In Which I Was Disturbed Over a Norse Myth, and What I Did About It

I'm submitting a short story of mine to a literary magazine, and it just made me realize a very interesting place to get ideas for writing - things that disturb you.

And I don't just mean in the sense of "things that scare you". I'm referring to when you hear or see or learn something that bothers you so much that you can't get it out of your mind and it keeps nagging at you and making you perpetually uncomfortable. It can be a real-life concern that disturbs you. It can be a philosophical concept with arguable bearing on real life. It can be a philosophical concept with tremendous bearing on real life. It can be a decision someone (maybe yourself) made that you're perfectly comfortable with except for one small fact. Really, it can be anything.

The thing that disturbed me and inspired this piece of fiction was a Norse myth that I read about two years ago in a class I took on the subject of Norse myths. At least, it was supposed to be a Norse mythology class. It turned into more of a "Why Loki is awesome" class. (I had the privilege of being introduced to the character of Loki through the actual Norse myths rather than the Marvel films, so I am therefore able to appreciate him on a completely different level.) We basically read a bunch of Norse myths (most of which involved Loki) and talked about them.
Now, the day finally came in which we read "The Binding of Loki". The way the teacher introduced it, she made it sound like, "Okay, everyone, the fun is over. Time for something serious and sad." And the way one of my classmates (who was the most knowledgeable about and fond of Loki) reacted to it, he made it sound like, "Oh no, this is sad."

I won't spoil the story for anyone who hasn't read it and would like to, but it doesn't end well for Loki. It ends with him in a painful and hellish situation (involving being chained up with a snake's venom dripping over him). It leaves him really unable to go anywhere or do anything and it somewhat brings to mind the end of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (minus the specifics of being turned into a blob of living jelly). He wasn't able to trickster his way out of it. He was stuck there until Ragnarok (and, if you think the Norse myths are true - which I don't, but I frequently imagine stories to be true - then he's stuck there still).

The thought of something like that happening to this beloved character was very upsetting and it stuck with me for quite a while. I couldn't stop thinking of Loki chained up with snake's venom dripping over him, and it all culminated in a short story written at around midnight when I couldn't sleep. It's very...abstract, one might say, and other than the fact that the Loki myth is mentioned a few times in the story (with the narrator comparing himself to Loki) and that the narrator finds himself in a similar position at the end, it really doesn't bear much resemblance to the story at all. However, I needed to get out my feelings regarding the story about Loki, which disturbed me and upset me that much.

What's funny is that, almost as soon as I wrote the story, I felt better about the story. It wasn't that I realized it was just fiction. It was that I did something with the feelings I had. I took the story and made something out of it. Maybe it was because I showed myself that I had power over it - power enough to make something out of it. I'm not really sure why the bad feelings stopped, but the point is, they did, and what's more, I got a story out of it.

It was a silly thing to get upset over. It was a very silly thing to be "disturbed" over, certainly. But the fact was, I was bothered by something, and I made art based on the thing that was bothering me. It was something I'd heard that I could not let go (or that would not let me go - I'm not sure which was the case). And now I have a story to which I am submitting to a literary magazine.

If you ever come across some information or situation that makes you feel viscerally uncomfortably and will not let you go, try making some sort of art out of it. Even if it doesn't make you feel one bit better, you will at least have something to show for it. And not only will that mean you've brought another wonderful thing into the world (because all art is, in its way, wonderful), you'll have exercised some power over the thing because you used it to create.

The Vegetable Game

I have recently made a great discovery. Specifically, it is that of how to get kids to eat their vegetables.

It involves playing something called the Vegetable Game.

The rules of the game are as follows: you put a piece of the vegetable in front of the child, and you repeat the name of the vegetable in increasingly comical tones. If the kid laughs, they have to eat the vegetable piece. (Eating a piece of the vegetable, to prove that it's not poisonous and for your own nutrition, is optional). You continue playing until the kid has consumed their entire serving.

I was playing this last night with my little cousin, who did not want to eat her cucumbers. She had three slices in front of her, and I told her that, if I could get her to laugh by saying "cucumber", she'd have to eat a slice.

It worked. It more than worked. It worked so well, she actually enjoyed the game and ate way more than the bare minimum of three slices of cucumber. It was also tremendous fun for me (finally, my debatable skills as a comedic actor can be used) and it was effective in getting her to eat.

This of course only works if you have a kid who can actually agree to such a game, but things do work more easily when you turn them into games, and the Vegetable Game is a very fun game for both parties involved. Supervisors of children, go forth in this knowledge of a new, exciting way to get kids to eat vegetables.

