Tag: depression

poplitealqueen reblogged your post  “For the title thing: Blink With Your Eyes Closed” and added:

*stares* So when are you seriously actually gonna write this?

Er… sometime in the next few years?

I’m going to try to get some of the incomplete stories into a more finished state before I start new long-fic, and this? This is probably another long-fic waiting to happen. Most of the title-prompt stuff is long-fic waiting to happen. 🙂

*hugs you* I’m glad you’re interested in seeing more!

At this point, though, I don’t know if I’m going to manage much until I can get my brain chemistry back under control and get the pain to stop. Or at least be lots less background noise.

I am making slow progress toward getting to a doctor and getting the ball rolling on official diagnoses or at least access to treatments to mitigate the pain better and rebalancing the brain chemistry. Right now, I’m waiting on things I can’t hurry along, and can’t do anything more yet.

(One part of something to help is reminding mom that she keeps mentioning getting a whole batch of TENs units for the family, since everyone has one form of chronic pain or another, until she actually does carry through on that.)

I just. The usual summer upswing of mood/productivity didn’t happen last year, and winter is never good for things, even with daylight bulbs and everything I can do with things that don’t require a prescription. Writing sprints help when I have someone to bounce off of, if I’m not absolutely blank, but too often lately there’s just been nothing holding onto my attention long enough to get words out.

I’m just glad the last couple of days I’ve been able to do the title-prompt things, though today has been more a struggle than yesterday. Probably because today started with some misunderstanding, plus the cat deciding to pee on the kitchen floor instead of in her litter box, and that set the tone for the day’s brain-space.

Also probably because I haven’t been able to manage food very well today, and it’s been a day of ow again. Spikes of ow, instead of steady ow, which makes it harder to filter out.

Thinky Thoughts

Thinky thoughts for the evening – really, for the last week or so – that I’m to the point of going “fuck if someone else has said it, or if it pisses anyone off”.

There has been, since I started writing, this concept of the Mary Sue. The “badly written authorial insert”, nominally. Always female. Often young. Always the protagonist of the fic.

And you know what? That discourages people from seeing themselves as the protagonist. It says that only certain types of people are allowed to be protagonists, and certainly not anyone who identifies as female.

That probably has been said more eloquently by people who have more time and faster fingers on the keyboard. I’ve probably even seen it float past on my dash. Still needed to articulate it anyway.

But that definition of Mary Sue has made it incredibly hard for me to be confident of OCs, especially non-male OCs, until recently. Left me wary of shaping characters who in any way resembled me that were meant for anything other than throw-away fic. Stuff meant to be self-deprecating and laughed at. Not with. At.

It’s that which made the post about doing a self-indulgent self-insert thing in January make me stop and think and go… “yes, yes I want to do this, even if no one reads.” And honestly, I don’t think the intrusive, niggling thought that no one wants to see a protagonist who is agender, aro-ace*, with invisible disabilities and mental health issues, deeply introverted, sometimes non-verbal, sometimes can’t be brief to save their life, both badly touch-starved and averse to physical contact (especially with strangers and/or without knowing it’s coming), and prone to severe bouts of anxiety when in unfamiliar non-emergency situations (and sometimes in emergency situations, too, the mess in my head keeps getting worse) will go away.

In short, I keep having this niggling fear that no one is going to want to see me in a story. Especially if I’m doing me from a first-person POV, as I am with the one. And may well do with the other. And doing the “gonna save as many as I can” thing, provided someone believes me, and doesn’t just think I’m crazy.

Anyway. I keep telling myself that this fear is my brain lying to me, and I’ll be fine, but it won’t shut up, because it’s winter and there’s not enough sun and it’s been a crap year for brain chemistry anyway, and yeah. I’m going to go back to attempting to write myself into my favorite universes, and see if I can’t keep my favorites alive because what else is writing self-indulgent fluff for?

(Do not tell me for getting into the pants of favorite characters, unless you mean that literally in the “their letting me borrow their clothes because I only have what I showed up in” sense. For others, yes, it may be. See also aromantic asexual*. I’ll be fine without sex or romance.)

*Asexual spectrum, because seriously, there’s flexibility and fluctuation in there for me, and it’s just easier to say ace and be done with it than try to explain further.

bluandorange:

so much of professional artwork can be boiled down to ‘Draw it again’

animation, storyboarding, illustration, comics, ALL Of it requires you to draw the same shit over and over and over again

and I don’t just mean ‘draw this character a bunch of times in order to tell their story’. I mean thumbnails, layout, pencils, inks–the incremental step-by-step to create the best version of your product possible. You draw your characters as stick figures, then you draw them again with more detail, then you draw them again and add crosshatching or shadows or whatever, and then you draw them AGAIN and focus on line weight and texture and fucking fuck fuck

you know what doesn’t play well with all this fucking work required to do your shit?

ADD and depression and anxiety

those mmmotherfuckers take one look at the fucking truckload of effort needed to complete a professional project and they just start spinning out of fucking control

its fucking frustrating as all hell because I love to draw, I love to tell stories and I want, more than anything in this world, to draw for a living. But man, most days? I can’t with all this. I can’t draw the thing a billion times. It’s amazing when I manage to draw it ONCE. It’s one and done with me, it always has been, and that’s NOT HELPFUL. That’s not good enough. 

and maybe with the right medication that’ll change. Maybe if my depression stops stealing my energy and my attention span lengthens and my anxiety gets manageable I’ll start building up the mental muscles needed to knuckle down and draw again and again and again, consistently, so I can be someone worth employing to draw cool shit

but I’ll be honest with you, most days, like today, I worry its not something that can be chemically balanced and I’m just too fucking lazy to make it as anything more than a decent fanartist living in their parent’s basement 

*offers a fist-bump of solidarity to @bluandorange*

So, until you can get the right balance of store-bought brain chemistry to supplement the natural brain chemistry to increase days when you’re functional in the way you want to be, you keep practicing with one-offs. You’ll keep those skills later, and be able to take them into the redrawing stage of things.

