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Burnout (Long read but I Needed to Talk)
3 years ago
To be perfectly honest, I've been feeling intense burnout from a lot of the more social aspects of the fandom for a while. I had a really rough personal year and just as I was gradually getting over that (the pandemic also stiffled some of the really good progress I was getting from therapy), the community has felt a lot more intensely contentious to people who while not hurting anybody or encouraging hurt get targetted harrassment to a point where I just...don't feel as welcome around these parts like how I used to.
I was initially going to talk about this via a "visual thread", which takes what would've been lengthy text posts and make 4-panel comics out of them so it'd grab people's attention...but that would take a lot of time and effort and I'm already really tired.
Some of what I was going to say was going to be a re-detailing of what I criticised before along with what I believed to be sensible solutions for the problems that spawn people's ill intentions because I still feel strongly about them and believe that there are sections of the community that are genuinely making people's lives worse for much smaller reasons than they may try and suggest despite them not actually breaking laws or enabling/encouraging real evil. But I've been repeating myself on that for nearly a year and a half, these are issues that haven't really minimized over that time despite more people recognising real-world compromises to human rights going on thanks to similar "puritanical" groups twisting horrible words in just the right ways to the right people...and I'm really, really tired of repeating myself when nothing I say has any tangible positive effect where it matters there.
I don't think I can out-and-out ditch the furry fandom.
I also heavily believe in the positives of more diverse, less size-limit-based body positivity in regards to fat people, which has coloured the trajectory I've ended up in for more than a decade.
No character I have in regular rotation, private or not, I really feel like "getting rid of" or "retiring". I still feel personal, validating connections to them that I don't think I can replace with compromises to facets of them that aren't...*them*.
But I definitely feel like I want to shake things up, maybe take a break from one version of how I dabble with this stuff and experiment with another version of that for a good bit.
At this point in writing something like this (and I decided to make this an FA journal for old time's sake but also because it feels more comfortable and natural than making a Twitter thread), I'd steer the subject towards some kind of announcement-esque bullet point of what I intend to do...this time, though, I still feel like I'm in a "thinking out loud" stage of this, but believe getting my thoughts out would help me focus on actually committing to making some kind of positive change sooner or later, rather than just keep thinking about it and exhaust myself too much to share my thoughts. Which has happened more often than I'd like to admit. Even this journal I didn't finish until the day after I started writing it.
While I can't say with 100% confidence that I'm going to do what I'm about to say, I want to and I want to look into how to do this...but, I'd love to just...step away for an indefinite amount of time from the more-established fat-fur-ish side of how I conduct myself here and...evaluate what excites me, inspires me and engages me over the fandom that's not tied to representation that much worse people would unfairly lump into being defined as "sexual" because they refuse to believe fat people are real and exist outside of people's objectifying gazes (and that despite ace-sexuals feeling validation and comfort in so-called "fetishes", that just the idea of "fetishes" can only be exclusively tied to sexuality despite absolutely no direct sexual activity being discussed or shown, let alone any sexual organs).
I almost feel like I'm betraying myself with these desires, like I've given into the stupid harrassment campaigns that people run against others that I do that thing where I reverse my anti-objectification stances and limit how I openly discuss or represent body positivity, by replacing all of how I conducted that stuff with stock, generic "marketably-sized" characters as my new form of representation. But...no character is being replaced. In my mind, at least, I'm not "replacing" anything in regards to my stances on body positivity...I just really feel like while I feel the way I conduct that stuff is limited by poor self-management of many communities to ensure hate campaigns don't have power over others like they do lately, I want to re-evaluate the stuff that got me excited over furry stuff/anthro characters in the first place.
Like, I've thought a lot more about some of the media that I had as a kid that led me down to bumping into the furry fandom even before I found out that my appreciation of fat representation could be combined with those concepts too. Even stuff that I like more as an adult than as a kid, like the film "Balto", is making me ponder over wanting to go back into being more experimentative while wearing the influences in a more interesting way than I may be at present. So...I'm tempted to do a from-scratch redo of how I do stuff in the fandom and see where it goes.
I also really badly want to stop using Twitter for stuff specific to the fandom now, at least with how I conduct myself currently. A lot of the problems with the community spawned from Twitter or at least Twitter as a platform certainly encouraged that stuff enough to fan the flames and...honestly, I disassociate really hard looking at my public furry Twitter's timeline now. If its not regular full-body pics of fat characters that mostly look like each other, it's people being incredibly contentious and...I don't think I want to really dabble in social media that much anymore. But it's a habit. It's like smoking, I try and quit and something about it worms its way back into my brain. I need to work on that a lot more.
So...hmmm, I suppose if anyone has some sensible and non-judgemental advice, feel free to get back to me. But either way, something needs to change and I recognise that. I've said to myself that I'd spend less time doing stuff relating to the fandom if it doesn't feel fun for me anymore...and...I have to admit, a lot of it hasn't felt fun for me for years. But I've been so used to certain things for so long that even if there's changes that feel more isolating and frustrating to me, I can't as easily plug myself out like some people may say people can.
