summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2015-01-23 01:47 pm
summercomfort) wrote2015-01-23 01:47 pm
(no subject)
Hi Dreamwidth.
You are safe and one single thing and not tumblr.
Important realization of the day: I think one major way I respond to stress is to run away from The Thing and overdoing it in a related area. It's a way of letting it leak out in other places. So, for instance, I drew a that I really wanted to post/share in the tumblr community, but it strays pretty far from my usual milieu, but remains very distinctively mine. Which means that I can't post it without people (a) immediately recognizing my work, and (b) being somewhat surprised that I also draw this sort of stuff.
So it triggered a "what is internet identity" freak out, because these things are already confusing enough in real life, but throw in the way fandom is somewhat apart from mainstream, and *then* add the fact that my career involves working with kids.... and suddenly everything is complicated. In short, my careful internet identity equilibrium is upset and I am scrambling to re-stabilize.
Anyways, because I'm having trouble with this internet identity thing, *of course* my coping mechanism is to run around over-sharing on tumblr and confessing my love to cute girl-crushes and just being generally tsundere.
That isn't healthy.
Let me try to cobble together some different things going on in my brain right now.
1) In about half an hour, my old boss is going to call me, probably to talk about the possibility of my returning to teaching in August. I don't know the answer to that question. I miss the clarity of teaching. Everything since June has been hazy. Even India felt weird. I'm capable of being present and competent and enjoying the moment. I'm also capable of rousing myself for some task or deadline, but everything else has just been a long series of lazy Sundays. [Edit: he just called, and he just wants me to be a month-long sub in March/April, which is .... anti-helpful to my quandries]
2) On Wednesday I was at a seminar and we watched a powerful 4-minute TED Talk by Clint Smith called "The Danger of Silence". A line that really stuck with me is "Silence is the residue of fear." Initially I was thinking about all the times when I stay silent. Then I was thinking about fandom applications (WS' silence), but now I'm thinking about what are other residues of fear. How I respond to fear and uncertainty.
3) At around the same time, came across this yesterday via pren -- basically the message being "don't copy other people, be yourself." I've been trying to work on Tisquantum recently, but it's been hard to gather up the momentum to go forward. I want to draw comics but there seems to be too many projects.
I guess I'm just fractured all over the place and desperately need some sort of singular focus. Something that can rouse me from this stupor.
(But nothing too stressful -- I've actually had 4 periods in the last 8 months, each consistently 60-ish days apart, which is... a really big deal for me. So I'm wondering if being hyped up and focused and productive means I'm ... not productive in other ways. :-/)
I feel like a lot of life is just swinging back and forth on a pendulum, making adjustments that make you swing too far the other way, until eventually you settle down. 2012-2013 was too stressful, so I made 2013-2014 less stressful, but that made it lonely, so I've made 2014-2015 less lonely but more fractured. So now I need to make things more focused, without bringing back the stress or the loneliness.
In a little more than a month, I'm going to be losing 3 people at work and gaining two new ones, which will significantly change the tempo of work, too.
-----
I don't think I can do another year of this, whatever this is. I need to find a sense of purpose and satisfaction in accomplishing stuff.
But anyway, the point of catching moments like this is that it gives me a change to re-adjust and re-center -- identify the inciting incident and evaluate the short- and long-term changes that need to happen. Instead of focusing on tasks I should do, I should go deeper and figure out how I feel about them.
- Tumblr Dash: gives me vague sense of connecting with other people, but not very satisfying
----> Problem: I'm not good at making friends. Looking back, my attempts to befriend people either on or off the internet usually stall out at the "hi I like you let's chat randomly" phase. I don't have experience "closing the deal" and getting it to the "hey let's visit each others' places and spend prolonged time in proximity with each other for no good reason" phase. I think all of my current friends -- it mostly happened as a fluke? Two friends happened due to a food exchange. Two friends happened due to role-playing games. I think everyone else happened because they insisted on being my friend. And the last time I made internet friends, meeting in real life was ... bad. Disastrous. Confusing. So tumblr allows me to connect with people to the level that I'm familiar with, which is the "hi I like you let's chat randomly", but not the "actual friends" level. And ... maybe it's gotten to a place where that natural level-up *should* happen and it's not and so there's an odd sort of stasis there??? (Doesn't help that everyone else on tumblr is also socially awkward. Woooo.)
