Musings

It started as a joke, an attempt to make Ho laugh when he was supposed to be super-serious and totally mature. It started with this.

I jokingly called it my spirit animal, said that somewhere inside me, there was a horse with a traffic cone, hoping one day it would wake up and be a unicorn, and that's when it struck me.
I am the traffic horse. I spend most of every day wishing I'll wake up the next day and be someone else, be magically comfortable in my own skin, and it's just not going to happen that way.
I look at myself and see everything I hate, whether it's my masculine hands or my thighs or my own personality, the way I react to things I know pose no threat to me, my own insecurities and fears and dislikes, the fact that I'm pretty sure most of my friends only tolerate me because they don't know how to tell me to go away, and instead of handling any of it in a mature and responsible manner, I shove it aside, hoping everything will be better in the morning, hoping I'll wake up a unicorn and everything will be just fine. The things I like about myself get shoved aside, unimportant, buried under my desire to just be someone else for a change.

I'm never going to just become a unicorn. It's likely I'll never be entirely comfortable in my own skin, whether it's because of my weight or my gender identity and how drastically it differs from the skin I'm in. I'll always laugh at inappropriate times and make jokes people don't understand. My hands will always be large and awkward, and gloves are never going to fit properly. I'll probably never be famous for anything that matters, if I'm famous at all. It's unlikely anyone will ever read anything I write and take from it everything I was trying to say. My friends will probably keep forgetting that I exist from time to time, I'll end up going to a near endless stream of movies by myself, and I'm always going to be afraid of zombies and spiders and being in crowds.
There is nothing wrong with not being a unicorn. There's nothing wrong with not being totally confident every second of every day. It's perfectly alright to have moments when you can't stand the way you look and when you think you've wasted your life trying to be someone you're not, studying something you can't stand, saying something no one has ever stopped to hear.

I am just a horse with a traffic cone on my head. I'm not a unicorn. With any luck, I'll never be one. I'm kidding myself if I think I'll ever fit in with the other unicorns. I fit in just fine with the other traffic horses, though, and maybe, just maybe, I can learn to be amazing at that. I don't need a horn. I don't need popularity or fame. I just need to be me.

More random stuff

I am a smoker.
I mean that quite literally. I smoke on a fairly regular basis. I have off and on for the last seven years or so, and I always seem to pick it back up when I'm unmedicated, stressed, or stuck somewhere in my life that I just don't want to be.
Now, before you get on your soapbox and tell me how horrible cigarettes are for me, trust me, I've heard it all. I spent years on that soapbox. I know all the graphic details of what smoking can do. Remember, please, that the only person who has any say what goes into my body is me. You're allowed to have an opinion, you're allowed to try to convince me to stop, and you're allowed to speak your mind. You are not allowed to judge my worth based on this, just like you shouldn't judge me for my past.
Allow me to be hypocritical for a moment and tell any of you who don't smoke to never, ever start. Ever.

In the months since I picked smoking back up this time around, I haven't had a single panic attack. I've had vague bits of anxiety here and there, but that's normal (or so I'm told). I've been unmedicated in this bout of things since early September, and I'm fully aware I'm using smoking as a crutch. It's something I can directly control. I can't say if I'd still be panic-free right now if I didn't pick up a pack again. I don't know. I can't see diverging timelines.
What I can say is right now, I actually feel pretty ok, even though pretty much anything capable of calming me down long-term has been self-destructive and somehow despite the fact that I haven't had more than three hours of sleep in a single stretch in what's starting to feel like forever.

I've been fighting the urge to just leave everything, get in the car, and drive until I run out of things to see. For the first time in a long time, I just want to chase the unknown, not know where I'll be the next morning, and be utterly and completely free. I want to meet new people and not have them know anything about me unless I directly tell them. I want to see new places and do things I'd never do if I stay here. The wanderlust is just getting stronger the longer I let myself stagnate in this town. I love my friends (most of the time, at least). I have a fantastic husband who puts up with far too much bullshit from me. I'm near my family if anything happens, and I've never wanted much more than that until now.
I don't think anything fantastic will come from running away from my life. It's not like I can afford to live on the road right now, anyway. Maybe some day, if I manage to not totally fail at making my life worth something, I can justify taking a month to just travel and see everything. For now, though, I just wander around a town I know like the back of my hand. It's enough to get me by until I find some new inspiration.

