WWB: Shakespeare quotes, suicidal depression and mountain goats. · 5:48am Apr 15th, 2017
[This blog post was started in the Melbourne airport at 3pm. It's being finished on Saturday at 3pm. Sorry for the delay, but between those two points is basically a nuclear powernap.]
So obviously I've been saying for a while I want to step back from pony writing, and obviously I haven't gone anywhere yet.
I think I've figured out what the issue was, and what I'm going to do about it. I've been playing the Numbers game, which is like the numbers game only I assigned the values myself. Big, popular, attract followers, get the adrenaline rush of it all. It's been a very fun competition I've played with myself, but it also puts me in the wrong mindset for why I want to keep writing here.
I've stopped charging Patrons for ponyfic. It still goes towards reminding me to make these blogposts, to making stories, of course. But instead I'll be trying to put out monthly updates of original fiction, exclusive to them. Right now, it's going to be a book about vampire hunters, kosher Italian restaurants, and engineers playing with the source code of the universe all wrong. That's what I'm going to be treating as a focus.
But I think pony is going to just be an outlet for me now. I think I'm going to stop caring whether something's going to be popular or not, and write it because it's true to me regardless of the audience. Write for an audience of myself, and come what may. Serpent and the Apple and Vows Made in Wine are well and truly outside my usual fare and they're never going to get the views of Rarity Loses her Virginity in a Poker Game. But they've also had my favourite comments sections of anything I've written, and Vows currently has an upvote for every three readers.
I think that's a sign I'm making a good decision.
After the break; Explaining the title.
Here's the full Shakespeare quote from which the title is derived;
"I pray you, do not fall in love with me, For I am falser than vows made in wine"
That title is dedicated to ScarletWeather, chairwoman of the AragoNumbers* shipping society. Having someone to share and re-experience We Know the Devil with—go check her blog for that one, go, go, go now—is a big reason I took this step. Last month I wrote stuff like Passion and Reason because that's still just what I wanted to write. Absolutely. I want to write stuff that makes people happy, feel good, and that story had a moral I strongly and heavily believe in. Why it rings as a boring story to some**. Why I knew that would happen but didn't much care.
*Need a better name for this...
** If you think its construction wasn't completely intentional, I urge you to consider how easily I could have made it a 'classic' romance by telling the same story from Pinkie Pie's perspective instead.
But the music I enjoy, the songs I listen to, the games that really connect with me are rarely happy things. It's not that I don't believe happiness can be real, and it's not that I don't fully endorse the attempt to share it. I do, absolutely. The truth is, though, that happiness is an unnatural state to me.
My favourite band is the Mountain Goats. This should surprise none of you by now, because odds are high if you've heard of them at all it's from a blog or comment where I quoted Darnielle's lyrics at you. I refuse to apologize for that, by the way. I went to their Melbourne concert last night. To get there, I had to blow over a year's worth of savings scraped together from Patreon where I could, and my disability pension otherwise, all to see a scrawny middle aged man with an almost-bowl-cut pogo around like a hyperactive teen and get lost in his music when if anyone were going to have a map to it it'd be him.
Standing room only, because the venue was booked out. Another concert had been booked for the overflow, and that got sold out almost immediately too. Because Darnielle isn't just some dorky dad trying at rockstardom; He's someone who's faced down his demons, come out the other side, come out breathing, and he tells you the light at the other end of the tunnel isn't just made of fire.
He's almost normal, except he cares way too much, so he's better. And his songs connect because they aren't just about what it feels like to be outside the tunnel; They're about how fucked up being in the tunnel is, and what it's like to not be out of it yet. Because there are so many of us in that darkness, but we're spread thin, and in the places we concentrate in we can seep out the blackness more than we let in the light.
And it's important because he's proof there's a light at all, and that it is just a tunnel. Without him, you're likely to think you're just regular old buried alive and waiting to suffocate.
Beside me stood a girl about my age, trembling in the crowd, holding a drink in one hand and throttling the straw with the other, focused on the stage. I said 'hi' to her and, just for reference, this is what I looked like that night;
Pictured: An intimidating bloke, apparently
(Direct link, just in case)
And she just panicked. Worse than anything you ever saw from Fluttershy, screwed her eyes shut and clenched her fist around the straw. "Sorry, am I scaring you?" She doesn't nod so much as tremble three times with her head.
Here she was, standing in a crowd pressed elbow to elbow in a sold out concert, and she came damn near an anxiety attack just from me saying 'hello'. So I wrote on my phone a message I still have, and showed her that instead;
I'm sorry I scared you. I'm scared too, honestly. But Mountain Goats saved my life and I'm glad I could share that with someone who might get that.
And she passed my phone back, smiling weakly. Still scared shitless the rest of the night, but no more anxiety when she glanced away from the stage and at me, which was, I think, as big a win as you can get with a person like that.
