SHWA backup

Challenge #12:


Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!


This is the closest I've got to deciding not to fill one of these prompts, because the dark side of appreciation posts is rejection sensitivity, and I have been there so many, many times, I hate being in situations where I have to decide who and what to appreciate and who and what not to mention. I always get it wrong and I always feel like I've hurt someone and I always, always drop back into the bit of my brain where no-one cares about me at all and I genuinely don't know if other people have that bit in their brain too, but I wouldn't want to contribute to anyone going there.


However. This project's got me nostalgic for The Way The Internet Was Back In My Day, and I want to appreciate a few people who apparently have never quite got to the point of writing me off. *g* I don't have a lot of people that I used to have on LJ because this is DW and my LJ is long gone, and I have done various iterations of "growing up" and moving away from fandom and fan spaces over the decades. I haven't even been in the habit of sharing when I do write fic here, which is going to change so I'll have to set up some filters for RL folk who just don't care. The me who found LJ and FF.Net in 2002 and the me of now have almost nothing in common, and I don't have any friends from school or university or childhood or 20s or 30s interest groups (apart from the TS) and I understand why, and I'm mostly sanguine about that now. And I am really bad at staying in touch with people.


And yet... and yet. There are shirebound and ancalime8301 and rabidsamfan. I don't know when we first crossed paths but it's got to be 25-odd years ago. We were in a common fandom in the heady days when the LotR movies were coming out and it was frantic and brilliant and the internet wasn't evil yet. We wrote fic and exchanged plotbunnies and wrote drabbles that were exactly 100 words, and we were, I think for a lot of people, community that they struggled to find elsewhere. I've drifted through a lot of fandoms since then and had a lot of fallow periods where I haven't posted for literal years, and when I have it's just been to whine about how crap I'm feeling.


But you're still here.


Our interactions are different, because times change and interests drift, and I think I'm very bad at thinking things into the screen when you guys post but not actually hitting the keyboard, and I should work on that. But you're still there, and you care, and I think you understand when I'm enthusing about something that you really couldn't care less about, because fandom is its own language and you might not get the subject but you do understand the process. Maybe we don't swap writing challenges any more but you're there still there to enthuse when I'm enthusiastic and hug when I'm grumbling and I've only even met one of you in person! These are the oldest friendships I have, and there's something really beautiful about being able to retain that portion of a time that was so special - like catching the light of a star in a small glass bottle and taking it out to look at when things are dark.


<3

Content advisory: light mentions of neurodivergence and burnout


( Challenge #8 - Talk about your creative process. )


I am hoping that everyone else's responses to this challenge will help me to understand a little about how other people approach projects, creativity, and maybe get some ideas about how to do things differently. If anyone has any thoughts to share about getting past this sort of rut (despite what I said about self help books I am open to advice!) and I would particularly be interested in experiences of neurodivergent people who are also prone to fixation.