Michelle O’Kane

AKA Feisty

Recent Posts

  • listen.

    this is important.

    when she looks at you you know what you are.
    its not easy to take.
    its an unaccustomed sensation.
    it is a deep current. her eyes wake it in you.
    it is something from our deepest core. it is where we all came from.
    before so many things happened.
    before we got wrong ideas.
    before we became liars and cowards and brutes.
    before we lost our colors and faded.
    before we became cardboard.
    before we learned to hate.
    before we knew doubt. back from when we flew like birds.
    she looks you in the eyes and you remember yourself.
    you remember who you are.
    you see who she is.
    it hurts but it has to happen.
    you come out of your own stomach.
    if you can see her, really see her,
    you give birth to yourself.

    nobody else has eyes that can do that.
    only her.
    only her.
    this is a beautiful and pure truth.



  • World Haemochromatosis Awareness Week

    World Haemochromatosis Awareness Week 1-7th June 2025

    Hemochromatosis is a condition where the body absorbs too much iron from food, leading to iron overload. This excess iron can damage organs like the liver, heart, and pancreas, causing serious complications like liver disease, heart problems, and diabetes.

    Haemochromatosis, aka the Celtic Curse, (Or, as I call it, the Celtic Cunt.) is what’s caused nearly all the medical crap that’s happened to this thing I call my body.

    Chronic pancreatitis: √
    Pancreatic tumor: √
    Diabetes: √
    And so on and so on and so one: √

    Iron to overloaded my gall bladder, causing its rupture. And that’s when I woke up with zero idea of who the fuck I was. Where the fuck I was. Or what life I’d been living.

    I’ve typed up a bit about my experience over here. And this site is where I publish stories about living life as an amnesiac.

    The main treatment for hemochromatosis is to remove iron from the body with scheduled visits for phlebotomy. Luckily I’m not scared of needles.

    To be continued.

    A nurse wearing a mask and gloves administers an IV to a patient’s hand in a hospital room. The scene, highlighting Haemochromatosis Awareness Week, includes medical supplies and equipment visible in the background.
    A nurse wearing a mask and gloves administers an IV to a patient’s hand in a hospital room. The scene, highlighting Haemochromatosis Awareness Week, includes medical supplies and equipment visible in the background.

  • Celebrating Life, Death and Peace

    At first, it’s a party. People come over.  They bring food and flowers and booze. They clean. They cook.  How are you? They ask,  because they truthfully want to know.  They bring books and ask you to go on walks.  They plan the memorial. They stay by your side on that day of celebration. Like a birthday party, a memorial celebrates a life. 

    How are you doing?  The soft voices that ask the caring questions start to evolve in tone, speed, intonation. Topics. Conversations evolve into the talk of life. The lives of the living. 

    The memorial is the last phase of people gifting you their time. They must get back to their lives. They must get back to the people in their lives. Friends visit only on weekends. The phone rings less. The walks get shorter and scarcer. The carefully wrapped casseroles stop appearing in the kitchen. The flowers start to wilt, dripping their leaves on the tabletop.  Like snowflakes and people—flowers wilt. 

    But I can’t, I do not return to my life because my life isn’t there anymore. And never will be again. My lives. My worlds. Blah blah blah.

    My friends go out for dinners and take day trips to lakes. My friends eat at home, or the home of friends. They return to their worlds. Silence now permeates what used to be our home. My house is now empty of noise because it is now missing my favorite sound. Now nothing seems right. 

    Now. For whom do I cook?  Who do I cook with? How do I comfort others? How do I adjust to a new life without that person’s existence? In the beginning—disbelief. Shock. A phone that becomes a cold thing that no longer brings me silly messages from the now dead person. I start feeling more feelings. They are feelings that slowly start to whisper away as I acclimate to what’s missing from my life. Missing from my lives.

    Then—then things start seeming kinda normal. I notice that the world is continuing. I cry less. I LOL. I listen to a podcast. I eat breakfast. Then—when I’m kinda functioning without that constant feeling of emptiness, loss, grief—that is when the death hits me. I’ve returned to the normal head space. 

    Life goes on and so do I.

    Right?

    I no longer have shock or disbelief to numb me. I no longer have the fresh, bloody cuts to bandage. All I have are what’s under the now scarred skin:  severed arteries and punctured organs and smokey images. Those things haven’t started healing yet—and I know that the deepest cuts never will. 

