#but those feelings still cling to me and I'm still grieving my drive for that other fic

[lavenoon]

Hey there, friendly reminder that you are awesome, amazing, and astoundingly talented! <3

Aaa hi Fan!! Making me melt too, I see 💜

🤲 what do YOU get out of writing?

I get to reread my own stuff, in more detail than if I just tried to remember an idea or daydream, and it feels much more tangible written down! I still reread fic I never published because it's just for me, and sometimes surprise myself with scenes I had entirely forgotten! So I'm very glad I wrote them down <3

There's also definitely the engagement/ interaction for published fic. Like yes, I shouldn't make anything dependent on that, but it's just so so validating and fun to hear from other people, and to enjoy something together! I'm very happy I get to share my ideas, and have people be excited for them <3

💋 when you leave comments on a fic, do you want to hear back from the writer?

Answered a bit more in depth here, but in short, I definitely enjoy it! I never want the author to feel pressured though, it's just a little bonus treat <3

🕯️ how do you think engaging with each other through tumblr, twitter, comments, kudos, creates healthy fandom experiences? How do you deal with that if you're not a social person/experience social anxiety?

There's the difference between worth and validation - you may know as a writer (or artist, creator of any kind) that your work has worth, but the validation is what makes you want to share it. If you don't feel like anyone reads your work, why would you continue publishing it? It doesn't mean you necessarily stop writing, but to post something you created means being vulnerable and putting a piece of yourself out there. If there's just no engagement, it feels like rejection.

Fandom is about interaction. We all want to share thoughts and ideas and theories, and it is vital to engage with what is there. That doesn't mean everyone needs to comment on everything! But if you read something, and you enjoy it, you definitely should leave some sort of "I liked this" reaction.

For the socially anxious folks, or people with few social spoons, there's always the options of likes and kudos - as long as these people don't make up the vast majority of a fandom, engagement will easily continue flowing even without explicit words from them! There's also anon options, or those pre-made html codes for more kudos, or other very simple comments (like just "extra kudos!" without any html) that still let an author know you liked it!

Plus, especially if it's anxiety making the engagement hard... The author did the same? Bearing a piece of themself for others to see, and as long as you don't waltz in and just point out all flaws without saying anything else, why would they not enjoy hearing from you? Comments give the author an idea what was good, what might need elaboration, and what ideas resonate!

Some people feel more comfortable on tumblr, some more on discord, some more in a different constellation - but please, please make an effort to engage. It's what keeps things going - you can't just "consume" and not give anything back, if everyone did that, creators would burn out like a flash fire and stop publishing things. I know I did. It's worth the anxiety, it's worth the effort, and a little bit can go a long way. I'm anxious any time I post, and I still do it! So as a creator I just want to hear from people that it was worth it for me, too, that it's received well. Find a form of engagement that works for you, but engage - otherwise, in time, there won't be anything to engage with.

🧿 what steps do you take to not take things personally if a fic doesn't do well, or if your writing/posting/sharing experience isn't going how you'd like it to?

Uh, admittedly, not too many. My rsd and anxiety unfortunately tend to make me catastrophize, and mostly it's damage control, not prevention.

What I do do is look at what engagement I did get - every kudos/ comment is a person, and even if it doesn't seem much, those are real people who like my work. Every bookmark means someone wants to see more. Those already mean a lot, and I remind myself to not get caught up in numbers - with private bookmarks, all the people who bookmarked AU might not even fit into my home! That's so so many people! Even my other fic, which runs at 16 bookmarks - that's a lot of people in a room!

So in short, I visualize the engagement I get as actual people, remind myself that was a real person who took time out of their day to let me know they liked my work! It's really never happened to me that there's no one who interacted with my work, and even if there were... Well, I already write a lot for just myself or friends, things that I don't necessarily share with the wide public, so I know where to go to find the validation I crave, and sometimes that validation is just keeping things entirely to myself and reread them again and again <3

[sineala]

I'm a different anon but I want those paragraphs of why you don't ship Steve/Bucky. I got into Stony by way of MCU!Stucky, so something I struggle with Stony fics (of any fandom) is feeling the Stony chemistry when Bucky is present as a character. With my very selective gay-ified memory of a very small slice of Marvel canon, I just feel like Steve probably wouldn't go for Tony if Bucky is an option? But I recognize I have very little evidence for this opinion other than shared 1940s life exp.

