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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2bNjiUZ:notbecauseofvictories replied to your post “s-leary reblogged your post and added:As someone who makes said rec…”
Oh man, the fact that the hunger is inexhaustible and demands absolute & universal adoration is so TRUE. Every nice comment or piece of art or whatever gives you like a 2 second high before that voice is back and whispering, “…..well this thing can’t be a marker of success or YOU wouldn’t have it.” And there’s no one moving that line but you.
If you knew you were moving the line you wouldn’t! But the voice is a whole lot more persistent than the nice things people say. (And I’d include a sidebar, about but it’s YOU, surely YOU are immune to this, but obviously, that’s not the case. But there’s a data point for jerkbrain; @notbecauseofvictories feels like that too, holy shit.)
Always wanting to improve is good. Not knowing how to enjoy where you are is bad!
Maybe the worst is nice comments on old unfinished WIPs. Sometimes I can’t even bear to bring myself to read them quite all the way through (I read them because it’s impossible to overstate the hold that AO3 notification email has on my brain, but I kind of don’t look straight at them while I do it). Because hoo boy, if you’ve let someone down like that you don’t deserve any praise at all, right? How dare you have wasted their time like that, without even an ending to show for it.
I have so many unanswered and incredibly lovely comments on my AO3, and prior to that on various Livejournal things (because my whole life I have been an overambitious project-starter-not-finisher) that say “even if you never finish this it’s still beautiful!” which is absolutely the best thing that someone can say, and the haze of guilt and shame is so bad I can’t even write back and say “thank you”, and that compounds the guilt, because people who write you things like that are so lovely and deserve to know it, but oh God I can’t.
(But if nobody commented on them at all, that would be even more fuel for that little voice, with nothing to set against it. see, all that effort was wasted if you can’t finish it. nobody even reads it because it’s an abandoned WIP, why did you bother putting up 150,000 words of it? you shouldn’t be doing this at all.)
But that’s absolutely it. It moves the goalposts. You think, if only I had X number of comments, that’d surely be a mark that this means something, and then you get that many comments, and your jerkbrain says oh but can you believe you’ve never had X number of kudos? author y gets that all the time i bet, and all I can say is thank heavens I’m so bad with numbers I can’t even keep them in my head long enough to compare myself with other people because I would probably melt.
You can’t, you can’t. But. There’s this underlying awareness, I think, that it’s fanfiction on the Internet, that it’s not something any outsider would ever appreciate, so this is all you get, the feedback is all you get, you can’t put this on your tombstone, your mom won’t want to hear about this at Thanksgiving (or at least, mine won’t; I don’t tell my family about this stuff because how do you explain it to non-fannish people? i occasionally say i wrote a thing on a website, I make it sound like essays or short stories or generic blog posts or something and just am real vague and don’t elaborate); you’ve got to set it against Jerkbrain and also your constant grinding underlying awareness that this is what you’re “wasting” your time on instead of Doing Something Significant With Your Time. (How many of us have slogged away in up-our-own-asses obscurity and toil on original novels until we forgot why it was that we liked to write in the first place? it’s not the same thing at all, you can’t just– do that and expect the same results. I tried, I ground myself down into total muteness by it, and that’s the only time in my life I went any significant span of time without writing. A universal truth seems to be nobody cares about your original shit. and it’s real goddamn easy to shorten that to nobody cares.) And whether you’re writing original or fanfic stuff, there’s a huge pressure that says taking time for your own projects like that is Selfish.
(Maybe that’s not as universal as I feel like it is. But I think it’s pretty common. I’m not the only snowflake to ever have existed. There’s always something More Useful you could be devoting that time to, and sometimes it’s other fun stuff but usually it’s the goddamn dishes or something, how dare you pretend like your Art matters when there are dishes to do, or you could be Improving Yourself instead, working out or doing your nails or something, there’s always shit like that; I’m sure there’s non-gendered stuff too but it’s really the specifically-womany shit that gets to me.)
