consulate general of tol himling

'I miss who I was' is such a selfish line of thinking that I simply haven't engaged with it for the past three years. It doesn't matter.

But tonight in the shower I acknowledged: about 3 years since the genocide in Gaza began (it's been ongoing for decades. we must assert this. but i'm referring to the wanton, gleeful destruction in hyperdrive that has been the 'norm' since October 2023), it's safe to say the old me is not coming back.

I've hidden a lot of despair behind 'well i'm doing a PhD so i can't exactly enjoy myself/pop out a fanfic like I used to' but I've been working with only half a mind on that, too. My PhD work is so meaningful and I have spent years just procrastinating and submitting halfhearted shit. My inability to enter a flow state, rapt with my own imagination, delighted to create and just write and write and write, has departed me. I'm not suicidal like I was last year, but I am incomplete. Grey. I am desperately trying to claw back my creative possibility, all that color that was inside me. And yet I am absolutely inert, for all my scrabbling for it.

And there's a part of me that watches wider fandom from afar, and resents fanfic writers who are so prolific these days, these days that I'm not; I'm confounded that they can find the *mind* to launch themselves into long narratives. That they dedicate mind and heart to the writing marathon and they stay there.

How? My irritation gets self-righteous: don't you know what's happening around you? What the fuck are you doing with your time, all these chapters' worth of precious time? And I know all the while that's probably envy, my wishing I could recapture that feeling I remember and see elsewhere now. That I could offer something lovely for a likeminded community to enjoy; that I could still communicate through something so joyful as art.

I've been trying to write in other forms. RP is fun; I've made actual real life friends out of it. It is not the creative life I long to return to. It's something. It's a pale substitute. It feels like failure. I want to write. I am writing. It's not writing. It's not enough. I don't know how to fix this. I want so much to fix this.