Myself vs. Audience...same identity crisis?
[Crossposted to my Dreamwidth][or should I say crossposted FROM my Dreamwidth to here?][It's in two places at any rate]
In the past week or so I'd been having a nebulous mental health discomfort on the topic of writing, sparked by me uploading a new chapter to a fic I'd first posted for Yuletide (the "rare fandom" fic exchange)— which had gotten a surprising amount of attention DURING Yuletide, when people were browsing the Yuletide fics specifically, but at this time of year? Rare fandom indeed, it may as well not exist. So now, no one cares that I've posted said new chapter (not even the person the original fic had been gifted to has responded to the message I sent about it). Nonetheless, I keep getting MORE fic ideas in this nonexistent fandom that no one will care if I ever actually write, and so my brain kind of melted down. But I couldn't quite put into words what was bothering me. All I knew was it had something to do with writing-for-me vs. writing for an audience.
I finally figured out what's going on in therapy this morning, so have this elaboration:
My most defining personal trait is that I have a vivid, overactive imagination. (In high school our gifted teacher let us look at our own files that she had on us, passed up through the gifted teachers since second grade, and I had been highly amused and more than a little delighted to discover that, in evaluating me for the gifted program, one of my 2nd grade teachers, on a chart where they were checking off like "below average, average, above average" etc for various traits, had made an extra box on the line for "imaginative" just so they could mark me ABOVE above average).
Nowadays I know I have this particular neurotype, "AuDHD," that this experience of mine fits into, so I'm going to use those terms to describe it now, though I didn't have the language to describe it at the time, just the feeling, the understanding that This is How I Am. So, my "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" manifested in me having a hyperactive brain, really. My body, uh-uh. But there was SO much going on inside my head, and it was all very interesting, which made me a big ol' daydreamer. And night dreamer, too, which is how It All got started, when I was six or seven years old and dreamed about one of Santa's elves going rogue and taking our church hostage on Christmas Eve, and woke up thinking, "That was a STORY!" and, now that I knew how to write, I set out to write it.
So there's the part of me that DOES write for me, that couldn't stop writing even if I was the only person in the world who could read-- heck, that wouldn't stop writing if I was in a coma, judging by how often I attempt to write my dreams into stories while I'm dreaming them. I love crafting stories. I love putting into words the rampant THOUGHTS racing through my head. It's a matter of putting order to chaos, too.
It's like I have probably said before at some point about the Pipeweed Mafia Epic. That was a watershed moment for me in writing, when I'd basically stopped everything but journaling (oh, and the One Book manuals, which I got paid for so that was some bonus incentive) since Sam had been born and this sense of I Must Spend My Time RESPONSIBLY settled upon me. Then I got this writing prompt and this ridiculous story poured out and I knew what it was to write for fun again.*
But that's the ADHD side's influence. The Autistic side's influence comes from the fact that I can WORD better in writing than in speaking. It's funny how I've always known this even when I didn't think I was autistic. Language problems? Me? Oh right, I'm much more fluent on paper than out loud, maybe I actually DO have something of a disability with spoken communication.
As a kid and still today my favorite fictional character was Anne Shirley, because she was…kind of an aspirational figure, really. She's the poster child for the way ADHD manifests in girls, I say nowadays, but at the time I could just say that She was like me but OUT LOUD. We shared that vivid, hyperactive imagination. But she was DOING stuff with hers. She was sharing it with the other kids, having adventures with it. The other kids respected her for all her ideas. Man, I would have loved to be able to do that, to share everything that was going on inside my brain with the other kids, to have adventures with them. But somehow I was just this Invisible, Oversensitive Lump they went to school with, if they noticed me at all.