Oh man, the fact that the hunger is inexhaustible and demands absolute & universal adoration is so TRUE. Every nice comment or piece of art or whatever gives you like a 2 second high before that voice is back and whispering, “…..well this thing can’t be a marker of success or YOU wouldn’t have it.” And there’s no one moving that line but you.
If you knew you were moving the line you wouldn’t! But the voice is a whole lot more persistent than the nice things people say. (And I’d include a sidebar, about but it’s YOU, surely YOU are immune to this, but obviously, that’s not the case. But there’s a data point for jerkbrain; @notbecauseofvictories feels like that too, holy shit.)
Always wanting to improve is good. Not knowing how to enjoy where you are is bad!
Maybe the worst is nice comments on old unfinished WIPs. Sometimes I can’t even bear to bring myself to read them quite all the way through (I read them because it’s impossible to overstate the hold that AO3 notification email has on my brain, but I kind of don’t look straight at them while I do it). Because hoo boy, if you’ve let someone down like that you don’t deserve any praise at all, right? How dare you have wasted their time like that, without even an ending to show for it.
I have so many unanswered and incredibly lovely comments on my AO3, and prior to that on various Livejournal things (because my whole life I have been an overambitious project-starter-not-finisher) that say “even if you never finish this it’s still beautiful!” which is absolutely the best thing that someone can say, and the haze of guilt and shame is so bad I can’t even write back and say “thank you”, and that compounds the guilt, because people who write you things like that are so lovely and deserve to know it, but oh God I can’t.
(But if nobody commented on them at all, that would be even more fuel for that little voice, with nothing to set against it. see, all that effort was wasted if you can’t finish it. nobody even reads it because it’s an abandoned WIP, why did you bother putting up 150,000 words of it? you shouldn’t be doing this at all.)
But that’s absolutely it. It moves the goalposts. You think, if only I had X number of comments, that’d surely be a mark that this means something, and then you get that many comments, and your jerkbrain says oh but can you believe you’ve never had X number of kudos? author y gets that all the time i bet, and all I can say is thank heavens I’m so bad with numbers I can’t even keep them in my head long enough to compare myself with other people because I would probably melt.
You can’t, you can’t. But. There’s this underlying awareness, I think, that it’s fanfiction on the Internet, that it’s not something any outsider would ever appreciate, so this is all you get, the feedback is all you get, you can’t put this on your tombstone, your mom won’t want to hear about this at Thanksgiving (or at least, mine won’t; I don’t tell my family about this stuff because how do you explain it to non-fannish people? i occasionally say i wrote a thing on a website, I make it sound like essays or short stories or generic blog posts or something and just am real vague and don’t elaborate); you’ve got to set it against Jerkbrain and also your constant grinding underlying awareness that this is what you’re “wasting” your time on instead of Doing Something Significant With Your Time. (How many of us have slogged away in up-our-own-asses obscurity and toil on original novels until we forgot why it was that we liked to write in the first place? it’s not the same thing at all, you can’t just– do that and expect the same results. I tried, I ground myself down into total muteness by it, and that’s the only time in my life I went any significant span of time without writing. A universal truth seems to be nobody cares about your original shit. and it’s real goddamn easy to shorten that to nobody cares.) And whether you’re writing original or fanfic stuff, there’s a huge pressure that says taking time for your own projects like that is Selfish.
(Maybe that’s not as universal as I feel like it is. But I think it’s pretty common. I’m not the only snowflake to ever have existed. There’s always something More Useful you could be devoting that time to, and sometimes it’s other fun stuff but usually it’s the goddamn dishes or something, how dare you pretend like your Art matters when there are dishes to do, or you could be Improving Yourself instead, working out or doing your nails or something, there’s always shit like that; I’m sure there’s non-gendered stuff too but it’s really the specifically-womany shit that gets to me.)
