Hey, so. We need to talk. Yes, it’s about my writing.
About a year ago something happened: I wrote Going Out In New York Style and it blew up. I still have no idea how that happened and why that specific fic became so popular, and I don’t think it’s important right now. Don’t get me wrong, I still love it, and I think that I did a great job, but in a certain way this sudden popularity (well, popularity by my standards) broke me. It made me create a certain standard for myself and connect my perception of myself as a person with the amount of feedback I was getting online, and this is really fucking unhealthy, and it made me subconsciously try to cater to an audience that only ever existed in my own head, and I feel like I was trying to replicate the success of one single fic to get that dopamine hit again, and this isn’t how it’s supposed to work in the first place. As I said: really fucking unhealthy. I started to care more about the feedback than about my own enjoyment of the process (or art itself, if I want to be pretentious), and it sucks. It’s so miserable because you’re never going to be satisfied, you will always want more. It’s an addiction, in a certain way.
This is, at least partially, why I wrote No Man Is an Island. I needed to write something with the primary audience of me, myself and I. Not thinking about the potential reaction, statistics and all the numbers-related crap, just writing what I genuinely wanted to write and being satisfied with the result, and stop measuring my self-worth in the amount of feedback, and I needed to do it in silence. The good news is, I still got it. I still can write and enjoy the process itself instead of writing solely to stroke my ego. The bad news is, Belleville Unmasked!, Love Like Winter and The House Is Alive are discontinued. Maybe I will return to them one day, but most likely not.
I know that at least some of you enjoyed those fics, and I’m sorry it has to end this way. I really am. But this isn’t me. This is some miserable fuck trying to make themself feel like they’re worth something and choosing the worst possible way to do it, and I don’t want to be that miserable fuck anymore. I want to get better. I want to be proud of what I wrote even if nobody in the world ever reads it. I’m still writing for the MCR fandom, I’m not planning to stop, I just want to get more in tune with who I really am as a writer instead of trying to uphold some image I forced onto myself.
And, while we’re at it, I’m also not doing flufftober this year. I tried to write something for it and once again felt like I was catering to the imaginary audience, so I stopped.
Just to clarify: this isn’t your fault. This is solely on me and my stupid brain. I am so lucky to have such supportive readers, and I’m so, so grateful to all of you. I’m sorry if I let you down. Thank you for being here with me.
