Lately I've been afraid of writing, and I don't know why. At first I chalked it up to a resurgence of my once omnipresent social anxiety (which is still very much present, if I'm being honest). But the more I sat with the feeling, the more I realized that wasn't true. Or not fully true, at least. The realization that it was something deeper came when I thought about sitting down to write some notes for a D&D campaign for the first time in months, and had a little mini-stress attack, complete with tightening in my chest and a weird surge of anxiety and adrenaline. It was worrying and stressful, which obviously didn't help anything. I'm a chronic avoider of stressful situations, so instead of confronting that issue, I pushed it away and subsequently avoided thinking about writing at all-- not very helpful, if writing is also your only creative outlet and the nearest thing you have to an "identity" to stake a claim on.
But since you can't avoid a situation forever (trust me, I've tried) eventually the problem popped up again. And again, and again, and again just a moment ago. And I mean literal moments from it happening to sitting down and writing this blog post. Which is, potentially, a sign of something good. Healing, or coming to terms, or something like that. But since I am not a therapist, and only act as an armchair psychologist for my friends and not myself, I can't say for certain.
That aside, I don't know what happened in the past few months to push me away from "I'm taking more time out of my schedule to do real writing" and into "The thought of doing writing gives me a small panic attack." I suspect it might have something to do with lack of output, and a paralyzing sense of imposter syndrome. I've been told by some people close to me that I'm pretty good at writing. Unfortunately, because I'm socially anxious about posting most of my writing into the world, I've rarely (if ever) been told the same by strangers. Because I am a person for whom validation from loved ones is merely sympathy and validation from strangers is proof, that's a problem. But it's not like I've never received any validation about my writing at all from strangers online-- I spent several years of (minor) success writing homebrew content for the Big Elf Game™. But that never graduated beyond monster descriptions, magic item ideas, and spells, because I never felt like I could "handle" making a dungeon or adventure (partly because I felt that I could never create a good map for one). I also found a niche in creating things for 5e inspired by Hasbro's other big property, Magic the Gathering, further pushing me into my own little corner. Since my writing was only ever bound to this Lilliputian world of game mathematics and descriptions inspired by existing properties, I never put anything deeper into the online world.
I also felt like I never had time for it-- the homebrew content ate up my creative hours, and the rest of my time was spent balancing the dozens of spinning plates we all hold above our heads and call "modern life". That's things like socializing, spending time with my partner, entertainment in the form of TV/books/video games, and cleaning the house and other daily duties. But a year ago, I moved to another country, severing a lot of my social life; I've worked to build a new one, but it's exhausting and stressful and sometimes staying home is easier. A few months ago, sometime near the start of summer I think, I stopped making stuff for D&D too. In spite of some mental tricks I'd performed on myself, the work had turned into drudgery, I was burnt-out and tired of it, and I was putting hours each day into something that was earning me maybe 50 bucks a month. And look, I'm a good little socialist, I know that our worth isn't measured by the digits of a bank account or a formula for money earned per hour. But some of the things you grow up with and live your life immersed in are hard to shake, and when the digital dollars are also the closest thing you ever receive to acknowledgement that you have any amount of skill, it matters a whole hell of a lot more.
Anyway, that's where I'm sitting now-- some of my biggest time sinks have been shaved away, the perpetual bustle of summer is over, my various trips and their associated plannings have passed, and I still get shit-all done in each day. (Creatively, that is. I cook, clean, do all of our grocery shopping, and manage to chip away at my backlog of games, books, and movies.) So as you can imagine, the thought of doing more writing tends to pop up now more than ever, forcing me to confront my newly-ingrained fear response about it.
As I said at the start, with (forced) time to examine it, I've realized the problem isn't some mercurial fear that people won't like what I make (although there is that, too). Put really simply, it's actually a fear that I'm not good enough. That everything I've ever written, everything that remotely seemed worth a damn at least, was just some mutated parasite stuck onto the side of some better, more glorious beast raised by a different hand. All the TTRPG work I ever did was making D&D homebrew, and even that was all based on pop-culture franchises. It was fun, and in a lot of ways it was easy, but it never went anywhere and it's hard to tell if that's because it was a tiny ecological niche to begin with, or if it's because my particular contribution was a gutless bug without much to contribute, ultimately destined for extinction.
Or maybe it's because I'm terrible at marketing myself, and everything in the D&D homebrew space relies on marketing. To be honest, it might be that latter thing-- I mean, have you seen some of the stuff that pops off over on Reddit? If all I needed for confidence was to see bad ideas and worse prose hit mainstream popularity, I'd be all set. But because I am usually anxious about putting anything up on a website it's rare that I share anything outside of my tiny Patreon and a decade-old tumblr blog. Of course, that's also because sitting down every day on most modern sites to upload images, write post titles, and perform perky self-advertising is like putting nails onto my chalkboard brain. (Not even fingernails, but rusty, bent, slightly-chipped-at-the-point, metal roofing nails. If you ever managed to rid yourself of the compulsion to shiver at fingernails on a chalkboard, think of that instead for a good time.)
Putting all that aside, I don't really know where that leaves me. I have this blog, and I managed to make this post, but the thought of finally engaging in creative fiction again still gives me a bit of terror. It's the same with the idea of joining in a blogwagon, or some sort of monthly writing challenge to be shared anywhere but my own computer screen. Maybe I'll get over it; maybe this post, the first thing I've written in months other than a text, will be the catalyst. Maybe I won't, and this is the end of my writing career before it ever really started. Then again, it's push through this or go back to a normal 9-to-5. Since death isn't my thing, and the 9-to-5 is even worse, I guess I'm going to have to stick with the writing.
