The Grind, pt 1/?
Jul. 27th, 2021 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksI'm having a long-running crisis of...something. Confidence, maybe. Lifestyle, perhaps. And I'm at the point of needing to work it out on the page to figure out how I'm feeling about things. So fair warning on that count.
Partly this is a fandom discontent situation. In thinking of things to say about Black Widow, I realized I...have nothing to say. I enjoyed it in the moment, I'm ultimately still entirely unsatisfied by Marvel's storytelling choices, and I don't know what more to say about a movie that I liked seeing so long as I wasn't thinking about what was happening more than five seconds into the past or future. I'm still reading old Marvel fic like it's the only thing keeping me alive at times, but the fandom feels dead for me at this point.
I have no idea what, if anything, I want to move onto instead. Fandom has been a very lonely place the last couple of years for me. A lot of drama passing by under the surface that makes me afraid to dip my feet in the water. I'm suspicious of source material creators; I'm suspicious of other fans. I wouldn't even know where to begin to be more actively engaged with fellow fans in any given fandom.
Part of that is also that I lack the time to be deeply involved in a fandom. I realized with some surprise and more than a little dismay that the reason--the rather face-palmingly obvious reason--I was able to be very (for me) active in Marvel fandom around Winter Soldier era, and to a lesser extent in the Mad Max fandom, was that I was unemployed at the time. Then I was underemployed in some very specific ways that still left a lot of hours that could be filled with fannish activity.
I've been bemoaning for several years that I manage to add a single work each year to my AO3 profile and nothing more. Even that is something of a wrench to accomplish. And it really, truly hadn't occurred to me that the difference was somewhere around forty hours a week and a commute. I kept trying to figure out what was wrong with me, that I had once been writing so much and couldn't seem to anymore, without consciously understanding that I, you know, went out and got a day job.
All of which is still ignoring the original work I do weekly. Which might not seem like much--goodness knows I look at other people's output and despair regularly--but it takes time and effort. I have a carefully maintained schedule that makes sure I don't fall behind on Lewisia, since it's "live," and the time it takes out of my days off is not nothing. And even so, I constantly have to remind myself that I am writing, I'm not doing nothing, for all that it sometimes feels like that.
Most of my downtime seems to go to chores, including a lot of self-imposed ones. Duolingo is a chore. Restocking my tumblr queue is a chore. Checking the sites or Twitter accounts of writers I like is a chore. I don't mean that they're especially onerous, or that I'm doing them against my will. It's just...they're all things that I've decided need to be maintained on a daily or weekly basis. They're just things I do.
So I've sort of lost the thread somewhere on the concept of "free time." And while I do sometimes lose a day off to the rabbit hole of YouTube or tumblr, mostly I spend what I think of as free time gardening. Or sewing. Or playing video games, though honestly, I actually have to make a specific effort to put time in on those. Because I can turn anything into a grind, apparently.
All of which is to say that I've constructed for myself a routine/series of routines which are highly functional, easy to stick to, and yet failing me on some fundamental level. Taken individually, the activities are all things I want to do. Seen in aggregate, they have become utterly joyless.
In crafting a reliable, comforting routine in which I meet all demands put on me by myself and others, I have built a finely-honed machine that converts any and all input into a slogging, grinding, churning drudgery.
Which is starting to seem like, you know, a problem.
Partly this is a fandom discontent situation. In thinking of things to say about Black Widow, I realized I...have nothing to say. I enjoyed it in the moment, I'm ultimately still entirely unsatisfied by Marvel's storytelling choices, and I don't know what more to say about a movie that I liked seeing so long as I wasn't thinking about what was happening more than five seconds into the past or future. I'm still reading old Marvel fic like it's the only thing keeping me alive at times, but the fandom feels dead for me at this point.
I have no idea what, if anything, I want to move onto instead. Fandom has been a very lonely place the last couple of years for me. A lot of drama passing by under the surface that makes me afraid to dip my feet in the water. I'm suspicious of source material creators; I'm suspicious of other fans. I wouldn't even know where to begin to be more actively engaged with fellow fans in any given fandom.
Part of that is also that I lack the time to be deeply involved in a fandom. I realized with some surprise and more than a little dismay that the reason--the rather face-palmingly obvious reason--I was able to be very (for me) active in Marvel fandom around Winter Soldier era, and to a lesser extent in the Mad Max fandom, was that I was unemployed at the time. Then I was underemployed in some very specific ways that still left a lot of hours that could be filled with fannish activity.
I've been bemoaning for several years that I manage to add a single work each year to my AO3 profile and nothing more. Even that is something of a wrench to accomplish. And it really, truly hadn't occurred to me that the difference was somewhere around forty hours a week and a commute. I kept trying to figure out what was wrong with me, that I had once been writing so much and couldn't seem to anymore, without consciously understanding that I, you know, went out and got a day job.
All of which is still ignoring the original work I do weekly. Which might not seem like much--goodness knows I look at other people's output and despair regularly--but it takes time and effort. I have a carefully maintained schedule that makes sure I don't fall behind on Lewisia, since it's "live," and the time it takes out of my days off is not nothing. And even so, I constantly have to remind myself that I am writing, I'm not doing nothing, for all that it sometimes feels like that.
Most of my downtime seems to go to chores, including a lot of self-imposed ones. Duolingo is a chore. Restocking my tumblr queue is a chore. Checking the sites or Twitter accounts of writers I like is a chore. I don't mean that they're especially onerous, or that I'm doing them against my will. It's just...they're all things that I've decided need to be maintained on a daily or weekly basis. They're just things I do.
So I've sort of lost the thread somewhere on the concept of "free time." And while I do sometimes lose a day off to the rabbit hole of YouTube or tumblr, mostly I spend what I think of as free time gardening. Or sewing. Or playing video games, though honestly, I actually have to make a specific effort to put time in on those. Because I can turn anything into a grind, apparently.
All of which is to say that I've constructed for myself a routine/series of routines which are highly functional, easy to stick to, and yet failing me on some fundamental level. Taken individually, the activities are all things I want to do. Seen in aggregate, they have become utterly joyless.
In crafting a reliable, comforting routine in which I meet all demands put on me by myself and others, I have built a finely-honed machine that converts any and all input into a slogging, grinding, churning drudgery.
Which is starting to seem like, you know, a problem.
