#constantly telling myself on a loop today that 'just because they didn't want my art doesn't mean it's bad art'

[dirtbagdefender]

i tried something new and the outcome wasn't favorable and that's okay. 🤝 my feelings are hurt because someone didn't want my art and those feelings are valid.

[indigo474]

July 15th-electric energy-

so much happens in my life.. daily.. so much life. my back doesnt hurt, i'm not exactly sure what i did, the weight was relatively light, 135.. i think i may have been in my head a bit and not really focused on what i was doing and ouch.. i did upper body on Thursday and it was heavy.. he really pushes me it seems more so on upper.. 112.5x2.. he keeps upping it.. i was disappointed in myself with the whole back thing.. i feel like it was a set back, because it was. James says it it all part of the process, i have to trust that it is and not be hard on myself..Kika looks great. Not the same happy pup but getting there. she's moving a little slower. the cute guy said bye to me Bye April.. see i remembered.. funny thing is.. i don't know his name.. I'll have to ask him the next time i see him. he's such a baby.. 20 something.. he's always talking about books.. he had a copy of the art of war in his gym bag.. intelligence is so sexy.. oh you read 💦

I was going to see my friend today but decided not too for various reasons. Mads has off from work and wanted to spend time together.. i was fine doing that but i had to tell her to stop treating me like shit.. i told her i didn't want to be around her. she gets in these moods where she is just on me.. everything i say she has a negative comment. she's been ok since i said something to her. we were going to go to the beach- she would rather go to a pool so we are going to the pool..

in the past few days i had 3 cardinals fly in front of me. 2x in my car and 1x in the woods. numbers numbers everywhere.. i realize i give meaning to things but dam it's weird seeing the same numbers everywhere.. 322 constantly.. i was running through the woods and 2 little dogs appeared out of nowhere.. i think i scared them just as much as they scared me.. i was so pissed- i cursed at their owner.. I tired to run and failed.. my inner critic came out loud.. hard. i didnt really fail i just didn't do what i wanted to do and i started to really beat myself up over it and i haven't gone down that path in a while but it's still there.. i had to catch myself.. why are you doing this to yourself? Why? I dont even know who's voice it is.. is it mine? x? my mom? who's voice is tell me im a total waste of space and a failure and nothing and unlovable and worse.. i cant imagine i was born thinking those things abut myself. And i catch myself and tell myself none of it is true.. don't fight it, love it, show yourself compassion and support and be your own friend. there is an old version of myself who would have quit a long time ago. there is an old version of me who wouldn't have even been able to recognize the loop of self hate that was being played inside her head, because it was normal to have those thoughts and feeling about herself.. this all happens within a 15 minute time frame as i am walking and running through the woods battling myself.. at war with myself. By the time i get to my car i feel like i've had some sort of breakthrough.

I was told i am too white by a black co worker. It happened during a supervisors meeting. there was a lot of cross talk going on so im not sure if anyone else heard it. I literally had to bite my lip to not say what i wanted to say because i knew if i said it the room would fall silent and i would be escorted out the door or this co worker would have wanted to fight me in the parking lot.. so i just documented it.. yep learned all about documentation in training. it's not the first comment i've received about me being white. something else happened this week.. with one of my reps and the ice queen. I documented it but.. i have a feeling.. i dont know what but this might not go away and it will be my word and the reps word against the ice queens word.. not sure how well i will make out in this situation.. the ice queen was wrong and she knows it.. i dont have anything to hide as i wasn't the one doing the talking.. i tried to make things better.. i learned a valuable lesson.. i just dont know if there is going to be a price to pay for said lesson.. there usually is.. i'll know come next thursday.

My mom texted me that my Aunt has cancer.. she thought i should know. I saw her at the park last year 2x and kept running. i told myself if i ever see her again i would stop and talk. i dont know how to tell Mads as i think she will be upset. I thought maybe something was wrong with Ryan. I guess not.. still in jail.

Other things .. explainable.. i feel the electricity in the air. there is a current of excitement.. i cant explain it but i can feel it. i can see it too.. in the clouds and the trees- the birds and butterflies.. i can feel it in the air- i can feel it.. so many people telling me they feel lucky.. i feel lucky i feel lucky.. its a good energy.. its a great energy..

the office narcissist left a gift on my desk this week. last week she ignored me and talked shit to my reps about me.. this week gifts.. i know i shouldn't be surprised.. i mean, i was married to someone who talked shit on me.. but i'm still surprised at how shitty people can be..

I have no idea what i'm doing as far as moving.. i saw a house but its too much house for me and honestly thats not what i really want.. i do and i dont.. a 30 year mortgage sounds horrible.. truly fucking horrible.. i dont want more stuff.. I want less stuff and more experiences.. sitting in an office all day is not living.. people laugh and say i spend more time at work then at home.. thats not a good thing that is messed up that we are made to believe thats normal.. so yeah.. still trying to figure out what it is i want to do..

over

[scummy-writes]

Hi! I didn't know who to talk to about this, but since you're one of the people in the fandom I look up to, I figured I should gather my courage and send this ask. As a writer, how do you deal with people's underwhelming response? Very few likes, just one or two reblogs, no respect or acknowledgement unless you open requests... It's breaking my heart at this point and I don't know what to do.

a…aaaa.. I can’t believe someone looks up to me. 

I’m sorry if this post is kind of all over the place. I kinda jump around with topics a lot.

Well, first off, I’m not going to lie- usually, I feel a bit hurt. It always hurts writing fics/drabbles/hcs and never seeing any response, or just very very little response. I often don’t write fluff or more serious topics because I know that those themes are always going to be overlooked for my smut instead. And if you’re a minor, writing smut is a no-go, which makes trying to gain traction or readers even more difficult.