I miss things.

I miss old friends, as well as places I used to haunt on the internet (where I met the majority of those friends). If any of you are reading this, know I miss you, the conversations we had, and knowing that I'd always have someone to talk to, even if it was 4 AM on a weeknight and we both had places to be in a few hours.
I sometimes miss my old life, before everything burst out of me and refused to be a secret any longer. I don't miss how it felt to keep everything inside, but I miss how easy it had become for me to just not talk about it. I miss how it was easy to be around people because I didn't feel the need to talk about everything, and I miss how easy it was to just make up a persona around strangers.
I miss the days when I didn't need to justify my bad habits with excuses like "at least I'm not drunk all the time" or "at least it's not meth".

I can't change what's already happened, but I can sure as hell take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Maybe some day I'll actually believe that.

Why Overachieving is Awesome

For those who don't follow me all over the internet, I'm not dead. I'm just in the middle of National Novel Writing Month.

I've stumbled across haters early on this year, some of them particularly more frightening than others (I'm looking at you, dude who has sent me legitimate hate mail through the USPS. Yeah. The cops know about you, by the way, you creepy motherfucker). This is almost on par with last year, when some people decided the appropriate reaction to "Oh, I can't write that many words in a month" was to tell me to kill myself.
What the actual fuck, you guys.

I have some important things to say in regards to all of you.

• My word goal is not your word goal. I do not expect you to chase the Million. I don't expect *me* to chase the Million. It is not for everyone. I am not trying to invalidate your words, nor am I trying to make you feel bad about not writing more. My goal is in no way whatsoever related to yours. Telling me to write less so you don't feel inadequate is not ok by any standards. Telling me to slow down because I'm writing too fast is not ok. Telling me I should do anything to make you feel better about your goal/pace/wordcount other than asking for encouragement is not fucking ok.
• You have absolutely no right to try to make me feel bad about needing to challenge myself to more than 50k in a month. NaNo is one of the best challenges I get in the year because it makes me churn out those longer stories, the ones that only writing 50k would barely make a dent in the plot.
• You have no right to tell me I don't need the inspiration NaNo provides. If I didn't need the inspiration NaNo gives me, why the fuck do I come back to this every year? If I don't need the inspiration, why am I not published already? Why am I not doing bigger and better things? It's because I need this month just as much as you do. I need a month to forget about everything else in my life and WRITE.
• You have no right to make me feel like less of a human being just because you don't understand why I would want to write more than 50k in 30 days. By extension, you have no right to make ANYONE feel like less of a human being because you don't understand the "why".
• You have no right to try to play off a blatant bit of hatred with a "lol, just kidding". It is hateful, it is hurtful, and we have feelings, too. One negative comment is enough to undo literal hundreds of positive comments from other people. I try very hard to support everyone, whether you manage to write five words or five hundred thousand words. I try hard to not make you feel bad about your word count, and I try hard to not make you feel bad if you're behind your pace goal. Right now, I'm catching up for the 11k behind my pace goal I happen to be, and when you point out that my pace goal is more than you can write in three weeks, express hate, and pass it off with a "just kidding", it fucking hurts. I am legitimately afraid to post in threads other than the two main OA threads because people keep posting "I hate you all lol jk jk" messages. I don't snap back with, "haha, you suck because you only have two thousand words I'm kidding just joking haha it was a joke". If I did, you would be pissed. I should not be afraid to post anywhere. I should not be afraid to ask for help in a genre lounge, or introduce myself to the other 20somethings. I am tired of the thinly-masked hate, I am tired of the blatant hate, I'm tired of the people who think we don't have feelings, and you have no right at all to do this to us.
  
• Your word goal is just as impressive as mine. Writing 50k in a month is an awesome achievement, and I'm not just saying that to make you feel better. Six years ago, if you'd asked me to write 50k in a month, I would've thought you were absolutely fucking insane. We are all overachievers. We're all doing something awesome this month. Just because my wordcount is higher doesn't mean I'm doing any better than you are; I have the exact same struggles to find time, figure out my plot, and make my characters more than two-dimensional.

Now, some of the awesome things about overachieving.

• I have met more insanely awesome people than I ever imagined through the OA thread this year. They're a support community, there when everything falls to shit (which it has several times this month alone), and they never make me feel unwelcome, whether they're aiming for 55k or the Million alongside me.

