My Fucked Up Brain [Crosspost]

 [Original post made to Dreamwidth Dec. 28, 2018]

Sometimes I just want to talk for ages about the various ways my brain is messed up. I'm gifted in the fact I got the help I needed to heal and recover and be aware enough that I can now draw lines and find connections into... Everything I guess. I've always been far too introspective for my own good. Or, maybe it was good for me to be. It's a gift and a curse to be hyper aware of things, and then be unable to fully prevent them from happening.

 

RSD is a good example of that. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is a difficult to deal with part of ADHD that essentially is like an over sensitive reaction to perceived (not necessarily intended or legitimate) rejection. I've had it flare up when a drawing I was proud of received critique I didn't want, I've had it when someone didn't respond to me in a chat despite being online, and I've had it happen when a friend merely stated they did not like an Overwatch character I liked (due to their game mechanics being admittedly difficult to deal with). It can kick up a dirt storm of depression and spiral into a state that is much like major depressive disorder, and panic attacks. I've learned how to spot them, and how to deter them, but my methods aren't fool safe, and I've even had a breakdown due to RSD in the past month. It's so frustrating!

 

And RSD from ADHD is only... One thing. Of many. I have general anxiety, which is a pretty way of saying I have anxiety over nearly everything. Social anxiety and temporal (time related) anxiety being the worst. Sometimes It'll flare up when people aren't talking to me, or when one person I really want to talk to isn't replying. It'll flare up when I have to work later in the day, with me staring down the clock each goddamn minute mentally calculating the exactly how much time I have left before I have to leave my house and go to work. Despite living maybe 8-12 minutes away from my job, I also am compelled to constantly be early so I always leave 30 minutes before Im due to clock in.

 

I'm lucky and glad that my depression at least is... more under wraps. Unlike my anxiety and ADHD, my depression wasn't genetic. It was caused from my abuse (and the residual PTSD as well, obviously), and I feel like it was 'easier' to sort of take care of. Granted, I don't think it'd be so easy if I wasn't on medication for it hah... 

 

Any way, there's no real point to this post. I'm purely just.... wanting to ramble. I enjoy it. It's how I healed so much this far. I still struggle with boundaries so I guess I probably shouldn't be rambling this shit to strangers but. I also struggle with 'caring' about self preservation a lot of the time. I'd rather give everyone all the ammo they need to tear me down if they want, that way it could just be done with and I can move on. Well, even saying that isn't true. I have the equivalent of a nuclear warhead I hold secret. Sometimes I give people the button to it. I'm glad everyone cares enough not to press it though...

Fears [Crosspost]

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Shipping and Healing [Crosspost]

 [Original post made to Dreamwidth Feb. 6th, 2019]

 It was back in about 2015 that I was much more attacked for ships I liked. The ship in question was BillDip, from Gravity Falls, a ship between a weird ass eldritch triangle, and a 12 year old boy. Before that, there was some uneasy chatter in ~2013 about BlackIce from Rise of the Guardians, a ship between Jack Frost and Pitch Black, but it really hit a peak boiling point in 2015. Things just got so heavy. And it did make me start to be critical of what I liked.

 

And no, not as in "golly thinking about it, I shouldnt do this" critical, but critical as in actually thinking deeply, and asking 'what is it about these dynamics or characters that makes me enjoy them?'. Around that time it was 'acceptable' on Tumblr to "Cope Ship". I thought about that critically, too. What determined whether a ship was for coping, or just for enjoyment? And did it really matter? No, of course it didn't, but because of the assault in the tags and ask box and fanmail (when it was still a thing) really weighed down on me. But to say a ship is a 'coping ship' outs you as a survivor of some sort of abuse, some sort of trauma, some sort of upset in your life that in all honesty you use ships to avoid, even if you don't realize it.

 

I for one was really unsure if I was 'coping' with ships. It's often not a conscious decision to do! You don't sit and one day think 'hmm I'll project the issues I experienced in my abuse on characters, and play it out in a way I find enjoyable or cathartic'. It just happens. It's an intuitive process for some people, and when you're aware of it, it seems to increase in it's catharsis.

 

But that year and onward, I became used to just... Outing myself. I repeated my abuse as a defense, where others were using it to attack. It hurt, it wore me the fuck down, it made Fandom terrifying. I used to talk about my abuse as a catharsis in itself. It was refreshing to take the weight and share it with my friends, to let them in on this dark private part of me. And now it was just something I had to vomit up to be excused from death threats. And I never felt excused. "You're awful if you ship this and you should die! Unless youre a survivor, of course". That little bit at the end did jack shit. Even prefacing your hatred with 'this doesnt include people of [x] category' doesn't help, doesn't make them feel any less attacked.

 

And then it became popular to cling to the idea that cope shipping was 'unhealthy coping'. It just crippled me further. I had a hell of a year in 2015 into 2016, and my therapist knows. I talked about it a lot. I had learned that I liked even more unconventional types of content in my ships, I loved it awful, I replaced intimacy with violence, it just felt right. And I learned a lot that year. I grew despite the bullshit about what fictional characters I wanted to have sex, and how I wanted them to do it.

 

This past year has been another year of healing, and I've noticed it... Through my ships. 

