fancy a cup of tea?

1. Through little baby steps, build up your self-confidence. Take note of your successes, and try not to minimize them. Maybe even keep a list on your phone of tiny victories. Smalltalk with a stranger? Success! Try a new food? Success! Washed a plate even though it was really really hard and you really couldn’t make yourself do it? Success! If it was hard for you and you did it anyway, you’re killing it!

2. Go somewhere regularly, and be kind to the people there. Maybe you buy a drink at the same place once a week, or perhaps you take the same bus home every night. Say hi to the barista, say Hi to the driver, say Hi to the person you always see at the stop. It doesn’t have to be anything complex! Just “Geez, it’s cold out today” or, “How’s your shift going?”. Once you open the door for interaction, people will feel more comfortable with you. Sometimes they’ll start to initiate. You’re not the only one struggling for community! Lots of others are looking for friendly faces!

3. If you really, really can’t get yourself to stop thinking self-depreciating thoughts, at the very least try to avoid saying them out loud. A few years back, if I fell on the sidewalk, I’d freak out, tell myself I looked like an idiot, say something about being a disaster, and run away. Now? So many options. “Bitches wish they could be this graceful”. “Parkour”. “Guess I live here now”. “I am a God laid low”. “I am as Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, and was punished for his hubris.” People love to laugh, and it feels good to make people laugh! If you can laugh at yourself, bad things stop feeling so bad. And if nobody laughs? “I am underappreciated in my time.” Sucks how people can’t get on your level, queen.

4. Say yes to things! “Want to go to my cooking class?” Sure! “Want to hang out sometime?” Take a leap! “Have you ever been to a ping pong tournament?” Level up! Try as any new things as you can, and if it goes badly? New story to tell at parties! Sure, it might be nerve wracking, and I’m not saying to take dangerous risks or go into things you know you hate, but over time, it gets easier to be spontaneous and do things yourself!

5. Plan things! Start group chats! Take an interest in people’s lives and hobbies! Anyone wanna come to your place and watch a TV show you love? Anyone want to go thrifting? I’m headed downtown in 10, anyone want to join me for coffee? Offer!

6. Show you care. As I said, other people crave relationships just like you. Would you like it if someone at work remembered your birthday? Would it be nice if someone heard you got married and took the time to get you a card? Would you love if someone took an interest in your board game collection? Build those bridges! Don’t fake an interest in something you aren’t into, but try and see what they see, and if you *do* enjoy it, you’ve got someone to enjoy it with!

Families aren’t built out of thin air. A big part of making them work is working on yourself, and being dedicated to being the best person you can be. Kind, reliable people attract kind, reliable people, and if you surround yourself with people you admire and respect, you’ll find that the future isn’t really all that scary at all.

“Always believe in yourself. Do this and no matter where you are, you will have nothing to fear.”—Hayao Miyazaki 

never learned to raise my hand, was too busy raising hell

“studio ghibli romances be like “what if we didn’t kiss, but instead both spiritually matured as people because we met each other.”

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

But don’t worry, most writers are and I’m here to help because reading them is making me cRAzY.

I’m writing this because I’ve read three otherwise great romance novels back to back featuring characters dealing with PTSD (or PTSD symptoms) and each one of them made the same dream mistakes. I honestly can’t think of a fiction book I’ve read that didn’t make these mistakes, so I thought I’d compile a handy dandy list of mistakes and how to fix them. 

Lucky for you, I have PTSD and a ton of fellow veteran friends who deal with these symptoms. 

*This is based on my experience and things told to me by friends. This is not to say that the below doesn’t happen in real life, only that it’s not as common as you might think.

The issue with these dreams is twofold: on one side is the psychological accuracy of the dream and on the other side is how you’re using the dream within the narrative.

Oh an Black Sails spoilers-ish ahead. 

1) Stop writing the dream as a shot-by-shot accurate retelling of Traumatic Event.

