#409.txt

Let me tell you WOW it was fun to try being a gardener instead of an architect for A Well-Organized Life. This was the entirety of the notes I made for it, and some of them I didn’t even end up using.

If you’re looking for a sign to try something new, this can be your omen! 🌱🌱🌱

I just devoured A Well-Organized Life in 24 Hours (which is saying something, since I have two small children lol RIP my sleep schedule). It was amazing. You’re a fantastic writer, and this is one of the best Ilya POVs I’ve ever read. A million thank-yous and kudos for all the work you put into it. 🙏

Beyond being a great Hollanov fic, this story actually impacted my life in a significant way. I’m currently studying to become a clinical psychologist. In my country, that means a five-year program followed by a year-long paid internship before certification. So it’s a lot. We’re also required to complete at least 25 hours of documented individual therapy, and this month I need to submit my choice of therapist to my university for approval.

I’ve been in quite a lot of therapy before CBT, psychodynamic therapy, couples therapy, and group therapy and all of it has helped me in different ways. But choosing a therapist this time has felt surprisingly difficult. I have a lot of theoretical knowledge from my studies, and if anything, that’s made the process harder. I think I’ve been overthinking it.

When I read the parts about Maxim and schema therapy, something really clicked. I realized that this might actually be exactly what I need. I think I hadn’t seriously considered it before because I don’t quite fit the “typical” profile we often associate with schema therapy. But something about the way you wrote it just resonated deeply with me. I ended up sitting on the couch crying, completely moved.

It also led to a long conversation with my husband about fanfiction, about how powerful freedom of expression and art can be, and about how important human connection is.

I’m not sure if I really have a question, or if I just wanted to share this with you. But I am of course very curious about your thoughts while writing this fic. I don’t know your personal experience with mental health or therapy, but your portrayal of it reached me in a very visceral way…and I spend a lot of time in that world, so that really says something.

Thank you again for your work. It truly meant a lot to me ❤️❤️

I am just … flabbergasted. You wonderful, gorgeous person, taking the time to write this out and make my heart so so full 💓 💓 💓 I’m endlessly grateful to you for sharing this

My only experience with psychology (apart from a few abortive sessions five years ago) is about twelve months and counting of primarily Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I’ve been going through a major depressive episode for a Hot Minute, and while I’m not in the weeds any more, I’m still in that awkward phase of not-fine, but not-totally-paralysed.

My psychologist spent a few sessions with me talking about the basics of schema therapy, and I was initially a bit resistant because I had an absolutely wonderful childhood, I’m super close with my parents, I was like … this doesn’t sound like me? But then I did some reading on my own and I have never felt so SEEN in my entire life. Like weeping-on-the-bus-reading-about-Defectiveness kind of seen.

When it came to the writing, I went through my copy of Jeffrey E Young’s Reinventing Your Life and tried to answer the questions “as” Ilya, or my interpretation of Ilya, to identify his coping mechanisms and then used some of the guidance there to direct the path of Ilya’s homework and progress.

Apart from Schema Therapy being a fantastic narrative device (since we’re already familiar with the shape of his childhood, and don’t need tons of exposition to explain how those experiences may have impacted him), I also had a clear image in my head of another child’s maladaptive coping being the mechanism to break Ilya’s resistance to therapy, and light up his empathy and protective instincts and make him realise that this could be helpful for him too.

I was honestly pretty nervous about hitting publish on a lot of the chapters because, while it’s just fanfic not a textbook, I’m very much Not An Expert when it comes to Maxim’s side of the conversation here, about guiding Ilya towards healing (hello, Unrelenting Standards, nice to see you again). But since it’s written so boxed into Ilya’s own head, I hoped I could get away with it, just seeing glimpses of the process and showing more of the way the progress is changing him.

This is already too long, but I can’t not say again how unbelievably touched I am. I would like to buy you a coffee and give you a big hug and sit in a cafe and laugh together about abandoning sleep for reading stories where we KNOW they’ll end up together and ask you a million questions about your studies and kids and husband and the whole lot of it.

Been thinking about this since I first read this take back in Feb

Me, a little dork in Grade 3, had my first shipping experience when Hermione hit Draco in Prisoner of Azkaban. In my early tween years, I discovered that We Are Not Alone when I came across (don’t worry, incredibly tame) DHR fanfic for the very first time.

I didn’t stick with it, and a month or two of fanfic obsession slid away until, of course, I lived the cliche of so many of us, when it came back twenty years later with the resilience of an antibiotic resistant superbacteria.

I hadn’t recognised it yet, but I was early into the long slope of (another) Major Depressive Episode, and desperate for tenderness, for romance, for beauty and for joy. And rather than shoot a dart on commercially successful romance novels, I browsed the Dramione subreddit and started reading some of the All-Timers.

And, eventually, I started on Lionheart.

This was reading like I hadn’t read in years. It wasn’t just the best fanfiction I’d read, it was the best anything I’d read for ages and ages. Beautiful and tender and honest and gripping and new and so incredibly fully-formed. It fucking blew my mind wide open. I dreamed of it. I mourned that it could never be visually adapted for a wider audience. I pinched myself whenever it was updated, to see if this was real, if this favourite part of my week was really just sitting there in my inbox, for free and without reciprocal obligation.