    In the passenger seat, I see the stars come out of the sky. Yeah, they’re bright in a hollow sky. You know it looks so good tonight. 

    My sky is exploding. My stars are combusting. I am a passenger. Newly healed and freshly sore. Waiting for my stars to come out of my sky.  

    And I knit and I knit.  A scarf for Darlene. Darlene will smile. I’ll feel her smile in the yarn coming alive in my hands. 

    I can not, I do not, return to my life because my life  isn’t there anymore. And never will be. My life—my world— is lost and I’m still trying to find it.

    My friends go out for dinners and take day trips to lakes. They also eat at home or the home of friends. They return to their worlds. My world is now silent. My house is now quiet. I pick up my yarn. The soft, fuzzy wool I’m gripping is the only reality I can touch. Feel.

    Knitting through my life.

    I’m a passenger in my own life. I’m navigating the unfamiliar, unpredictable, terrain of amnesia. I am knitting together a semblance of connection, one stitch at a time.

    I find myself in the hospital room, I stand next to the bed on which is resting my dead mother. This happens many, many times in indecipherable periods. I’m looking out the window. It is June 14. My birthday–my half birthday–is on the 21st. Summer solstice.

    I stare at the white blinds, which are slanted open. I look through countless strips of shiny white plastic. My gaze creeps across the shutters, to the sky. The sky is blue. I’m standing on the fifth floor of the other wing of The Hospital. The sky is blue. It’s that clear, clear, clear, clean, lightish blue. It is the kind of blue that occurs only for a brief period. It happens on days with a slight breeze and little pollution. Danny and I left the trailer in San Jose. After the call came, around 7:30 a.m., we departed. Danny Lee Clark Junior (he’s dead now, too) was with me. Now, it was around 9:30. It wasn’t yet 10:00. The light would be less clear at 10:00. It would start to look hot. And it was, after all, June. June 14th. 1990. I look at my mother. I look at her. She looks peaceful. I’d never seen her look so peaceful. Ever. The bandage wrapped around the top of her head was neat clean, and white. It only covered the top of her eyebrows. I would not–did not–think about the bloody wound hiding beneath the clean, white dressing. I realized that I’d never seen her face so smooth, the lines around her eyes were softer. Now I stared at her eyelids, which rested. Still.

    I would not–did not–think about the bloody wound hiding beneath the clean, white dressing. I realized that I’d never seen her face so smooth, the lines around her eyes softer. Everything about her makes me think that she was, at last, in peace.

  • Amnesia Or Time Travel

    Amnesia Or Time Travel

    I’m not myself. I’m not Michelle Kathleen O’Kane. I’m just a foggy picture of whatever I once was. 

    Now I’m a fading, static instant photograph. Shake it like a Polaroid picture. Words inside my head shake. Letters and punctuation and quotation marks floating around this turbulent area behind the bones of my skull. 

    The universe, inside my head, is a flat Polaroid picture. I’m searching for light to force emulsion. But this empty brain inside this skull is dark. To dark to develop the lives of all the versions of myself I’ve lived. Now I’m collecting layers—negative and positive layers, which help me diffuse into the infinitely developing images. My lives.

    Time travel is complex. Memories are never the same place twice. 

    This place. This soft gray shawl, my WIP on my bed. On my west elm side table a book waits to be read. Dare To Surrender. By Lilly Feisty. Me.

    Me Before and Me After incessantly converse about me. I wake up while driving in various cars, and I’m always the driver. Cars. I often travel in time. I find myself in the driver’s seat in incongruous cars: 72 Blue Nova, yellow VW rabbit—I got this car when my mother died. Blue Ford Ranger. New. Miata! Purchased that new, too. 

    I received a bit of money when my mom died. So when I turned 18 I could spend my inheritance on whatever the fuck I wanted. I bought house. In Santa Clara. I made a garden. 

    Aware. When I’m driving I surround myself with the color-changing hills. I’m humming along with Elvis Costello.  I’m watching the detectives. (The Angels Wanna Wear) my red shoes. 

    I’m now pointed west, driving 92 toward Half Moon Bay. I’m various makes of cars, all of which I owned. Today I’m driving a clutch—my blue Ford Ranger. This is the car I purchased with the money I received after my mother died. 

    I am now 18, and she’d died just a few months ago, while I was 17. Just before my mother died she’d received several thousand dollars, and then my brother and I inherited that money. So, of course, I spent it. 

    I’ve finally come to realized and understand how crazy I am. 

