wait, so that was about €400 on those two things. I was disabled and needed an end to this pain.

January 2022, I get an ultrasound and they scan everything in my torso except for my uterus. I don’t know what the GP was thinking. I told them in no uncertain terms that it was my uterus and my lower back hurting. My other organs were fine. We still go ahead with the gynaecologist appointment, but even for private healthcare I had to wait months to be seen. The absolute state of healthcare in Ireland! Both of those times I had to travel 2.5-3 hours on the bus. The day I got the phone call telling me I had an appointment, I was over the moon, but then excitement went away and I was nervous so I put together my sterilisation binder to build up my case for why I need a hysterectomy. I had no diagnosis at this point. I was not going to back down. I printed out the binder I put together and I brought my husband with me for backup and for moral support. I was expecting the worst and I got a lot of resistance at first, but with my wit I won. I think what really convinced the doctor was that I said I was in so much pain I wanted to kill myself if I couldn’t get a hysterectomy. I couldn’t wait much longer. I knew that the pain was going to get worse because I saw it get worse.

People talk a lot about how there’s medical fatphobia and how thin people always get taken seriously at the doctors. I get really annoyed when I hear that because doctors thought I was fine and I was being a hysterical drama queen. I was told that I couldn’t possibly have endometriosis or adenomyosis because I wasn’t “bloated” and I “didn’t have heavy periods”. My body shape literally masked my chronic illness. Who knew that being thin with an hourglass figure comes with downsides? Even though I was heavier then than I am now, I still had a pretty flat stomach and my waist was still small. It was easy for me and doctors to write it off as just filling out or gaining weight with age, very normal stuff usually. Had this gone on longer, I would have definitely ended up even more bloated and losing my mind because of it. The point is, doctors are a pain in the butt to deal with and thin or fat, you get screwed over either way!

The surgery cost too much on the private system in Ireland and if I got it through the public system I would have to wait years for an appointment to get approved for a hysterectomy before they even operate on me and then there’d another wait. I went directly to a clinic in Lithuania, which was way cheaper for the surgery. Those few months in between that gynaecologist appointment and my surgery were hell. My chronic pain got worse and everyone around me was trying to dissuade me from getting a hysterectomy.

The only reason I didn’t get my hysterectomy sooner was my parents had various trips planned over the summer and autumn: Turkey and Athens in May, Italy and a Mediterranean cruise in September, and Hawaii and California in October. They wanted to make up for lost time. I wasn’t sure how quickly I would recover so I wanted to wait until I was done travelling. During that time I was on this medication that put me on chemical menopause and I was still in pain. The entire time I was travelling, I was anxious because I would get cramps without warning and my period could start at any time. Luckily I didn’t bleed at all.

Exactly a week before my hysterectomy, I got my very last period and it was the most painful period of my life. I didn’t realise how much relief the birth control had given me over the years. I was in so much pain I could barely leave my bed. Even with a closed 20″ corset and a hot water bottle held against my stomach I was in so much pain. I had to take heavy painkillers to get the pain to go away. I was so close to calling an ambulance, but I was worried about getting covid in hospital and doctors and nurses laughing at how ridiculous I look trying to relieve my pain and not taking me seriously.

I spent the next few days moaning in bed and when I got my hysterectomy, honestly when I woke up the pain was not that much worse than that last period. Weeks after my surgery I got a diagnostic report that I had to decode and figure out what it was saying because some things get lost in translation. It was originally thought that I had endometriosis, but it turns out it was actually adenomyosis and when I saw the report of what the uterine walls measured, it was well into the diagnostic criteria for adenomyosis. I think about how much worse things could have gotten for me had I waited. Finally, we had a name for my chronic illness, that should bring clarity and closure, right?

I had back pain afterwards and eventually we figured out at this point that it’s purely mental and my adenomyosis left me so traumatised that feeling good and healthy is alien to me. Suddenly the cause of my pain is gone and my mental health is still in the toilet? There were times there that I thought I didn’t deserve to be healthy and I had imposter syndrome. Who knew that being depressed and anxious all the time hurts you physically too? Man, the brain is weird!

I started going to the gym more regularly and challenging myself more and things finally got better. Back pain is pretty much all gone. I finally got a medical cannabis prescription just before Christmas of 2023 and that’s helped a lot, but I can’t always have it…

“I have nothing to declare, except my genius*” *weed

It’s winter 2024 and I’ve been medicating every day and I am dreading travel because it means I can’t have my medication. Even if it’s legal medicinally in Florida I can’t bring my supply with me from the UK and I can’t walk up to a dispensary with my UK prescription even though my clinic is an American company. There’s no reciprocity. I certainly didn’t want to end up like Paul McCartney when he went to Japan and brought weed with him and got arrested and sent to jail. So I was forced to go without.