Okay. For the five of you who, I guess, sincerely want to know why I don't ship 616 Steve/Bucky. Here goes.

I get why people ship MCU Steve/Bucky. They had a lot of comics material to draw on when deciding how to present Captain America in the MCU, and they intentionally chose and shaped a story that would make Bucky incredibly important to Steve; the combination of factors they arranged is such that no one else in the MCU is going to be able to be what Bucky is to Steve, although certainly other characters can be meaningful to Steve in different ways.

The MCU started off by borrowing from Ults, as they did for much of the MCU, and making Bucky Steve's childhood best friend as well as WWII teammate. They structured the plots of the Cap movies so as to make Bucky very important to Steve in all of them. In CATFA, rescuing Bucky was Steve's motivation to finally become Captain America, in the sense of actually going off and using his newfound abilities to fight evil. And then Bucky dies, which they arrange so that we can actually see Steve grieving for him (rather than a scenario closer to 616 in which they both go down at the same time). They also had the advantage of knowing that they next wanted to adapt The Winter Soldier arc, a storyline in which Bucky comes back -- so, since they knew that, they were able to take the "man out of time" quality of Steve and refine it and aim it, narratively, so that Steve is adrift in this strange future, and even though he connects with Sam and Natasha in CATWS (as well as the other Avengers in the team movies) they really set it up so that for him Bucky is the person who represents his past, who knows the "real" Steve who isn't Captain America, who has all this shared life experience that no one else can match. After Peggy dies in CACW, there is no one but Bucky who knows Steve from before the ice.

Recently I saw while checking fannish news sites that Chris Evans described Bucky as Steve's home. And, man, if that's what they're going for, I can see it. I mean, they've done three movies where one of the major things that drives the plot, in each of these movies, is the fact that Steve has some intense feelings for Bucky -- the rescue in CATFA, the, uh, entire plot of CATWS, and Steve trying to find Bucky and keep him safe in CACW. Bucky clearly means a hell of a lot to him, and Steve's plots have centered on having Bucky as his friend and ally. Why shouldn't you ship Steve with this guy who is his home? I get the impulse.

And I feel like I should start out by saying all this because I see all these things that people like about MCU Steve/Bucky. This is my understanding of what people like about MCU Steve/Bucky. What MCU Steve and Bucky have are all extremely romantic things for your OTP to have; if this is what you see in them, I see why you ship it in the MCU. But I don't think any of what people like about MCU Steve/Bucky is there for them in 616. At all.

I'm not saying this because I don't like 616 Bucky, because I do. I like him a lot! He's great! But... I don't ship him with 616 Steve. I don't really see it, not when there are other choices I see a lot better. (Like Tony.)

Where I am coming from in terms of my familiarity with comics: I've read some but not all of Golden Age Cap and none of the fifties Commie Smasher stuff. I've read a fair amount of Silver Age and Modern Cap comics, including the 1970s Invaders run, which is my primary point of reference for pre-retcon WWII Steve & Bucky. After v1, I've read Waid's v1/v3, most of the parts of Brubaker's run that Steve was alive for (including WWII-set work like The Marvels Project), and, God help me, most of Remender and all of everything after. So I acknowledge that I haven't read everything with Steve & Bucky and it's possible that there's something with 616 Steve/Bucky content that I haven't read that would really sway me, but if there is, I haven't heard about it.

Right. So, first off, one of the big differences is that Steve and Bucky aren't childhood friends, did not grow up together, and in fact did not meet until Steve was already Captain America. Steve's best friend as a child, in a retcon from the early 80s, was a kid named Arnie Roth. Not Bucky. So right there, if one of the things you like about Steve/Bucky in the MCU is the intimacy of the fact that Bucky knows who Steve was before the serum -- well, he doesn't in the comics. They don't have that.