And, eventually, I wondered how greenerteacups got so incredibly fucking good at doing this. So good and so passionate that she would sit at a computer and write and write and edit and edit and polish and publish, and make some absolute rando immediately down tools so they could inhale her words without delay.

I mean, how does anyone get good at anything? They start.

The last time I had written for a creative purpose had been at least two decades prior. Though I’ve been a Grangerian book addict since I was eight, writing has always terrified me. I think it’s the bridge between the idea in my mind and the immediate next word on the page that’s been so scary. I even deliberately picked subjects at uni that didn’t have essay assessments, only exams (also, I stan exams, don’t @ me).

But I started.

I started with 15k words of a DHR fic that’s still a WIP I might come back to. And then I got the idea for The Wrong People, and wrote 130k words to, roughly, 85% completion of the story.

It was never as good as Lionheart, but that was okay. I, a lifelong perfectionist, grappled with the idea every single day that I had to be shit before I was good. New Lionheart chapters were a North Star to strive towards.

And then the depression really hit. I didn’t write a single word for nine months, knocked out a quick one-shot in a night, then struggled to find a groove until I got Kingdon fever.

For the last five months, I’ve tried to write a thousand words every day. It has been, for the most part, the only part of my life that I’ve looked forward to while I’ve been searching for a way to spark life back into me. It’s given me more satisfaction than anything I’m actually, objectively, good at, a professional at, have trained for.

I will never not be grateful to greenerteacups for the incredible gift she left by writing Lionheart and putting it out on the stoop of internet. She owes none of us any explanation or justification for why she and Lionheart have disappeared, but I have loved and I have lost and I am better for it.

Maybe one day she’ll be in a place where it’s beneficial to her to see the love that remains in Lionheart’s wake, so I post this here in the hope that day comes.

My friend and I got to talking recently about the influx of “writers who don’t read” opinions on the internet, which also got us to talking about AI-assisted or AI-generated writing. I honestly don’t understand how someone who is not desperately, voraciously, frothing-at-the-mouth into reading would decide that writing is the best medium for the creativity and stories they have spilling out of their heads, but, hey, we all contain multitudes.

Rather than The Cultural Paucity Of Younger Generations (and other generation-war narratives that only serve to divide the non-elitist classes), this feels to me like a natural consequence of the mainstay of our greyscaled world: productivity. Who has time to read? Where’s the productivity gain in reading fiction?

If you’re old enough to remember the pre-GFC years, before “hustle” became a form of employment, then maybe you can validate my impression that artistic pursuit was considered a lowly-paid, highly-competitive career, but still a career that it was possible to pursue. I can’t think of anyone in my high school graduating class of 2008 who had plans to become the next Georgia O’Keeffe or Margaret Atwood (at least, not that they said out loud), but there were people who planned to save up their money and spend a year putting all their effort and love and sweat and tears into their band or photography, and maybe something would happen for them, or maybe it wouldn’t. But it was worth trying.

What a waste of productivity, right?

Instead they could have hustled, fit in piece of shit ad-hoc jobs around the edges of creative pursuits, until the ad-hoc jobs became even more ad-hoc, and they had to hustle harder and harder until there was no time left at all for painting, not if they wanted to buy groceries that month.

But! Now you can hustle AND be creative AND stay productive! All you need to do is let AI do the grunt work! Just seed your ideas and tweak the responses and you, too, can have a low-effort roll of the dice at becoming the next George R. R. Martin, one who’s guaranteed to write to the ending because the computer can’t say no.

Like, I hate it, but I do get it.

I should probably say at this point that I have very few ties to professional artistic communities, dedicated creative writers, academic cultural analysis, and no background in economic or political science. My skill set is hard science (obligatory Scully video, as is legally required), and I’ve returned to writing after a gap of about twenty-two years with no training or guidance. I’m just here, on the fringes of these communities, with a love of the game, so this has probably all been said before.

The pursuit of creativity in a capitalist structure is, pretty much by definition, a battle of compromise. Of palatability and speed and access and marketability and the fragile tastes of the majorities.

The barter economy, while charming and inducing lovely visions of communities taking care of each other, has been so thoroughly hollowed out by the last decade of betrayals of “exposure”, the unbalanced scales of heart and soul and brilliance and effort on one side, and the impact of a fine-print acknowledgement lost to an audience doomscrolling while simultaneously watching TV.

Which leaves us, delightfully, with the gift economy.

Of course, people still hustle here for kudos and views and internet points that don’t matter, and of course AI has spread like a weed wherever it can.

But, in my mind, this is still where the purest authenticity in modern creativity is still able to thrive. People write things because they can’t not write them. Because it consumes them until it’s on the page. And it’s left on the internet as an offering, an open door: maybe this will please you too? Maybe something I do, for the pure unremunerated benefit of working hard and having something at the end, something that is mine, little pieces of my life and soul twisted into the vocabulary and shape and form, inextricable from the seed of an idea in a way that AI is unable to mimic on your behalf — maybe it will reach into someone’s heart and make them realise that someone they’ve never met on the other side of the world has written something that will forever alter the lens through which they view their life. And the author just left it there, waiting for them, without asking for anything in return.

What a gift we can give to each other. To remind each other than the very essence of you, all the words you always misspell (looking at you, “devastating”), all the books you’ve read (or not), all family dynamics you survived, all the weirdos in your uni tutorials who will one day make excellent background characters: this is cherished. This makes a stranger feel seen. This rings true. This delights people.