-----> Question: are these sorta-friendships worth it?
- Work: I feel accomplished and competent in the moment, but once that moment is past, I don't care anymore. Unlike teaching, I don't see a beautiful path laid out in front of me that I should follow. Instead there's these little rocks, and a few floating wood pieces, and... I just feel unmoored. It was better in the month when I had to take over the shipping stuff, because at least then there was a reason for me to be in the office every day, and there were concrete tasks that I could do. But other than that, I've been feeling a lot of disconnect between meetings where we figure out what *should* be done, and the actual doing of the thing. It got a little better when I realized that I was basically wearing 10 different hats, ranging from secretary to CEO, but it's still horribly vague and Definitely Not Fun. Even when I do see a clear path of what needs to be done, (a) a lot of it is not for me to do, and (b) the miscellaneous stuff that I *can* do, I *don't want to*. It's not my path.
-----> Question: If I don't do it, who will?
-----> Question: Can I make it my path? Find a way to feel ownership?
- Drawing Comics: Okay so drawing comics is A Thing I Do. And I want to keep doing it. But the trick is figuring out "about what" and "for whom"? Which probably gets to the bigger question of WHY. And I think it's because (a) I like telling stories, (b) visually is how I do it best, and (c) there's an inherent satisfaction that comes from getting the panels to lay out right and effectively convey the emotions that I want to express. When I tell stories with my friends, that's role-playing, and something I don't do often enough. When I am telling Tisquantum, it's a long hard slog with very little sense of payoff at the end. When I'm telling travel stories or China Comics, I feel performance anxiety, like I'm putting too much of myself out there and people are going to expect me to speak for all of China or something. When I am telling fan stories, I *do* get the feeling of effectively telling a story to an appreciative audience, but in the end, it's not Mine in a way that the others are. Then there's the comics anthology that the club is working on. The finished product will be pretty cool, but I feel pretty distanced from it right now. It's like ... I feel like I'm pretty decent at this thing, but I don't feel motivated to improve my skills because there isn't a story that I feel like I HAVE to tell, you know?
-------> Problem: The type of comic that I'm the most suited for is the educational/historical comic told with the teacher voice. But for me to embrace it, I have to accept that drawing comics is *not* to tell stories, but to educate. (Thus negating point (a))
-------> Question: Can I fill my storytelling itch via shorter stories and rpgs?
-------> Question: Will the satisfaction I get from finishing Tisquantum be worth the effort of completing it?
- Socializing: I definitely prefer hanging out with people in real life vs. the internet. But real life doesn't have dumb gifsets and webcomics and people who have Captain America feels. The only stuff I can talk to ppl about in real life is work, or how their little man fights are going, or how their other friends are doing, or how lost I feel. So basically the problem is that I don't have enough topics to talk to real life people about.
-------> Solution: find more realms of interactions with real life people -- roleplay together, watch movies together, read books together, draw together
-------> Solution 2: think of that part of tumblr like the little man fights. Jono doesn't go to little man fights every day, I shouldn't do internet socializing every day. It should just be my Tuesday Night Activity. Like... Tumblr Club.
----
Well, that was fun. I'm going to try out the Tumblr Club thing: cut down on the number of people I follow, and just make Tuesday Night my tumblr night. Then with the extra brain space I'm going to try to figure out the Work questions. :-///
You are safe and one single thing and not tumblr.
