from this ask meme, thank you anisha <3<3
10. how has writing positively impacted your mental health or overall mood?
oh BOY that's a big question. Sorry about the longwinded answer
it's an outlet! On the lighter side of things, I need a creative outlet or I start shrivelling up. It's really nice to just be able to sit there and create a thing that didn't exist before, and it's really nice to be able to share that with people and know that even for five minutes other people existed in a similar headspace as me. I like that it's kind of an escape, it's all fictional so I can try out as many different things as I want and they don't need to be seen by anyone if I don't want. Like I wrote a trans Henry fic that I've maybe shown one person, and it was truly,,,, just for me. I really like that freedom. And then those fics are permanently available to me and only exist for me! I think that's really cool. I've got a lot in drafts that only exists for me that I return to pretty frequently.
On the,,, not so light side of things, I had an Incredibly rough 2021. My mental health was in the shitter to be frank. And on some of those days I went on full lockdown and all I could do was write, and you'll see that in September I was,,,, producing a frankly astounding amount of fic.
An Asymptote To Which We Are Ceaselessly Striving was the first of these. Reading it back I find the end of it so preachy and annoying lmao, but at the time I really fucking needed to write about people making mistakes, being open and honest about that, and moving on. And moving on not necessarily in a direction that everyone thinks is upwards. Ted still having a network rallying around him after isolating himself, Sharon finding a new family after making a career mistake. I'm obviously trying to skirt around some personal stuff but I just want to say that most of that fic I put out in September last year was absolutely me using fic as a coping strategy when everything else had burnt out - and to see that not only did I produce something, but people read it and it resonated with them!! It would have been enough to know that I could still make something, but it meant the world that other people got something out of those fics too.
These are all fics I consider part of that Era (12-16th September, five days where I published 19,957 words of fic):
No, I Don't Have Any Plans Tomorrow
The last chapter of intimacy is about truth will always be frustrating to me because I hate it lmfao, I know I needed to write it at the time but fuck me I'm so disappointed in how I ended it lmfao. I really liked that world I made and I hope to find peace with it one day.
I've Only Seen You In Your Halo
