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rewrite-the-wrongs · 4 years

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first off, i’ve decided to turn off auto caps on my phone, and i’m gonna be real lazy about it, so the blog’s gonna look a little crooked. which i very much like.

pictured first!:

working on a soft sci-fi novella about an enby girl named Mud who’s living on a dying mining colony with her grandfather, Josiah. Mud’s going to hitch a ride off-planet on a space train—i get to use the word pantograph in a silly cosmic-to-quantum context, which is perhaps my favorite thing ever—and find herself caught in the crossfire of a robbery. when her traincar is detached, she’ll be cast adrift at near-lightspeed, and will turn her head and have herself a kaleidoscopic view of spacetime.

used to be i would scoff at using italics for an epistolary form, but then i reread No Country For Old Men—which, if i’m being frank, seems more like it’s about how the US is controlled by shitty old men than anything; it’s not as if violence is this unbegotten force, rather than a means of control currently held in monopoly by white men and the state. but that’s beside my point, which is that at the start of each chapter there’s a monologue by sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and they’re totally italicized, and McCarthy is notoriously too pretentious to even use quotation marks, so fuck it! Josiah’s father’s letters to him are in italics. yeet or be yoten.

ALSO, on the other half of the screen, i’m rewatching Train to Busan, which i friggin love. its violence is never too over the top, but it still manages to make its zombies terrifying in the way they rocket recklessly toward the nearest human they see, 28 Days Later-style. also, like 80% of the film takes place on a single train and isn’t boring? super impressive. even more impressive is that, among the small cadre of survivors we find ourselves rooting for, each and every one of their deaths is just gutwrenching, emotionally speaking, which i’m not sure any zombie movie has ever done for me (the death of Shaun’s mom in Shaun of the Dead notwithstanding).

the second photo!:

sometimes i’m not near my computer or i’m just too anxious to open it (been getting way better about that, though—thanks, D&D!). this note happened during one such instance, and became a little spitball session for Mud’s novella, in which i roughly sketched some of the weird shit that she might see as she’s spaghettified. it’s nice to do that kind of thing in a note—i don’t often feel as though i have my own permission to just write without constantly reworking what i’m looking at, but when i’m on my phone, that’s just not nearly as true. granted, that leads to way more half-baked (or, let’s be real, definitely all the way baked, LOL!) and/or mistake-ridden ideas. no matter; the iron hammer of the editor shall temper what the editor’s sickle does not slice away.

much love as always—

easy

#writing #process #space train #soft sci-fi #sci-fi #science fiction #speculative fiction #spec fic #Train to Busan #horror #zombies #film #korean film #writers on tumblr #queer #queer fiction #enby #enby girl #long-ass caption

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rewrite-the-wrongs · 4 years

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ever get in a fight with your own brain? / ADHD & RSD

I spoke in my first post about the pace at which I create, and the constant mental back-and-forth I go through when reading or writing. The thing I didn’t mention, though, is that it can take a nearly-insurmountable effort to get to the point that I’m actually producing anything.

For instance: After I wrote the first two sentences of this post and four words of the next, I left my computer on my bed and went to have a shit. While there, I spent about fifty minutes on my phone (it’s no wonder I have fucking hemorrhoids, my poor butthole). Even as I continue typing now, I can’t stop flipping to other tabs. Sometimes I even pick up my phone and look at the same fucking apps I have open in Chrome.

I spent about three years talking with a therapist about this same issue nearly every week. She would ask me, “Easy, do you still want to be a writer?” and I would feel this horrible knot in my stomach, like if I said Yes I would be lying, even though that’s just not the case. No matter what I would press through the discomfort and say, “Yes. This is what I want. It’s what I love.” But something in my assertion felt hollow.

The question becomes: Why? Why in the living hell does my brain try so goddamn hard to prevent me from doing a thing that I spent countless hours practicing as a child straight up through my early twenties? Why has it taken me so long--I’m 27 now--to get back on the horse, even when I know that holding all of this creativity in can very literally make me ill?

I present to you an article a friend of mine shared a while back, and the first time I considered the very real possibility that I’m dealing with ADHD that is most certainly comorbid with my depression and anxiety:

https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria#1

That’s a rudimentary rundown of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), a common symptom of ADHD. Basically, rejection (perceived or genuine) can trigger a stress response, which subsequently can lead to extreme emotional responses to said rejection.

Nobody likes to be rejected, but this shit takes it a step further, into a place that can be utterly debilitating. When I try to get creative, I often freeze up or get incredibly sad after a short time working. This is because, on some semiconscious level, I’ve convinced myself my writing will be rejected before anybody’s ever had the chance to read it. I completely overwhelm myself with the idea of an audience--I can’t help but think about how hard it is to be published, or how huge the internet is and how easy it is to be drowned out in a sea of voices, or how my absurdly limited human brain can’t possibly come up with something nobody’s thought of before.