And it was true. I'm an agoraphobic magnet for muggings, and I was in a different city, in a different state. I didn't know anyone, was out until midnight, and I was all doing it for this one dude. Because that's how much that kind of message means to people like her, a person like me.
This part? This part I'm writing right here? That stress built up over those three days. I'm writing this now Saturday, got home Wednesday night, and it's taken me that long to recover from how overdrawn at the mental health bank I was for those three days.
I'm going to finish this with a last comment about Vows Made in Wine, where I drew it from.
The week I finished Mare Who Once Lived on the Moon was the most suicidal I'd been in about three years. I wasn't sad. I wasn't all that depressed. But for the two years of writing it, I'd pinned my entire will to live around the idea of finishing a novel. Then, I did.
It wasn't published, it wasn't fully edited, and I needed to fix the ending chapters (I got three comments about that Wednesday alone and the fic was finished in February). Didn't matter, because that wasn't the part I'd hinged my life around. It wasn't publishing or editing; It was writing 'the end'. And I'd done that.
So, I stood up, made a cup of tea, looked out the window, and realized I desperately wanted to be dead. I'd been cramming that down hard for months—even when I'm well I got a background track of "killyourselfkillyourselfkillyourself" playing on loop because my brain is fucking awful to me—but now I didn't have the megaphone blaring "FINISH THE BOOK, FINISH THE BOOK" wailing over the top of it.
I wrote Vows after a Mountain Goats concert, because I realized what I really wanted to read was something that helped me see my feelings externally, understand them, and be better able to deal with them because first thing's first, know thine enemy.
I think Rarity's right at the end of Vows, where she knows if Dash truly believes what she's telling her, it'll work, even though she hasn't found that thing herself. I don't think she's wrong, I think that looking too hard at the solution causes you to squint at it, and... actually, I think it's a core motto from Serpent and the Apple as well. Trying to understand something changes the nature of it.
I think it's something you have to believe without knowing, without trying to know. To figure out after you're already out in the light, looking back in.
That's why I think I want to do more stuff like this, more stuff like what Darnielle does, even though it'll never be my more popular stuff; Because I think it's important to hear what the tunnel looks like from someone who's standing in the light, calling back. Because there isn't a map through that tunnel, at least not one I've seen. You gotta hear those directions from someone calling them out, and those directions tend to be landmarks. Sights and sensations; When you step where it's cold, get the chocolate and move into a space with friends. When you see the floating sensation, brace yourself against oncoming hazards.
And not everyone goes through that tunnel the same way, or sees the same landmarks. But I'm going to show you the landmarks I know, and I'm going to tell you where my feet hit next.
You get told a lot of bullshit and a lot of truth when you're in that darkness, and it's hard to know which is which. It's easy to write it all off as useless bullshit that you simply cannot do. It's a lot harder to do that when they explain it to you in the context of shit that you're staring down right in front of you.
And I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.
I'm glad you'll make it. I like your stories. I'd be sad if you, and they, were gone.
The stuff from inside the tunnel has never been my more popular stuff either. (Well, mostly, there's one weird anomaly.) But it means more, I feel, to the people who find it.
Although my writing has a flip side that, ah... doesn't mean jack shit. I'll keep writing that too, though. It's not as though posting here costs anything but a little time. (For me, depression slides very easily into rage. The rage stories are just as necessary for me to write, but they're not so necessary for anybody to read.)
4496826
I'll die before I stop writing fluffy ships and comedies, damn it, it's just the feeling I'm not supposed to write stories like this that I'm going to start ignoring.
That sounds like a good thing to do. I've enjoyed your newer stuff! I'm looking forward to more.
Glad you're still with us, man.
Sometimes I can't tell if I'm engaged in stoicism, or nihilism of the self. I need to be the rock, because who else will? But is that a good question, an egotistical control-freak question, a strategy for suppressing and ignoring my own feelings, or just a bent sideways expression of suicidal ideation, deciding that my mental health is less valuable than that of those around me?
I have not been able to write in years. The harder I clamp down on myself, the more impossible it becomes. Ideas get mentally cut short half-developed, before I allow myself to think them all the way out, because I will never write them, or certainly never could write something of the length the idea requires. I cannot waste time--there is always some Real Work I should be doing instead. The time I spend playing long-duration games has cratered. Adding up the time I fritter idly on reddit, on watching shows, or on reading fiction, though, shows that the free time I have available to pursue them in has not. I simply can't bring myself to start anything that is a time commitment--"If you have time and mental energy to do that, you have time to do what you should be doing."
I beat myself into the shape of taking responsibility for things properly, and now I can't turn it off; I try to take responsibility for everything around me. Am I in a tunnel? I don't even know.
