compartmentalization
I think I finally realized why I stopped writing - not just fiction, or fanfiction, or poetry, or in my physical journal, or even something as ultimately meaningless as this old livejournal that no one follows or reads anymore. At the end of the day, writing - at least for me, the way I do it - requires some practice of self reflection, some degree of introspection. And these days I'm unwilling or too afraid to face up to myself even to the little bit that's required for writing. Writing out your fantasies requires the mental work of, well, fantasizing... which at the end of the day is about as personal as you can get, really.
I always cared deeply about my writing, even when I thought it was terrible and even when I didn't really understand or think too hard about why I wrote in the first place and whether I was doing it for me or for an audience. But from the very beginning, I've always written as if for an audience, even if the audience ends up being limited to myself. I care so much about my writing because it is deeply personal in the end. Even when I'm writing a story, that voice is my own, the thoughts are reflective of who I am as a person. You can't write what you don't know, or at least can't even imagine. Your writing is bounded by who you are, in the same way that if you have a limited vocabulary, you are to some extent limited in your ability to express yourself.
Anyway, I can make a lot of good excuses about having very little time or doing other things, like Chinese taking up hours of my life every day, or my mental exhaustion from work and how by the time I get home, I just want to escape into someone else's world, with the least amount of effort necessary. But at the end of the day, I slowly wrote less and less and then stopped altogether - not even a few sentences, not even a blog entry, not even some anonymous comments on reddit - because I don't even know who I am anymore, and that makes it really hard to write.
If I started writing, I would have to think too much. I can't write without also examining my life with every little bit that I write, and it doesn't matter if I'm writing some story set in a fantasy ancient China or writing smut about Star Wars characters. Writing means that I have to think about all the very many things I've spent months at this point trying very hard not to think about it, and at this point that's too painful to start.
I'm functioning this well because I'm very successfully ignoring all the things that would make me not function this well. It's probably not a great way to handle things, but you do it for a while and then eventually you're so used to it that you don't even know how to start handling it anymore - all the bits and pieces have been compartmentalized away until I've lost track of exactly how I'm supposed to pull them out to sort through them and get rid of what I need to let go of. I guess this post is the first step forward though.
I always cared deeply about my writing, even when I thought it was terrible and even when I didn't really understand or think too hard about why I wrote in the first place and whether I was doing it for me or for an audience. But from the very beginning, I've always written as if for an audience, even if the audience ends up being limited to myself. I care so much about my writing because it is deeply personal in the end. Even when I'm writing a story, that voice is my own, the thoughts are reflective of who I am as a person. You can't write what you don't know, or at least can't even imagine. Your writing is bounded by who you are, in the same way that if you have a limited vocabulary, you are to some extent limited in your ability to express yourself.
Anyway, I can make a lot of good excuses about having very little time or doing other things, like Chinese taking up hours of my life every day, or my mental exhaustion from work and how by the time I get home, I just want to escape into someone else's world, with the least amount of effort necessary. But at the end of the day, I slowly wrote less and less and then stopped altogether - not even a few sentences, not even a blog entry, not even some anonymous comments on reddit - because I don't even know who I am anymore, and that makes it really hard to write.
If I started writing, I would have to think too much. I can't write without also examining my life with every little bit that I write, and it doesn't matter if I'm writing some story set in a fantasy ancient China or writing smut about Star Wars characters. Writing means that I have to think about all the very many things I've spent months at this point trying very hard not to think about it, and at this point that's too painful to start.
I'm functioning this well because I'm very successfully ignoring all the things that would make me not function this well. It's probably not a great way to handle things, but you do it for a while and then eventually you're so used to it that you don't even know how to start handling it anymore - all the bits and pieces have been compartmentalized away until I've lost track of exactly how I'm supposed to pull them out to sort through them and get rid of what I need to let go of. I guess this post is the first step forward though.