This issue becomes even worse when I have a personal connection to my audience. I went to school for writing, and I was surrounded by talented people, some of whom I’ve maintained contact with. Many of them publish pieces in lit mags or online pretty frequently, and a couple have books out. I’ve contacted two of them directly to ask about writing reviews/essays on their work, and they’ve enthusiastically said yes. Unfortunately--and predictably, if you’re following along--that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Those messages both went out some two years ago.

I actually came out to one of those two writers on a whim recently, and mentioned/apologized for the lack of review--and she’d forgotten about it completely.

It used to be that most of my rejection sensitivity was aimed at my lack of social grace. I was a pretty hapless kid, lost in my own thoughts, almost never tracking the conversation around me. I would frequently offer non sequitur distractions in class, to the chagrin of my teachers and often my classmates. I can distinctly recall many occasions during which I

1) Patiently waited with my hand up for ten solid minutes, thinking only about whatever random fact or opinion the conversation had brought to mind;

2) Relayed said fact or opinion;

3) Was corrected or chastised, either by the teacher or kids around me or both;

4) Put my head down on my desk and began to quietly cry and hope nobody would ever look at me again.

But it wasn’t just in the classroom that I struggled to be social. Cue an image of me watching at least a solid hundred kids and parents do the Cha Cha Slide while I sat entirely alone in a corner of the gym. Cue an image of another gym, where I was watching my younger sister and several friends play in our elementary school’s steel drum band alongside every band in our county’s program; all of the players gathered on bleachers opposite our audience bleachers, and a few non-players traipsed over to sit and socialize, and I sat there thinking about crossing that gym the entire time I was there. Cue an image of a moment at a swimming pool when I misspoke and offended a friend-of-a-friend, and tried to make myself apologize but just sat there and felt queasy, and I never found the courage to speak to either person again.

When I got to high school, things got worse before they got better. I became so stressed out by rejection that I began vomiting simply because I was around somebody I was attracted to who didn’t reciprocate my feelings. In the span of maybe two months, I dropped from a hundred eighty pounds to about one-fifteen. RSD literally nearly killed me.

At this point I was writing fervently, producing upwards of a hundred thousand words between a few different shitty novel concepts. My art was the one place I could go that rejection couldn’t touch me, the one thing I would share with anybody who would have a look. I enrolled in those writing workshop classes I mentioned last post. Whenever I had a spare moment that wasn’t reserved for video games or books or my eventual girlfriend, I was creating. And my brain and I kept at it that way for years.

This is the internet, so you’ve heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, yeah?

I found myself very firmly at the peak Mt. Ignorance when I entered college. My high school program had prepared me extremely well, and before long I was singled out by more than one professor, and even a couple upperclassmen. It went to my head quickly.

Enter a very tumultuous, extremely unhealthy relationship that began with me cheating on my high school sweetheart (no way that could go wrong). By the start of spring semester, this older woman realized she’d invented a version of me in her head I couldn’t possibly live up to, and I--being a deeply closeted egg, still, and steeped in learned misogyny--collapsed in on myself and turned into a borderline stalker for a couple of months. (I have since apologized, and we’re still in touch, albeit it very, very distantly.)

I deeply internalized this rejection, to the point that I started to denigrate myself as an artist, and my brain connected RSD more inextricably to my writing. When I hit sophomore year, my confidence had begun to waver, and even though I was still learning and improving, by the time I was a junior that confidence had all but dissolved. I was flat on my ass in what a political scientist friend of mine calls THE VALLEY OF DESPAIR, or the trough at the very bottom of the Dunning-Kruger curve.

This lack of confidence culminated in an independent study that I should have failed. It was spring semester of my junior year. I had the opportunity to work one-on-one with my favorite professor and, in my opinion, the most talented writer we had to learn from. But I was nearly out of creative energy, and I found it nearly impossible to write anything I felt would be good enough, especially for someone I idolized so intensely. I wound up sending him stories I’d written for a fiction workshop the semester before, and even then I wasn’t able to complete the course. That professor left my grade unmarked until I graduated, at which point he aced me out of what was probably a mixture of pity and a need to keep our small private school’s GPA high.

Senior year, I found poetry, which gave me the opportunity to produce less in terms of volume. I stayed in poetry the whole year, and wrote less than I had since I was eight. When I left school, I stalled out almost entirely.

This is all a rather long-winded way of saying that my brain is my own worst enemy when it comes to writing. RSD leaves me prone to catastrophizing everything, and the general trajectory of my life felt downward for a long time.