I don't know if Bucky's age in WWII was ever explicitly given, pre-retcon -- Brubaker has put his age at sixteen -- but he was very definitely depicted as a kid sidekick, pubescent if not pre-pubescent (to me, he looks like he's about twelve), in the vein of Golden Age kid sidekicks everywhere, until Brubaker's run in 2005. MCU was working with the age retcons already in (actually, more like the ages from Ults), so if you're a MCU fan, Steve and Bucky have always been close to the same age, and their relationship has been one of equal or near-equal teammates and close friends. The retcons have pushed 616 Steve/Bucky closer to the same age -- when they met, now Steve would have been 20 and Bucky 16 -- but this really hasn't been the case for the majority of the years Marvel Comics has been going. Bucky has spent the majority of his fictional 616 life being Steve's (dead) kid sidekick, and if you're going to slash them in 616 you have to either accept that this does not bother you and you're going to use evidence of their friendship from that kid-sidekick time period to lend credence to your shipping, or you're going to restrict yourself to only material published after 2005, of which there... isn't much. (More on this later.)

This is personal preference on my part, I am aware, but the mentor/kid sidekick dynamic is not one that does a lot for me in terms of a romantic pairing; I think I'd have a hard time seeing pre-retcon 616 Steve/Bucky in a way that wouldn't paint it as, uh, kind of a fucked-up thing for Captain America to do with his kid sidekick, on account of the age/experience gap. It is a squick for me. And, yeah, I know that Bucky's not a kid now, and that the retcon evens out the age gap, but I think the fact that there's so much canon (even recent canon ignoring the retcon!) in which Bucky is a kid makes it hard for me to... just ignore it. That's a me problem. I know. And even when he's not an actual kid he's still a sidekick, which is that same dynamic, just less extreme. It's just hard for me to get over that in 616; in MCU, the Steve/Bucky fans have never had to get over that.

And, okay, yes, Steve does have some intense feelings about Bucky in 616 -- but they're essentially a one-sided relationship, because Steve's intense feelings are basically "being sad that Bucky is dead." He feels personally responsible for Bucky's death; MCU Steve mourns Bucky, certainly, as a lost friend, but 616 Steve's power differential over Bucky is a lot greater. He was a kid, Steve was supposed to protect him, and he let him down. It's different. Anyway, we see a lot more dead Bucky than we do live Bucky. One of Steve's major characterization points, especially in early Silver Age canon, is that he regrets that he couldn't save Bucky. Bucky is basically a narrative trope, a source of pain for Steve, not a living character with motivations and agency and so on and so forth who Steve is regularly interacting with. Prior to Brubaker, Bucky was dead. Dead dead dead. Not coming back, never going to come back. So the comics weren't really structured like the MCU films are, where this hanging thread of Bucky's death in CATFA is neatly resolved by his return to life in the next movie -- in the comics, he died, he was dead, and he was gonna stay dead forever. MCU viewers didn't have to wait nearly forty years, real-time, to see Bucky come back after his death was retconned into Avengers #4. Comics readers did. This has some pacing consequences for the comics.

So, yeah, sure, 616 Steve grieved Bucky's death. He made Rick Jones dress up as Bucky and be his new teen sidekick (side note: what the fuck, Steve?). There are a bunch of plots where he thinks Bucky is alive again but it isn't really Bucky and he's sad all over again. Or plots where he's a man out of time and he misses the past and misses Bucky. I'm not saying those don't exist, or that they're not evidence that Steve cares, because Steve certainly cares. But the thing about the pacing of all this is that eventually they stop doing those plots. Over time he connects with new people, modern people, civilians and superheroes, his fellow Avengers and his new sidekicks. Eventually Steve settles in and lives in the present and his life is no longer about missing the past and he's finally accepted who he is and when he is. (I feel like this is something MCU Steve hasn't really had the chance to do.) And it's long after he's accepted this that Bucky finally comes back into his life. If they’d brought Bucky back to life in, say, 1965, it might have been different, but as it is Steve definitely has a place in the modern world by the time he meets Bucky again, and he doesn't have to cling to Bucky as the sole focus of the past he desperately wants to return to -- because that's not who he is anymore. So if one of the things you like about MCU Steve/Bucky is Bucky being particularly special to Steve in this way, as a continued focus of intense feeling, you're not going to find the exact same thing in 616. There's grief, but then there's acceptance, and then there's... a whole lot of time Steve doesn't spend thinking about Bucky. There is a lot of Cap canon and it's not all about Bucky. Or even mostly about Bucky.

