Tuesday, March 19, 2013

In Which We Fight

It was a fucking awful day yesterday. It's been a fucking awful week already. I've been pulling whatever I can to help myself get through The Next Thing, because there are way too many Next Things for someone quietly sinking under a miasma of bad feelings. Today I pulled Sucker Punch and Natasha Romanova. Lots of women I adore!

There's a thing that keeps circling around on tumblr, a phrase that I found and loved. "Natasha Romanoff [sic] punches her fears in the face." I like that image. It's a good image. I like to imagine that I do that with my fears and little voices that tell me no one wants to hear it, my problems aren't that bad, I should be able to fix them myself so stop bugging everyone. I like to imagine I walk up to those fears and insecurities and self-aggrandizations, rationalizations, all meek and submissive. Hi, how you doin. Walk up to my fears, shake their hand. Then punch them in the face.

I spend a lot of time inside my own head. Okay, I spend all my time inside my own head, because until they develop telepathy treatments we can't exactly by in other people's heads, but I do. Possibly because I'm a writer, or a creative person, or any number of bullshit reasons but I do spend a lot of time thinking and daydreaming. It's a thing. It helps. Especially when things are shit and my head is full of thoughts like the above, like whatever I'm doing isn't any good or isn't even good enough, which is one of those depressive oxymorons because if you don't matter, how can it matter that what you're doing isn't any good or isn't good enough? Hell with that, your depression says, the point is that you are a bad person and you should feel bad. And fuck that, I say, and picture myself in Hollywood commando black with a good set of kevlar and some badass boots, maybe a set of brass knuckles, and punch depression in the face.

You can't always fight. Sometimes you have to recharge. That's where the whole routine of taking care of yourself, enlisting other people to help remind you to walk around, drink some water, eat something healthy and tasty (please both your physical body and your senses), get a good amount but not too much sleep, and do something quiet that helps you, where that comes into play. Sticky notes and alarms and things. There's a mental recharging, too. We can't always be Sweet Pea with a machine gun and a broadsword hacking down orcs, robots, and Axis zombies. Sometimes we have to turn to ourselves and go "Look, honey. Things are bad right now, okay? I know it hurts. But I love you, and I'm right here with you, and we'll get through this." And sometimes when I do that I'm an older woman (well, a woman older than I am now) and sometimes I'm, um, Thorin Oakenshield, and, you know, whatever works, right? Being kind to myself. Hugs and comfort and it'll all be okay.

(I mentioned living inside my own head a lot, right?)

I have mental subroutines. I have had for a long time, I don't know when it started. Subroutines is the programming term because among the many things I grew up with, computer programming was one of them. You can call it brain hacking. You can call it dissociation even though that's a misleading term, it's not as harmful as that implies and it's not nearly as drastic. I call it headvoices, to distinguish from brainweasels, or sometimes patterns or paradigms. When I'm writing I call them characters. When I'm working, which is to say all the time, I pull out the ones I think will best help. And I turn to Eve, my profiler/assassin/mercenary operative, and I tell her "Okay, you work logistics. Figure out how I can get all the shit I need to do done in this amount of time. Here's the essential list, here's the optimal list. Go." And I turn to Sam, my oldest character, and I shove him into my mental Workshop and go "Okay, here's the list of worlds I'm going to be playing in when Eve finds me some writing time, here's the sections I need to get done, here's the parts where the stories are weakest. Go fix." And I turn to Alan, my half-Sluagh nigh on immortal really old bastard, and I go "Okay, here's the list of insecurities and brainweasels. Here's the battle axe of empirical confidence, here's the broadsword of skillsets. Go kill. Go punch something in the face." Alan likes punching things in the face.

And then I come out of my head and get dressed for work, brush my teeth, put on my earrings and my rings and my shoes and grab my lunch and head to work. And in the back of my head, Alan and Sam and Eve are hard at work, busy little subroutines or dissociative whatevers, but mostly, the back of my mind is working on the things I set it to work on so that when I have time to sit down and look at it again, it's more solid. Morebetter. Usually. Call it guided meditation, if you like. Or patterning, or spellcraft, or selective thought process, or whatever. It helps. It helps me, it helps some people I know, too.

This week is not going to get better any time soon. I am not expecting this. I'd like it to! But somehow, I don't think it will. But that's okay. I have a vivid imagination, and right now as I get ready for work, I'm balling up all the shitty stuff that's been happening, putting a physical semblance on it in my head, and punching it in the face.

Like Natasha fucking Romanova.

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