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Year-end fannish reflections
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fandom_stocking fic this morning! I'm really getting into it this year; there are a bunch of White Collar fandom people with stockings up, and while I'm not going to write something for everyone, I'm at least trying to write something for everyone I know. (I don't think I'm going to make it, but I'm taking a stab at it ...) And I'm really having a lot of fun. I'll crosspost them here after the stocking reveals.
Also,fandom_stocking has a volunteer post where you can sign up to fill stockings that no one has filled yet!
The past few years, I've done end-of-year fanfic review posts, but it's starting to feel kind of redundant to list all my fic, since I'm posting everything to my AO3 account now. It made more sense when I had fic spread around in a dozen places, but not so much when it's all in a tidy, searchable list already. And AO3 has a lovely stats feature, which tells me that I posted 193,125 words of fanfic in 2012, compared to 256,553 in 2011 and 123,782 in 2010. (I knew that 2011 was a big fic year for me - it was the year I discovered White Collar, and I wrote a lot. I didn't realize I'd written that much this year, though.)
I guess you all know that the past few months in fandom haven't been good ones for me. But I really do believe that this is mostly down to me, and the way that I've been handling my own fandom experience. I also want to apologize most sincerely to those of you that I've quarreled with, treated badly, and said hurtful things to. I'm going to try to be a better (fannish) person in 2013 -- less quarrelsome and touchy, less inclined to allow myself to react with offense and hurt to innocuous comments.
Knowing how my own brain works, especially my tendency to be pulled into bad downward spirals, there are a few behaviors of mine that I need to start working to correct. I usually spend the last week or so of any year reflecting on what I've done in the past year, and this year I think that I've allowed myself to become very unhappy for completely preventable reasons, and then gone around spreading my unhappiness to other people.
There's been this slowly growing feedback loop where the more unhappy I get, the more I lurk, because I can't motivate myself to post comments or participate in discussions when I'm feeling this way. I just want to sit in my chair and have the Internet happen to me. It's not precisely depression, but it's a step away from it -- not outright misery, just a bleak lack of motivation to do anything. I have been spending literally hours a day, every day, doing nothing but mindlessly surfing Livejournal, reading my flist and my friends-of-friends and every White Collar fanfic ever, whether I'm enjoying it or not. I seem to be getting locked into this "no energy to move, must surf and read everything" mode, and then I just sit there and read EVERYTHING IN SIGHT: clicking on spoiler tags (even knowing that spoilers wreck my enjoyment of things), clicking on White Collar meta even when I can tell from the part outside the cut that it'll make me unhappy, reading pairings I hate, just reading EVERY DAMN THING whether it's good for me or not -- mostly because I haven't got the willpower not to click on it. Refreshing the same pages and comment threads dozens of times a day (or dozens of times an HOUR) to see if anything new has turned up.
And at the same time that I'm doing this, I'll have a dozen open tabs with comments I should answer or friends' posts I want to comment on. But instead of doing that, I'll be slumped in my chair, staring at the screen, reading posts that I don't actually want to read because I haven't got the motivation to do anything else.
You can see what I mean about this being located somewhere on the depression continuum, if not actually on the "depressed and needs therapy" end of it. I think it took me awhile to recognize what was happening to me because it didn't really feel like outright depression (which I've had). I wasn't really that unhappy most of the time. It was just a complete and utter lack of motivation to do anything, and a lack of adequate willpower to say "no" to myself when confronted with a temptation, like another link to click on. Which isn't necessarily a problem if it happens a little bit; everyone has some times when they feel like that, especially after a long hard day. Except I wasn't doing it to kick back after a long hard day -- sometimes, yeah, but more often, that's just what my days were like. And every day that I spent 6-8 hours doing NOTHING but reading things on the Internet made me feel a little bleaker, still not really miserable, just frustrated with myself for not getting anywhere on any of my checklists, and therefore, even more likely to do the same damn thing the next day. Meanwhile, I was socially disengaging while still feeling engaged; I was still reading everybody's posts, so I felt like I was part of things, but I couldn't muster the energy to comment, or to reply to the comments I'd gotten.