    I haven’t watched a movie with another person in over 5 years. I haven’t laughed with someone in as many years. A few times something I’m watching or hearing has caused the sound—the sharp chirp of a laugh. The noise scares me. Hearing my own laugh is such an unfamiliar sound that it shocks me. Then, of course, anxiety crushes those feelings and I have no idea why. Or maybe I do, but forgot. 

    I’m jealous of so many things I see on TV. Landscapes and cities and people at tables with white espresso cups. 

    Lives.

  • My Worlds Of Words

    My Worlds Of Words

    Each morning, I wake and find myself still present. I am in a living room, lying on a sofa, observing my hands. They continue to function, holding a fork and bringing mashed potatoes to my mouth.

    A cyclone churns within my mind, with memories and knowledge fragmented by the relentless force of unrealized possibilities.

    My phone says it’s Saturday. I realize I’m at Jake and Gina’s place. I wonder if we slept together.

    Maintaining a semblance of normalcy becomes increasingly difficult. They interact with me based on their understanding of my behavior, although I do not recall these interactions.

    At this moment, my heart beats forcefully, reminiscent of trains on tracks. I cannot recall my address. I share my living space with two other people, one is my son. Each morning, I think of him. His age fluctuates in my memory, sometimes eight, sometimes eleven. I am approximately thirty-six years old.

    Upon waking, the house felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Each morning, confusion persists. My mind is turbulent, resembling a hurricane that hurls debris against the structure of my skull. This debris consists of my fragmented memories.

    I devote significant time to introspection. I realize that I have not left my residence in several days. Others encourage me to go outside, and I am inclined to comply. When they request that I engage in activities, it appears to provide them with reassurance.

    External sounds, such as screeching tires, ambulance sirens, and barking dogs, evoke fear in me. These noises consistently cause distress, though the reason remains unclear.

    I remember getting my clit pierced. I remember lying on a sterile cot, spreading my legs. The male piercer pushed the needle through my flesh. It hurt more than childbirth.

    Words resemble crevices in mountains. I traverse the deteriorating, unclean fissures formed by the scrutiny of others. My heart resists contemplation, analysis, and recollection.

    I cling to my words. My worlds of words. I get lost in the history of a lifetime.

  • ABOUT TIME

    ABOUT TIME

    Here is what is this about. I don’t know what I’m about. Nor does anybody else. 

    Things, like time, are war. Games. War games. Time—is of the essence. I grasp the heavy rifle in my hands. I blast the abyss with bullets of memories, leaving sparkling lights that, slow, dim into the darkness. Often I wish I was still younger. My terrain in my head, then, was a much smaller area to blow up. 

    Time after time—we do not have the luxury of forgetting that time is of the essence. The second hand unwinds. The drum beats out of time. 

    Days and time whirl us up in its violent tornado. Lives living a billion schedules, pattering around the world in an infinitely interactive lacy web. 

    Somewhere. Some wheres. Somethings. Things. My bed. My paintings. My Le Creuset Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven. Blue Azure. 

    Now. I’m a writer. With published books. My published books are romance novels. Now I write my memories. My memories are rarely the same story accurately remembered. So. So I’m forcing myself to scrawl each version of the stories I remember. Then I just try to fit all the pieces together in a way that—fits. Or—doesn’t. 

    I love pretty stories. I love writing. Now I write. Now I’m in the middle of a tornado.  Throwing the letters & words & exclamation points!!!

    My brain is inside my skull. I know this is true because I’ve seen it. Seen images of this. In the X-ray I a tornado, violently rotating within a column of air. cumulonimbus cloud. This whirlwind slices out pieces of what’s left in my mind. 

    A tornado is a violently rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the Earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. It is often referred to as a twister, whirlwind or cyclone

    I’m not sure why. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know why. Even if I knew why, I wouldn’t remember anyway. Time. Flies. 

    Carnival games. Loud. Tacky. Frustrating. Exhausting. But. What isn’t? 

  • Worlds

    Worlds

    I am my own world. My spinning world of love and grief and memories. My world of my worlds. My world of my words.

    At first, it’s a party. People come over.  They bring food and flowers and booze. They clean. They cook.  How are you? They ask,  because they truthfully want to know.  They bring books and ask you to go on walks.  They plan the memorial. They stay by your side on that day of celebration. Like birthday parties, a memorial celebrates a life. 

