TCrystal Reincarnation
MLP: FiM
Adventure
Drama
Slice of Life
The birth of Flurry Heart was apparently a bit more complicated than first thought. As Flurry already seems to have lived a life beforehand.
Violence
Profanity
Human
Alt. Universe
OC
Cadance
Shining Armor
Flurry Heart
Charles Farrow · 4.4k words · 230 6 · 7.5k views

Understanding my limits, and an explanation for those that'd like to know · 9:15pm Dec 29th, 2023

Unsure if anyone really reads these things, but I'll write one just for the sake of it. If nothing else it might help me look back on things in the future, hopefully wiser.

About 5 years ago, when I was 18 I released my first chapter of a fanfiction on this site. I was worried and had worked on it on and off for about a month, but was still proud of it in the end. You may know this story as Crystal Reincarnation, the Flurry Heart / displaced human story. Back then it must have covered a niche of interest that some people liked, because it got a decent amount of attention, for a while even sitting without any dislikes.

I was Happy and proud of my achievement, and that people liked my story, but as I tried to continue it I encountered issues. Namely that people had liked the first chapter so much, even myself, that no matter what I wrote for the second chapter, the quality was just not up to snuff with what I thought was necessary. I couldn't live up to my own expectations, or the building image of the expectation I was imagining others may have to it.
And So It was trapped in a limbo, like the 12 other stories I never published.

However as I've recently come to learn, some of what made writing so hard, which for me was a mix of perfectionism and sheer inability to just sit down and do it, even when I wanted to, stems from something that has universally been a problem for me my whole life.
All my life I've always felt a lack of drive, dreams and initiative, not to say I didn't have grand ideas or could imagine cool things I'd love to do or make happen, but that It was always exceedingly hard to do so. This was both for my life in school, at home and in terms of keeping up with friends as well as my hobbies. I had a hard time focusing on things that didn't elicit some amount of instant gratification, like video games or movies and shows.

I've come to learn after some sessions with a psychiatrist, that this Is, at least partly, because I have a diagnosis known as ADD, which is something quite similar to ADHD, though a little harder to spot. ADD is like ADHD, with none of the hyperactive energy and all the attention deficit. My brain doesn't produce the right levels of dopamine that it should, which means doing things feels harder, as my brain literally doesn't create enough of the feel good chemicals to tell itself that doing things can be rewarding. Instead even mundane things like moving a dish 10 feet from the table to the sink or buttering a piece of bread can be hard to do.

I've gone around for most of the years I can remember, not knowing whether I was stupid, lazy or what was wrong with me.
Was I just inherently bad at doing simple things? Why couldn't I write or draw even when I really wanted to? I must have been simply too stupid or inept to figure it out right? Why did I keep lying about my responsibilities to my mother, when I knew how much more angry she would be with me than if I had just admitted the truth of my failings?

I can't say that it's all because of the diagnosis, I know I had and have a role to play in the way I've lived my life, but It's nice to finally understand that It's not because I'm just an inherently lazy, stupid liar, but because some part of me wasn't made right.
It helps even more to know that I now have ways to improve myself. Not only through psychiatric training, but also via medicine.
I've started taking a prescription called methylphenidate, which is a form of ADHD medicine, and even just the small dose I'm on for now has allowed to begin doing things, to take initiative, to write and draw more when I want to.

It's not a miracle drug, mind, but it's helped a lot to see that there are ways that I can actually function like a regular person, and I still need to work on dropping many bad habits that I've developed through my life, and even with all that, the medicine only lasts for 8 hours on a given day, after which I get a little more loopy than I was to begin with, but still...

For the first time in years, I've come back to this site not as a reader, but as a writer, and I have something I've not dared entertain myself with for many years. Hope. Hope that I can actually do what I set out to do, hope that I can succeed and fail and learn and thrive. Hope that if I do manage to grow and write more, and release more stories and chapters, that you'll maybe give them a chance, and that hopefully you'll get some enjoyment from them.

I make no promises to anyone but myself, but I wish to do better, I wish to feel better and think better, and I hope this explains at least partly why I've not updated the stories you may have come across.