I'm glad you are feeling better.
The darker parts of your experience leave me sitting at my desk, wanting to give you some form of support and having no idea what to tell you. Whatever I come up with feels like an empty platitude and probably delivered late anyway. You'd expect a wannabe scribbler like me to be more capable with words, right?
So I think I'll keep it simple. I have no true idea how you feel, nor do I think anything I may say could help you when you need it, but I'm glad you found a form of writing that pleases you again. I liked your last stories, I think I connected with them at least on some levels, and even if they may be less popular I appreciate what you do.
Godspeed.
I just listened to the song twice. He stares at me through the chorus and I have to stare back.
I... should maybe listen to more.
However you drown out or otherwise overwhelm that voice works for me. I look forward to seeing whatever else you have in store, whether pony or not.
Have you tried any antidepressant medications? I have one that works for me, and thanks to that, combined with a desire for self-improvement, I'm no longer a lunatic with zero regard for human life.
4496902
He's not staring at you, he's staring down your demons.
I've not commented before, but I have been reading your stories for some time, and I wanted to say a few things to you.
For one, as far as I've seen, I think your stories may be some of the most enjoyable ones on this site for me. Your characterizations have degree of emotional earnestness and zest that I rarely find in many stories I chance across these days. (In particular, I'm still looking forward to the continuation of "The Demesne of the Reluctant Twilight Sparkle", whenever you happen to get back to it. It's one of my favourites so far.) Having attempted to be a novelist myself in the past, I respect your skill, and I can see the hard work that goes into your writing.
Next; far be it from me to tell you how to live your life, but in my experience, everyone has a different path, and must create a different map to suit that path. Some of our paths are more similar than others, and we can learn from the struggles of other people in such cases. But often, we have to strike out into unknown territory by ourselves, for ourselves. I want to applaud your shift away from chasing popularity or external validation; for such things are fickle and variable, and I believe that there is no person you can come to know and appreciate as well as you can ultimately come to know yourself. I look forward to seeing what you write from that place, and I imagine it will be more fulfilling both for you and for those readers whose literary interests harmonize with yours. Even if there are fewer of them, the connections that emerge can be far richer.
Finally, I of course cannot speak to the full details of your struggles with depression, but I have grappled with similar demons of my own, including the event horizon of suicide, so I can relate. Of course, the shape and details of the struggle can be quite different for different people...but I hope it's helpful of me to simply say that it can get better, and it will get better if you keep lifting yourself up, and seeking those who can help you where you need it. To my mind, our genuine connections to others, and our own genuine self-love, are some of the primary things that healthily anchor us in life; but these can be very difficult to find and build. There is no shame in that very human struggle, and I believe it is a struggle that ultimately leads to strength of heart.
Anyway, that's my three cents as a friendly stranger, and pardon me if I overstepped in my goodwill. Cheers, and I'll be following your work. You have my well wishes for the year to come.
4496828 Fuck that feeling. Write what you want. I gave up on popularity and wrote a story about Rarity Snuggling Everypony. It fucking backfired and is now my most popular fic. Which is simultaneously hilarious and depressing in one go.
I write what I want, when I want, and I write things that I like. Sometimes I know other people won't like it, so it never gets published, but I like it, and that's what matters. Writing is sometimes an outlet that you let other people take a peek at.
Enjoy yourself. Write for you. You'll feel better about things, and you'll probably find that a lot of people enjoy things because YOU are enjoying them, and that will show in your writing.
4498190 Did you mean to respond to someone else?
4498195 I did indeed! Sorry for the confusion, that was directed at Mr. Numbers.
The line “I could never do something so selfish. You know that.” really resonated with me, because there was a couple of times when I was really close to making the last mistake of my life and the only reason I didn't was because of how many people I'd leave behind, missing me. There are some days I don't carry on for me but for the people who know me and like being around me.
The thing about suicidal tendencies that a lot of people don't get is that you don't have to be "sad" to want to kill yourself. You just have to not want to live, to have nothing to live for. The closest I ever came I wasn't sad, I wasn't "depressed", I was empty. I didn't fell anything and truth be told the only reason I am still here today is I didn't even have the motivation to just end it. Thankfully the moment passed and I was able to drag myself to something better.
That "tunnel"? Even when you get out of it there is always a danger of wandering back in so you need people to help keep you from the dangerous spots.
Write what you want to write, not what you think will be popular or what you think you "should" write. Sometimes what you want to write will be the same thing you think you "should" be writing and all the better but you'll get more enjoyment from writing what you want and I know I'll get more enjoyment from reading the stuff you wanted to write instead of the stuff you felt obligated to write.
Just, stick around and give us something to read, OK?
We should probably chat sometime. I feel you (as you probably already know, unless I am below your radar).