But I went to therapy, and I came out to my partner just about a year ago now, and I’m happier every day. I’m relearning the patience with myself and my artistic process. I’m pushing myself to keep learning and gaining experience and knowledge. I’ve got a couple different creative projects going. And I’m here on Tumblr, blogging for the second time in a week (ish--where the hell are the time stamps on these posts?!).

Every time I start to feel the crushing weight of the world above me--every time I feel like I’ll never climb out of the Valley of Despair, like I couldn’t possibly contribute anything good to the world--I’m going to remind myself of this image:

TL;DR: Fuck you, brain. You’re not the boss of me. I’m a writer, and I will remain one. And my writing is for me. Any other readers are a bonus.

Much love, y’all--

Easy

#writing #ADHD #RSD #Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria #process #creativity #diary

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rewrite-the-wrongs · 4 years

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Bout to play a lil more with Thunk, my agender Warforged Barbarian, who’s recently becoming a little more organic and it’s fucking gross and I love it.

#D&D #dungeons and dragons #warforged #barbarian #workspace #messy desk

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rewrite-the-wrongs · 4 years

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introductions / howdy, pardner

My first short story was about a fishboy and his human best friend. They battled a mutant piranha (whose name I think may have been Mutant Piranha, such was the monumental daring of my creative endeavor) and his army, who were out to destroy a mountain that held a whole planet together. The boys won singlehandedly, because scale was apparently a bit of a mystery to me.

This was the second grade. My teacher--who held me every day as I cried for weeks, confused and miserable and stranded in the throes of my parents’ divorce--understood before I did that I create to a ploddingly slow and steady drumbeat. A sentence is always so much more in my head than I’m able to let out, at first; I have to pore over it again and again, fleshing and flourishing (and often correcting) it, the same way I often have to reread paragraphs or pages or whole books to truly capture their meaning. In a word processor, this back-and-forth is as easily said as it is done; on double-wide ruled paper with dashed-line handwriting guides, the task is magnitudes more time-consuming, especially for somebody as messy as I am. So, while nearly everybody else played at recess on the sandlot and the jungle gym around us, a select few stragglers laid our reading folders on our laps and finished our stories.

My villain, that dastardly Mutant Piranha, found himself in prison at the story’s close. Awaiting trial, I guess; I never ventured that far ahead, seeing the big fishy bastard for a coward. “When no one was looking, he stabbed himself.” That’s the last line, stuck in my memory, not for its own sake, but for my poor teacher’s horrified face as she read my final draft there on the playground.

A mom volunteered to type up the class’ stories and get them printed and bound. For years afterward I reread that collection, always proud to have written the second-longest piece therein. I felt the weight of the pages, inhaled the tiny but acrid breeze that came from rapidly leafing through them. Knew it was a whole smattering of worlds inside, that one of those worlds was wholly mine, and I had the power to show it to people however I wished. Yes, I thought, I want this.

I’ve been introduced to writing many times over, by many people. Don’t get me wrong--I nightowled the first several chapters to many half-baked novel concepts all through my youth. But teachers have a way of showing a thing to you from new angles.

The first person to impact me as such was a high school teacher who was essentially given carte-blanche to construct a creative writing workshop in the English curriculum. The first semester was structured--you practiced poems, short fiction, humor and essay writing, drama, the gamut. Every semester after, the carte-blanche was passed on: A single assignment due a week, each a single draft of a poem or a minimum of two pages’ worth of prose. Forty-five minutes a day to work, and of course free time at home. By the time I graduated, I’d finagled my schedule such that I was spending two periods a day in the computer lab, and several hours after school every day working the literary arts magazine before I went home to get the rest of my homework out of the way and write some more..

My next big influence came in the form of a pair of writers who taught fiction at my university, a married couple. One had me print stories and literally, physically cut them up section-by-section as a method of reworking chronologies. Told me stories happened like engines or clocks or programs--pieces that meshed differently depending on how they were put together, rules that held each other in place. The other showed boundless confidence in me, listened happily to some older students who recommended I be brought on board for a national arts mag. They both encouraged me toward grad school, but toward the end of my junior year I began to stumble, and by senior year I was, to be frank, a drunken asshole. Time I could be bothered to set aside for writing began to dwindle. I limped through the editorship with the help of my extremely talented, utterly more-than-worthy successor--and come to think of it, I’ve never truly thanked her. Maybe I’ll send her that message, now that I’m feeling more myself.