This trip was cursed from the very beginning. The original day I was to fly to America, I threw up in the airport hotel, nearly passed out, and ended up in hospital, missing my original flight. I couldn’t even put on my shoes so I went to hospital barefoot and in my pyjamas. While in hospital I was poked with needles while dehydrated and it was not fun. I was embarrassed and looked the lowest I’ve ever looked. I left the hospital dishevelled, in my pyjamas, with only a pair of grippy socks on my feet. I looked like I escaped from the psych ward. I was lonely for the past couple of weeks because my husband was on a business trip and I desperately wanted to see him. He went all the way to Gatwick to pick me up and bring me home. I left for Florida the following week and oh boy I was depressed the entire trip. Because I didn’t have my medical cannabis, I had trouble sleeping and staying calm and I was going through a lot of anxiety and depression regarding my book launch. My mental health was deteriorating before all of our eyes. One day I couldn’t stop crying. If I had access to my medication or even had my husband there, I would have been able to keep it together.

Travel plans for the year had to be cancelled because of how bad my depression had gotten. Previously, travel was one of the things that kept my depression under control because I at least had something to look forward to. Now one of my coping mechanisms is gone. I felt like an ostracised disappointment.

“Are we out of the woods yet?”

What am I gonna do? I kept powering forward with promoting my book and tried to make the best of everything. I went to therapy and it was awful. It felt robotic and I dreaded every appointment and it was obvious that I didn’t want to be there and I was just going with the motions. I would cry and just lie in bed after every appointment. The type of therapy that is given here on the public system is cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT, and it feels like gaslighting and lying to myself and I can’t do that. I pride myself on living authentically and I can’t lie to myself and say that everything is okay and think that I’m worthy. At my last appointment I was more depressed than ever before and said some awful, internalised ableist things about myself. Think about what a school bully would say about a kid with autism and now multiply that intensity by three, that’s the type of things I said about myself at that appointment.

Sure, I was selling some books and doing well considering no one believed in me. I had no professionals doing PR for me. I’m just some random woman on the internet who loves classic rock and true crime, but I really wanted a steady job. There was no way that I could make back all that I’ve spent on getting my book published.

The reality of publishing a book is that you don’t make that much money through book sales so much as you make it through other opportunities like gigs and jobs. I felt a lot better about myself when I saw that a YouTuber I like said it took her eight years to make back the costs of publishing her book. Seeing her honesty really helped me put it into perspective and feel better about my situation. Honesty is something I value a lot.

The reality is that it’s a privilege to be able to do creative pursuits full time. It’s an accomplishment to make a living wage off of your creative work. You see it historically. Look at all the writers and artists you’d hear about in school. If you read about their lives, you’ll see that they’re all from privileged backgrounds. Not too different from indie band members whose parents’ names are blue on Wikipedia. It’s not fair to compare yourself to a nepo baby or someone born with a silver spoon in their mouth. For a very short period of time in the social democratic mid-20th century you finally saw some working class people make it in the arts because they had funding and support from the government to do so and these were our inspiring rags to riches social mobility stories. This was the American Dream. Land of opportunity! And then as you grow up you realise you’re stuck in your place and social mobility isn’t what it used to be and meritocracy is a joke because it’s all about who you know, not what you know. It makes me sad that for every rags to riches “self-made” success story, you have so many others who were equally, or perhaps even more, talented but they never got the big break, didn’t have such good luck, and you’ll never know their names.

I knew that I couldn’t write full time about classic rock forever and I felt the burnout there. I wanted to feel independent for once and so I started looking for jobs and I was depressed about getting rejected again. It destroyed my self esteem even more. I felt totally hopeless. Am I so dumb and useless that no one wants to hire me? My husband kept encouraging me to apply and he sent me a job posting that I was pretty well qualified for and so I took that chance. I did it to make him happy and proud. Little did I know, I would get the job. Depression is still a battle, but I’m proud of how far I’ve come.

How I got a job after years of un(der)employment and disability

Note: I like to keep my work and personal life separate so I will be vague about what my job is. Please respect my privacy regarding my day job. Thank you for understanding.

I have very high expectations of myself and I think it comes from my mother. She’s a high expectations parent. It’s no wonder I’m really hard on myself. But there are some times where I really need to give myself credit and here’s that moment. I didn’t really apply to that many jobs and I wasn’t searching for a job for very long and I ended up employed. That’s something to be really proud of because there are many people who actively search for months and years.

I got this email out of nowhere and at first I thought it was a joke or a scam because it happens all the time, but it turns out it was one of the jobs I was applying for. There were two stages of interviews, one online and the other in person. Previously when applying for jobs I would agonise and stress out like crazy. It didn’t help that I was living below the poverty line and every penny counts so I’d freak out over the bus fare. My anxiety and stress affected my performance in interviews, without a doubt. Thanks to my medication and an attitude change, my anxiety was under control and I approached the interview with more confidence and with an attitude of ‘If I get the job, great! If I don’t, it’s not meant to be.’ It also helped that I was having a good enough week. I did well in the online interview and they said straight away at the end that I’m moving onto the next round. Great news!

