Get to Know the Author and Reassessing · 6:45pm Jun 8th, 2020
I don't know why I'm writing this, perhaps as some sort of therapy. I live with roommates, but keep to myself. I don't interact a lot with family, and I don't keep many friends. I could blame others for that, but in truth, I'm not very friendly. I don't mean I'm rude and nasty to people, more that I don't interact and positively react to other people. I'm sort of a background character.
It doesn't take much to get me down. I don't visibly show it if you see me in person, but I get depressed easily, and always have. I might be as expressive as Maud Pie, but my anxiety is often raging out of control. Lately, between real world events, my stressful work, and writing here, that anxiety has been extremely bad. It isn't the worst I have ever suffered, but it is enough to make me feel depressed, have severe gut aches, and limit how much I'm eating.
Since no one actually knows much about me, let me give a biography of myself.
First up, let it be public that I'm transgender. I came out not long before transgender people hit the spotlight, but it was before that. For a long time I was self-hating about that, and it took me a long time to get past that that. I was terrified of anyone knowing how I viewed my gender growing up, and often would do strange things to avoid being seen as female. Ultimately it didn't work very well, as I was recognized as different from a very early age although most assumed I was gay (I'm actually grey-assexual), but this was the 80s and 90s and being effeminate and noticeably more at ease with females rather than males meant gay to people.
I went through a reactionary phase in high school and college where I embraced far- right evangelical beliefs. It was meant to prove my clear support of normal, and hide the fact that I didn't feel anything like normal when listening to the rhetoric around me. Let me be clear about something: I don't hate Christianity, I actually get angered by how unChristian the churches have become. If anything my journey has made me very firm in my own Christian beliefs. I don't want to get too deep into that here, as it is a whole other can of worms. Just know I don't harbor any hatred towards Christianity, just have strong disagreements with a lot of people who loudly proclaim things in God's name.
I have been married, twice. Both times ended in divorce. Both times as a result of performing poorly in bed (and often not having much interest in performing in bed).
The first time I was married my spouse committed adultery, took photos of it, and said "opps, guess we need to get divorced now" (and yes, the photos were presented as evidence in the divorce trial). That divorce was a good thing, as that spouse regularly physically beat me, threatened me with knives, degraded me at every opportunity, and just as a final bit of spite required that I do all the housework while I was working three jobs and would punish me with more beatings if I failed to do things up to their standards. I was ordered to have sex or be hurt most of the time we had sex, and most of the other times I engaged them for fear they would get angry if I didn't, or they were in the process of hurting me and I conceded to having sex. The second one divorced me soon after I came out as trans. Basically it came down to I had to pretend not to be trans for their sake or they would leave. They could deal with me being uncomfortable with myself, suicidal, and so on, but they couldn't deal with me being trans, so they left. They said me being trans was me not treating them with respect or love.
For the last few years I have generally been keeping my head down, keeping to myself, and trying not to be a bother to anyone. I have always read a lot, and always wanted to write. A few years ago I decided to take a stab at it here, and so through my writing I have come to try to interact with people.
There's a lot that is me trying to communicate my experiences in my writing, and I have been called out on it as it not making my work relatable to the audience, or in some cases, too relatable. Writing is sort of like my therapy though. I invent characters, and express different aspects of my experiences or personality through different characters while filling the rest of the character with things from other inspirations. I do try to write characters that don't line up with me well, or have less of me in them than other characters, but there are some things that tend to shine through. I try not to make it about those things, and give them unique and interesting stories that could never happen in real life, but they are my babies.
I don't do much comedy, as I don't laugh much. From a very young age on I came to associate laughter as someone getting ready to do something cruel or being in the process of doing something cruel. I know this is a warped view of things, but it doesn't change the fact that when I hear laughter my automatic impulse is to be more on guard against whatever bad is about to happen.
I can't write what I have no investment in. I simply can't force myself to write things that my heart isn't in. That's part of why I don't take patron requests. If I am not invested on a project I'm going to fail to deliver, and that isn't fair to anyone who paid me to write something. It is also why I get discouraged when I get lengthy replies about what I should or should not write. I am not here to be a professional writer, I don't have the range of emotion to do that, or the investment in stories enough people care about. I have the ability to give my all to what I feel invested in.
I'm never going to have a large following, never going to have a story top 300 likes (most likely won't have another top 200), and never be anyone's favorite author or even in their top 5. I can live with those things.
Those things being said: Nameless is being pulled from writing list altogether. I don't feel the investment in that story anymore, and no one else did for that matter. I was trying to do something a little different, but it didn't work out. I'm assessing what to do with the rest of the current projects week by week.
Wow all I can say is am sorry people can suck so much and I hope your in a better place now.
Very nice of you to share this. Do you find that pony helps you cope with your troubles?
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I find it soothing. It's an outlet when I don't have many outlets.
I have my passion projects that don't get as much attention that I translate my feelings into the most (the Pandemic series), although those tend to be the most polarizing of my work- despite having fantastical elements and often extremely powerful characters people tend to find a lot of the issues in them feel too real, and the fact that very few of the main characters in them fall strictly into a label of good or evil can be off-putting. They also tend to be very slow paved and spend a lot of time meandering towards their conclusions.