#i found earliest drafts of the book titled 'the fifth stage of a grief' I FORGOT THAT WAS EVER A TITLE FOR IT

[ladyloveandjustice]

so im in a weirdly chill mood today, and want to casually talk about for like the past six months? years? decades? I’ve been suffering over severe anxiety and ANNOYING self-conciousness over every single thing i do that gets worse and worse and constantly second guessing myself. WHILE ALSO BEING AWARE THAT BEING AROUND SOMEONE WHO CONSTANTLY SECOND GUESSES THEMSELVES CAN BE INCREDIBLY ANNOYING AND FEEL LIKE THEY’RE TRYING TO GUILT TRIP YOU so not wanting to be too public about it but then just like...having nervous breakdowns. I feel an emotion, snap, hate myself for showing my emotion, then descend into an anxious cycle of self loathing.

its kinda extended to my liveblogs at times, i get in these things where i’m like “why is anyone paying me, my commentary is garbage i can’t even do basic plot comprehension half the time and I try too fucking hard to be funny and deep and end up being annoyingly nitpicky” and its a horrible cycle~ yet I still love liveblogging. I didn’t want to honest about it bc it’s not good ~self marketing~, but it’s why I can’t really bring myself to expand it more, why I charge below what in-my-ideal-world-would-be-a-fair-minimum-wage (also because I know people don’t have much money to spare in these times). If I charged more, I’d feel like I was meeting standards even less and be caught even more in my self-hatred

Right now I’m in the mood where I’m looking over past liveblogs and being like “yeah I’m too repetitive sometimes but these are pretty fun! Its pretty impressive I managed some of this in a horrible mood. The way I have trouble keeping up with some things can be cute. through a certain lens.”

who knows how long that cutting myself some slack will last! but right now while I’m doing it I wanted to talk about it.

These feelings extend to the book I published in a HUGE fucking way. That goddamn book is so connected to the messy teen depression-anxiety- angst and craving for love through all my flaws,I was going through fresh out of high school, even though it got so edited and rewritten over the years, it was something I started writing when I was 19, based on something I wrote when I was 14, and like...that’s the core of the book...and its messy writing, when I look at it a certain way, that’s valuable! But when I look at it another way, there are so many ways I could have told this story better, so many things I was trying to communicate I don’t think I did successfully, so many ways its maybe actively harmful, that’s it’s hard not to feel so much regret..

like i wrote a character with adhd not realizing I had it and honestly think I wrote her wrong now? At the same time I then also based a lot of her quirks off mine after looking up symptoms and was too fucking dumb to realize what that meant so maybe she is accurate i don’t know. I definitely would have written her differently if I had known. That’s just like a MICROCOSM of the things I obsess over in that book btw, I’m INCREDIBLY annoying in my head and definitely bit off more than I can chew publishing a story...Like That.

I want to maybe be able to post some kind of memoir of all the feelings I had someday, especially the struggle I had with the  publishing and the Idea of Marketing, because it could be potentially helpful to other Writers Trying to Start Out (then I think to myself “no it wont” sometimes like I said I’M ANNOYING), but it’s hard to group them together in a way that makes sense/doesn’t feel too raw for me. Someday.

But basically I’m reading Noelle Stevenson’s memoir and feel vaguely inspired to be more transparent about my own mental issues that are connected to Trying to Be Creative and why its harder for me to write now more than ever. 

It’s hard to sell yourself, and your work, when you don’t like yourself. I’ve never been good at talking to people and being social and hiding what a mess I am, I might never be good at Networking, and that’s what it really takes to survive...in this world. I’m trying to work on becoming a better adult through therapy and all that! I have a nutritionist now addressing what seems to be an eating disorder I’ve had my whole life! But it never feels like enough, and never feels like I did enough or tried hard enough. I break my own promises to myself- ‘learn to take criticism’ ‘don’t be that person’ ‘work harder’- all the time, and it’s tough.

so I thought I’d just dump all that out of there while I have the courage.