health — Blog — Maya Beck

yo! yo! chekeraccho!

I have been lost in a forest-sized into a carefully balanced breakfast plate of Achievement, Contentment, Sickness, and Rest. I return bearing a cornucopia of updates:

First, I’ve split my website into this one, my all-rounder writer website, and the Sumayyah Beck website, which will focus on children’s literature. For now, they are identical, but I hope to have that one be a more focused and chibi version of this one, with no blog or curriculum vitae but with school event booking info.

Second, I’ve had a blog out for a while about the naming practices I learned writing my novel.

Fun fact: the main character's name came about when I was wondering the origin of the name Darell, which is—to me—a rather black name.

I get a little sad when people mispronounce the main character’s name as “Ariel.” She's not the new Little Mermaid! She’s a French Huckleberry! 😾

Most important of my updates is that my first school event was a delight!

Look at that lovely staff! I did a reading and signing as part of a literacy night.

My sister-in-law, who made it all happen, even made bookmarks! Aren't they cute?

(Technically, she's my partner's sister, but I love her, so she is my sister now too. Her nephews are utter delights, and so they are my nephews to spoil. 💕 Armenians are similar enough to Black people that it’s pretty easy to see my partner’s family as my family.)

I even had an author table!

With a witch hat!

I plan for my second school event to be at the school where I work—I’m realizing that how much I love getting to work with/for children. ☺️

It reminds me of how I entertained the idea of becoming a middle school teacher for a while. I wanted to work with, and learn from, the age group I was writing for. There was a kidlit blogger I used to follow in the 2010 who did exactly that, but I can’t recall his name… Rick Riordan also works at a middle school, iirc…

——

Anywho, the other most important update is that I was on a panel at World Fantasy Con!

I'm still not sure how I was invited, but I guess I'm less invisible than I feared. It was nice to meet & reunite with some Clarion folks and meet the folks behind some of my fave lit mags. Unfortunately, I came down with a cold (downside of working at a school, I suppose 😷), so I limited my socializing.

Still, I came away with the energy to attend more SFF conventions! I'd forgotten how much fun it was.

On the health & sickness front, I have a surgery scheduled in December and have been scheduling consultations and MRIs and all the associated to-do. I don't have anything to say about my condition that hasn't been better said by Lupita Nyong’o, but this is a good reason to wind down and take it easy for a while.

My cold has since developed into a cough, after all.

Or has it just aggravated my asthma?

Or do I have bronchitis again?

Oh, anything, everything, many things; all I know is that I’ve been coughing and sickly lately.

In a past life, I died of pneumonia shortly after agreeing to tutor the Queen of Sweden, because she had me waking up at 5am and commuting in the January cold! So I’ve got to be careful not to let that happen again.

On the personal front, I have been formally diagnosed with autism:

This surprises nobody who knows me well, especially not my partner, my therapist, or the friends who peer-reviewed me. This also is a big “duh” to 20-something Maya of the past, who had a secret account identifying as an Aspie, but it probably would surprise the therapist I had from 2015-202.

My official report recommends that I read one of the writers I saw live at the KPBS Book Festival, whose book I already saved because I was interested. Plus, she is local and a fellow member of a group I'm part of. Yay, twinsies!

I've been working with a therapist who specializes in autism for a while, and therapy that assumes I'm on the spectrum was so very effective that I wanted to wipe out that last bit of lingering doubt. I've struggled for years with social overwhelm and difficulty interpreting ambiguous communication, but now I have at least two (2) medical professionals who believe me.

I've been trying to turn masking into a skill that I consciously turn on like code-switching rather than a defense mechanism that activates when I feel unsafe—this does require me to be aware when I'm masking and aware when it’s safe to unmask. The diagnosis gives me a path forward, but that path still requires a lot of work on my part. I’ve got to get better at reaching out for support, decrease my social demands, learn to listen to my body, be okay with people misinterpreting me, and start letting people know that anything indirect and oblique is not going to reach me, lol.

My least favorite things about having The Type of Brain That Takes Things Literally and Needs to be Told Things Explicitly is that sometimes people respond to differences with assumptions—which is exactly what I don’t need. I hate when people assume they know what I’m capable of without asking me, or when they give me things I didn’t ask for and become offended when I point out that I didn’t ask for them. My lifelong homework will be to more quickly identify and avoid assumption-driven people in favor of people who understand concepts like consent and preferences.

Even before the diagnosis, I started working on another kidlit novel, although it’s YA. It’s based on myself as an awkward homeschooled teen. I wanted to challenge myself to write something with a voice close to this blog, which has my everyday casual (unmasked?) voice. Airrelle is written in a children’s version of my literary voice, after all; influenced more by the classic kid’s literature I grew up reading than the contemporary kid’s literature I’ve been reading recently. Let’s see how contemporary we can do.

I’d been writing the character as subtly autistic-coded since most of my favorite characters are. But now I suppose I can make it supertext instead of text. So yes, my next book is about a Black autistic girl whose special interest is magical girls, in a world where magical girls have been an envious reality ever since a beautiful alien made first contact.

PS: I’m kinda proud of America right now, corny as that is. I’m disappointed in California, though.