Strange self-awareness

I've been having these really bizarre moments of self-awareness lately. And it's not pleasant self-awareness. It's the sort of thing where you realize that you exist and everything you're doing and have done have happened to an actual person and that person is you and everything gets existential for a bit and you can't quite get over it for a while.

The first incident was on Tuesday. It was night, and I was at my grandparents' house like I usually am on Tuesday nights. My grandparents were asleep, and I went to the bathroom and noticed myself in the mirror. Maybe it's because they have a lot of mirrors in their bathrooms so I saw myself reflected more times there than I'd see myself reflected in most bathrooms, but I saw myself in the mirror and thought, "This is me. This is the body I pilot. I am looking at a human's body, and it is my own. It is the one associated with me. This is me. I see actually me in the mirror." And it was one of those moments and I had to leave the room and just sort of calm down for a bit.

The second incident was on Wednesday. I was in a bathroom again and I saw myself in a mirror again, and the same thing happened. Not quite as intensely, but it happened.

The third incident was on Thursday. I realized, after two days of writing-related difficulty, that my characters didn't feel real to me and never quite had. There's a certain extent to which I'm willing to stretch my definition of "reality". I accept the world around me as real in the sense of physical reality. I accept the things in my head, like my ideas or imaginations or the parts of my mind I personify, as reality in my head - you might call it head-reality. I accept religious things like God and angels as real in not just a physical sense (in that they are things that exist not just in my head) but also in a surpassingly-physical sense - like a super-reality, one might say. I accept stories and fiction as reality in their own contexts - not like I actually think things like A Wrinkle in Time or The Great Gatsby or Doctor Who happened with real people, but I accept them as having a sort of continuity that makes them "real" in their own contexts. There's different kinds of real.

Anyway, I'd been having trouble with my writing. I didn't feel motivated to write, and I didn't care about the story. I kept productive during those two days by writing some details about one character's backstory (or rather, things he did before the story's start) that would help me further the story's point if they actually appeared in the story, but I don't think I'm going to be able to conveniently work them into the story. I don't think that's what made me come to my realization, but I did realize that I hadn't been able to see my characters as real. I was invested in them and their relationships, but I didn't feel like they were real. I didn't believe in them. And as a writer, you have to believe in your characters and you have to think they're real on some level. It just wasn't working for me.

I told all my grandpa about this today while I was hanging out with him. He asked me how I was going to deal with it. I thought about it for a moment and said, "I'm going to stay away from mirrors." He laughed. I went on.

"I think I'm going to dissociate for a bit," I said. "I live in pretty much a constant state of dissociation - just doing things and not really thinking that it's me who's doing them. Just doing them. I think the reason other people don't think about these things like I do is because they're busy doing their own lives and not thinking about the fact that they're the ones doing them, that they're actually them, doing things in their bodies, in this reality. So I'm going to distance myself from the fact that I exist and just think about other stuff. Which is kind of the exact opposite of my problem. It's kind of ironic."

(My grandpa thought this was all quite interesting, and he said something to the effect that this is why he likes talking to me. We can get curiously philosophical together.)

That's been my experience with realizing that I'm real and that I exist and I pilot a body in the physical world and weird stuff like that. Interesting stuff to think about, as long as you don't have to think about it for too long.

All things end

Being a college student, I have found myself in a place in which college students find themselves all the time. I have found myself in the position of having to take and study for the semester's finals. This is extremely stressful, especially since I've had a class that was very difficult for me and actually damaged my entire self-perception. I'm really only good at academics - well, that and writing - and if I'm not doing well in a class, I feel like I'm not good at my purpose, which is admittedly true. It's also incredibly stressful and occasionally debilitating.

I am also in the position of having to say goodbye to my classes, which is also a bit difficult. I have problems with leaving and losing things, and this has so far been the hardest college semester to end, for a variety of complex emotional reasons. I'm going to miss my classes, which were insightful and interesting. I'm going to miss the class environments, which were wonderful and welcoming and genuinely pleasant. I'm going to miss my acquaintances, who I grew attached to despite not really forming strong emotional bonds with them (that's difficult for me to do, and there was barely any time to do so). I'm going to miss my teachers, who all taught so well.

There's a phrase I've been using for a very long time, and it's helped me cope with reality very well. The phrase is "all things end". It helps me with good things and bad things. It's been increasingly relevant here.

All things end; anything good is going to leave, and I may as well enjoy it while it's here while knowing it won't last forever so I don't have to deal with the pain of growing too attached to it. Thinking something will last forever is a great way to appreciate it while it's here and never recover from losing it when it finally has to go. If you know it's going to end, you can enjoy it while still being informed as to the reality of its impermanence.

All things end; anything bad has got to end sometime, even if it ends when your life does. If you know that something bad will end, it somehow makes it more bearable. You might not know when it ends, but every moment you spend is a moment closer to its end. Sometimes, knowing that it will end makes it bearable.