I'm just tired. Really tired. I need to work something out.
I was initially going to talk about this via a "visual thread", which takes what would've been lengthy text posts and make 4-panel comics out of them so it'd grab people's attention...but that would take a lot of time and effort and I'm already really tired.
Some of what I was going to say was going to be a re-detailing of what I criticised before along with what I believed to be sensible solutions for the problems that spawn people's ill intentions because I still feel strongly about them and believe that there are sections of the community that are genuinely making people's lives worse for much smaller reasons than they may try and suggest despite them not actually breaking laws or enabling/encouraging real evil. But I've been repeating myself on that for nearly a year and a half, these are issues that haven't really minimized over that time despite more people recognising real-world compromises to human rights going on thanks to similar "puritanical" groups twisting horrible words in just the right ways to the right people...and I'm really, really tired of repeating myself when nothing I say has any tangible positive effect where it matters there.
I don't think I can out-and-out ditch the furry fandom.
I also heavily believe in the positives of more diverse, less size-limit-based body positivity in regards to fat people, which has coloured the trajectory I've ended up in for more than a decade.
No character I have in regular rotation, private or not, I really feel like "getting rid of" or "retiring". I still feel personal, validating connections to them that I don't think I can replace with compromises to facets of them that aren't...*them*.
But I definitely feel like I want to shake things up, maybe take a break from one version of how I dabble with this stuff and experiment with another version of that for a good bit.
At this point in writing something like this (and I decided to make this an FA journal for old time's sake but also because it feels more comfortable and natural than making a Twitter thread), I'd steer the subject towards some kind of announcement-esque bullet point of what I intend to do...this time, though, I still feel like I'm in a "thinking out loud" stage of this, but believe getting my thoughts out would help me focus on actually committing to making some kind of positive change sooner or later, rather than just keep thinking about it and exhaust myself too much to share my thoughts. Which has happened more often than I'd like to admit. Even this journal I didn't finish until the day after I started writing it.
While I can't say with 100% confidence that I'm going to do what I'm about to say, I want to and I want to look into how to do this...but, I'd love to just...step away for an indefinite amount of time from the more-established fat-fur-ish side of how I conduct myself here and...evaluate what excites me, inspires me and engages me over the fandom that's not tied to representation that much worse people would unfairly lump into being defined as "sexual" because they refuse to believe fat people are real and exist outside of people's objectifying gazes (and that despite ace-sexuals feeling validation and comfort in so-called "fetishes", that just the idea of "fetishes" can only be exclusively tied to sexuality despite absolutely no direct sexual activity being discussed or shown, let alone any sexual organs).
I almost feel like I'm betraying myself with these desires, like I've given into the stupid harrassment campaigns that people run against others that I do that thing where I reverse my anti-objectification stances and limit how I openly discuss or represent body positivity, by replacing all of how I conducted that stuff with stock, generic "marketably-sized" characters as my new form of representation. But...no character is being replaced. In my mind, at least, I'm not "replacing" anything in regards to my stances on body positivity...I just really feel like while I feel the way I conduct that stuff is limited by poor self-management of many communities to ensure hate campaigns don't have power over others like they do lately, I want to re-evaluate the stuff that got me excited over furry stuff/anthro characters in the first place.
Like, I've thought a lot more about some of the media that I had as a kid that led me down to bumping into the furry fandom even before I found out that my appreciation of fat representation could be combined with those concepts too. Even stuff that I like more as an adult than as a kid, like the film "Balto", is making me ponder over wanting to go back into being more experimentative while wearing the influences in a more interesting way than I may be at present. So...I'm tempted to do a from-scratch redo of how I do stuff in the fandom and see where it goes.
I also really badly want to stop using Twitter for stuff specific to the fandom now, at least with how I conduct myself currently. A lot of the problems with the community spawned from Twitter or at least Twitter as a platform certainly encouraged that stuff enough to fan the flames and...honestly, I disassociate really hard looking at my public furry Twitter's timeline now. If its not regular full-body pics of fat characters that mostly look like each other, it's people being incredibly contentious and...I don't think I want to really dabble in social media that much anymore. But it's a habit. It's like smoking, I try and quit and something about it worms its way back into my brain. I need to work on that a lot more.
So...hmmm, I suppose if anyone has some sensible and non-judgemental advice, feel free to get back to me. But either way, something needs to change and I recognise that. I've said to myself that I'd spend less time doing stuff relating to the fandom if it doesn't feel fun for me anymore...and...I have to admit, a lot of it hasn't felt fun for me for years. But I've been so used to certain things for so long that even if there's changes that feel more isolating and frustrating to me, I can't as easily plug myself out like some people may say people can.
I'm just tired. Really tired. I need to work something out.