When Stress Ruins Fun

First off, I apologize for how little I've been blogging lately. Things have come up in life, and it hasn't helped that, try though I might, I haven't really been able to find anything to blog about that might be of any interest to anyone else.

That said, in the midst of the relative business of my life (going out and doing things with family members, getting things together for my upcoming return to school, things such as that), I've learned something that I probably should have understood long ago and that I understand now and that I think is relevant to everyone.

For a while, I understood that my aunt, sister, and sister's friend were going to go out and do some fun activities together, which I had been looking forward to partaking in along with them. (Yes, I'm a boring, dull introvert, but sometimes I like to get out and do stuff with other people.) They'd been planning this event for some weeks now, and though I wasn't very involved in the planning (it was mostly my sister's affair), I knew I was allowed to come along if I wanted. They were going to go to the movies, hang out in enjoyable public places, and go back to my aunt's house for a Doctor Who marathon. These are the sorts of things I tend to find very fun and enjoyable, and I was counting on having a good time.

What no one was counting on was how absolutely busy life got in the days preceding that. It wasn't that anything big or even stressful happened; it was just that I found myself, in the days coming before the supposed day of fun, I got dragged along to do other things with and for other people. Some of them were also fun (like meeting a friend at the summer fair my town has every year), some of them were more along the lines of jobs and work done for other people (like babysitting young, rambunctious cousins), some of them were just events I had to go to for the sake of other people (like my cousin's fifteenth birthday party). But because I found myself caught up in other activities, all of them one after another, I found myself stressed-out enough so that I just knew that, if I went with my aunt and sister on their little adventures, I would not enjoy it for lack of energy and excess amounts of stress.

Something fairly interesting happened the day before we were going to follow up on our plans, however. I had a bit of a breakdown.

It wasn't huge; it mostly involved me getting very tense and nervous and needing to hide from other people lest my being around them cause me to be even more nervous. I couldn't interact with people in the relatively polite and sociable manner that I'm typically able to interact with them. I had trouble forming sentences, and when someone came to talk to me, my thoughts always followed the lines of, "How can I get out of this as soon as possible?" I was in survival mode, and I was not having fun.

I don't know if this is the result of my clinically-diagnosed anxiety or if it's my often life-impeding introversion or if it's just an odd quirk of mine, but when I do high-energy things of any nature, I find them inherently anxiety-inducing. I could be having an excellent time, doing exciting things that I absolutely love doing, but I'm still experiencing anxiety. Maybe I just acknowledge the fact that excitement is a form of anxiety, and that being "anxious" doesn't necessarily mean one is "nervous", but having a good time stresses me out and tires me, and I need to recover from it. And I had been doing anxious things (some enjoyable, some not-so-enjoyable) for quite a few days in a row, and I had to stop.

This made me very unhappy, because I had been looking forward to what my aunt and sister were doing, and I wanted to do them. But I couldn't. The energy was not there. My anti-stress levels were depleted. I couldn't even deal with minor social interactions, and all I wanted was to be left alone. Thinking about the following day's fun events were not helping, and they only made it worse. When the fear of activities became even greater than the stress that would probably result from them and not worth the enjoyment I would get, I knew I'd had enough. 

After calming down somewhat, I explained this to my aunt and sister, who were fortunately very accepting of the fact, even though they would miss my company. (My family is, in general, very accepting of the fact that I experience more stress than usual people, even if they don't always understand some of the things it makes me do.) I compared it to someone who has heart problems and has gone with their friends to an amusement park whose rides would cause health problems if they rode them. It would be wiser if the person didn't go on the rides, but they'd really want to, and perhaps going on the rides wouldn't kill them, but it would certainly put them in a great deal of discomfort and pain that should have been avoided.

It was telling them this that I realized my anxiety really is a health limitation. It keeps me from doing things that I would enjoy, and it makes a number of everyday activities more difficult. I can't drive because my fear of driving and the sense of panic that has always happened the few times I've gotten behind the wheel has kept me from learning how. In stores, I never ask people for help with finding things because I don't trust my ability to make coherent sentences when put in the terrifying position of explaining something to a stranger. I have to use the self-checkout at grocery stores because interacting with cashiers, while finally possible now, is more trouble than it's worth. It's a health limitation, and I've been so used to living that way, I've failed to realize it.

I understand that anxiety like that isn't something most post people actually have to deal with on a regular basis, but I do think there's something I learned from this that anyone can appreciate. Sometimes, we don't know our limits or else we willfully ignore them, and sometimes it takes the aftermath of pressing ourselves to realize that the limits even exist. All of us only have so much we can take where things are concerned, and we sometimes have to feel it to know it. Fortunately, I was able to find my limits before anything terribly bad came of them, and hopefully other people can learn how to do the same.