so what do we make of all this? what has the world come to? is there a way we can make it through more or less okay? i used to be an optimist. now it feels more like desperately clinging to the bits of joy still left in the world. but i don't believe in giving into doomerism because then nothing will ever change. hope is needed. hope has to be cultivated, and so what if i'm the one who has to do it? can i contribute anything to that ideal?

Thoughts

"Ice Boys": Abandoning Perfection to Write for Myself

I was never one for journaling. I guess I've always processed things internally. At one point in my life, I did work through a difficult period by just writing stream-of-consciousness life updates that ended up spilling my real thoughts. That was in middle school. Since then, I've mostly stuck through processing the world through characters.

I had one set of characters for about 10 or so years now that I've always imagined, and I feared that if I told anyone else about them, their inner world would crumble. As if speaking their names would unleash some kind of curse unravelling the fabric of their universe. But eventually, they grew too powerful to be contained. (The craziest thing about how dramatic I was about this is that it's literally a hockey player/figure skater romance story). I dismissed them for years as having too self-indulgent of backstories, not enough plot, unrealistic career trajectories. What makes me laugh is what finally made me say "okay, why not?" was me reading the first two Game Changers books by Rachel Reid. And while I respect Reid and she seems cool, the prose in them made me go "psht, I could do this"--and instead of being a condescending dick in my head and calling it a day, I actually followed through and did it.

What I learned most from doing it is that the minute I imagine some mass audience, my confidence evaporates. I spent a lot of my teenage years embroiled in an era of fierce identity politics on Tumblr (these debates still happen in online spaces but 2012-2017 was A Lot) and I developed the sense that everything I wrote had to be perfectly unproblematic. Characters could never do anything bad to each other and there was One Correct Way to portray queer issues (usually with a lot of stilted "I'm proud of you" conversations). I was never super edgy or anything, but as a person who explores other people's experiences by trying to write about them, it gave me the idea that unless my work had been thoroughly vetted by people with those experiences, it shouldn't see the light of day. For a long time, I was paralyzed by this school of thought. Characters who were supposed to do problematic things did mostly nothing. I would draft diverse casts and immediately panic over whether I'd made some horrible mistake in their portrayal. I knew I wanted to write but I would call myself "unpublishable."

Maybe I feared that if I wrote my internal universe, it would out me as a "problematic" person. Or that I wouldn't be able to take criticism because I'd nutured these characters for so many years. What I found was that because I had sat on them for so long, they were more nuanced and developed than I gave them credit for. The story I ended up writing was one about learning to process grief--both of a relationship and of a parent--and wondering how "healed" one has to be in order to jump into a new relationship (especially when there's a linguistic and cultural barrier involved). By getting so caught up in whether the story was "marketable" or completely accurate in its representation, I wasn't writing for myself.

So, I took my internal universe, wrote it up, shared it with my partner and some friends, and found that they grew just as attached to my boys as I was. Sharing it wasn't fully easy (I literally made a powerpoint about it with disclaimers about some of my writing decisions) but when they received it as well as they did, I realized that I wrote something that people related to. I'm used to sharing everything with my partner and know what to expect (a lot of this emoji: ) but this was one friend's first time reading any of my work. I was honestly shocked to realize people had favourite characters (I can't pick favourites!), that the therapy scenes were true to life, and that my protagonists's "fled-his-home-country-at-age-12-and-lost-his-mother-to-suicide-at-15" tragic backstory was somehow grounded.

All this to say, write the story. Chances are, you're psyching yourself out and whatever you're thinking of isn't that weird. Write for yourself and the other five freaks in the room. You learn more by trying than not trying.