• I know more people through the OA thread and chat who are genuinely happy when I hit my next goal that it almost (almost) makes up for the people who feel nothing but irrational hatred. I love that we are all cheerleaders for everyone, that we all support each other, and we can have friendly wars with each other and not worry about who wins or is better or any such thing, because we've long since accepted that most of us have different writing speeds and pace goals.
• These people support me no matter what. If I manage to write a single word. or write 70k in a day, or if I finally get to spend a night with my husband, or if I finally get a freaking night off work, my fellow OAers are there to celebrate with me. When my grandfather passed away on Tuesday, the OA thread was the first group of people to know because they understand what it's like to be in the middle of an insane story at an insane pace and not want to write a single fucking word. They're every ounce of inspiration I need exactly when I need it, and they're the comfort I need when I'm wondering just why the hell I do this every year.

I spend more energy than is really healthy or relevant to my actual life cleaning up drama, be it from other OAers (that's right, we're not fucking perfect), the people in my daily life, or the people I'm forced to interact with because they don't understand why I do things the way I do.

I do not have time to answer your questions about my word count. I do not have time to respond to every person who pops up with a "You know you're not supposed to count words written before November, right?" question. I do not have time to deal with you and your distractions from your own novels, and if I could turn off NaNoMail from non-approved people, I would. I don't ask you about your word count, so why the fuck do you think you can ask me about mine? Am I constantly prodding you, asking if those words you have were legitimately written in November?
No.
I'm not.
And even if you had brought some over, would I care?
No.
It's none of my fucking business what you do.
Stop thinking what I do is your business.



Now, for the love of everything that's holy, can we knock it off with the fucking drama and get back to the writing? 

This post left intentionally vague.

Today is an important day for me.
Seven years ago, on October 6, I didn't die.

As a cheesey celebration of that fact, I'm declaring today "Friendly Graffiti Day". I know far too well how much a little bit of kindness can make everything ok, even if it's just long enough to make a terrible decision REALLY obvious.
Join me, if you want. Scrawl nice things on bulletin boards, in bathroom stalls, in random forum comments, on tumblr (when the maintenence is over), wherever someone might need it. Use post-it notes or pens or scratch things with keys.

I love the people I know, and every day I get to spend knowing them is an awesome day.



Also, you.
Right there.
On the internet.

You're an amazing person. You are loved, you deserve the best, and you are beautiful. Never, ever forget that.

NaNoWriMo, general insanity, and working all the time

NaNoWriMo lurks on the horizon, I don't have a plot (or characters), and I am once again seriously considering going for the big Million.
I have a million and one reasons I shouldn't go for it, like my work schedule (six days a week), MLing on my own for the first time, moderating a part of the NaNo forums, my total lack of free time, my lack of anything to write, and yet here I am, trying to convince myself all the reasons I have NOT to do it are better than the one reason I have to do it again.

That reason, you ask?
It's not the glory. It's not to piss off the people who said I couldn't do it last year (and still don't believe I did). It's definitely not the utter lack of sleep, dangerous overcaffeination, and blatant disregard for personal well-being. Writing the Million last year was one of the most ridiculous and fun things I've ever challenged myself to do, and while a large portion of it made very little sense, it did get me writing more than my standard crap genres. That's right. The reason I want to do it again is to make myself write in genres I don't typically touch and have fun doing it.
I know me. If left to my own devices, I'll write the same boring fantasy adventure story with the same boring characters, vaguely disguised as a new and unique plot. Sure, I could go adopt a plot, adopt characters, and run with it, but I would still tell the same story every single time.
That's why. That's why I want to ignore everything screaming at me to not do this, and what part of my brain I'll listen to in the end is still undecided.

Quick little update

Between getting a job (and keeping it) and finishing some sewing commissions, I've once again ignored my blog.

'Letcon 2012 was fantastic, as was getting out of this town for a while. Life (in most aspects) has been good. That's right. Not just ok. Good. Outside isn't as scary, I'm writing again (thanks to Camp NaNo), and I've finally put chords to some of the songs I've been scrawling in random notebooks all year.

Also, I'm part of this video blog with my fellow 'Lets (although not all of us are vlogging). I promise I'm more timely about my vlogs than I am about this blog.