#gingerspeaks

I did this with the help of my family and partners, but I moved by myself. Or, well, just me and my cat. All for the sake of some dumb graduate program, I moved three thousand miles from New York City to San Francisco.

I knew almost no one here when I arrived. Finding housing caused multiple breakdowns and a loss of faith in humanity. Furnishing my new apartment seemed a monumental task on its own. And then I started classes.

Graduate school, if you’re wondering, is incredibly hard. I’ve had weeks where I had almost a thousand pages of reading. I have projects worth 20% of my grade that make no fucking sense. Even if the standard weren’t so high already, my own standards for myself already are.

Some days I was so homesick I felt like I might puke. Some days I wanted to give up entirely. Most days I’m so lonely my mind is like a dark echo chamber.

I struggled through, and was finally convinced to find a therapist. The process took nearly six weeks. And in that time, something worse happened.

My cousin killed himself. And yes. We were close.

There was no immediate funeral and plane tickets were expensive. So I stayed. I stayed and grieved alone. I stayed and swung half-heartedly at my mountain of homework. I got lots of support from some people who love me, but others showed how little they really cared.

I’m telling you, the vast expanse of the internet, all of this, because almost none of you know me personally, and I’m tired of keeping things to myself. I kept trying to push through. I kept thinking I was exaggerating the difficulty and the pain. Tried to convince myself that the pain didn’t matter because I had things to do. Belittled myself and what I was going through.

It has come to my attention recently that those three things: moving a great distance (alone), beginning higher education, and losing a loved one, are all, by themselves, major uhpeaval events in a person’s life. Each is unimaginably challenging on its own. And that I’ve gone through them all in the space of four months and I’m not calling it quits says quite a lot.

We are, very often, stronger than we believe. More resilient than we imagine. More resourceful and intelligent and determined than perhaps many people have told us we are.

Anyway, if you are also struggling or also lonely or just want to say hi, I would love a few extra friends. I’m trying to remember to reach out to people.

Or worse, I start writing for fanfiction to get around to actually liking one character and now that's all I want to write with. I've written more for him than he will ever have in canon. He is more OC than not Ship of Theseus style but because I'm now morally attached to his name and face he will never be truly my character no matter how much I adore the version of him I've made. I have AUs and AUs of AUs that are basically original writing now, with absolutely zero connection to the source material plot wise, but I can't just rename him or fix the colors, because then it doesn't make sense because I have left half of the reason of Why He Is The Way He Is in that hell hole of a canon and then when I finally cut ties with it, none of the character's actions make sense to me anymore.

And!! I can't make any new characters!! Because I'm stuck with This Fucking Guy, so everyone else talks about the different characters they've made and loved and all their extended universes and I'm over here with 27 different versions of This Fucking Guy that are all just a little to the left of him and all act just a little bit different, like that one trope in western cartoons where a character gets separated prism style into all their various emotions. They run around rent free in my head and cause chaos, but also, it's still all just This One Fucking Guy.

And worse, he still exists outside my head as his canon counterpart, and other people have varying iterations of This Fucking Guy, and then I have to sit there and bite my fucking knuckles because he's not my OC, he is occasionally other people's Fucking Guy, not to mention Canon, and I take a little bit of psychic damage every time I see something and go 'oh he would not fucking do that' and then remember that in other people's interpretations of him, he would, in fact, fucking do that.

I can go ridiculously in depth about every aspect of his character design, his backstory, every little change I made from universe to universe and how it's affected him. I know his skill set at every point in his life, where it diverges, where he ends up, how good he gets to be. I have pages of notes about what he knows and doesn't know depending on the universe. He has been human. He has been alien. He has been a mermaid. He has been a cow. He has been an avian person. He has lost limbs, changed his face, his shape, but I cannot remove the canon character core from him or he simply ceases to be. I am so utterly insane about this.

And also I will never, ever be able to write anything that isn't under the umbrella of 'fanfiction' because I can Ship of Theseus him all I want for better and more functional parts, a real backstory, family, a home, a lover, multiple lovers, but at the end of the day, everybody is still going to recognize the Ship that he set out as. Worse, he's a background character. Just popular enough to be recognizable, but he was made on a whim. Just to fill an empty spot in a story, and long forgotten by the original author and barely remembered by fans as anything other than the one guy who's just conveniently around when you need him.