As a result, I became fixated on the phenomenon of art that is objectively considered to be impactful, and also spent like, a really weird amount of time reading the Wikipedia pages for emotions and other “subjective” experiences, not because those Wikipedia pages have The Facts about emotions like fear, but because they must talk about subjective experience.

It led me to thinking about the body and the way experience is grounded in it, and the reality of whatever hard-to-describe and ephemeral basic need we have to feel safe in our bodies, to feel that we have control over that space, to feel that our bodies belong to us. We all agree that rape is traumatic, but where does the trauma come from? Pain is not a substance you can measure in a beaker. In what way are our bodies “us?” In what way is our personhood grounded in physical matter?

It got me thinking about the supposed mind-body dichotomy, something I read the Wikipedia page for as well, and the idea of a body as a habitat and a sacred space and a labyrinthine forest from which you are always running from something, which, like everything else, made me think of werewolves, because I was thinking about that tweet that said your anger is a part of you that loves you, and I was trying to make peace with my fear and tell it that it was real.

And I think being a werewolf can be about fear, because I spent so long treating it as my enemy and trying to flee from it, but it is not my enemy. Fear is the part of me that loves me, that will do anything, anything, anything to keep me safe, and if I am allowed to say it, trauma of any kind turns you into whatever monster you must become to survive it. And I became very opinionated about the fact that werewolf stories are all wrong, because now they treat it like some kind of medical, contagious disease, when really you must say to your fear my, what big teeth you have and wait for it to answer that they are to protect you with, my dear.

In short, I have been wrestling with my sympathetic nervous system response my whole life as if it is the wolf within that I cannot let loose. But fear is my most basic instinct toward self-preservation, which makes it the most basic form of self-love, which means that being a werewolf is also about love, maybe. I wrote pages and pages and pages of poems during this time, all exploring what the Wolf represented to me: selfish, ruthless self-love, animalistic enough that I was liberated from having to prove that what I felt was bad enough, because this entity was something that didn’t give a fuck about that. From this perspective, a werewolf’s wolf side isn’t an intruder from without; it is the part of them that survives the bad thing, and it is the part of them that wants to bite, rather than tolerate, the thing that hurts them, to tear it to pieces.

I explored the idea of the monstrous as self-love. I became really, really fixated on the link between fear and love, to the point that I came to the conclusion that a horror story must also be a love story, and vice versa. Reading horror was the only thing that made me feel better for a while, because what I needed was for the fear to be real, for it to be okay for me to feel it. I came to the conclusion that we are really afraid of only a few things, and most of them are described by not being understood and not being loved.

I was afraid of both of those things, even though it didn’t seem like it on the surface: I was afraid that I lived in a world that did not care about me, that would always be fundamentally, systematically callous toward what I needed to feel safe and to feel whole, and I was afraid that the terminology and words to describe what I felt did not exist, that I wasn’t traumatized but I wasn’t anxious either I was just something that did not deserve to be addressed or seen.

despite its season, even nature knows how to sing.

I could feel myself working toward a crying meltdown and was getting preemptively ashamed of what was about to happen when he said, “Hey, are you someone who benefits from breaks?”

It broke me.

Did I benefit from breaks? I didn’t know. I’d never taken them.

When a problem frustrated or upset me I just gritted my teeth and plowed through the emotional distress because eventually if you batter and flail at something long enough you figure it out. So what if you get bruised on the way.

I viscerally remembered in that moment being forced to sit at the table late into the night with my dad screaming at me, trying to understand math. I remembered taking that with me into adulthood and having breakdowns every week trying to understand coding. I could have taken a break? Would it help? I didn’t know! I’d never taken one!

“Yes,” I told him. We paused our call. I ate lunch. I focused on other stuff for half an hour. I came back in a significantly better state of mind, and the thing he’d been trying to explain had been gently cooking in the back of my head and seemed easier to understand.

Now when I find myself gritting my teeth at problems I can hear his gentle voice asking if I benefit from breaks. Yes, dear god, yes why did I never get taught breaks? Why was the only way I knew to keep suffering until something worked?

I was relating to this same friend recently my roadtrip to the redwoods with my wife. “We stopped every hour or so to get out and stretch our legs and switch drivers. It was really nice. When I was a kid we’d just drive twelve hours straight and not stop for anything, just gas. We’d eat in the car and power through.”

He gave a wry smile, immediately connecting the mindset of my parents on a road trip to what they’d instilled in me about brute forcing through discomfort. “Do you benefit from breaks?” he echoed, drawing my attention to it, making me smile with the same sad acknowledgement.

And yes, funny jokes about writing, but when I see posts like these I want to scream

If you feel like the sex scene you're writing is repetitive, no number of synonyms for "thrust" will help you. Synonyms for "cock" or "cunt" will REALLY not help you.

Sex scenes are character studies as much as they are action scenes. What are the characters' frameworks for what they're doing? Emotions, thoughts, specific physical sensations. If there are metaphors, do the metaphors make sense with the characters' experiences/the story's theme's/the setting? Is the sex scene completing a character arc, even a small one? Is there a character arc within the sex scene itself, even a small one?

A really good sex scene is specific and grounded to the physicality, emotions, and thoughts of the characters involved. Even if it's a PWP!

Now, when I am struggling with hygiene, I pretend I am part of a village with an annual festival, and I get one day a year to spend luxuriously at a bathhouse in preparation.

What my friend imparted on me was the skill of turning mundane tasks into fantastical adventures to make them more compelling and bearable.

So next time you need to go on a mental health walk, maybe consider doing reconnaissance for a secret underground organisation.

Like, the most luxurious "bath" I've ever had was in the woods with a pot of boiled lake water. So much effort went into that! It was a whole big process! I had to fetch the water up the hill, boil it over the fire, and hang up a bedsheet for a little privacy. Used a mug to transfer water into a pan to cool a little before pouring it over myself while the rest stayed hot in the big pot. But the near-boiling water steaming off my skin into the cooler air felt glorious and the whole process was wildly satisfying. I was a fucking forest nymph.

They were peer reviewed by theoretical physicists????