#obviously this isn’t a great example of sophisticated writing it’s very informal lol

[fnaf-fanatical]

(I tried uploading the audio file but tumblr doesn't like me for some reason :[ )

Anyways:

School Project

I’ve been writing for a while, which actually started through here because tumblr posts with incorrect quotes led me to reading stories, which in turn made me start writing them. I was 11 or 12 at the time, fresh into my first real fandom, and very into wattpad stories, which as anyone on this site will know are unhinged, unedited, and due to the fact that most people writing there are very young like I was, are more than often lower quality than other writing sites (which is not to hate on wattpad writers - i’ve actually even read some really good and profound stories on there, both fanfic and otherwise, but that’s not the vast majority of the site, at least from what I’ve seen).

Honestly I first started writing because not only did it let me make the things I want to see - and was the start of my maladaptive daydreams though I didn’t know anything about that yet - but because it was also an outlet. Life was shitty, and it showed me that other people struggled, that my favorite characters could suffer from anxiety and depression and just shitty mental health, and that meant that I could project onto them. I wasn’t the one who wanted to kill myself dramatically or mutilate my body to get people to finally recognize I was in pain, the character was. I was too scared to ever harm myself physically, at least with a blade or the way I’d seen depicted in stories, but when I wrote, it didn’t matter how realistic it was or how gorey or graphic, because it was all fictional, and the rules were fake anyways.

And over time, obviously, my writing got better and I learned to Care About Myself more, until I didn’t really need to do that anymore. Except... I still liked making stories. I’d always been a storyteller, and writing gave me a medium to do so that would actually get me listened to, my stories could be long and rambling and people wouldn’t be annoyed or stop listening because it was a text, so they could stop reading if they wanted or not look at it or come back to it when they had more energy, and I wouldn’t directly face that, probably wouldn’t even know it was happening.

And, well, one of the things with time blindness is that you can be sitting there, know the time is 2:30 and you’ve got to eat something before you go to bed hours later, and yet you’ll blink and suddenly it’s 10:45 and you haven’t eaten anything, used the bathroom, or even really moved in 8 hours and where did the time go what happened. I started setting an alarm to remind myself to eat dinner, but that didn’t change the fact that I could get so “in-the-zone” that literal hours would blink by like seconds, because while my perception of time has always been wack, focusing - likely hyperfocus cause of the undiagnosed adhd - knows no rules or bounds and disregards the passage of time like a used bandaid that will inevitably show up again later where you least want it yet will go unnoticed and un-thought of until then.

Genuinely, I think I’ve grown a lot as a writer and I enjoy most of my own works, both because they’re what I want to see and because I can appreciate the skill that goes into it - which doesn’t mean I don’t still have a lot to learn, just that I’ve learned to stop shitting on my own abilities because it’s not perfect.

I’d always noticed when I was reading - usually proper books, when I was younger at least - different mistakes or ways things could’ve been articulated better, and when I didn’t know what a word or concept was I’d do everything I could to find out. So it’s no surprise that those skills transferred over to when I became a writer and took every source I could to try and improve my writing, some more valid than others.

Just... yeah. Writing helped me a lot, and I like where I’m at now.