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Year of Revelations
8 years ago
Hi,
2017 has been a year of many things. For me it has been a year of personal revelations. These big things that dig deep into my personal mental health issues that I've had throughout my life.
I'm going to start with the second revelation of three that I want to cover. It is a simple one and that is my skills are worth something. I had some private math tutoring gigs come my way recently. I had not been aware just how much people would pay for math tutoring. Particularly for mutlivariate calculus, since there aren't a lot of tutors at that level. It's not something I can rely on as a source of income. It seems word of mouth is the best advertisement in that area, and so I have no knowledge of if or when someone may contact me wanting help. But for a person who has suffered imposter syndrome on a large scale, and had interanlized that it was a prewritten rule of the universe that he couldn't do anything truly of value, it is a pretty important bit of evidence to the contrary.
The first revelation is a bit of a weird one. It is the revelation that reading is okay. Like I said, it's a bit weird, but I'll try to explain this. Now I generally like reading, as one who is a writer should. But for me getting started on reading a new book or story was difficult. The problem was that books had a tendency to draw me (any good book should, really). But I would become obsessed while reading them. Because of this I developed a strange sort of aversion to reading anything that wasn't by an author I 'trusted,' for lack of a better term. Trusted to tell a good story and be worth the time and emotional energy spent on reading their work.
But picking up some stories this year and reading them, I did not feel the same sort of obsession as before. I could read without getting trapped. I could put the book down and do other things and then come back to it. I truly haven't read anything since being on sertraline regularly. (Most stuff I did read was either really short stories or I just skimmed). So feeling like I can actually do that makes it a bit more plausible to do more reading and get more ideas and inspiration for my work.
And that takes me to revelation number three. A revelation that comes from a book I read because in part of revelation two. This has to do with a hangup in my own writing. As you've likely noticed I have not written much over the past few years. At best I post something every couple of months. The hangup I've had is feeling my stuff wasn't good enough. That I needed to be striving for a level of perfection in my own work stylistically.
A couple weeks back a book released from an author I like. I was quite looking forward to it as I've enjoyed previous stuff by said author befored. And it had a bit of hype around it as well. But reading it, fuck I didn't like it. I felt it was probematic and flawed in ways that make me wonder if the author bothered to reread it at all. And I just feel, reading that, that if people paid the author money to publish that and other people said they liked it then I really don't need to be worrying about the quality of my own work. I should just strive to do my best trust myself that it's good stuff.
I think I'm going to forgo the patreon idea from a couple of weeks back. That had been before I scored the tutoring gigs and was hoping for a bit of extra income from somewhere. And with this new found confidence in myself I don't need the dangling carrot to motivate me. I put up a couple of stories over the past month and have another nearing completion. I've been really going like clockwork.
I'm going to start with the second revelation of three that I want to cover. It is a simple one and that is my skills are worth something. I had some private math tutoring gigs come my way recently. I had not been aware just how much people would pay for math tutoring. Particularly for mutlivariate calculus, since there aren't a lot of tutors at that level. It's not something I can rely on as a source of income. It seems word of mouth is the best advertisement in that area, and so I have no knowledge of if or when someone may contact me wanting help. But for a person who has suffered imposter syndrome on a large scale, and had interanlized that it was a prewritten rule of the universe that he couldn't do anything truly of value, it is a pretty important bit of evidence to the contrary.
The first revelation is a bit of a weird one. It is the revelation that reading is okay. Like I said, it's a bit weird, but I'll try to explain this. Now I generally like reading, as one who is a writer should. But for me getting started on reading a new book or story was difficult. The problem was that books had a tendency to draw me (any good book should, really). But I would become obsessed while reading them. Because of this I developed a strange sort of aversion to reading anything that wasn't by an author I 'trusted,' for lack of a better term. Trusted to tell a good story and be worth the time and emotional energy spent on reading their work.
But picking up some stories this year and reading them, I did not feel the same sort of obsession as before. I could read without getting trapped. I could put the book down and do other things and then come back to it. I truly haven't read anything since being on sertraline regularly. (Most stuff I did read was either really short stories or I just skimmed). So feeling like I can actually do that makes it a bit more plausible to do more reading and get more ideas and inspiration for my work.
And that takes me to revelation number three. A revelation that comes from a book I read because in part of revelation two. This has to do with a hangup in my own writing. As you've likely noticed I have not written much over the past few years. At best I post something every couple of months. The hangup I've had is feeling my stuff wasn't good enough. That I needed to be striving for a level of perfection in my own work stylistically.
A couple weeks back a book released from an author I like. I was quite looking forward to it as I've enjoyed previous stuff by said author befored. And it had a bit of hype around it as well. But reading it, fuck I didn't like it. I felt it was probematic and flawed in ways that make me wonder if the author bothered to reread it at all. And I just feel, reading that, that if people paid the author money to publish that and other people said they liked it then I really don't need to be worrying about the quality of my own work. I should just strive to do my best trust myself that it's good stuff.
I think I'm going to forgo the patreon idea from a couple of weeks back. That had been before I scored the tutoring gigs and was hoping for a bit of extra income from somewhere. And with this new found confidence in myself I don't need the dangling carrot to motivate me. I put up a couple of stories over the past month and have another nearing completion. I've been really going like clockwork.