Building on that, the idea of Bucky as the best possible romantic partner for Steve specifically in terms of shared life experience is one of the big draws of MCU Steve/Bucky, as I understand it -- the idea that no one else has this shared life experience. And this is also another one of the things that is absolutely not true of 616. When Steve came back to life in 616, it was 1964. World War II had ended less than twenty years ago. If Steve hadn't gone into the ice he would have been in his early 40s. There were a whole lot of people walking around with shared life experience, and the comics knew that and used it. Pretty much everyone he served with other than Bucky was still alive! His childhood friend Arnie was still alive in the 1980s! Over the years, Steve builds various friendships with a bunch of people he served with or otherwise knew in the war: Fury, Fury's Howling Commandos, Logan, Natasha, Namor, the rest of the Invaders! Granted, some of this has gotten more and more improbable as we get farther out from World War II time-wise but that doesn't make it canonically untrue. Bucky definitely isn't the only person hanging around Earth-616 who has served in World War II. If that's Steve's criterion, he has options, is what I'm saying. There are other people out there who understand where he's coming from. He's not alone if he doesn't have Bucky.

While I'm at it, the commonality of Steve and Bucky being super-soldiers together also isn't a thing that exists in 616 in exactly the same way. Bucky was never experimented on in captivity; he did get the metal arm and was naturally an excellent sniper. In Fear Itself he is, IIRC, boosted to peak-human when Fury saves him with the Infinity Formula, but this isn't a thing that makes him and Steve unique, because there are plenty of super-powered people running around Earth-616. I mean, if you're going to say that Steve should date someone who's a super-soldier because only a fellow super-soldier can understand that aspect of Steve, then that's a lot of people in 616, up to and including Tony at certain points in his life. (Because, yes, Extremis was a super-soldier program.)

There's also the fact that, well, if you want to ship Steve and Bucky in 616, they don't exactly have a lot of canon together. If you ship 616 Steve/Tony, they have a lot of canon. The Cap-IM Slashy Moments List has about 200 moments, and those are just the bits people think are the absolute slashiest -- Steve and Tony have been in, at this point, close to two thousand comics together. This is not the case for Steve and Bucky. If you're willing to consider pre-retcon Steve/Bucky, you have the Golden Age Cap comics, and you have the 70s Invaders comics, as well as a few flashback issues of Cap here and there. I really enjoy the Invaders comics -- they're a whole lot of fun -- and they do portray Steve and Bucky as great teammates who get along well, but not, I think, in a particularly slashy way. If you want to look only at post-retcon Steve/Bucky, you are limited to comics after 2005. Steve unfortunately died pretty soon after Bucky came back to life -- so they don't really interact -- and then Steve stays dead until 2010, and after that they... still don't really interact much. They never serve on an Avengers team together. Bucky appears only infrequently in Steve's book. I never finished reading Brubaker's run so there may be some canon I am missing but no one has told me about it being particularly slashy for Steve/Bucky; I am told they do interact some in Brubaker's Winter Soldier run, if you want to read them in a book together, but I have not heard anything particularly slashy about it or, indeed, most of their other interactions. As far as I can tell, Brubaker goes straight for the Bucky/Nat in terms of romance, when Bucky comes back, right from the very beginning.

It's clear when Steve and Bucky do interact that they're good friends and that they have fond memories of serving together, and Bucky is closer to Steve than the rest of the Invaders are, probably, but you're not going to find a deep relationship where Bucky is everything to Steve. To the best of my recollection, the last time I saw them together on page in a non-WWII setting having any kind of prolonged conversation was in Avengers Standoff and then Secret Empire, and for most of their interaction, Steve was Hydra. I guess there was that scene at the beginning of Standoff where Bucky cooked him eggs in that diner. That was Real Steve. And that was two entire years ago.

(Okay, the bit after Fear Itself where Steve punches Fury in the face because he's mad Fury lied and didn't tell him Bucky was alive again is pretty great. I will give you that.)