Important realization of the day: I think one major way I respond to stress is to run away from The Thing and overdoing it in a related area. It's a way of letting it leak out in other places. So, for instance, I drew a that I really wanted to post/share in the tumblr community, but it strays pretty far from my usual milieu, but remains very distinctively mine. Which means that I can't post it without people (a) immediately recognizing my work, and (b) being somewhat surprised that I also draw this sort of stuff.
So it triggered a "what is internet identity" freak out, because these things are already confusing enough in real life, but throw in the way fandom is somewhat apart from mainstream, and *then* add the fact that my career involves working with kids.... and suddenly everything is complicated. In short, my careful internet identity equilibrium is upset and I am scrambling to re-stabilize.
Anyways, because I'm having trouble with this internet identity thing, *of course* my coping mechanism is to run around over-sharing on tumblr and confessing my love to cute girl-crushes and just being generally tsundere.
That isn't healthy.
Let me try to cobble together some different things going on in my brain right now.
1) In about half an hour, my old boss is going to call me, probably to talk about the possibility of my returning to teaching in August. I don't know the answer to that question. I miss the clarity of teaching. Everything since June has been hazy. Even India felt weird. I'm capable of being present and competent and enjoying the moment. I'm also capable of rousing myself for some task or deadline, but everything else has just been a long series of lazy Sundays. [Edit: he just called, and he just wants me to be a month-long sub in March/April, which is .... anti-helpful to my quandries]
2) On Wednesday I was at a seminar and we watched a powerful 4-minute TED Talk by Clint Smith called "The Danger of Silence". A line that really stuck with me is "Silence is the residue of fear." Initially I was thinking about all the times when I stay silent. Then I was thinking about fandom applications (WS' silence), but now I'm thinking about what are other residues of fear. How I respond to fear and uncertainty.
3) At around the same time, came across this yesterday via pren -- basically the message being "don't copy other people, be yourself." I've been trying to work on Tisquantum recently, but it's been hard to gather up the momentum to go forward. I want to draw comics but there seems to be too many projects.
I guess I'm just fractured all over the place and desperately need some sort of singular focus. Something that can rouse me from this stupor.
(But nothing too stressful -- I've actually had 4 periods in the last 8 months, each consistently 60-ish days apart, which is... a really big deal for me. So I'm wondering if being hyped up and focused and productive means I'm ... not productive in other ways. :-/)
I feel like a lot of life is just swinging back and forth on a pendulum, making adjustments that make you swing too far the other way, until eventually you settle down. 2012-2013 was too stressful, so I made 2013-2014 less stressful, but that made it lonely, so I've made 2014-2015 less lonely but more fractured. So now I need to make things more focused, without bringing back the stress or the loneliness.
In a little more than a month, I'm going to be losing 3 people at work and gaining two new ones, which will significantly change the tempo of work, too.
-----
I don't think I can do another year of this, whatever this is. I need to find a sense of purpose and satisfaction in accomplishing stuff.
But anyway, the point of catching moments like this is that it gives me a change to re-adjust and re-center -- identify the inciting incident and evaluate the short- and long-term changes that need to happen. Instead of focusing on tasks I should do, I should go deeper and figure out how I feel about them.
- Tumblr Dash: gives me vague sense of connecting with other people, but not very satisfying
----> Problem: I'm not good at making friends. Looking back, my attempts to befriend people either on or off the internet usually stall out at the "hi I like you let's chat randomly" phase. I don't have experience "closing the deal" and getting it to the "hey let's visit each others' places and spend prolonged time in proximity with each other for no good reason" phase. I think all of my current friends -- it mostly happened as a fluke? Two friends happened due to a food exchange. Two friends happened due to role-playing games. I think everyone else happened because they insisted on being my friend. And the last time I made internet friends, meeting in real life was ... bad. Disastrous. Confusing. So tumblr allows me to connect with people to the level that I'm familiar with, which is the "hi I like you let's chat randomly", but not the "actual friends" level. And ... maybe it's gotten to a place where that natural level-up *should* happen and it's not and so there's an odd sort of stasis there??? (Doesn't help that everyone else on tumblr is also socially awkward. Woooo.)