My Invisibility Complex— less an inborn personal trait and more of a reactive one, but it's the other trait having its say in how I identify with myself as a writer. I feel invisible, since I was pretty young. I have this whole vivid existence inside my head that no one can see. I still struggle with it today, even though I'm able to identify it and use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy against it and write therapy sessions for Viktor Hargreeves about it. It's the trait that rears its head when I don't get feedback on social media, that gets green with envy when other people's fanfics get spread around and shared and mine get a few kudos if I'm lucky. And it's the trait that was eating at me the most when I kept wanting to write for a fandom that doesn't exist, that manifested as a voice that kept whispering "No one CARES, what's the POINT?"**
Because sharing my writing is how I've felt SEEN, since I was little. Some of my classmates DID like to read the little books I made. My 6th grade Language Arts teacher, Mr. Rodgers, was so visibly delighted with the way I weaved spelling word sentences into stories, he'd ask me to read my assignments to the class, beaming at me the whole time (and he's still high on the list of Teachers That Had the Biggest Positive Impact On Me. He and Mrs. Forte— the above-mentioned high school gifted teacher, whom I still exchange Christmas cards with even— and the biggest reason for both of them is that they enthusiastically encouraged my writing). Many years later, an old classmate had run into my dad and kept going on about how much her daughter reminded her of me, which bewildered me, because I, you know, thought I was unmemorable, invisible; then I spoke to her myself and she explained that her daughter was always making those little paper booklets and filling them with stories, just like I used to do— so it wasn't just how I FELT seen, it WAS how I was seen!
In middle school English class we had to journal for the first five minutes or so, and then our teacher asked if anyone wanted to share what we'd written, and I always volunteered, because that was my moment to be SEEN, for all the Me inside me to actually come out for my classmates to get to know, even if I'd only written something like "Today was boring. I wish we could have an adventure." And then come to think of it I would have usually written something ridiculous that could have happened instead, so maybe it wasn't such a boring entry after all.
So, that's my thing with writing— it's hard to separate into Writing for Myself and Writing for an Audience because both aspects are woven deeply into my own sense of identity. I can't not write, because it's how I give the chaos of my brain substance. But writing is also the only way I really know how to connect with others, so it hurts much more deeply than it should when people ignore what I write. And, bringing the ADHD back into the conversation, I have terrible time management skills, so my brain is constantly both forgetting to do things and ruminating that I probably HAVE forgotten to do things, so if I take the time to write a story that nobody will read, it will yell at me, "YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME," and I will be unable to do ANYTHING, productive or not.
Which, more deeply, worries me that fanfiction has ruined me for ever getting back to writing original fiction. If I feel there's no point in writing a story for a non-existent fandom, how is there a point in writing a story for a fandom that never had a CHANCE to exist, because it's always just been inside my own head? How could I bear waiting years for my stories to be actually published, and even then wonder if anyone's actually reading them? Paper books don't have a handy comments section or even a Kudos button! How can I overcome all these hangups and just write?
(Nonetheless, I did write approximately 1,000 words of Blossom Culp fics in the past week anyway).
*While looking for that link, I ended up finding a WHOLE bunch of appropriate other posts in my "writing" tag on Dreamwidth. For example, here's me on how writing was my Voice as a child, and how dare I say "No one cares what you have to say"** to that poor little inner kid? And here's me wondering what I actually HAVE to write about, post-Pipeweed Mafia but pre- discovering AO3, and here's me post-discovering AO3 wondering which of my many works-in-progress I can actually hunker down and finish, many of which HAVE been finished since, many of which have NOT, AND you'll notice far down the list, I mention the Blossom Culp fic which finally finishing NOW five years later triggered this ruminating to begin with. And here's me wishing I had people to talk about my writing with, also five years ago.
**Another thing that stood out while reading the posts in my Dreamwidth "writing" tag was how often I attributed this voice to The Lone Power of @dduane's Young Wizards universe— ie Satan, the Prince of Lies, the Creator of Entropy. It occurred to me that it's been awhile since I've correctly identified this voice in this way— I've dutifully reblogged Tumblr posts encouraging a person to ignore the voices, inner and outer, that tell you not to create, but it had gotten to a kind of wishful thinking state: maybe if I tell myself this enough I'll believe it? But I used to believe a lot more STRONGLY that the voice that tells you, or specifically me, that my voice Isn't Needed, No One Cares, Just Shut Up— is the voice of Evil, trying to stem the tide of Creation. I need to get back to calling that voice what It is, again.
