Let’s talk.
This is a long post that also happens to be long overdue. Also posted as a thread to my twitter (tl;dr at end).
Hi everyone. It’s been a while. I’ve been debating for a little bit on how to write this, going back and forth between feeling scared and feeling determined to say what I want to say. I’m finally at a point where I can confidently say: let’s talk.
First, I want to say this: I’m sorry. I haven’t been very consistent these past two years, with both my writing and with keeping in touch with everyone I’ve met online. If you’re reading this and I haven’t spoken to you in a while, know this: I will be getting in touch with you soon. I haven’t forgotten the amazing people I call friends.
If you folks will have me, I’d love to catch up with everyone I haven’t talked to during my absence. I want to make one thing very, very clear— me being gone was never about me not wanting to talk to the people on here or participate in this community. The thing I regret the most about being gone is leaving people in the dark. If my absence has in any way, shape, or form hurt you, I cannot begin to apologize enough from the bottom of my heart. That was never my intention, although intentions don’t fix the hurt caused.
I want to discuss the reason for my absence, so please bear in mind that I’m not trying to excuse being gone— just explain why.
Some of you may know that I have three diagnosed mental conditions that have mostly been manageable through medication and therapy. When I first started writing online, I was halfway through undergrad and I wanted a place where I could put my writing so people might enjoy it. I found that pretty quickly on Ao3. As I worked on getting my writing degree, I would spend hours and hours working on what became ASID. I was thrilled beyond belief when ASID drew in readers who left wonderful comments.
I have a huge amount of love in my heart for everyone who has ever read any of my works, and I wouldn’t change anything about that. Ever. But as I graduated from college, I started noticing that my mental health was on a sharp decline that it hadn’t been on since high school. I tried to keep it at bay for a while, because I was sure I would bounce back.
I did not.
I began to take small breaks as I jumped into graduate school. I feel very purposeless without school in the background of my life; I’d gotten a degree that a lot of people in my life implied was useless, and with every break I took I felt more and more like an imposter. What’s a writer who doesn’t write? Had I gotten my degree for nothing? I trudged on through grad school and received my Masters in May. It still didn’t feel right. I felt like a failure.
Every time I logged on to talk to friends or check my comments, a voice in the back of my head kept popping up. I was getting older and less motivated. Life outside of undergrad hit me all at once. Nothing I wrote felt good enough to post. The amount of debt I was in already made me ill, and I went through four years of schooling just to feel like the degree I earned was for nothing.
There’s a weird misconception that artists have to be suffering to make good art. We have to be low to do our best. And I was low, lower than I had been since the absolute worst days of my life, and I still couldn’t produce anything. The pain wasn’t enough to jump-start me. What worth did I have, then? What worth does someone who has put their heart into their writing have if they can’t write anymore?
I mistakenly felt like I was an imposter among genuine people, like the friends I had made and the writers I admired were on the other side of a window, in a place I couldn’t get into. When the pandemic rolled around, things had already been teetering on the edge. I won’t sit here and pretend that I got hit any worse than anyone else during 2020— I had a roof over my head and a place to go during my state’s lockdown. But there was ample time, and yet I still wasn’t writing. I couldn’t even do that right. I had to rawdog my mental illness for a stretch, live in a town where the worst trauma of my life had happened to me, and feel like a total, complete, garbage failure every single day. Logging in was more and more of a reminder that I was dead weight.
Financially, I wasn’t doing much better. In the past year or so, I’ve had to provide for myself living on my own on an nonprofits’s pay (not much), as well as occasionally provide for my uncle. I’d thought that by my mid-twenties my life would be different; that I’d be better. In the last few months, it’s become clear that I require surgery for something that may not yet be able to be covered by my insurance; my options now are to wait for it to progress and get worse for coverage or pay out of pocket for the surgery sooner. It’s likely I will need a second one afterwards to completely correct my issues.
For a while, that just made the idea of writing again feel selfish. Why spend time interacting with the community when I should be working to make money because I wasn’t eligible for the stimulus? Why sit down and write something that I would probably just scrap anyway? There’s a lot of other more personal things that happened during my absence that I won’t delve into, including the passing of our family dog. I’m sorry if this seems vague as well, or if it appears that I’m just trying to make excuses— I’m not. Ever since I was younger, I’ve always kind of receded in on myself any time I feel anxious or like a phony. I know it’s not a good habit.
So that’s why I’m here right now, writing this. If I could go back and tell myself that those things I thought about myself weren’t true— that I deserve to have fun in this community and I deserve to talk to the people I care about— I would. But unfortunately, I can’t do that. All I can do is move forward.
I’m not going to sit here and promise that things will be the way that they were back when I first started; not right away, at least. But as of lately I’ve been letting myself peek at my Tumblr dash every so often or log into my Ao3 to see my comments. Those things used to scare me— and they still kind of do right now— but I can’t let them anymore. Joining this community is one of the best things I have ever done. I mean that. The people I’ve met, the comments I’ve received, hell even the discourse I’ve jumped in on— I wouldn’t trade any of it. Things might be overwhelming for a little bit as I adjust to being back after so long, but I want to be here. I want to let myself be happy again.
If you’ve read this far— thank you. Thank you so much for your love and for your patience. Like I said before, I cannot stress enough that my absence was because of myself alone and had nothing to do with my amazing friends on here or the community. If I haven’t messaged you in a long time— again, I apologize. I really, really did drop off. But the only way I can be better at being consistent with the people I care about is by holding myself accountable, not shrinking away.
It may take me a few days to really sort through all of my unread messages and comments and asks and give them the attention they deserve. But I promise, I’ll reach out to everyone whenever I’ve taken the time to do so. Thank you all for being there even when I am not.
Tl;dr—Mentally and financially, I’ve been struggling a lot this past year. I fell back into bad habits of receding into myself and leaving people in the dark, and I really wish I hadn’t. I’d love to be a more active part of this community again. I love all of you so, so much.