    The memorial is when people start to float away. They must get back to their lives. They must get back to the people in their lives. My phone rings less. The walks get shorter and scarcer. The carefully wrapped casseroles stop appearing in the kitchen. The flowers start to wilt, dripping their leaves on the tabletop.  Like snowflakes and people—flowers melt. 

    How are you doing?  The soft voices that asked the caring questions start to evolve in tone, speed, intonation. And  topics. Conversations evolve into the talk of life. The lives of the living. 

    But I can’t, I do not, return to my life because my life isn’t there anymore. And never will be again. My life—my world— has been demolished.  

    My friends go out for dinners. They take day trips to lakes. Some of my friends eat at home, or at the home of friends. They return to their worlds. Silence now permeates what used to be our home. My house is now empty of noise.

    Now. For whom do I cook?  Who do I cook with? How do I comfort others? How do I adjust to a new life without my friend’s existence? In the beginning, there’s disbelief and shock. The phone begins to freeze, it no longer brings me silly messages from the now dead person.

    I start feeling more feelings. These feelings of grief slowly start to fade. Every day I awake and acclimate to this strange new life.

    Then—then things start seeming kinda normal. I notice that the world is continuing. I cry less. I lol. I listen to a podcast. I eat breakfast. Then—when I’m kinda functioning without that constant feeling of emptiness, loss, grief—that is when the death hits me. I’ve returned to the normal headspace. 

    I no longer have shock or disbelief to numb me. I no longer have the fresh, bloody cuts to bandage. All I have are what’s under the now scarred skin:  severed arteries and punctured organs and smokey images. .

    And I knit and I knit.  A scarf for Darlene. Darlene will smile. I’ll feel her smile in the yarn coming alive in my hands. 

    I can’t, I do not, return to my life because my life isn’t there anymore.

    Now I’m writing the epilogue.

  • Last Caress

    Like a lot of people, I wake up every morning. I’m sure this is true because I’m alive. Again. I’m in a living room, on a sofa. Staring at my hands. Hands that still move and do things like hold a fork and bring mashed potatoes to my mouth. Later I’ll puke it up. But nobody cares about that.

    A cyclone spins inside my skull, memories and knowledge torn apart by jagged winds of what might have been.

    Happy, sad, embarrassed, confused, disappointed, scared. Disparate. I never remember why I experience these emotions. Sometimes I scream them. Sometimes I dream them.

    My phone tells me that it’s Saturday. I recognize that I am at Jake and Gina’s house. I wonder if we had sex. I I’ll forget this event occurred but I’ll remember the other people. And they won’t forget. Trying to be a little bit normal is increasingly disorienting. these things that happened by me, but not by them. So they interact with me, working with the knowledge of my behavior that I don’t remember.

    And now. My heartbeat’s pounding like trains on tracks. Noisy and clunky and

    r. I don’t remember where I live. I have three roommates, both of whom I like. One of whom is my son. Every morning I wake up and think of him and he’s eight. He’s eleven. And I am thirty-six, about.

    Where I woke up, this house—not familiar or comfortable. Nothing is. Every morning I wake up, filled with confusion. It’s a storm, my brain is a hurricane, throwing thrash at my skull. The trash are my memories. Some of them belong in the trash, and some are there by mistake.

    Moving hurts. My hips and calves, it’s a screeching pain, but the muscles don’t remember the pain from yesterday. I either feel like my ribs are stabbing my lungs or so sad I just cry. Every day.

    I live with Louise, my best friend, and I have done so for over a year. I know it’s been this frame of time because she has told me this and I have written it down. I don’t remember where I wrote it down. Lost notes.

    I do feel at home in my home. I think everything becomes distant when I’m away from it. I think a lot. It occurs to me that I haven’t left my house in days. People tell me to leave my house, and I want to. People tell me to do a lot of things, and the telling me makes them feel good. 

    The sounds of outside are terrifying and intriguing, with a shocking amount of screeching. I have no reason or recollection of why things like sounds scare me. But I only remember sounds.

    I remember that I got my clit pierced. I remember spreading my legs on a sterile bed so he could stick the needle through my clit. The piercing hurt more than childbirth. I remember that a few weeks later that barbell fell out of my clit, on the playa. But I don’t remember this morning. 

    I am walking and it’s getting dark. I’m glad that I remembered to wear shoes because the cement is hot. Earlier, I watched the news. The person on Jake’s television told me it was going to be over 95 today. The person was a woman. She smiled in a way that brought up the entire left side of her mouth in a straight line. I only watched her because I wanted to see if her mouth would touch her nose. She had a small waist. I imagined her driving a Saturn, with two doors. Just two doors for Ms. Sunshine. 