It’s a pain in the ass, the brain keeps telling you lies about it, and some days it’s all you can do to bother with trying to do anything. And sometimes you have to stop for a little while, recharge, and come at things again another day.

And all of that is okay.

And that? Goes for all the rest of the artists and writers who are struggling with a brain that does not play nice, and you feel like it will never get anywhere. You’ll make it, for whatever value of make it. You’re awesome, just for trying and for making things, because that is an excellent thing to do.

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.

Stephen Fry (via awake-society)

Morning, 12 Dec 16

As soon as dad gets back from the work he had to do in the office this morning, we’re going over to the local social services building, and dealing with bureaucratic red tape to get me government-funded health insurance (medicaid, if they’re not being horrible, and insisting that no, the computers are right, I can’t possibly be qualified for medicaid because the household income that doesn’t actually have enough wiggle room in it for private health insurance is too high for medicaid, and I just need to settle for the bare-bones and still can’t actually afford it private health insurance that requires paying too much out of pocket to be worth it).

Yes, they’ll probably be far better than that. Anxiety doesn’t give a damn and neither does depression and both lie very convincingly sometimes. This is why dad is coming with me, so that someone there has a brain that doesn’t hate them and play emotional roller coaster at times like this.

(Also, this is the worst time of month to be trying to do this, and it’s a particularly bad month with the desire to throw rocks at this here planet until it’s all pretty on fire.)

Will post again when I’m back, success or failure.

blvntsandbras:

kucala:

meowtian:

beijinhos:

hint: if a person with clinical depression and anxiety says theyre tired …. dont tell them they have no reason to be …. bc guess what….. They Know and Its Shitty

Louder!!!

I just want to add one thing-

If you have depression or anxiety? you’re not tired for no reason.

You’re tired because you have depression/anxiety.

Not only do they both come with low energy/fatigue as a legit common side effect, but they’re both fucking /exhausting/. fighting your brain all the time? exhausting. adrenaline crashes from anxiety/panic attacks? exhausting. being on edge all the time? exhausting. plus doing things costs /more/ energy when you have those mental illnesses.

You’re not tired for no reason, you’re tied because you have an illness that makes you tired.

I needed to hear this so bad that it made me cry

the-last-hair-bender
replied to your post “Brain, can we please maybe save the frustration for things actually…”

So, I don’t know if this will help for you but it helped me. Physically yell at your depression and tell it to fuck off. As loudly as you can get away with.

If that doesn’t work, than know that I adore you and if you need to talk I’m around.

Yelling isn’t an option, more for my own anxiety/probable PTSD than because of other people. I do find that saying something, even if all I’m doing is grumbling into the void of the internet, does help, at least a little.

Right now, there is also hot ramen with extra ginger to help encourage whatever is trying to inhabit my respiratory tract to fuck off, plenty of water, and attempts to figure out what Julian is up to in my raised-by-the-Obsidian-Order AU, because so far I’m not entirely sure it’s going to add up to a plot.

(Other than Julian has decided that he’s going to keep two Obsidian Order spies, two Bajoran ex-resistance cell members, one half-Cardassian teenager, and possibly a handful of Starfleet officers. They’re his, they chose him, he’ll keep them, thank you, yes he knows they have jobs to do, they can do them, that’s awesome, they’re still his, and name a god to fail to help you if you hurt them.)

Also, thank you. I’m sitting here grinning because compliments and talking, and it’s an awesome reinforcement that my brain is lying to me a lot. 🙂

thebibliosphere:

Anon asked: Would it be alright if I asked a bit of advice? How do you get stuff
done when you don’t have the motivation for it? (Also could you white out
my blog name if you do answer? If it’s not too much trouble)

Honestly sometimes it’s not just a question of motivation, and it helps to realize that.

For me at the moment, I’m going through a depressive episode and I’m struggling with some executive dysfunction. The inside of my head is currently me just screaming at myself to move and do stuff but the message isn’t quite getting there. For the longest time I thought that when this happened I was just being useless, but age and an actual understanding of how mental health works has allowed me to realize this is for what it is. Sometimes I simply can’t work and self care is the best I can manage and that’s okay.

Other times of course, if I am simply dreading something and can’t bring myself to do it, I set up rewards for myself. If I do X amount before Y time I can enjoy Z.

It can either be I get to read another chapter of a book I am enjoying, or I can go mess around with Skyrim for an hour and aim arrows at everybody’s knees. In that instance it requires discipline not to just let myself screw around more than is warranted, which is where self discipline comes in handy. Which sadly I don’t possess much of, so I set up alarms to annoy myself into doing what needs to be done and give myself a sense of schedule and structure. Give myself goals like “write 500-1000 words today” and if all I manage is 500 then my goal is still achieved.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when something looms over you. Break it down into sizeable chunks, allow yourself appropriate times to rest and just relax—otherwise you risk a burn out—and those are much harder to recover from than allowing yourself the kindness of saying “I’ll try again tomorrow.”

I hope that helps some, anon.