This is just a little post to prove that this blog isn't inactive, and my presence on the internet hasn't entirely disappeared. I have tried several times to draft something more cogent, but it either becomes too unhinged to share or I just wind up with a sketchy outline that I can't fill out.
Basically, for months now, I have been doing poorly, physically but mostly mentally. I have a new diagnosis that explains a lot of this, but I have been mulling over how much I should share about that. Suffice to say that winters have always been bad for me, and this year it hit particularly hard.
I have not written in any real sense since the end of October. I worked hard on worldbuilding for a NaNoWriMo project, coming up with over 25k words of worldbuilding, and then realized I no longer had it in me to actually do NaNoWriMo. A few days after that decision, my brain imploded.
It would be simple -- too simple -- to say that it's merely an issue of overwork, that writing 6 days a week for most of two years was too much for me. But, honestly, I do not find that pace too hard to keep up with if I have a steady sugar drip of external validation for my dark little soul, and if the bottom doesn't drop out of my mental health. I could've withstood a lack of validation, but too much other stuff happened, so here I am.
I had to leave Twitter something like two or three weeks ago. The introduction of the view count was the last straw for me. I wanted to write a long post about how bad Twitter has been for me and why I don't think the publishing industry should be so reliant on it, but I haven't been able to wring it out of myself. The long and short of it is that Twitter is designed to foster drama and comparison with others, and the view count insidiously plays into that.
Seeing the depressing stats on my posts was enough. I have a sliver of self-preservation in me still. I had to leave. If having a writing career requires me to be constantly torpedoing my mental health with social media and scratching my brain for pithy Twitterisms, maybe it's not worth it. It wasn't getting me anywhere to be on Twitter anyways, so maybe I can do without it.
So, what have I been doing? Well, telling myself I should just go for a walk when I can barely get off the floor some days. But also, coping by absorbing myself in various fixations. I've realized that this has always been a way to cope with these bouts. In middle school I wrote my little stories on notebook paper, in high school I dove headlong into ancient Greek history and botany (especially of carnivorous plants), in college I obsessed over Bach and forum roleplaying.
Fantasyland has been blockaded. I cannot reach it. So I am obsessing over fragrance. I have a binder full of entries for each fragrance, complete with cute little title cards that I've drawn. I must have at least a hundred fragrances in my drawers, between full bottles and minis that used to belong to dead people, and samples that I've gotten for free by hustling on Facebook. I get myself through the dark hours of night by thinking of what I shall wear tomorrow.
Hell, here's my Fragrantica profile, since perfume reviews the only writing I've been producing lately. Look at all the little balloons on my reviews -- that means people liked what I wrote!
I've been reading more too. Chugged my way through the first Warriors series -- a nostalgic pursuit for me. Now I've started Narnia, which I've never read all the way through before. I'm also working on The Last of the Wine, the tatty old copy that my high school ancient history teacher gave me as a gift when I graduated. I love how Renault's writing is thoroughly immersed in the time period. The vivid descriptions of the temples, the streets, the gymnasia, Athenian fleet setting out for Sicily, the walls of the city. Maybe I was never able to understand the fuss over Madeline Miller because I was so pampered by Mary Renault.
Since early this year, I've been working on The Tale of Genji. It's been slow going, partly because the Tyler translation is accurate to the point of being difficult to comprehend, partly because the book is so huge (~1,100 pages!) that I have to be careful to not pull my shoulder when reading it. I still love the hell out of it though. Genji is a horrible man, I love to see what fresh drama he is getting himself into. But also, all the beautiful imagery, the conversations through standing curtains, the long hair, the colorful robes, the women renouncing the world to become nuns...I can't recommend it highly enough, even though no one will ever take me up on it.
Well, that's the basic summary of my life. I am still alive, even if I have all the dynamism of crusty clam on the seafloor. It will pass at some point, and then we'll see what I am.
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