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#CAT ART *Tulip kitten* 🌷🐈‍⬛🌷

I had to deal with this recently after years of labouring on a manuscript and stressing about criticism and backlash (because writers get loads of negative attention now) and had to basically drop this project and not write for several weeks because that was causing the burnout.

I floundered for a while.

I figured making things with my hands was probably good. As was learning things and exploring new stories by watching movies I'd never seen before, learning about parts of movie history I had never known--found some really good documentaries on exploitation films, 80s horror, nudity and censorship in film, drive-ins--and generally just trying to take a vacation from my profession--which, I realise now, I have never done before in all my 20+ years of writing.

I think the solution to burnout is a vacation. A real vacation. A leave-your-phone-behind, don't-post-about-it vacation. Even a weekend would help. If you can go somewhere else for a weekend, do it. If you can't, well, put your phone away and go to the movies, or just watch an old movie at home. If you can walk, go on a walk around your neighbourhood and explore like you might have if you were a kid. Ride bikes. Roll in the grass at a park. Go to the thrift store and find something you can fix up or decorate and make it yours--we found a little bookcase and painted stripes on it and now it holds all our board games, as an example. If you have a yard, go mess around with it. If you don't, find some containers and put dirt and flower seeds in them--even dandelion seeds, which are free and everywhere! Draw on the wallpaper with sharpies, or get some acrylic paint from the craft store and paint an old bedsheet and hang it up if you rent.

Engage with the world that materially exists and do something that only benefits you, that only you know about--don't post about it! Try not posting about your life for a while, not scrolling. Put the phone down and change your environment a little.

I started really throwing myself into this lately, and it helps.

I think burnout is talked about like some big scary monster that can't be solved by regular people suffering it (because who the fuck has the money to do nothing for YEARS on end???). But I truly think burnout is just what happens when you don't take a vacation regularly.

You don't need a lot of money to take a vacation, you can do it with your regular days off. My mom used to take us on random vacations on weekends. She didn't know where we were going, we just started driving and she would keep turning toward things that were interesting to look at, until we were in Solvang or Idyllwild or somewhere and she would see a neat little motel and we'd stop and stay there for saturday night, and on sunday we'd wander around and go places that looked interesting in that little spot, and then go back home. This was back when gas and motels were a lil cheaper, but the idea is you don't have to plan a vacation and it doesn't have to be very long to be good and fun.

So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and “found family” often (though not always) ends up as a sort of...middle ground between that point and the “Only Romance Is Important” idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, and—at least in some ways—a found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.

In practice, I think that....even when we know that we don’t see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate “familial” with “important” (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least it’s a lot easier to make that case—and also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that “just friendship” might not.

...which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. That’s the highest-status box there is! Don’t you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??

But Friendship—philia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses it—isn’t a weaker form or “first stage” of other loves. It’s its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to “legitimize” it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.

(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! There’s a fandom I’ve gotten into recently that—as not infrequently happens—has a central relationship you could easily consider “father-son,” “best friends,” or a mixture of the two, and there’s variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as “best friends” in my own interpretation, but...a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the “father-son” camp. And even though I’ve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few years—mainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions I‘ve formulated while thinking about them—I still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! They’re very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, they’re still in my brain.)

The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own right—which stinks, because it’s great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. It’s also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.

The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of “Family” so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until it’s started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when we’ve lost the verbal distinction between “relationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connection” (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the “found family” definition of “any group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and aren’t related.”

bestie boo, let me fill you in on something: if you're going to take any part of 'good grammar' and randomly assign it to She's A Witch! AI, you might as well give up. It's over. You're cooked. Anyone who has spent the last decade or more learning to type properly, anyone who has spent any time writing articles/papers/essays that require you to use 'good grammar' is going to fall into that 'oh no it might be AI' trap.