On Lofty Goals, Emotional Labour, and YOI Music Week
This post probably isn’t necessary, in that no one has demanded an answer or even asked the question, but I feel compelled to say something nonetheless. Maybe it’s because I’ve been through this experience that divides so clearly into before and after, and even though I know that it’s unlikely someone would have noticed something if I didn’t make this post, I still have to. Maybe it’s because I’m the type who wears her heart on her sleeve, and maybe it’s because the act of writing fiction generally exposes you to your readers so I feel like being emotionally vulnerable here is no more risky than couching it in a fictionalized version of events experienced by the characters you know. For whatever the reason, I need to write this out. So mildly heavy personal stuff ahoy. TW mention of death.
YOI music week is coming up, in the same week that my final semester of grad school begins. Being the person that I am and having the fic that I do, I had predictably ambitious goals for it: I was going to do the full week, writing one fic or ficlet for each day. It was kind of the perfect theme week for me; I’m a music-oriented writer. And since I had a research project that was already a little bit behind my ideal schedule and also haven’t updated my WIPs in a while and also had school to contend with, I had planned to get as much done of that week as possible before the actual event began, and so I began researching and chatting with fellow author friends about ideas and writing down basic plot ideas.
And then on Saturday morning my aunt died of cancer.
We had the funeral very quickly because of our religious beliefs; I flew five hours across the country on Monday, I carried her casket on Tuesday, and I flew five hours back home yesterday. I spent roughly 50 hours in the near-constant company of family members in various stages of grieving: my mother, who lost her only sister; my grandfather, who celebrated his 100th birthday three months ago and had to bury his daughter two weeks before she was set to turn 73 years old; my own sister, who is emotionally intense at the very best of times; and my cousins, who called her many things--surrogate sister, mother, grandmother, friend. I spent some of my 10+ hours in airplanes trying to write, but at the end of the day the words just wouldn’t come.
My dad, who’s far more pragmatic than he is emotional, couldn’t figure out why the day of the funeral left him so exhausted; he “barely did anything”, in terms of physical labour. He drove to a few places and he ate food and he sat and talked to people. But he was exhausted—we were all exhausted—because of the emotional labour involved in realizing that you’ll never hear someone’s voice again, that they won’t be at your future wedding, that there’s a hole in the world and a hole in your heart, of whatever size and shape, because someone you love is gone. Even when you can cry in front of other people, there’s a performative element to it that drains you; you have to be strong for the mourners around you. When I was finally alone on Tuesday night, even though I’d cried a lot throughout the day, I collapsed into bed and started sobbing and I didn’t think I’d be able to stop. I couldn’t figure out why this hit me so hard, except that my aunt was someone I loved and she died a difficult and premature death after an often-difficult life, and I’m just plain fucking going to miss her a lot.
Emotional labour is labour, and it’s tiring, and it will zap you of energy you feel like you should have. And I just don’t have it in me to do all of YOI music week, along with the readings I feel like I should do and the preparations I want to do for the start of school. I don’t want to take another long long break with Setting Sun, and I know it’s been a few weeks already and I am plenty worried about the complications of school and research and stuff as the fall approaches, but I also have to protect against mental burnout and right now, hoo boy, all I want to do is sit on my couch and watch chocolate cake tutorial videos and play a stupid little iPhone game about airplanes.
I know I have supportive and patient readers, and I know that people probably weren’t expecting me to write a fic a day for a whole week. But I wanted to do this, and I had set these goals for myself, and I’m disappointed to have to realize that things probably won’t work out the way that I planned. I don’t want to leave this fandom for a long time but right now the thought of trying to keep even one character in my head, and trying to write out their actions with any style, is just...I can’t. I have nothing.
I’m not officially going on a break or anything. I’m going to be trying my best to keep one foot in the fiction-writing waters because it has made me happier than a lot of things this year, and I know it will keep making me happy. I know my aunt would want me to be happy, and I will be again. But that’s the situation as it is right now. This post functions more as a processing tool than anything else, so if you’ve read this far, thank you. I’ll be around. Please call your family and tell them you love them, and please live the life that makes you happiest.