 

No, I'm not suddenly shipping sunshine and daisies and fluffy stuff, but I am having that be a little more common in my thoughts. But the main thing I realized that made me notice that I was healing was... I started shipping more M/F (hetero) ships and couples.

 

"What does that have to do with anything? Het ships are booooring."

 

No, they aren't, but as with most things, women have been criticized for their clinging to M/M ships while simultaneously being told that M/F is uninteresting. Did anyone ever stop and think just why M/M was more popular in the first place?

 

Male characters are given more personality and interesting traits, they dominate stories constantly, you're made to understand them deeper while the female characters mostly sit in the back line or get fridged. That's a pretty common reasoning and explanation, but not the only one.

 

Another way sort of relates to that, though. Women are taught to hate what they are. Sometimes the ways they are taught are subtle, sometimes its overt. They aren't as strong or interesting as men, they aren't given the same opportunities as men, their flaws in a man are considered gifts and talents. So why not lean towards male characters? Why not project on a male character so he seems interesting and ship him with a man?

 

Of course, these are also not the only reason.

 

Mine, specifically, is a small mix of the two above but with a third: I was abused. Do you know how hard it is to insert yourself into any romantic or sexual situation after you've been violated that way? I'll let you in, it's not easy. I leaned towards M/M because it allowed me to explore my trauma though characters who were physically unlike me. It was an extra boundary within the safety that fanfiction and fan content already provided me.

 

And the fact that I've started really leaning into M/F ships and more away from M/M, and project onto the female characters, and be able to in a less protected way insert myself into these fantasies to cope with being abused... Is such a step forward. And it feels almost small, and I'm afraid I might even get backlash from fandoms from it- I've had friends go through it! I've seen it! It's annoying and stupid and.... People just don't realize that shipping and fandom isn't just a fun little hobby to keep themselves entertained, but can also be a subconscious way to heal and overcome problems in their real lives. 

 

That's what fiction has always been! And calling it Fanfiction doesn't make it any less of that!

 

Anyway this was just... a small rant to get this out of my system, because it's been on my brain lately. In the end, this is mostly an exploration of self, opinion, and what I perceive, so, like, don't get all upset if I said something that doesn't 100% fit your situation, or someone elses. It's just my own speculations.

So Much to Do, So Little Focus [Crosspost]

 [Orignal post made to Dreamwidth in Feb. 19, 2019]

I feel like every single time I complain about these types of issues, that its just more of an excuse, that I'm totally 100% capable of doing things but am being 'lazy'. I know its not true, but the more it happens, the more I talk about it, the more that voice in the back of my head likes to lie.

 

I have ADHD-I and its a fucking bitch. Most times, working around it isn't too hard, I just have to lower my standards and minimize my goals. Sometimes it even grants that sweet release of forgetfulness, where I'm not even worried about the many things I want or need to do! But even then, eventually the anxiety will nag. I'm not doing enough, I'm not doing it fast enough, I've been resting too long, people are waiting, people are expecting me to do more. To write, to draw, to run blogs, to work, to cook, to live. Its like this looming shadow, and I don't really know if its even there. Does anyone really care to that extent? Do I really have eyes online who wait with baited breath?

 

Possibly. And even then, probably not as many as it feels. But I just. I feel like a failure for having all these ideas, these stories, these illustrations and comics, that just sit in my brain and know they'll never get onto paper. Whats worse is, it's stuff I want to do! I want to write, I want to draw, I want to be able to sit for hours and just get it out!!! But I can't! Everything is a temptation, and even if I manage to stifle everything, close every tab, ghost on every possible platform, my brain itself finds new ways to harass and tempt me! 

 

It's gotten to the point where the people I talk to even get agitated if I bring it up. They repeat the same advice, things that worked for them, and I tell them it doesn't work for me and they get annoyed about it. It's not my fault my brain is wired so different, that it requires new hoops to jump through to keep interested, that it becomes bored so quickly. I can barely do a 'focus oriented' task for more than 2 hours, outside of my day job, where there are enough variables in my day to keep me going. 

 

I've tried scheduling my days, and I've tried having alarms. I've tried just forcing my way through it, but hit this immensely difficult glass wall that I can't move past. I've jotted down ideas to come back to and they ended up just sitting in a notebook. I get the spark of creativity and grab it and then it decides to disappear after hardly an hour and i'm left uninspired.

 

I don't want more medication, especially for ADHD. But sometimes I wonder if it's worth the spikes of anxiety I inevitably get. 

 

Not even solely related to art or writing! With friends, too. I change to quickly but subtly, kind of like when you move all the furniture in your house slightly to the left a few inches. I feel like I'm suddenly difficult for my friends and partners to traverse because suddenly I'm so different. Suddenly I'm trying an entirely different strategy that seems to work only for it to fail a week later.

 

Like I hate going to therapy sometimes because I'll have found a thing that works, but it only works for about a week, and then I have to admit I haven't kept up with it because I just forgot about it again.

 

I don't know if it's going to get better or if it'll get worse, or if I'll be able to manage with the incredibly slow way I work, where I'm stuck at the whim of my own creative breezes. I want to talk about it, but again, I feel like I've just talked about it so much, and that what people offer me just doesn't... Work. And then I feel bad for having to tell them it doesn't work.

 

Now I'm just rehashing the same complaints. I just wish my brain worked fucking normally, and that I had more self control and focus.