#but it seems more temporal. more short lived. more bearable

[sparrowposting]

Life is good despite the horrors. Life is good despite the horrors!!!

[bettsfic]

Hi betts, how do you separate yourself from your fanfiction works? As in having the mindset that ‘you are not your work’? I feel like I’ve fallen into the myth that positive feedback equates to readers liking me for me, when in most cases I imagine they’re solely interested in my content. I guess I’m expecting too much from fandom members? I just don’t feel like I belong to the fandom if it weren’t for my fanfiction. Thanks for your time.

this is a really great and really big question that for me anyway had far deeper roots in my mental health than i initially recognized. 

even before i found fandom, i strongly conflated love with being of use to someone, and then i would get upset that people used me. all of my relationships were either distant or volatile. i knew that i was the only thing all my relationships had in common, but i couldn’t figure out what i was doing wrong. 

what i was doing wrong was that i didn’t know how to love or be loved. i only knew how to need and be needed. i was defined wholly by my relationships with others; without them, i was no one. i changed everything about myself to fit with the people i was surrounded by. i had no ability whatsoever to see or assess myself. my worth was measured in others’ perception of me. if they hated me, i hated me. if they loved me...actually, i still hated me, because i believed that love was temporary, and it was only a matter of time they saw the “real” me and they would take their love away. it was much easier to mold myself into someone they could love. 

i once told a guy i was dating, i just want to be who you want me to be. and he looked at me like i was crazy, and asked, then how can i love you? 

when i found writing, i didn’t know what love really felt like. i only knew obsession and codependency. i didn’t know how to feel emotions in order to process them, so everything that had ever happened to me was still just sitting inside me, waiting. writing offered me a tool to begin working through the pile. it offered me a means to observe and validate myself, and feel my feelings. 

but when i was first developing a relationship with writing, i put so much of myself into it that i couldn’t help but use feedback as a measure of self-worth. 

i think to some degree, every artist needs a witness. almost everything we write exists to be made public to some degree, and it’s a totally normal thing to want to seek reception. but conflating other people liking you, and by extension your work, with your worthiness to exist, creates a lot of self-suffering.

i remember realizing that i had boxed myself into a corner, and i knew i had to reassess my perspective of myself and my work. i had found myself in the same position you describe, feeling bad because readers didn’t love me, they loved my writing (see: being of use and wondering why people always used me). especially with fanfic, which has so much to do with quantity, 90% of readers don’t even look at the fic writer’s name, let alone kudos or comment. reading is a self-fulfilling endeavor the same way eating is. all of us need stories to live. as writers, we’re just the chefs. when you eat a good meal, you don’t fall in love with the chef. most of the time you don’t even know their name. the food isn’t the chef and the story isn’t you. 

but also, i was, and always had been, disgusted and baffled by people who *did* love me, especially if i felt i had nothing useful to offer them. once, a friend of mine drove like 3 hours to come visit me for dinner, and then drove 3 hours back. for some reason i assumed he was on a road trip somewhere and just passing through. when he told me he had come just to hang out with me, my brain short-circuited. i couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to hang out with me like, for fun. 

after a few years of posting fic, a weird thing happened where a few people did seem to like *me* because of my writing, insofar as they would follow my blog and interact with me and eventually we became friends. there may even be people out there who like me and don’t interact with me. but that idea also kind of weirded me out for a long time, because i kept thinking, who am i? no one. i’m nothing. i’m boring. go read my writing, that’s what matters. 

and then i realized, i could not have it both ways. either i wanted to be seen, or i wanted to go unseen. i was schrödinger’s validation. 

so i think the very simple answer is “learn to love yourself,” but i was so far behind when it came to love, i didn’t know what loving yourself even meant. so i think a better adage is “learn love.” learn what love is, what it feels like, what it looks like. and then turn that definition on yourself and your work. 

i love myself, even when i mess up, even when i’m not meeting my expectations. i love my work, even when it’s bad. when other people love me and my work, that makes me happy. when they don’t, that’s fine, because i still have plenty of my own love left. 

in practicality, for a few years i basically had to constantly chant to myself “what other people think of me is not my business.” a reader’s relationship with your writing is not your obligation to know or control. it’s only your obligation to create the stories you want to tell, and maybe you share them so you can share the love you put into them, or maybe you don’t. maybe you eat the meal you cook, or maybe you share it with someone else. whether they like it or not has no bearing on who you are. it’s all just personal taste.

more importantly, you can’t generate self-beliefs externally. someone’s opinion of you or your work cannot define you, because no one has a wider view of you than you. you are the expert of yourself. it took me a long time to change all of my self-beliefs, or what i’ve come to call “life sentences,” into statements of temporality and priority. “i’m brave” turned into “i value courage.” “i’m bad at directions” turned into “sometimes i get turned around.” every time i’m about to make a sweeping judgment of myself, i try to recast it into something more malleable, because every state of the self is temporary, and i always want to give myself the opportunity to grow.

i won’t lie and say i have a totally healthy relationship with my writing. i still get jealous sometimes, although it’s much briefer and more bearable than it used to be. i still get deeply annoyed by tactless or rude feedback, but i rarely get upset. i *do* get upset when someone sends me a link to a forum or thread of people making fun of me; i think it’s hard to unlearn that. sometimes i still feel the need to defend or justify or apologize for my work. and i definitely still compulsively refresh my comment inbox whenever i post something i’m proud of. but for the most part, i’m in a much better place than i used to be.

currently i’m working on making peace with the idea of publication, that my original work treads a morally risky line that is easily misunderstood, and i’m publishing into a world of mob mentality and cancel culture. and moreover, once a work is published, once it’s out there, it can never go back in. i’m trying to figure out whether i’m confident enough now in my work to still stand by it in ten years or fifty. i’m also freaked out about how anything i publish will outlive me. as someone who has always lived with existential dread, it’s terrifying to think i may write something that could be read in a hundred years, that my voice might live longer than my body. there is a very slim chance of it, but as i’ve mentioned before, i think it’s better to plan more for success than failure. 

i’m not sure if any of this is helpful, but it’s the path i took to get where i am. i wish you the best of luck navigating your relationship with your work. 

my carrd | writing advice masterdoc