riding the echo down

Here’s the post about scrupulosity!

OCD is best known for germaphobia and hoarding and religious scrupulosity, all of which I’ve dealt with in varying degrees, but I think it’s less well-known that religious scrupulosity is basically a form of moral scrupulosity, and that it can take other shapes as well.

Sidebar: scrupulosity as a word just means an obsessive, overwhelming anxiety/fear of being bad, for whatever bad means to you. You can probably guess why it often hijacks religious beliefs, and why it loves to square dance with intrusive thoughts.

In practice, this means constantly feeling like I’m not doing enough: for new people, for friends, for mutuals, for the fandom as a whole. I want to be welcoming and encouraging. I want to read and chat with new writers so they write more! I want to keep up with my friends’ fics! I want to read other fics just because they look interesting! And of course if I’m reading, I want to be commenting and live reacting and reccing on tumblr! I want to gift drabbles and fanart and reaction fics to people so they know how awesome they and their work are!

(also I want to write my own fics and draw my own art, and I’m really not good at pushing my own work because I’m always fighting the idea that it’s selfish to want people to read my work.)

There’s a reason Mr Rogers is so prominent on my ancestor altar, y'all, and it’s because I want to be a good person so fucking bad. It’s because in my heart and soul there’s a part of me that’s constantly certain that I’m a fucked up, horrible monster and if people like me it’s only because I’m fooling them.

I know I maybe over-identify with Xaden, okay? He knows he’s going to be the bad guy for a lot of people no matter what he does, and he still does everything he can, and he gets shit on for it. I think about his comments in Samara, about how people are fuckheads to him but he doesn’t mind because they go easier on Garrick.

One of the things that’s come up when I write Xaden more than once is projecting my own insecurities onto him. The certainty that he can never do enough. The fear that he really is the monster people see when they look at him, and no amount of… well, no amount of anything is going to fix that.

There’s a reason he’s fascinated by Violet telling him he’s a good person.

I really, really struggle when people talk about how Xaden is a terrible person and an awful friend and everyone else would be better off without him because I feel like that’s true of me too.

Disclaimer: I know that’s not the same thing, and people are entitled to their interpretations of the characters! This is just me talking about what goes on in my head. The ways my brain lies to me ultimately have nothing to do with the way people write fic. If it doesn’t latch on to this, it would (and does) latch onto something else.

I still don’t have a point. I’m just finding it helpful to write this stuff out and work through it, and some people seem to have found the first post helpful to read so! Let’s be vulnerable.

I have nightmares about the world ending periodically.

It's different every time, but they tend not to be the kind of world-ending situations that you see in books or movies. They're about reality failing, the laws of... well, the laws of everything ceasing to work.

The one I still remember most vividly even years later, it was one I couldn't stop, and everything was just... slowly falling apart. I remember when words just stopped working and I lost the ability to read and the panic and sadness I felt were so raw that it stuck with me.

Last night's dream was one where I kept repeating it when I "failed" and the situation became more complicated every time. At first I thought I was just trying to fix one bad situation, where I got shot, and when I managed to make everything go smoothly so no one got killed, it just... kept rolling forward to a more complicated situation, and eventually it was about understanding different kinds of magic, and the songs that kept the universe from falling apart (the only ones I remember were on the Bat Out of Hell II album by Meatloaf), and I had to solve riddles but every time I went through of course I could remember the answers from the previous times and it got so weirdly boring.

Boring apocalypses suck.

As I was going through I was also constantly worried about where my spouse was, where my kid was, were they okay, if they weren't with me, where had they gone, over and over. Finally my spouse and I got in to some side dimension and were able to stabilize everything and it was safe, yay, etc, but when we came out it turned out time had been different in there and we'd been gone two and a half years. We were able to be reunited with our kid almost immediately and she seemed fine? She'd missed us but she had been with a foster family that was apparently really nice.

And then she said something about Jesus and I just... recoiled in horror, in the dream. It was like my kid had been replaced with a pod person and I didn't know what to do.

That was when I woke up.

(Reposting from my Tumblr because this is more personal than I usually get over there.)

I'm not putting this on my fandom blog because ultimately it's not fandom specific... but since we're talking about mental health as fic writers and fandom people, I asked myself, should I insert myself into this conversation?

Because if I'm not on Tumblr, I would not have an excuse to avoid doing my accounting homework and while I do find figuring depreciation to be calming I don't want to do it before today. ( Read more... )

I don't understand why I'm so bad at existing in more than one space at a time.

I haven't been here in ages, and that's because I've been on tumblr. I'm on tumblr (and also IG) because that's where my fandom friends are. I'd love to have them here but... no luck.

And it's hard to convince them when I'm not posting, so I guess it's a catch-22, isn't it?

I occasionally make long serious posts over on tumblr, because it's there and people read it. It's rare, but let's be honest, any posts are rare here so... idk.

I periodically think about having a "real" blog and I even set one up on weblog.lol but then I feel like I'm posting into the void because there's no way to even know if someone's reading it really.

And I guess it's like realizing you used to go to this one coffee shop all the time but suddenly you realize you haven't been for ages and ages, because your schedule changed or something else shifted and there was just enough friction that it didn't happen.

What I really need is automated crossposting, probably. The best way for me to make sure something happens is to automate it. But I don't think I have a good way to do that right now in either direction. (If you have a good one, let me know.)

We've been dealing with a dollop of stressful stuff offline this year- there were major changes at work, Bug graduated fifth grade and is starting middle school in a few weeks (how!?), we've been thinking about selling the condo if we can find a place with a yard that's in our budget.

I'm going to move over the couple of posts and backdate them, probably. At this point, between this dw account and the locked one where we backed up our LJ, dreamwidth has by far the longest share of my life history.

No point, not really. Just rambling.