All things end; neutral things will end just like good things and bad things end. Learn what you can learn from them while they're here. Then move on to the next thing that comes into your life and learn what you can learn from it. Once it's gone, something else will come into your life, and you must learn from it, too. Repeat.

All things end; this is how I'm getting through losing the people and things I've grown attached to, the stress I have to push through, and the miscellany surrounding.

Don't shame people for liking things.

I went to see Catching Fire with my sister and some family friends yesterday. My sister loved it, as did I, and it made me rather happy to see her enjoying it so much. She previously stated that she didn't want to read it because "it's about a million kids running around and killing each other" (she didn't care when I corrected her count to twenty-four). But now she likes it, and it makes me happy to see her enjoying a piece of good fiction. I don't know why she likes it (I presume she came to believe that it has a good plot and that it is interesting and engaging), but no matter why she likes it, she likes it, and it makes her happy.

I have two friends (twin teenage girls) who have yet to read or watch The Hunger Games and who were also originally aversive to the idea for much the same reasons that my sister was. However, through conversations with me about it, they found out that it has themes of revolution as well as a love triangle. These things interested them. They like revolutions, and they like love triangles. (They happen to positively love Les Miserables, which features both of these things).

Some people who knew my two friends wanted to read The Hunger Games because of its love triangle might think they were just stupid teenage girls being stupid teenage girls. The love triangle (and the inclusion of romance in general) is a common criticism of The Hunger Games. It's a series associated with teenage girls, a demographic commonly seen as stupid and immature, and anything that "panders" to them is considered equally stupid. Since teenage girls supposedly love romance and love triangles, the love triangle featuring Katniss with Peeta and Gale is often seen as stupid and unnecessary, and people who like it (especially if they're part of a target audience who is often denounced by those who supposedly know better) are shamed for it.

To be honest, that's pretty stupid and unnecessary in and of itself. And when I refer to "that", I mean "shaming people for liking something". A less-mature person might shame my two friends for being interested in The Hunger Games largely because of its love triangle. They'd accuse them of stereotypically conforming to the unintelligent target audience of the series and embodying everything that's wrong with people who read fiction like that. Why would anyone to do that other than to perpetuate snobbery and make themselves feel superior, though? Saying you shouldn't like something for whatever reason shows an astonishing lack of confidence on the part of the person saying that. Sometimes, people have stereotypical interests not because they're stupid or for the sake of conformity but because they genuinely like them.

If my two friends like love triangles, they like love triangles, and that's all there is to that. They like something. The thing they like has a lot of badly-written examples, and these badly-written examples are often used to characterized or stereotype the people who tend to like them (or, rather, the people who are given them in the fiction directed at them), but just because you're a teenaged girl who likes fiction that depicts complex romantic relationships and feelings where three people are involved doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. Ultimately, it just means you like something, and if you find examples of it in fiction that you like, then good for you! Awesome! Read those books! Watch those movies! Fiction should make people happy, and if it makes you happy, that's fantastic. If it makes you happy, then it's fulfilling its goal. And if you read and watch things that make you happy, then you're helping the people who wrote such things fulfill their goals as writers, and that's honestly kind of beautiful.

In which I talk about how there's not familial abuse or anything in my novel and why this is cool.

A rather big reason I like my current novel: the way it portrays family as experienced by someone with a mental illness. I'm aware that family intolerance and abuse exists, especially in cases with mental illness, but I'm also aware that there are many cases where the family isn't intolerant, abusive, or otherwise harmful towards the family member with the mental illness, even they don't understand the person's experience or know what to do about it.

I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that there are less families that are abusive/toxic towards people with mental illness than there are family that are abusive/toxic. And even if that's not the case, I've seen a lot of abusive or dysfunctional families in fiction, to the point where I'm beginning to think they might be just plain overrepresented. (Which doesn't mean realistic representations of abuse are not necessary; they are, but representations of another kind of reality would also be good.)

And another thing I don't see a lot of in fiction: family members or relationships that are toxic but not necessarily abusive or caused out of ill will on the part of the toxic person. The novel I'm writing has a character - the mentally-ill protagonist's aunt, who looks after him for most of the story as he undergoes recovery - whose actions have a mostly negative affect on her nephew until it is made very clear to her the effect she's having. When it's pointed out to her that she needs to change, she does so to the best of her ability. Furthermore, all her toxic actions are born from the fact that she has an inherently nurturing and protective personality and doesn't know what to do with it when she's finally presented with a target for her nurturing and protection. All of them. It's not because she's bad/selfish/dysfunctional/bad at dealing with people/[insert other negative trait here]. It's because she really, really wants someone to look after (preferably in a mother/child kind of relationship but with aunt/nephew being acceptable, too) and when she's finally put into that kind of situation, she's ill-prepared for it and she doesn't realize that a mentally-ill young adult (and thus, from her perspective, vulnerable) shouldn't be treated the same as a child.

