In my opinion, I think we spend the first stage of our lives in childhood getting fed all these ideas about the roles we're meant to play and models shown to us about the milestones we're expected to pass through like going to the prom and getting married, if you pay attention to media and archetypes we unconsciously recognize, it only reinforces those expectations about what we're meant to do.
I remember growing up watching all these traditionally girly movies about teenaged girls and just how awesome their highschool experience was and how it was such a fundamental time they'll never forget, and the story always went pretty much the same way; New girl in school arrives sparking the attention of both the cute guy and the popular mean girl while immediately finding her group of people that unconditionally love and support her right off the bat and though she faces some adversity and embarrassment due to the antics of the mean girl, eventually everyone rebels against her propping up the new girl as hero and gets the guy in the end. (usually at the prom/dance and ends up being crowned queen naturally.)
Only all those kinds of media conveniently leave out all of the really messy and cringey bits in-between and how highschool is a horribly mandated institution that does not look out for all teens equally and is essentially a cesspool where a bunch of people who are going through the moodiest and most emotionally turbulent time in their lives are stuck together and have no one to take it out on but eachother.
By the time we end up in our teens we're so disillusioned with what we were told life was gonna be like when we finally grew up that we're angry and so withdrawn from the world we don't even want to exist in it anymore because of just how hard and confusing it truly is. What do you mean that all my interests are secretly political and define me? What do you mean that this author that I liked reading is actually a bigoted transphobe? What does that say about me? Who am I if I'm not what I consume? Why does any subgroup I fit into even matter in the first place? This isn't what it was supposed to be like!
It's honestly no wonder that if we manage to make it into early adulthood, we're just so burnt out and exhausted with the system we end up spending the majority of time in our beds just doomscrolling and rotting cause we don't have the energy for anything else.
But then we reach this point where something manages to spark our interest again that leads us to go down this rabbithole of information that makes us feel more invigorated then we have in a long time, which then leads us to reflect more on our lives and realize that life isn't so bad after all because even if there are these things that didn't happen for me or that I can't change, at least the sun is still gonna come up tomorrow and I'll likely find something new or familiar to keep me company and realize that there actually is a lot both the world and I still have to offer and discover.
In short, our childhoods are spent in socialization and programming, our teenagehood is where we become aware of the reality of life and are fatigued by it, but our adulthood is meant to be a time to reclaim all that enthusiasm we once had and fall back in love with life as we figure out what we do have within our power and how we can change. It takes a lot of time to detangle society's expectations from your own but it's well worth it to have that feeling of wonder and awe again when you find something that just clicks and resonates so perfectly, and that's exactly what I'm gonna do.
Hello! Welcome to our tenth Spotlight Of The Week! This week’s post is all about . . .
@tc-doherty!
This week’s writer writes fantasy novels, almost always queers. She often refers to her work as being “folk fantasy” because it is inspired directly from folklore and fairy tales rather than traditional high fantasy like Lord of the Rings or D&D. She writers original works, and bounces between middle grade, young adult, and new adult age ranges. Basically, she writes whatever she feels like at the time, but it’s always fantasy, original, and a novel!
She has a patreon! Find it here, that’s where she posts.
She has two novels that are published, and two novels that are on Patreon that should be published soon-ish. You can find more info about her novels here, but here’s a short overview:
Dragon's Daughter is a lesbian knight/dragon love story duology which takes place after a young dragon is mistaken for princess and "rescued" against her will, after which she is folded into human society and all the complication that entails. (Dragon's Choice is book two, coming out later this year). The Ghost is book one of a middle grade quartet about the resurgence of dark magic and what fighting that entails. It's lightly horror seasoned. The second book, The Fairy, is coming to Patreon this year. Second Chances (coming out later this year/early next year) follows two boys over the span of 15 years~ or so as they deal with their feelings for each other, their pasts, and the norms of the society they live in. It's angst with a happy ending.
Fun facts about this week’s author:
She’s been writing since kindergarten
She decided to be an author at eight years old, over a quarter of a century ago!
She really likes writing character driven stories, and she thinks they’re often easy to read.
Her favorite thing to write is dialogue
She gets really into world building–there’s usually going to be a lot of focus on clothing and also the own folklore/legendary cycles/idioms that exist within the world of the novel.
She writes about the things she loves, and she hopes that means other people will have a good time when she reads her work
And that’s a wrap! Thanks so much for reading all the way to the end of this week’s post, and make sure to check out the Spotlight Of The Week intro post if you or someone you know would appreciate being ‘under the spotlight’ in the weeks to come :)
Hi dad, sorry, could you please come pick me up, everything is hell here and I don't know how to stop the world from feeling like its ending, and each existential crisis seems to be lasting longer. You told me if I worked hard, everything would be okay, but dad I've worked so hard that my fingers bleed and I am burnt to ash, and I know you told me the best forests grow out of wildfire ashes but when will that happen and are you sure the fires won't wreck the saplings again before they become trees?
Sorry to let you down, dad. I promise I am trying to be well again but what used to be my dreams are now sitting on a shelf gathering dust and the demons in my head have started to win more often because they know how tired I am. Is this what growing up was supposed to be? Is this what growing older was meant to be? Why didn't you tell me this? Why did you lie to me?