It's really insidious, because it builds on itself and it doesn't actually feel, at least at first, like anything is wrong, because it's just a slight extension of what people do normally. It actually wasn't until I was reading a checklist of symptoms for Seasonal Affective Disorder recently, and realizing that quite a lot of them applied to me, that I started realizing a lot of what I had been attributing to lack of willpower and/or energy was actually the top of a slow slide down a depression iceberg. It didn't happen this way before; it didn't feel this way before. I'm not having any of the symptoms that I recognize as depression symptoms in myself; I'm not having crying jags or suicidal thoughts or self-harming behavior or insomnia. I just spend a whole lot of time feeling like an overcooked leaf of cabbage, limp and blah and gray, and not really having the motivation to do anything, except let myself sink deeper and deeper into behaviors that make me unhappy.
There is definitely something brain-chemical going on, but it's not really depression as such, because it's something that I still can tell I have a lot of control over. All it really takes to make me feel better is to put together enough motivation to get myself to DO STUFF, either physical stuff or just writing-a-lot, doing-things-with-my-brain kind of stuff. The days when I either get out of the house and have a social life, or spend most of the day writing and/or painting and end up so brain-tired that I can hardly hold a conversation -- those are good days.
I'm not saying this to excuse any of my bad behavior in fandom this year. I have been pretty bitchy, and I feel bad for that, and I'm sorry for being unpleasant to people. I also don't think that it's objectively all me; there are legitimately areas of fandom that are going to make me unhappy, and certain opinions that I need to avoid for my own happiness. I'm not saying that anyone else needs to do things differently, just that I know I'm overly affected by other people's negative opinions -- it's not that they shouldn't have them, it's just that I need to take responsibility for knowing that I react that way, and, therefore, stay out of areas of fandom that I apparently don't have the emotional fortitude to deal with when I'm feeling emotionally fragile. (Which is, evidently, where I'm located right now.)
It's pretty much all come together in a big ball of badness the last few months. There's stuff in fandom that my particular emotional constitution doesn't handle very well, but I'd probably be able to deal with it if I weren't already on a downswing of my emotional roller coaster. But because I'm on a downswing, rather than handling it in an emotionally mature way, I've been reacting in the worst of all possible ways: by withdrawing socially (therefore depriving myself of positive social feedback) while still lurking in all the places that make me unhappy.
And the thing is, I'm pretty sure that I'm right about all of this. Thinking it over, I really do think this is what's happening to me, and this makes the "what to do?" part of it very simple indeed.
Basically, I need to cut down my Internet time, but not cut out the good stuff. I need to stop doing the things on the Internet that make me unhappy (wasting hours and hours at mindless surfing and reading unhappy-making things). But I need to do more of the things that make me happy: writing and posting fic, and chatting with my friends in their journals and my own. I had thought for a while that the answer was going to be cutting out the Internet as much as possible, but I really don't think so anymore, because depriving myself of the fun parts just leaves me bereft of my hobbies and a big chunk of my social life. The trick is to stop doing that "surf, read, gloom" thing, and instead, do more of what makes me happy on the Internet, and less of what makes me sad.
I've already started working on this by blocking my computer's access to a lot of the broader fandom -- communities and newsletters and such -- but, at the same time, trying to up my participation in the social life right around my online "home": commenting on flist people's posts a bit more, and trying to post a little more and let fewer comments go unanswered.
Someone on my last "I am so depressed about fandom, help!" post suggested writing more fanfic, and I've noticed that working on the fandom-stocking fics is working like a charm. I'm too busy to do things that are bad for me, I feel like I'm accomplishing something, and it allows me to wallow in the aspects of canon that make me happiest.
So, yes. More of that in 2013, I hope, and less of the other thing. And with luck and a bit of effort, the overall effect is that I'll be more of an active participant in my online life, and also more pleasant to talk to.
ETA: If you did wade through all of that ... please don't be worried about me! There is really no reason to. *I'm* not. Actually, I'm feeling pretty cheerful at having recognized the problem, even if it took awhile, and made, I think, a pretty good plan to deal with it.
fandom_stocking fic this morning! I'm really getting into it this year; there are a bunch of White Collar fandom people with stockings up, and while I'm not going to write something for everyone, I'm at least trying to write something for everyone I know. (I don't think I'm going to make it, but I'm taking a stab at it ...) And I'm really having a lot of fun. I'll crosspost them here after the stocking reveals.Also,
fandom_stocking has a volunteer post where you can sign up to fill stockings that no one has filled yet!The past few years, I've done end-of-year fanfic review posts, but it's starting to feel kind of redundant to list all my fic, since I'm posting everything to my AO3 account now. It made more sense when I had fic spread around in a dozen places, but not so much when it's all in a tidy, searchable list already. And AO3 has a lovely stats feature, which tells me that I posted 193,125 words of fanfic in 2012, compared to 256,553 in 2011 and 123,782 in 2010. (I knew that 2011 was a big fic year for me - it was the year I discovered White Collar, and I wrote a lot. I didn't realize I'd written that much this year, though.)