-----> Question: are these sorta-friendships worth it?
- Work: I feel accomplished and competent in the moment, but once that moment is past, I don't care anymore. Unlike teaching, I don't see a beautiful path laid out in front of me that I should follow. Instead there's these little rocks, and a few floating wood pieces, and... I just feel unmoored. It was better in the month when I had to take over the shipping stuff, because at least then there was a reason for me to be in the office every day, and there were concrete tasks that I could do. But other than that, I've been feeling a lot of disconnect between meetings where we figure out what *should* be done, and the actual doing of the thing. It got a little better when I realized that I was basically wearing 10 different hats, ranging from secretary to CEO, but it's still horribly vague and Definitely Not Fun. Even when I do see a clear path of what needs to be done, (a) a lot of it is not for me to do, and (b) the miscellaneous stuff that I *can* do, I *don't want to*. It's not my path.
-----> Question: If I don't do it, who will?
-----> Question: Can I make it my path? Find a way to feel ownership?
- Drawing Comics: Okay so drawing comics is A Thing I Do. And I want to keep doing it. But the trick is figuring out "about what" and "for whom"? Which probably gets to the bigger question of WHY. And I think it's because (a) I like telling stories, (b) visually is how I do it best, and (c) there's an inherent satisfaction that comes from getting the panels to lay out right and effectively convey the emotions that I want to express. When I tell stories with my friends, that's role-playing, and something I don't do often enough. When I am telling Tisquantum, it's a long hard slog with very little sense of payoff at the end. When I'm telling travel stories or China Comics, I feel performance anxiety, like I'm putting too much of myself out there and people are going to expect me to speak for all of China or something. When I am telling fan stories, I *do* get the feeling of effectively telling a story to an appreciative audience, but in the end, it's not Mine in a way that the others are. Then there's the comics anthology that the club is working on. The finished product will be pretty cool, but I feel pretty distanced from it right now. It's like ... I feel like I'm pretty decent at this thing, but I don't feel motivated to improve my skills because there isn't a story that I feel like I HAVE to tell, you know?
-------> Problem: The type of comic that I'm the most suited for is the educational/historical comic told with the teacher voice. But for me to embrace it, I have to accept that drawing comics is *not* to tell stories, but to educate. (Thus negating point (a))
-------> Question: Can I fill my storytelling itch via shorter stories and rpgs?
-------> Question: Will the satisfaction I get from finishing Tisquantum be worth the effort of completing it?
- Socializing: I definitely prefer hanging out with people in real life vs. the internet. But real life doesn't have dumb gifsets and webcomics and people who have Captain America feels. The only stuff I can talk to ppl about in real life is work, or how their little man fights are going, or how their other friends are doing, or how lost I feel. So basically the problem is that I don't have enough topics to talk to real life people about.
-------> Solution: find more realms of interactions with real life people -- roleplay together, watch movies together, read books together, draw together
-------> Solution 2: think of that part of tumblr like the little man fights. Jono doesn't go to little man fights every day, I shouldn't do internet socializing every day. It should just be my Tuesday Night Activity. Like... Tumblr Club.
----
Well, that was fun. I'm going to try out the Tumblr Club thing: cut down on the number of people I follow, and just make Tuesday Night my tumblr night. Then with the extra brain space I'm going to try to figure out the Work questions. :-///
no subject
I've really reduced my tumblr time, though it's not like I made much of a conscious choice? I think it's because I have good conversations more regularly on other spaces and that's where I go. Tumblr it felt like I was "hunting" my friends whereas other spaces make it easier to check in and talk, as far as online interactions go.
no subject
I have similar mixed feelings about my social media use. I end up doing it because I'm starved for social interaction IRL, but short of hanging out at Starbucks or the library all day (not so practical with a baby...) I'm just not going to encounter new people.
no subject