I know that there are two 616 miniseries that MCU Steve/Bucky fans enjoy. One is Captain America: White, and the other is Captain America: Man Out of Time. Cap White is a WWII-set miniseries but it is also one in which the creators have definitely gone hard for kid-sidekick Bucky, so I feel like it's hard to really get a lot of slashiness there. And then there's Man Out of Time, which as we all know tackles Steve's origin story, and it shows how important Bucky is to Steve and how poorly Steve initially fits into the modern world by making him determined to go back in time to the forties. And he does, in fact, go back in time, albeit to a time after Bucky's death. But the thing about Man Out of Time, for me, is that ultimately, Steve chooses the future. When he has to pick between the past and the future, he picks the future. He picks the Avengers. And at the end we see Steve at the Grand Canyon, where Bucky always wanted to go, and, yes, he's obviously thinking of Bucky... but he has, in the end, made a choice to stay with the Avengers, and that's one of the things I actually love the most about Man Out of Time. Steve gets an opportunity to stay in the forties and he instead makes a conscious choice to go be an Avenger.

(There is also the recent Cap annual if you want to see them interacting in WWII in recent canon, which is very good but... it's not, like, super-slashy.)

And then there's the question of how long Steve and Bucky have known each other. Being childhood friends in the MCU gives them a long, long time to know each other, longer than anyone else in the MCU could. At this point in the MCU, Steve has only known the Avengers for, what, six years? He's known Bucky for way longer than that. By the time he meets Bucky again in the MCU he's only been an Avenger for a couple years, right? The Avengers are the new guys. The situation is reversed in 616. Steve meets Bucky in 1940 and they serve together until 1945. That's five years. Depending on what you believe about Marvel's sliding timescale, by the time Steve and Bucky meet again, Steve has been an Avenger for somewhere between ten and fifteen years. If you think about the other founding Avengers (Tony, Thor, Hank, Jan) or the rest of the Kooky Quartet (Clint, Wanda, Pietro), Steve has known them two to three times as long as he's known Bucky -- and the lower bound here is an entire decade. He's known Sam for at least as long as he's known Bucky, and probably longer, since he met Sam in 1969 and that is way closer to the beginning of modern Marvel than it is to the current day. There are all these people whom Steve has had years and years to form deep and enduring friendships and relationships with, before Bucky ever came back into the picture.

So as you can see, the situation in 616 for Steve/Bucky is really, really not the same as it is for MCU, and as far as I can tell, everything that MCU fans like about Steve/Bucky just doesn't play out the same way in 616 for a variety of reasons. If you want a 616 Steve ship with the goddamn single-minded intensity of MCU Steve/Bucky, honestly, 616 Steve/Tony is going to be your best bet, because I can point to multiple major comics events that basically revolve around Steve and Tony and their epic feelings for each other, with the proviso that sometimes these feelings involve them trying to murder each other. But I figure if you like CATWS you are probably okay with that. Also, hey, if you enjoy extremely intense fight scenes in which one character, beaten badly, is lying there, unresisting, staring into the eyes of his former friend while his friend readies the final blow, begging his friend to finish it -- well, let me introduce you to 616 Steve/Tony in Civil War:

So, you know, there's that.

You might ask at this point, okay, well, what would 616 Steve/Bucky look like on its own merits? If it doesn't look like MCU Steve/Bucky, what would it look like? Honestly, post-retcon, I think it would look a hell of a lot like shipping Steve with, say, another one of his fellow Invaders or other WWII teammates. Something like Steve/Namor. (Although probably with less "I resent all the times you tried to murder my friends" than Steve/Namor would have. So maybe Steve/Logan is a better comparison, except I don't remember how much of WWII Logan remembers.) Buddies from World War II, a lot of camaraderie and positive feelings and shared memories to bond over, and it would be sweet, but there wouldn't be any kind of unique dynamic that Steve only shares with Bucky, and I don't think there'd be the intensity that Steve and Bucky have in the MCU. It would be fun. It would be nice. It would be the kind of rarepair you'd request in exchanges. But it probably wouldn't be a juggernaut ship.

Until they start pulling all of MCU back into 616, you're just not going to get a dynamic in 616 where Bucky is Steve's home. You're really not.

Also, uh, if you want to talk about 616 Steve's feelings about home, and who he associates with home, I think we all know that there is a canonical statement about this:

In 616 Steve chooses the future, and I'm going to keep on shipping him with the futurist, the guy whose voice was the first voice he heard, coming out of the ice. The one who's been there for him since he woke up. The one who gave him a home.

