Gender: ChaoticNeutral

"I truly do not want to go" and

Loads of people in the tags are asking how I do it? I feel this won't be groundbreaking advice, but here is what I have learned:

Previous experience. Really no way around it. Now that I hit thirty, I feel like I have done enough things to know, intellectually, from experience, what will feel nice if I overcome the avoidance, and what won't. For example, every time I go to the beach, I wake up early and would rather eat a tire than get off the bed. But I remember that every time I got up and went to the beach, I was glad I did it. So I just get up, feeling like shit, and get ready, feeling like shit, and I get to the beach and magic!! I feel great, I love the beach!! Sometimes you just gotta do it scared feeling kinda like shit.

Am I avoiding the thing or getting to the thing? I have a lot of demand avoidance around just, y'know, getting up, getting ready and going out the door. Universal human experience. If I notice that doing the actual thing (Swim in the pool!) sounds nice, but I'm avoiding having to rally myself to go do that (Fetch swimsuit! Sunscreen! Towel!), then I know it's demand avoidance and I should just fucking go.

Is the thing making me feel excited at all or just anxious? I have had previous occasions when I did the opposite; I convinced myself it was just demand avoidance when I really just. Hated the thing. And wanted to stop. If you feel a mix of excitement and dread, or excitement and anxiety, that might be demand avoidance. But if thinking of doing the thing just makes you feel actively anxious, then yeah. You don't want to do the thing.

tell them about bill mantlo, creator of rocket racoon, whose brother has to start gofundmes to pay his medical bills while marvel makes millions off that character's merch. or to gary friedrich, creator of ghost rider, who sued DC for using the character at a point where it should have returned to him, lost, and was then counter-sued for selling merch including sketches for fans at conventions. or alan moore, who vowed to never work with DC again after he was screwed out of owning watchmen. or the archetypal examples of this phenomenon, jack kirby (co-creator of iron man, captain america, ant-man, the hulk, and a fuckton more characters) who of course was also screwed out of any ownership, or jerry siegel and joe shuster, who spent decades fighting over the copyright to superman, a character they created and sold for $130 as desperate struggling artists and who then went on to make millions for DC comics.

or if they're not a comics fan, why not talk to them about robert kurvitz, head writer of disco elysium, who through an extremely suspect purchase lost the rights to the world of elysium, representing his life's creative work. or to hideo kojima, who was forced out of konami, keeping absolutely no rights to his iconic metal gear franchise, and had his demo for Silent Hills made into fucking vaporware that nobody can download anymore!

or about the time that disney used threats of legal action to put a stop to such nefarious infringement of their copright as 'being painted on the walls of a daycare' or 'being put on a child's gravestone'.