It's been a long summer...

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 21:47:10 GMT

(Forewarning that this is a bit vent-y (or should I say 'vent-i', hah.), I tried not to get too dour but it has been a time. I'll put a bolded line when things lighten up in case you want to read about what I've read this summer.)

At some point I realized that posting on here has become a bit like how it is to write in my diary, since when I'm doing terribly I just won't be compelled to write in it, even though that's theoretically the purpose of journaling. Anyway, I'm moving back to school in a little over a week and it could not come fast enough.

I made a post the night I got home from school in June, and even though I just rambled on about some random thoughts, I had so much wind in my sails, but by mid-July at most that wind was just gone, to a degree that even I was shocked. This summer was supposed to be about getting my foundations as an Adult(tm) set up, since I turned 21 back in April. I had documents to renew, appointments to make and people to talk to, but I never could have expected how much that was going to take out of me. It's been a lot to organize and sort out, especially when I'm walking the line between wanting to be more independent but still needing to rely on my parents for a lot of things that's been causing a lot of friction between them and me.

Now it's August and I feel like I haven't been able to get done half the stuff that I initially wanted to, and especially not the stuff that's most important. It's immensely frustrating, but there's also no one I can really point to and blame other than myself. Some of my friends like to say that "I don't have that dog in me" when it comes to certain situations, but what I've been feeling is that I used to have the dog in me, but now after two decades the dog is old and tired and can't dog the way it used to. I guess that's just what undiagnosed neurodivergency will do to a person, but I think there's something uniquely excruciating about it to have been brought up in an online space where you watch that happen to so many people and think "That won't happen to me though," until suddenly it does. Such is the way of hubris, I suppose lol

The whole being trans thing isn't really helping either. I still haven't told anyone in my family, purely because I just don't feel like I have a very strong direction for myself yet, but god if it hasn't done me some psychic damage over the past three months with the way that I get treated. It's difficult to deal with because no harm is meant by it, but there's still harm being done, and I can't eliminate that harm because I don't feel like I can tell the truth. It's a vicious cycle that I think I'll just have to keep running from for a while longer until I find my footing. For this coming year though, I think I'm going to ask my closest friends to start calling me by a new name, if only so that I can take the first step towards confronting this part of myself instead of continuing to ignore it for my own peace of mind. Because if there's anything these past two years have taught me, it's that whatever peace of mind I'm gaining now, it's painfully temporary.

I think the most frightening thing of all, though, is the way that even my interest in fandom kind of seemed to lose its luster a bit the more time went on. I fell into a bit of a fic-reading slump in July, and that made it so much harder to keep myself entertained when I didn't have the motivation to pick up a book or a game. I felt like my interest in the stories and characters I love so much kind of fell into stagnation, and I'll admit that I'm a person who thinks about stories and blorbos to cope. So if no blorbos, then how cope?? I'm on my way to climbing out of that by now, but I would honestly say that little blip in my interest in things was just as awful as everything else.

Thankfully though, the whole thing hasn't been a wash,

Like I said in my post back in June, I did actually manage to post something this summer (yay!). I'm frustrated that I wasn't able to get anything else off my plate, but I'm taking the small victories as they come. My expectations are still low for the fall on account of my capstone, but I don't intend to stop creating. Or at least, trying to lol

Speaking of my capstone, I've spent the latter half of the summer rereading TGCF so that I can write a literary analysis about one of the scenes (I haven't quite decided which out of the few I have in mind, but the opening of Mount Tonglu is coming up soon in my reread *eyes emoji*). It's been an interesting experience to go through something that I loved in such a self-indulgent way to stick tabs in it and think about it in a scholarly way, but it's a project I'm really looking forward to, even if it might eat me alive. It's a story that I just can't help but admire (if my incessant yapping in certain friend's dms while reading is any indication lmao) so I'm looking forward to really getting into the weeds with it.

My two other reading projects for the summer have been (and don't laugh at the contrast) Crime and Punishment and The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System. The former, I've owned since I was probably 16 years old and I wanted to read it on account of a now dearly beloathed former fandom of mine, but now just because I think it's interesting to read translated classics. I did still enjoy The Stranger when I read it in junior year of high school (even if my team lost the mock trial -3-). Crime and Punishment is... a bit less comprehensible, I would say? I do have fun with it (especially when Razumihin or Dounia are on the page) but I definitely don't feel like I've picked up on all the philosophy the book has tried to throw down. Such is the consequence of rawdogging the classics, I would say.

As for the latter... I've enjoyed it so much more than I ever thought I would. My friends did a good job of keeping my expectations for it Low so that when I did actually read it, I was so pleasantly surprised. I'm only halfway done, since I set it aside to read TGCF, but SVSSS lives its premise with such shameless abandon that I just couldn't help but get sucked in to the story. I feel like this might be at least a warm take, but I actually have preferred SVSSS over MDZS so far, which I wasn't expecting. It's been a bit hard to articulate why, but it's like there are a lot of individual parts about MDZS that I really enjoy but they don't really come together into a whole that I enjoy as much as I do the whole of SVSSS. Of course, I still love all three of MXTX's series, but I just wasn't expecting her oldest (and arguably trashiest (said affectionately, of course)) work to find itself in second place in my heart.

Aside from reading, the highlights of my summer have always involved the moments that I've gotten to spend with my real-life friends, who are thankfully still close enough by that I've been able to visit them quite a few times over the summer. They always manage to give me a pick-me-up when I need it, and it was actually the fact that I was lucky enough to spend the entirety of the last week with them that has kind of managed to jump-start my brain back into normalcy. None of them will see this, since they don't use this site, but I'm still really grateful to them anyway.

In any case, this has been quite the experiment into posting serious real-life lamentations on the internet, I don't know if I'll ever do it again, but I wanted to at least bookend this summer, since... now that I'm thinking about it, this will be my last ever true summer vacation for the forseeable future, unless I decide to go for a master's degree. Huh...

Instead of unpacking that thought, let me leave you with some non-Genshin fic recs from this summer (and a bit earlier because I'm a cheater), just for fun!:

- Faith for the second run, by senblades (Persona 5, Gen + Akechi/Joker, T-rated, 391k, Incomplete) - This fic single-handedly repaired my bittersweet relationship with Persona 5 and also irreparably altered my brain chemistry about Akechi, Sumire, and Haru.
- all the king's horses, by DFP (Honkai: Star Rail, Boothill/Argenti, M-rated, 8k, Complete) - A heartwrenching character study about a ship I started liking as a bit, but if there's anyone who can make me like something unironically, it's DFP <3
- How to Lose 800 Years of Cultivation, by Princeliest (TGCF, Feng Xin/Mu Qing, E-Rated, 24.6k, Complete) - I. Have reread this more than I would like to admit. I was already kinda obsessed with Mu Qing after reading the books, but Princeliest's fics made it irreparable.

Here's to a better fall, and to getting things back on track!

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