So that’s why I don’t ship 616 Steve/Bucky. It’s really, really not the same dynamic as the MCU, and if you’re looking for 616 characters that Steve has repeatedly demonstrated deep and intense affection for, as well as a lasting friendship and partnership... well, there’s Tony, right there.

[lesbian-ed]

How do you move on? I've been in love with this girl for years and I only recently realized we'd never truly be in a committed relationship and it broke my heart. I miss her and I think about her everyday. I joined Her and I've gone on a few dates, but nothing has stuck. I don't really want it to or expect it to, but it still sucks.. I'm completely emotionally unavailable. I feel like I could sleep around and feel nothing. I've never felt like that before. How can I move on?

First and foremost, Anon, I think we need to dispelthe notion that moving on and getting over a broken heart necessarilymean jumping on to the next woman in line. If, as you said yourself,you are emotionally unavailable, my experience is that trying to bewith someone else to break the spell won’t aid you in the least.

See, moving on isn’t about moving on to the nextgirl, but moving on with life, with ourselves. You shouldn’t be attempting toerase the mark this girl has left on you by inviting lots of other women into your bed because it won’t have any effect if youhaven’t done the proper ‘digesting'—it’s no use to strain your bodyto fit in with another while trying to mend your heart and change yourmind. There’s a whole process involved, one of letting go and‘enjoying’ one’s solitude.

I know 'enjoying’ might seem a bit inappropriate whencoupled with the word 'solitude’ in light of an unsuccessfulrelationship, but there are elements of enjoyment to be found inbeing alone once one has surpassed that initial moment of disbelief,hurt, possibly despair. There is nothing novel in recommendingsomeone time in dealing with issues of feeling, I’m sure, andthere’s a reason why people will tell you to wait and let timeflow, but what most fail to tell you is that you cannot sit idly bywhilst consumed by the thought of this one girl, the errors orproblems that led to this outcome, wishing things were different—onthe contrary, I think one must use this moment to assess things asrealistically as possible. If it didn’t work out, then it wasn’tmeant to be—otherwise, logically, it wouldn’t have broken, wouldit?

There is a difference between grieving what we thinkmight have been amazing and condemning ourselves to misery by believing that that was the one chance for happinesswe’d get in this life. The first is a feeling that comes and goes,for, even in the future, when we have left this wholly behind (and itwill happen if you let it, if you make it happen), we still do findourselves wondering 'well, what if?’ but we don’t lose sleepover it anymore; it’s casual, human curiosity. Whereas the second option can lead us to a statevery close to what you’re describing, in which we become somehow verydependent on the memory of what was and on the desire of what couldhave been (or should have been, in our minds), dependent onthe idea of the woman that does not want us back. And that is bad.

It’s common in the first weeks following a break-upor another kind of romantic disenchantment, but to suffer years ofthis, of being shackled to one person who is clearly not at allshackled back to us?

You ask, Anon, how to move on. One must allow time tosweep away the dust of our sadness—but, and many will not like mesaying this, one must also give oneself permission to move on; onemust, at some point, actively pursue the overcoming of our sentimentif time by itself won’t do the trick. And to do that does not mean topursue someone else—but, perhaps, to pursue ourselves.

Now, personally, I dislike psychology and I do notwish to present myself an expert on the matter (Sappho forbid!), butthese sorts of issues, of over-dependence on an ex-girlfriend, onwanting what didn’t come to pass or what has already ended (or neverbegun, depending on the case) always seem to me linked to issues ofconfidence and self-esteem, as if one found it hard or unfeasible toimagine oneself without that person in one’s life. But the truthgenerally is that the person in question is already out of ourlife and we have not yet accepted that reality. For fear, perhaps; ofnever being loved again, of never loving someone to thatdegree again, of never settling down and finding happiness in thearms of any other woman… Reasons abound.

But we tend to feed on a handful of illusions and allof these motives for fear are just that: illusions. Nobody losesvalue by not being corresponded in love; nobody ceases to beimportant because one person in the world suddenly thinksdifferently; nobody is doomed to sadness because we believe ourselvesunloved and/or unloving. I wager we put too much value upon others’perception of us, that we base too much of our happiness on otherpeople—wonderful people, sure, women who stand out in a crowd,otherwise we would not have loved them, but even so we should notforget ourselves to their benefit. We should have the courage to facelife as it is; to choose to move forwards, to leave behind that whichgives us nothing.

