Got a bit done today, more than I've done in a few days.
I got a little bit done on my primary solo project, and I've sent off the preview to someone who has been wanting to see my progress on it. I hope she likes it! I also sent it to a partner from here, just to show what I'm working on since he asked. He approves of it for now, even if it is just a couple paragraphs of content.
That felt really good.
I may not express it often, but I am really self-conscious about my writing skills. I've always feared that after two years unable to write anything of quality and nine years since I last wrote any decent poetry, my skill has atrophied and I may never be as good as I was in 2011, even though I was barely an adult at the time. I am self-conscious nearly to the point of fanaticism, ceaselessly aiming to improve my craft, to fix everything, to put together a perfect narrative, inasmuch as I am capable of. I know my fears are unfounded; I have yet to have a single partner tell me I'm not a good writer. Perhaps a bit excessively flowery, but not
bad. In fact, I have had a few go to great lengths to praise me for what I write, even though most of the time, all I see are the flaws. How I could have described something better. How I could have turned the scene. Tiny errors here and there that I missed. Continuity issues. Flow. Minute grammatical errors, typos, missed punctuation.
It happens. But, in my mind, it shouldn't happen to
me. In my mind, I should be above all of that, but alas, I am but a human. A mere hobbyist. I am not above anything, not even tiny errors that I somehow missed.
Time has been unkind to me, starting in, incidentally, 2011; ever since then, a decade later, I've been trying to heal the hurt, stitch the wounds I received primarily in the spring and summer of that fateful year and well into winter of 2013, all while getting dragged in the mud, caking it into my wounds and cut by stones, knocked to my knees and repeatedly skinning them ever since.
2020, ironically, was "my year". Springtime and into summer, to be specific, was when things finally turned in my favor. While the world fell apart, while hundreds of thousands sickened and died, while the economy crumbled, I finally rose from the ashes of nine years of instability and displacement like a phoenix, born anew.
For the first time ever, even going back to my infancy, I have a stable home. I have my family around me and supporting me, family I feared I had burned bridges with when I was too unwell to understand that they wanted the best for me, but did not know how to help me anymore. I do not fault them, not now. At the time, though, I was too blinded by my pain to see it from their perspective.
But being out of constant crisis for the first time in ten years has not been without its issues. After a lifetime of constant struggle, I do not know how to handle peace. I have known very little softness, very little kindness, in all of my life, and even now, I do not know how to relax. Learning to let go is like learning how to breathe again. Like learning how to walk again after a terrible accident. I've spent so much time preparing for the next crisis, waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, that I am suspicious of peacetime. I have no reason to fear, and I know this. I am due to be wed this winter, possibly as early as December. I am loved and supported. My home is clean, there's food in my pantry and my refrigerator. I have a bed to sleep in, the lights are on, I have heating and AC for the first time in many years. I have all I ever wanted- or, at least, grew to desire when my original, loftier ambitions died. But still...
Ever since I was small, my pain has sustained me. I forged it into armor, my writing hand my weapon of choice. I wrote incessantly, on any paper I could find; words that spoke when I could not, of things too terrible to bear, too horrible to vocalize. Writing has been my outlet for over 20 years, a voiceless scream into the void, an indignant, silent cry.
When I lost it in 2012, I thought I would die. The pain had gone too deep, and I could not write, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many stanzas I feverishly scribbled and then, dissatisfied, crossed out, in my notebook, now long gone. Words were insufficient to describe what had happened... until I felt nothing at all. Everything wiped away by a chemical lobotomy and bad coping methods.
Two years, blank. Two years, adrift, unfeeling, only occasionally attempting to post through the fog, and even then, it rang hollow. Looking back at those times- as I do have the records, posts still there on a dying forum, on dead threads, with long-gone partners- is like gazing into a looking glass and finding something too ugly to bear reflected in the depths.
Which brings me to BMR. My return in October of this year after my hiatus revived me in a way little has. Yes, I have been on that dying forum still, as I have been since I was 13 years old. I am still there in a very limited capacity, but I have come to find this place as my new home, a renewal of my muse.
I have been reborn in the pale light of the blue moon.
But BMR, as we know, does not come without its own issues. Ghosting and the like. People getting too close for comfort. People misunderstanding that I'm not necessarily here just for the porn. Yes, smut happens in every single RP I am in, with only a couple outliers in which it never got that far. Yes, I do list kinks because hey, if I figure I'm gonna write smut, why not enjoy it? And in any case, a lot of care goes into crafting my characters. Some kinks suit them specifically, some of them are for my own enjoyment. I suppose, in each character I create, there is a little spark of me. A drop of my vital essence. But that is likely inevitable when I put so much heart into what I do, so much care in every single story I craft.
Which leads me to the crux of this post, trite as it is, and as unread as it will go (not that I particularly mind). When I returned from my hiatus, I was often very, very hurt by perceived snubs in the form of ghostings, in messages I sent to people who deemed me not even worthy of a response to say "no thanks". I took it very, very personally, being as sensitive as I am about my writing. But as of late, I've... Grown, I believe. I am more understanding of these perceived "slights", such as they are. I see things from a different point of view.
Honestly, I don't know what is to blame for this shift in perspective. Is it because of praise recently heaped upon me? Is it because I'm secure in the partners I do have, and have such rapport with pretty much all of them? Is it because I'm so happy with all of my stories that additional plots never going anywhere, or people never bothering to reply to me when I express interest (very rarely, as until recently I had made a rule for myself not to engage others for fear of rejection)?
I have no idea. But I'm happy with it.
No queue update today; don't feel like it.
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