Listen, not only do dreams seldom follow reality, but our own memories are tricky at best. I don’t remember getting beaten up because a) it was horrifying and we block stuff like that out and b) I was going in and out of consciousness. It would be pretty strange for me to dream something I don’t even fully remember. Our brains are simply not wired to do these vivid factually-accurate cinematic retellings.

My friend dreams things that did happen, but in his own words those dreams are always wrong in some noticeable or bizarre way. For instance, he’s getting chased through the streets of Iraq by a werewolf. 

2) Dreams are informed by reality, not direct reflections of it. 

It’s entirely likely my friend dreamt of a werewolf in Iraq because I got him binge watching Supernatural and the two ideas merged in his dreamstate. But see, that’s how dreams work. 

The trauma event exists as a constant in his subconscious, but he has all this other information right there in his conscious mind all day, every day. In dreams, there isn’t a clear delineation between that information.

My dreams are often dependent on whatever I’ve fallen asleep watching on television. The themes are consistent, but not the content.

In Black Sails, Captain Flint’s trauma dreams feature his dead partner and friend following him around his empty ship. You have an element of the trauma (the animated corpse of his friend) + his daily existence (his ship). The two things intersect to form these unsettling nightmares as expressions of his fears and grief. He never once relives the event itself in his dreams as shown on screen.

Speaking of…

3) Trauma dreams often revolve around feelings, not necessarily the events themselves.

The PTSD package generally includes heaps of shame, guilt, anger and fear. As someone who survived a beating when I should have had control of the situation, my dreams tend to revolve around fear that people will know I’m a fraud or being unable to act in a dangerous situation. 

Again, it’s entirely common for trauma victims to not remember large chunks (or the whole thing) of the trauma event. So why should their dreams be stunningly accurate? What we remember are feelings. Real strong feelings.

You cannot go wrong if you write your trauma dream around feelings, not a specific event.

4) If you present trauma dreams as expressions of themes, you can let go of the trauma dream as an exposition dump/way overused suspense trope.

You know you’ve read this: MC has dreams that are a shot-by-shot retelling of Traumatic Event that always cut off right before Traumatic Event, so that the Big Reveal must happen by a discovery later in the novel. 

If I were the MC in a book, the easy and common thing would be to use the “dream sequence” as an expository retelling of Traumatic Event as a way to give some backstory to why I might be surly, mistrustful, afraid to try something new, whatever, and to clumsily shoehorn in suspense where there doesn’t need to be.

The much more interesting thing might be if my dreams were inconsistent in content but consistent in theme. In one I’m on an alien planet (because I fell asleep watching the Science Channel again) and the ground opens up and I fall into a pit from which I can’t escape because I am helpless. In another a man is watching me while I sleep where I am again frozen and helpless. This would force the reader to think: what is the recurring issue in these dreams? Why is it important? What is this telling me about this character and what happened to her? 

It could be a personal preference, but I’d rather see the Traumatic Event either told in narrative flashbacks (not dreams) or verbally retold by the character in question. Let the dreams tell me something deeper about the character. It’s not that I was beat up, it’s that I feel like a failure because of it. One of these things is a shallow factual detail, the other tells you something about me as a person that I’m sharing with you, gentle reader, because talking about this stuff is healthy.

5) The Traumatic Event doesn’t have to be a big secret. 

In Black Sails, we know what happened to Captain Flint’s partner. It happened in real time in the show. That didn’t make his uber disturbing dreams less disturbing or mysterious. Fans still debate exactly what the symbolism was and what they were telling us about James Flint in those moments. We do know from the dreams that he was disturbed, obsessed, and also monumentally guilty and blaming himself for what happened. 

The mystery was perhaps more heightened by the fact that the dreams weren’t direct reflections of reality. We know who this person was, what she believed, and why she died. That Flint is imagining her screaming silently in his ear is horrifying and discordant with what we know to be factual. This adds emotional complexity to his character and the decisions he’s making while suffering these dreams. 

^^^this didn’t happen. It was a dream. A real unsettling dream.

Once you let go of the concept of the trauma dream as a literal retelling and exposition dump, you have the entire dreamscape to work in other narrative elements, like symbolism, metaphor, foreshadowing, etc.