On feeling more myself:

That drunken rage was brought on by a myriad list of factors, the primary ones being 1) I am the child of recovering alcoholics, and our inherited family trauma runs deep, 2) An assault that will likely be mentioned no further from hereon in, as I have reached a solid level of catharsis about it, 3) Some toxic-ass relationship issues, and 4) I was a massive egg and had no idea (or, really, I had some idea, just not the language or understanding or even the proper empathy to eloquently and effectively explore it).

I had a recent relapse with drinking, technically--a mimosa at Christmas breakfast at my partner’s parents’ home--but I’m not honestly sure I can call it a legitimate relapse. I’m not in any official self-help group, I’ve never engaged in the twelve steps or a professional rehabilitation. I had a very wonderful therapist for a few years but reached a point at which I could not pay her any longer and we parted ways--I miss her dearly, as she truly became my friend and confidante; she was the first person I came out to, and very well-equipped to handle it, lucky for me--but I’m still on behavioral medication. That tiny smidgen of alcohol pushed my antidepressants right out of my brain, and I became terribly anxious and angry and sad all at once, and briefly lashed out during a conversation with my partner behind closed doors. Not nearly the lashing out I’ve released in the now-distant past--more on that maybe-never, but who knows, as I am obviously a chronic over-sharer.

Frankly, I don’t deserve my partner. She endured my past abuses, told me to my face I had to be better, and found it in herself to wait for me to grow. She’s endlessly and tirelessly supportive of me. She sat with me to help me maintain the nerve to start this blog tonight. I came out to her as a trans woman just under a year ago, now, and I’m happier than ever, and we communicate better than ever. Our relationship is, bar-none, the healthiest and stablest and happiest I’ve ever been in.

So, naturally, I apologized fairly quickly at Christmas, and continuing where I’d left off at two and a half years, decided I’m still solid without booze.

If we’re all being honest, though (and I’m doing my best to be one hundred percent honest, here, though I will absolutely be censoring names because no shit), I still smoke way too much fuckin’ weed. High as balls, right now. 420 blaze it, all day erryday, bruh. That self-medicated ADHD life. I should be on Adderall and not antidepressants, probably, but it’s been a while since an appointment and psychiatrists are expensive, so I’m at where I’m at for now. Sativas help a lot. It helps with the dysphoria, too.

I don’t have a legal diagnosis for gender dysphoria, but tell that to my extreme urge to both be in and have a vagina. I’m making little changes--my hair, an outfit at a time, no longer policing how I walk or run or how much emphasis I put on S sounds. If I manage to come out to my parents sometime soon--and it feels like that moment is closer every day--maybe I’ll tell y’all my real, full chosen name. For right now, call me Easy.

Anyhow. My goals here are pretty simple:

1) Share words, both those by people I like/admire/sometimes know! and occasionally words I’ve made that I like. See the above screenshot from my notes app. Steal some words if you want, but if you manage to make money off some of mine, holler at ya gurl’s Venmo, yeah?

2) Discuss words, how they work, and how we create them, use them, engage with them, and ultimately make art of them. I am not a professional linguist, but I went to undergrad for creative writing, so, hey, I’ll have opinions and do my best to back them up with ideas from people smarter than I am.

3) Books! Read them, revisit them, quote them, talk about them, sometimes maybe even review them, if I’m feeling particularly bold. No writer can exist in a vacuum, and any writer who insists they don’t like to read is either a) dyslexic and prefers audiobooks or b) in serious need of switching to a communications major (no shade, but also definitely a little shade @corporate journalism).

5) I added this last, but I feel it’s less important than 4 and does not deserve bookend status, and I am verbose but incredibly lazy, so here I am, fucking with the system. Anyway: Art! Music! Video games! I fucking love them. I’ll talk about them, sometimes, too. Maybe I’ll finally do some of the ekphrastic work I’ve felt rattling around in my brain for a while now. Jade Cocoon 2′s Water Wormhole Forest, looking right the fuck at you.

6) Ah, shit, I did it again. Oh well. Last-but-not-last: This is obviously, in some ways, a diary, or a massive personal essay. I will sometimes discuss people, places, or experiences that have informed my work just the same as other people’s art has.

4) Be an unabashed and open Trans woman. TERFs, transphobes, ill-informed biological essentialists not permitted. Come at me and my girldick and prepare to be dunked on and subsequently shown the door via a swift and painful steel-toed kick in the ass. Everybody who doesn’t suck, if I screw up on any matter of socio-ethics or respect for diversity, please feel free to correct me.

Punk’s dead, but we’re a generation of motherfucking necromancers. Be gay, do crime, fight the patriarchy, and fart when you gotta. May the Great Old Ones select you to ascend to a higher plane and learn the terrible truths of existence.

Much love--

Easy

#writers #writing #creative writing #trans #trans woman #fuck TERFs #writing about writing #writer #my writing #diary

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