Someone might argue that to love a woman still,albeit she loves us not, might give us some strength here and there;that this ideal, romantic, self-sacrificing love is ‘inspiring’; thatit is the only force driving us onwards, that it compells us to make something outof ourselves so those cherished eyes will once again befall us… And I would be forced to respond that livingfor someone else, and especially to that degree, is no way of living.It shouldn’t be difficult to verify that these circumstances are farfrom healthy—and to cling to a love with so much potential for harmis masochistic to say the least. We build prisons out of our owndreams, sometimes, and pain from our joys. With all the romanticismwe tend to use in approaching relationships, it’s a fairly commontrap to fall into.

You might accuse me of being unromantic or unfeelingto speak of these things in this tone, but I assure you I know allabout seeing no way out, about being chained to someone I loved whowould not bat an eyelash towards me. We all have at least oneexperience with this kind of thing and we must find ways to breakfree from this conundrum.

I said earlier that moving on might have something todo with finding ourselves rather than someone else to replace thewoman we loved. That’s also got to do with self-esteem. Many will saythey are incapable and unwilling to love themselves because theybelieve the 'love yourself and others will love you’ line a fallacy;whether it is true or not is completely negligible, because you don’tneed to love yourself, just accept and, perhaps most of all,respect yourself.

Respect your faults and qualities, the time you needto get back up again. Get to know yourself a bit better, enact a bitof harmless selfishness (as in 'I want to see that film in theatresand so I shall, regardless of company’ rather than 'fuck mum and dad,I can spray paint my room and turn up the heavy metal to full volumeif I want to’, mind you), spend time with yourself.

That is, I think, the best and only way to trulyheal. Talk to yourself, listen to yourself. What do you like doing?What are your wants and needs? What are your dreams? What’s yourfavourite smell, food, colour, book, film? Maybe you enjoy walking orswimming or sculpting or meditating or writing. Immerse yourself inyourself. Amidst the chaos of contemporary life, despite thepressures of study or work or peers or family, take a few minutesoff to be with yourself. No, you will not find a void there—and ifyou do, who better to fill it with something nice than you?

You mentioned putting yourself out there, trying toget in touch with other women, but I think sometimes we need to getin touch with ourselves first. And not just when getting over abreak-up or something of the sort, but as much as possible.

It well may be that this is nothing but my own,hyper-individual view on the matter and that many people willdisagree, but, alas, I was the one to answer your question on thisblog today. These are methods by which I have risen again afteradversities of the heart. For we rise again always, Anon. We mustsometimes help ourselves to do it, occupy our hands and muscles andthoughts with something other than our perceived failures, dosomething with ourselves for ourselves rather than for others, wantto be better for ourselves rather than for a partner. In theend, there are few people we can rely on in life apart from thatperson we see in the mirror staring back at us every day.

To finish this (and spare you any more of myphilosophy of life), you will get through this, Anon. It might seemlike a dead end right now, it might seem like you will never leavethis spot of stagnation, but you will. You must want it, as well, ifjust a little bit; be courageous and shed this shell. Breathe. Letyourself be alone for a little while, let it sink in that it did notwork—and that you are not obliged to make anything with anyone elsework at the moment. Focus on you. Find what brings you pleasure anddo not insult your own intelligence and spirit by thinking only shegives you pleasure in life; it isn’t true, not for you, not foranyone. We are made for more than to serve as partners to others,adorable as they might prove to be. If you are currently unable toopen yourself up, then don’t. Don’t go looking for women you’re notyet ready nor willing to bring into your life. Take what you have atthe moment and make the best of it for the time being.

The pressure to find a new girlfriend might even dieout. And that’s a good thing, because we tend to find the mostfantastic and remarkable partners precisely when we aren’tlooking—when we’re ready to live a life with them ratherthan for them, if you know what I mean!

Be patient with yourself and listen to yourself. Bekind. Be to yourself what you’d like others to be. You’ll do just fine.

/Mod T