It's been a while since I last wrote something on here, huh.
The last post I made, nearly a year ago, ended on a fairly optimistic note. After ages of holding myself to the standard of Needing to make content, I was giving myself the room to breathe. To just be, to live in my own little corner, and enjoy peace for a while. Fully cognizant that when I was ready to start up again, I'd do so with gusto.
I didn't take 2025 into account when I wrote that, huh.
I can't mince words, 2025 might be the worst year in my life. Sure, it's got some solid competition, but none of those other years have felt like getting the wind knocked out of me by a rocket powered boxing glove, and then being left crumpled up on the ground and gasping for air. The experience of going through the last 6 or so months has just felt like one extended joke at my expense for daring to feel optimistic about my future at the end of the previous year.
At the start of the year, I was finally coming to terms with my sense of self. I had friends around, online and IRL. I was so ready to get back into the swing of things, create new art, and even maybe start making videos. Things were looking up.
Then in April, my roommate told me she was moving out, which meant I had to find another place on my own. And but weeks before the move was set to happen, one of my closest friends passed away after a year-long battle with leukemia. With basically no time to pick myself back up, I was off to my new place. Left to my own devices.
And now we're here. On the final day of the 3rd quarter of the year. And I can only describe the 4 or so months since that move as white noise. Static. Like I blinked out of existence and found myself flung out of space and time. The world keeps going, but I haven't. It's hard to not feel like I am stuck in purgatory sometimes, given how nothing seems to happen. Or want to happen, even.
This is where we get to the crux of what I wanted to write about in this post. This feeling like you're watching your life slip through your fingers, but you don't have the energy to hold it back. To do anything to exert any control over where the flow of time takes you. And where any motivation to do the things you used to love comes in limited, pathetic spurts that seem to fade away before you can even react.
It's not like motivation was exactly a plentiful commodity for me before then, either. But it has felt much harder to come by as of late. It's all been feeling a lot more... pointless. Like I'm almost resigning to my own inability to get things done. Crawling further and further into a hole of my own making, unwilling to face the outside world. Like, I've played a few games. Watched some TV shows. I'm not doing nothing... at least 35% of the time, anyway.
As the months have passed though, I've been feeling that urge to create return to me, like I had expected would happen after an extended break. But in spite of that urge, I feel even more constrained than ever before. I only feel motivated when I'm at work and unable to do anything, then I lose the energy by the time I'm home and have the free time. These days, I'm honestly lucky if I even remember to actually do something fun before it's time for bed. Let alone anything I can feel proud of. I have the impulse to get going again, but something is blocking me. And I think I have an idea of why.
There's a part of me that's afraid.
I've been witness to a lot of "drama" recently, especially on Tumblr. A lot of which involves fellow trans women getting dogpiled for discussing transfeminism. Being dismissed as hysterical bitches. Getting death threats and hate speech, while their TME peers get practically nothing even when discussing ostensibly the same topics. Getting blamed for their own oppression, and asked to make nice with their oppressors. It's disheartening, frustrating, and most importantly it just makes me want to crawl further back into the hole. Why bother speaking, even sharing my opinions, if that's what awaits me as well? Just another witch to burn at the stake?
Fuck that.
There was a point where my decision to take a step back from being a more visible figure was a healthy decision to give myself respite from years of burdening myself. Now, it feels more like an anxiety response. A choice I continue to make not because it's the right move, but because I am cowering. And that choice is now getting in the way of what is best for me, which is to create.
I've been watching so many videos recently from some of my favorite YouTubers, such as Schaffrillas Productions, KingK and Daryl Talks Games. For years, I've been finding something appealing about the idea of making videos like theirs. Rankings of things I love, retrospectives on my favorite games, essays diving into deeper psychological and sociological analyses of properties and games... Lots of nebulous ideas that have been trying to take shape, but never really succeeding. And now that I'm feeling the closest to being able to make it all happen, I feel stuck. Like something inside me doesn't want to set it into motion.
To be fair, it's probably not just that fear of Online Discourse™ that's making it difficult to get things going. As I've established, 2025 has given me no shortage of issues to work through. But I think that trying to reclaim the spark from the clutches of my own anxieties is probably the best place to start.
With only 3 months left to the year, I think it's as good a time as any to give myself a goal to aim for. I wanna make a video by the end of 2025. Even if it's something small or silly. Just get something out there to get the ball rolling, to see how the process flows. And we'll go from there. Maybe it'll be something DROD-related. Maybe it'll be something completely off the wall. We'll see what I come up with. But the most important thing for me is that I want to push back against the fear of being perceived. It may feel safe and comfy in the relative darkness, but I'm not useful to anyone if I let myself be consumed by the rot.
And if nothing else, I just want to give this absolute dogshit year a middle finger. At the start of the year, I promised myself I was going to make 2025 my year, and that I'd fight for it. It may have kicked my ass in the intervening time, but I'm not down for the count. And as long as I keep getting back up, that's all that matters. I'll get back the life I've wanted for myself, no matter how much I have to endure to get there.
That's what my friend would have wanted for me, I'm sure.
-Billie
| Feeling: | Determined |
|---|---|
| Listening: | Yuki Kajiura - Sagitta lumnis |
| Watching: | Futurama |
| Playing: | Meteos |
| Reading: | Order of the Stick: No Cure For Paladin Blues |