I guess you all know that the past few months in fandom haven't been good ones for me. But I really do believe that this is mostly down to me, and the way that I've been handling my own fandom experience. I also want to apologize most sincerely to those of you that I've quarreled with, treated badly, and said hurtful things to. I'm going to try to be a better (fannish) person in 2013 -- less quarrelsome and touchy, less inclined to allow myself to react with offense and hurt to innocuous comments.
Knowing how my own brain works, especially my tendency to be pulled into bad downward spirals, there are a few behaviors of mine that I need to start working to correct. I usually spend the last week or so of any year reflecting on what I've done in the past year, and this year I think that I've allowed myself to become very unhappy for completely preventable reasons, and then gone around spreading my unhappiness to other people.
There's been this slowly growing feedback loop where the more unhappy I get, the more I lurk, because I can't motivate myself to post comments or participate in discussions when I'm feeling this way. I just want to sit in my chair and have the Internet happen to me. It's not precisely depression, but it's a step away from it -- not outright misery, just a bleak lack of motivation to do anything. I have been spending literally hours a day, every day, doing nothing but mindlessly surfing Livejournal, reading my flist and my friends-of-friends and every White Collar fanfic ever, whether I'm enjoying it or not. I seem to be getting locked into this "no energy to move, must surf and read everything" mode, and then I just sit there and read EVERYTHING IN SIGHT: clicking on spoiler tags (even knowing that spoilers wreck my enjoyment of things), clicking on White Collar meta even when I can tell from the part outside the cut that it'll make me unhappy, reading pairings I hate, just reading EVERY DAMN THING whether it's good for me or not -- mostly because I haven't got the willpower not to click on it. Refreshing the same pages and comment threads dozens of times a day (or dozens of times an HOUR) to see if anything new has turned up.
And at the same time that I'm doing this, I'll have a dozen open tabs with comments I should answer or friends' posts I want to comment on. But instead of doing that, I'll be slumped in my chair, staring at the screen, reading posts that I don't actually want to read because I haven't got the motivation to do anything else.
You can see what I mean about this being located somewhere on the depression continuum, if not actually on the "depressed and needs therapy" end of it. I think it took me awhile to recognize what was happening to me because it didn't really feel like outright depression (which I've had). I wasn't really that unhappy most of the time. It was just a complete and utter lack of motivation to do anything, and a lack of adequate willpower to say "no" to myself when confronted with a temptation, like another link to click on. Which isn't necessarily a problem if it happens a little bit; everyone has some times when they feel like that, especially after a long hard day. Except I wasn't doing it to kick back after a long hard day -- sometimes, yeah, but more often, that's just what my days were like. And every day that I spent 6-8 hours doing NOTHING but reading things on the Internet made me feel a little bleaker, still not really miserable, just frustrated with myself for not getting anywhere on any of my checklists, and therefore, even more likely to do the same damn thing the next day. Meanwhile, I was socially disengaging while still feeling engaged; I was still reading everybody's posts, so I felt like I was part of things, but I couldn't muster the energy to comment, or to reply to the comments I'd gotten.
It's really insidious, because it builds on itself and it doesn't actually feel, at least at first, like anything is wrong, because it's just a slight extension of what people do normally. It actually wasn't until I was reading a checklist of symptoms for Seasonal Affective Disorder recently, and realizing that quite a lot of them applied to me, that I started realizing a lot of what I had been attributing to lack of willpower and/or energy was actually the top of a slow slide down a depression iceberg. It didn't happen this way before; it didn't feel this way before. I'm not having any of the symptoms that I recognize as depression symptoms in myself; I'm not having crying jags or suicidal thoughts or self-harming behavior or insomnia. I just spend a whole lot of time feeling like an overcooked leaf of cabbage, limp and blah and gray, and not really having the motivation to do anything, except let myself sink deeper and deeper into behaviors that make me unhappy.
There is definitely something brain-chemical going on, but it's not really depression as such, because it's something that I still can tell I have a lot of control over. All it really takes to make me feel better is to put together enough motivation to get myself to DO STUFF, either physical stuff or just writing-a-lot, doing-things-with-my-brain kind of stuff. The days when I either get out of the house and have a social life, or spend most of the day writing and/or painting and end up so brain-tired that I can hardly hold a conversation -- those are good days.