There have been several times where I’ve barely gotten any notes on stuff I’ve poured a lot of time into. I’ve even written an off-anon request before only to have the person who requested it not even like/reblog it, or make any sort of comment. I’ve been there, we’ve all been there, and it’s tough to climb back up. 

I’m not sure how long you’ve been following me, but there was a point where my normal note count for hcs dropped from 700 notes down to 20-60 notes if I was lucky, just depending on what I was writing about. In fact, I even left the blog due to some bullying I was enduring and the combination of barely getting a note count that I had considered ‘good’. Since I’ve came back, I’ve focused on what made me happy, and even though I still have the knee-jerk reaction, I’ve learned not to try and compare notes. Ultimately, it’s made me happy, though I might have a bit of ‘survivor bias’ going on since I’ve been collecting readers since the start of 2017. 

I have a few things that help me out, and one of them is learning to appreciate the notes I do have.

For example, even though its just been a day, I only have about 29 notes on my recent yooran drabble. Thats not including my own reblogs, and then if I were to not include friend reblogs, it’d be about 27 or 26. That’s incredibly low for me, personally, because if I post up a fic (depending on the character and theme) I can get around 80-100 notes depending on how lucky I am.

(Now thats not me trying to tell you 30ish notes isn’t a lot, because it is!! It is a lot and if you ever get that many notes on a post you should feel proud of it! But, if you’re me and you’ve been here for a while, that’s low compared to other posts of mine. Please keep reading so I can explain more: )

If this was back to last year, when I was contemplating leaving my blog, that would have hurt me a lot more than it does today, because I was constantly in a loop of comparing notes with my other posts or even my friends posts. I had convinced myself that notes = quality, when that’s not the case at all. Believe it or not, just because a post has 5 notes, or 1 note, or even 0 notes, doesn’t mean whatever content on it is terribly written, or shoddy, or dumb. There have been wonderful hc posts, wonderful pictures of art that I have seen that have barely gotten 10 notes. 

So I think one thing that is hard to get yourself to learn is that a lack of notes doesn’t mean what you are producing is bad. Learning this is hard, and it’s especially hard when you’re constantly discouraged by lack of notes, but you need to write for yourself first and foremost. I haven’t been writing publicly for long, in fact I think the first fanfics I published were in 2016, but I had been writing since middle school. I used to carry a worn down composition notebook and write the most absolutely cringiest fanfiction ever. It had self inserts, it had ocs that were children of me and my favorites, it had terrible, terrible, references to games/music I loved as a kid- but no one read it but me. I never posted it online, and I wrote it to make me happy- and cringy middle school me was super fucking happy with that story. I’m pretty sure I was working through a second compositon notebook before I moved on from the show I was writing about. 

From that point on, I knew I liked writing. I joined writing classes, wrote cringy fiction for my english teachers to read (good fucking god bless my teachers for putting up with my terrible shit but still encouraging me).  

Eventually, since I liked writing so much and my drawing skills declined, I ended up promising to write stories for my friends birthdays. Where one person would be reading it, besides me, and that’s how it was until I posted my first MM fic on AO3. Even with those first few fics, I feel like it’s unfair to count them now, because they were posted just a few months after the game released, I believe, and I honestly just really consider myself lucky that those first two mm fics of mine got the traction they did.

But I think because I was so used to writing to make myself happy, it really fucked me up when I started trying on focusing my writing on only making others happy instead of myself. 

So, a lot of newer folks might not know this, since I’m assuming a lot of people think this is just a pretty photo queue blog with occasional posts, but I started off writing Hcs on here. At first, I don’t think they got a huge traction, but as I slowly got more followers, I got more notes and requests. But eventually it got extremely taxing to keep those up, because what I had wanted was to make others happy with them, but it’s hard to believe you’re doing a good job when you drop from 700 to 20-60 notes. And so I stressed a lot to the point of ‘leaving’ (but as you can see that ended up just being a few month hiatus), but one thing was that I was forced to acknowledge how bad my viewpoint was on the whole situation. I had lost the motivation of writing for myself to make me happy, and instead tried to treat myself as a writing machine only meant to make others happy. That’s not a healthy viewpoint when it comes to writing, especially if you’re doing this as a hobby.

Because of all that, I stopped writing hc posts and focused on fics, because writing fanfics made me happy. It still makes me happy, and because I kept on truckin and still posting, I’m accomplishing things I never thought I would accomplish. 

Writing for success is a long, hard, road that will often leave you unsatisfied, but writing for yourself is a shorter road that will make you happy- even if it’s just venting away emotions you couldn’t let out in any other way.

If it helps you out any, because I’m unsure if I’m making any sense, some pieces that I’m super happy about are pieces that no one but me and maybe one other person has seen. They’re locked away as drafts or in folders and I’m even unsure if I’ll share some of them.

Besides all of the stuff I’ve mentioned, if I’m feeling bad and what I just told you isn’t helping me, sometimes I just talk to a friend or two. Just hearing someone in real time, even if it’s possibly extremely bias or something, tell me that they like my stories or they think my writing is good- that still means a lot to me, and sometimes it perks me up. If that’s not an option with you, you can always talk to your family as well, or old teachers you may have shown some of your work to. I’m very fortunate to have a few teachers willing to help me out with a few questions, even though I’ve…long since graduated orz.

I’m sorry if none of this helps. But if anything, please please don’t give up writing. If you choose to do something like that, please have it be 100% your own decision that isn’t influenced by a note or hit count. I’m positive that whatever you are writing is good, and I know that not seeing that note count get higher hurts, but that note count has absolutely no bearing on how well written your story is.

If theres anything else I can talk to you about, please feel free to send me some more questions, and again I am really sorry if this didn’t help you.