I go to the in person interview and once again, I go in calm, but confident, going with the flow. I texted my husband to let him know I’m at the job interview and I’ll text him afterwards when it’s done either with good news or bad news. Not long into the interview, I was straight up offered the job on the spot. I was really proud of myself.

I went from unemployed disabled person to employed and still disabled. When you look at the statistics for people with autism, employment rates are really low. There’s many reasons for this: difficulty reading social cues, anxiety in social situations, the dilemma of whether or not you should disclose your disability – which is a lose/lose situation, and of course all of the stigmas and biases against people with autism. In general with disability, you have to deal with large CV gaps and how do you explain those to a prospective employer? It’s a lot to overcome. I had autism working against me and I had my medical history working against me. How would I overcome this and show that I am indeed capable and well enough to work? I’ll tell you.

Don’t be idle

First, you need to keep busy and do what you can do. Just show up and do your best every day. Do something! Anything! A hobby. Volunteering. Creative pursuits. Think outside the box. Doing these things can give you skills and many of these skills are transferrable. Don’t work for free, skip the unpaid internships. If you’re in a creative field, don’t devalue yourself (and other people in the process) by working for free. Don’t contribute to that race to the bottom. If you’re a creative or an artist, put together a portfolio of your work. Make a website for yourself. Start a blog. Start a podcast. Do something! Take some initiative. It at least shows that you’re not sitting on your butt doing nothing.

I’ve been writing this blog for almost a decade now and that’s my portfolio of my writing work with a little graphic design on the side and some social media marketing too.

When in doubt, just put it down as experience

When I was working on my masters thesis I spoke to a woman who was head of a journalists union. She said that if you’re struggling to find a job, volunteer and put that down as experience. If you run the social media accounts for a charity shop, that counts as experience. If you help livestream or take video of church (or other place of worship, to be inclusive) services, that’s experience too. Do you have a blog or podcast? That counts too! Do you have an Etsy shop or do you sell clothes secondhand on a platform like Depop or Vinted? Have you ever done a pop up shop? That’s work experience! Ever do public speaking? That’s a skill! Heck, do you babysit or dogsit? That’s experience! When in doubt, just put it down as experience and know how to sell it. Job interviews are all about selling yourself and convincing the boss why they should hire you.

I believe what helped me get the job I have now is my experience writing a book, marketing it, and fulfilling orders. I also run this blog, of course, and have interviewed a lot of musicians over the years and reviewed a lot of books and had to complete blog posts to deadlines. That shows planning, responsibility, and initiative. All good characteristics in a worker. By framing my blog and my book as work experience, I was able to successfully close that CV gap. Of course, I also mentioned my freelance jobs on my CV and in the interview.

Take advantage of any free services for jobseekers

I found my job through a jobseeker service that is run by the city council and they have a jobs board online and in person. They offer workshops, CV advice clinics, interview advice clinics, and training opportunities. You pay your taxes for it, take advantage of it. Good luck!

What if I don’t have references?

One of my biggest concerns in the job hunt was not having references because my last freelance job had gone out of business and I have done a couple of collaborations here and there, but I’m not sure if it was enough for them to agree to be a reference for me. I’ve also been out of university for years so I can’t exactly go to one of my professors and ask them to be a reference. Plus, all of them are in a different country.

Luckily my job didn’t ask me for references (I think it’s because I made a really good impression and I really sold my skills, knowledge, and expertise), but my backup plan was to volunteer somewhere and go to an art therapy group that provides character references for attendees. I hope this helps! Best of luck!

Where do we go from here?

I’m not abandoning this blog, but I won’t be posting as regularly as I used to. I’m hoping to write something at least once a month. Great if I can do blog posts fortnightly. But right now I’m in my self care and self improvement era. If I’m not taking care of myself, I can’t be the best writer I can be.

There’s some things in the pipeline for Crime of the Century and I’ll keep you up to date on my social media and make a roundup blog post about all of the Crime of the Century happenings. Yes, in-person events where you can meet me and get a signed copy of the book. Stock update: I have less than 50 books at my house at the moment, so if you want to buy your copy directly through me, don’t delay because I might sell out with all of these events! I hate FOMO marketing, but when you’re a small business, you don’t have the economies of scale of a big business and when you’re a small creator, you don’t have the audience and fanbase of a big creator, so there’s a lot of careful consideration around restocks and doing another print run. When you’re self publishing, print runs come out of your own pocket. That said, ebooks are always available and you can buy them directly through me! The great thing about buying directly through me is no one else takes a cut and I don’t have to wait months for a royalty cheque. I’ll be offering a few sales this summer, so make sure to follow my social media for all the updates.

I also have a couple of books to review and I’ll post the reviews here when they’re done. I’m not gonna make too many promises because I don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver. Anyway, see you soon!

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