    My legs feel like drumsticks and I keep dropping them. Clink click clicking clap. The cement, the concrete, the sound of gravel under my drumsticks, is a grimy rhythm. Like my memories, rolling in dirt and being trampled by objects. Words hurt.

    Words are crevices in mountains, and must be waded and climbed through. My drumstick legs are walking in the crumbling dirty crevices of other peoples’ stares. My heart hates thinking, figuring, remembering. I gave my life away. Now he has my son. I have no ability to hear that voice of the person—that person who will always sound like my son. It’s another sound I made and I wish I hear it every day. 

    I don’t have a phone. I live somewhere far away. My drumstick legs can’t make a steady beat as we clank up the rocky mountains. I can’t walk home. I can’t walk into the ether–even it’s mine.

  • Then I was like,

    Then I was like,

    I’m not myself. I’m not Michelle. I’m not Michelle Kathleen. Nor Lilli Feisty. 

    I’m a foggy picture of whatever I once was. 

    Instant photograph. I’m searching for light to provoke my emulsion. I’m collecting layers—negative and positive layers, which helps to me diffuse into the infinitely developing image. My image.

    This place. The soft grey shawl, my knitting on my bed. The book on my nightstand. French. Forgetting is complex. I’m constantly trying to tie where I am with things I remember. 

    My life once encompassed a world—and my heart aches because I’ll never travel to other continents and I remember that world. I remember taking continents. As a child growing up in the Redwood forest I lived in a never-ending story. 

    I wake up while driving in various cars, and I’m always the driver. Toay280, approaching the 101/92 exchange. Aware. While I’m driving I surround myself with the color-changing hills. I’m humming along with Elvis Costello.  I’m watching the detectives. (The Angels Wanna Wear) My Red shoes. 

    I’m now pointed west, driving to Half Moon Bay. I’m in various makes of cars, all of which I owned. Today I’m driving a clutch—my blue Ford Ranger. This is the car I purchased with money I received after my mother died. I am now 18, and she’d died just a few months ago. She died during surgery for removal of the “golfball sized” tumor in her brain.

    I drive past memories. The Half Moon Bay Nursery, on the south side of 92.  on the south side of the road and now I’m just starting to drive through the outskirts of the town. My town. My ocean and sea salt and blue blue blue sky and sea, white wavy clouds tying the sun and sea together. 

    I’ve finally come to realized and understand how crazy I am. 

    I haven’t watched a movie with another person in over 5 years. I haven’t laughed with someone in as many years. A few times something I’m watching or hearing has caused the sound—the sharp chirp of a laugh. The noise scares me. Hearing my own laugh is such an unfamiliar sound that it shocks me. Then, of course, I’m sad. 

    I’m rolling myself down a hill. I’m rolling across the green, twinkling grass and behind me is the grass, a 5’4” lane that I’m creating as I roll away.

    I’m jealous of many things I see on instagram– landscapes and cities and people at tables with white espresso cups. Budapest. Prague. Vienna.

    Lifes.

  • Instinct and the Spotless Mind

    Instinct and the Spotless Mind

    The first time I picked up a pencil to write I used my right hand. Instinct.

    “Through learning we form memories, and those memories build on instincts to allow beneficial behavior.” MIT

    2020, Reno

    One day my gall bladder ruptured. So my friends called 911, and I went through emergency surgery to have my gallbladder removed. I woke up with 99% of my existence erased.

    I couldn’t remember anything — any person or place or thing. Or books that I had read. And books I’d written.

    I couldn’t write because I couldn’t remember what I was writing. This caused me to stumble off a rocky cliff and plunge into a stormy ocean of vodka.

    But writing is like being right-handed — it’s instinct. So now I have scribbles of memories on paper. Somewhere.

    I have healthcare! A hospital neuropsychologist evaluated me. I now have financial assistance because I was diagnosed as being severely mentally disabled.

    Me, my other selves and I write about tripping. Falling. Landing into a piece of time to who we used to. Who we want to become. Who we are—now. 

    I’m never sure what is now.

    Now. I’m never sure which hand to use to pick up a pen. Or an eraser. Or a metaphor.

    Writing is still my strongest instinct. The accident never changed that.
    So. Here I am. 

    Remembering. 

    Forgetting. 

    Destroying

    Creating.

    Knitting.