I'm not saying this to excuse any of my bad behavior in fandom this year. I have been pretty bitchy, and I feel bad for that, and I'm sorry for being unpleasant to people. I also don't think that it's objectively all me; there are legitimately areas of fandom that are going to make me unhappy, and certain opinions that I need to avoid for my own happiness. I'm not saying that anyone else needs to do things differently, just that I know I'm overly affected by other people's negative opinions -- it's not that they shouldn't have them, it's just that I need to take responsibility for knowing that I react that way, and, therefore, stay out of areas of fandom that I apparently don't have the emotional fortitude to deal with when I'm feeling emotionally fragile. (Which is, evidently, where I'm located right now.)
It's pretty much all come together in a big ball of badness the last few months. There's stuff in fandom that my particular emotional constitution doesn't handle very well, but I'd probably be able to deal with it if I weren't already on a downswing of my emotional roller coaster. But because I'm on a downswing, rather than handling it in an emotionally mature way, I've been reacting in the worst of all possible ways: by withdrawing socially (therefore depriving myself of positive social feedback) while still lurking in all the places that make me unhappy.
And the thing is, I'm pretty sure that I'm right about all of this. Thinking it over, I really do think this is what's happening to me, and this makes the "what to do?" part of it very simple indeed.
Basically, I need to cut down my Internet time, but not cut out the good stuff. I need to stop doing the things on the Internet that make me unhappy (wasting hours and hours at mindless surfing and reading unhappy-making things). But I need to do more of the things that make me happy: writing and posting fic, and chatting with my friends in their journals and my own. I had thought for a while that the answer was going to be cutting out the Internet as much as possible, but I really don't think so anymore, because depriving myself of the fun parts just leaves me bereft of my hobbies and a big chunk of my social life. The trick is to stop doing that "surf, read, gloom" thing, and instead, do more of what makes me happy on the Internet, and less of what makes me sad.
I've already started working on this by blocking my computer's access to a lot of the broader fandom -- communities and newsletters and such -- but, at the same time, trying to up my participation in the social life right around my online "home": commenting on flist people's posts a bit more, and trying to post a little more and let fewer comments go unanswered.
Someone on my last "I am so depressed about fandom, help!" post suggested writing more fanfic, and I've noticed that working on the fandom-stocking fics is working like a charm. I'm too busy to do things that are bad for me, I feel like I'm accomplishing something, and it allows me to wallow in the aspects of canon that make me happiest.
So, yes. More of that in 2013, I hope, and less of the other thing. And with luck and a bit of effort, the overall effect is that I'll be more of an active participant in my online life, and also more pleasant to talk to.
ETA: If you did wade through all of that ... please don't be worried about me! There is really no reason to. *I'm* not. Actually, I'm feeling pretty cheerful at having recognized the problem, even if it took awhile, and made, I think, a pretty good plan to deal with it.
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I sort of fell into Tumblr because it was for me the low stress fandom I needed this summer. Especially when I had no energy to respond to anyone's posts or felt like "grrr..." for no good reason. Having said that what works for me sounds like the exact opposite of what works for you. :) You always seem so much happier when you're writing meta and participating in discussions and posting fic.
I'm glad you found what works for you and you have a good idea of what's happening.
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Anyway, yeah, I think that it's important to figure out what works for one's own set of mental hardware. I had basically been trying to downplay my active fannish involvement in an attempt to get a handle on it, but that ended up having exactly the opposite of the desired effect, for me; I need to be involved in order to be happy. But for you it obviously works the other way 'round, and that's good to know, too! I hope things improve. *hugs*
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Lately, I've been doing more outdoor activities like learning how to downhill ski (it's a lot of fun for me!) :) Plus hiking. I found that the more I exercise the better I feel overall.
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On the fannish front, I do exactly what you do, and I think you're absolutely right about cutting out the things that bring you down, and finding a positive way of tackling it sounds like a great plan. I'm too fandom-shy still (got too hurt after the fandom-meltdown that was Children of Earth (Torchwood))) to engage with 'mainstream' communities, but my flist is still there, and you guys have always been my favourite fandom anyway :)
I guess what I'm really saying is thank you, and hope you're doing better for this, and here's to a Happy 2013 :)
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But anyway, thank you, and here's hoping 2013 will be better for all of us!