This is my thousandth post on my blog. As of this year I have done extensive streaks of writing. Last year I wrote extensively on multiple projects, with this year being more about expanding my skill base – working in video, audio, and animation projects.
So many times this past two months I have started to speak, only to find myself silenced by so many good reasons. This will upset a person. This isn’t my place to say. People do not like this as much as I do. If I talk about this, people will understand it differently to what I mean. If I put this out there, and nobody likes it, I will have proof of that. If I use this now I will not have it another time. This is just my emotions, and will not form a good component of a corpus that hypothetically, one day, might yield commercial work. Nobody has the context to understand why this matters and I cannot give it to them. Everyone’s angry about this thing right now, don’t talk about a related matter.
I pretty much just stopped.
Burnout isn’t really the word for it. Burnout implies that I’m tired of doing it, and I imagine the result of stopping would be relief. It wasn’t. I just felt more sad and angry and anxious, like I was being muted and not by anyone actually asking me to do it. The feeling I have so often, the feeling that echoes in my bones, is that I am radioactive; people can abide me, enjoy me even, that they can feel the glow for a bit, but that in time, I make them sick. I hurt by my presence.
Today, I made an off-handed comment about story structure.
A friend had to leave the room.
I wasn’t even trying to be cruel. I know, because I know what trying to be cruel feels like. I really enjoy that. It’s one of the things that really worries me about who I am: when tasked to be creative, the only work I make that seems to work is stuff about sex and violence, and that says a lot about how my brain’s been hammered into shape by my life. I know what it’s like to hurt people and enjoy doing so. I keep looking for targets, and in my early internet going days, I used to spend my time looking for fights.
Nowadays, I don’t get that urge out, and even when I don’t do anything about that feeling, I still hurt people. And some days I will try and give myself that tiniest feeling, and say something meanspirited about… a company. A videogame. A public personality who has no reason to ever feel anything about what I have to say, no reason to hunt me down and sue me for ten million dollars.
And yet, just the act of expressing that, just letting that element of myself out at all hurts people. People who aren’t in the room. People who aren’t involved, or addressed.
Going to get back into publishing a thing every day. I’ve written something every day this year – but let’s see if I can’t get back into that groove of sharing it, and putting it out there. Podcast days are getting tighter and better. Hopefully I can keep to that.