Maybe I don't read/watch enough things with families in them, but I honestly don't remember the last depiction I saw of a family that wasn't dysfunctional or significantly not-ideal in some way. Which isn't to say that I'm trying to write an ideal family or anything - I'm trying to write a family that I think is realistic - but many of the families I've seen in real life aren't like the families I see in fiction, in that they're not as dysfunctional. (Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I can think of some examples of families portrayed in a positive light, where none of the members are or were harmful to each other in any way, but a lot of the time, one of, if not the, main message of the piece of fiction was about how families are or can be good.)

I don't know, I'm just really happy about portraying something that 1. I don't think is portrayed very much in fiction, or 2. isn't likely to be portrayed in this kind of story.

NaNoWriMo

I - I've a bit of a confession to make. And a bit of an apology.

As of now, I have quit my NaNoWriMo novel to write another project.

NaNo was too stressful for me to keep up with - I should have known it, I should have known that my anxiety is too much to have me successfully write a novel AND deal with school and live and people and et cetera - but I AM still working on something. I've got another novel idea, one that I think has much more "heart", so to speak, than the last idea did. And given that I'm only setting myself a 1,000-words-a-day daily wordcount (as opposed to a 2,000-words-a-day daily wordcount), I think I can make it. And the subject matter is something that will prove sort of relaxing/enjoyable/pleasant for me (while still making for a good plot, of course).

Sometimes, you've just got to know when to give up, you know? And here you go. This is me knowing when to give up. This is me trying to ignore my limits for the who-knows-how-manyth time and of course being pushed too far. This is me knowing what to do with my time regardless. This is me taking what, for me, was a stupid idea and making it better.

Cheers.

Telemarketers

A telemarketer called while I was eating ice cream and watching Monty Python (something I haven't done for a while). I was quite irked but I went out of my way to be nice to her. I like going out of my way to be nice to telemarketers. I hear people talk about how they like antagonizing those people, and I don't think that's very nice because telemarketers have a rubbish job, and they KNOW it's a rubbish job, but it's theirs, and I don't know how many people are kind to them (not many, I imagine), so I make it my job to be kind to telemarketers.

The Importance of Irrelevance (or, My Meeting with My Psychologist)

I went to see my psychologist today. The thing about going to see my psychologist is that I always end up saying something with her, but I can't ever really think of anything to talk about beforehand, and even though we always end up having a good conversation, it never feels like the conversation was about the thing we should have been talking about, whatever that may be.

A lot of things happened this time around, but there were two interesting things in particular. One of them was that I had two...I wouldn't call them "panic attacks", but they were more like, say, "anxiety fits that manifested themselves in very physical forms". Like twice during that meeting, because of what we were talking about, I felt my heart rate go up, this stuff aching pain in my neck, back, and shoulders, difficulty breathing, dizziness, etc. I actually have this feeling rather frequently these days. I had it at least one today before I had to see my psychologist. I'm able to physically detect them now. And they are now very very physical. That was interesting.

The other thing that happened involved me explaining something Doctor Who-related to my psychologist. It was very on-topic and if I remember rightly, she practically asked me to tell her about Doctor Who. (She knows I like that show.) As I explained something, she noted that I sounded and seemed much more excited and animated talking about it than I seemed while talking about the other stuff. She used this as evidence that I actually really like Doctor Who, to the point that it might be something "important" to me, something that I "love". And I actually got really sad when she said that, because Doctor Who (and the rest of the things I get excited about) aren't that important. Like the only things that give me any sort of pleasure aren't important. They're not productive (with perhaps the exception of writing, but it really depends). They don't involve real-world skills or concerns. They're not responsibilities, they don't help anyone. They're not important.

And for some reason or another, it makes me feel really really sad that the only things I care about are unimportant things. Like they tell you to make your life about the things that you love or that make you excited; the only things I love or get excited about are stupid, trivial things. And the "important" things like school and doing things for people are really dull most of the time and sometimes outright painful. They're certainly getting harder, for a host of reasons.

Though my psychologist did mention that I got excited about books. (I agreed and then rambled on a bit about The Great Gatsby. Again, this too was perfectly warranted by context.) She pointed out that my intent is to become a high school English teacher. I always did sort of intend to use the books I like in the classes I teach. (Provided they're part of the required curriculum. But many of the books I like are the sorts of books that are taught in schools.)

She then pointed out that, in the future, my teaching will be important. My books will be exciting and interesting. Something that is interesting to me right now but not terribly important will be the entire foundation for my employment in the future.
I suppose it's okay for my life's main interests to be totally irrelevant if they (or at least some of them) are going to become important later on. I guess it's okay if my main reasons for living are unimportant if they're going to help me do arguably the most important things in my life later.

Maybe one's life interests don't have to be important all the time. Maybe the things that give one's life meaning don't have to be useful or important or objectively significant right now. Maybe it's enough if the important things for now are boring and painful and the important things for later are enjoyable and interesting and the opposite of painful.