It's the last day of NaNo.
Say that out loud looking off somewhere to middle stage with enough melancholy in your voice and it sounds nice. I didn't try that in real life, of course.
The last day of NaNo has been successful. I reached my 40k goal and then a few hundred or so. Better Angels, as it has become titled, is about halfway done. I'm going to try to keep to the 1.3k goal in May and see if I can finish it before then.
But I know I won't, because NaNo is over. It may be a personal drive but there's no real reason. Because NaNo ended. Because things end.
Another thing that's ended: SVVA.
Of course I didn't finish it and then bury my head under a pillow. Of course I didn't send my little sparkly Viking vampire alien off to an unknown world and then have a nice cry. Of course I didn't succumb to such ridiculous emotions.
Of course I'm lying.
Nine months. I'm not even going to notice the convenient number there. But nine months. Much of that being procrastination, but still. Nine months.
Most of the books I've finished lately have been NaNo projects that were over in a month or a little over. I'm not accustomed to long-time projects now. I forgot how they worm under your skin and settle down right between the two halves of your heart like they belong there, like they and they alone stitch the parts together and keep you alive.
I think it'll be good for my temperament and well-being if I keep to short-term projects that need to be finished in a month or two. This is stressful.
When did writing become not-fun and bittersweet and just generally ouch?
Don't answer that.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Friday, April 5, 2013
Trust.
Not quite a week into Camp NaNo. It's going pretty well. I'm about to 7k words with a goal of 40k, so I'm doing fairly well.
I have another ramble, though. A completely unplanned one that's come about today by a lot of stressful things that makes me want to straighten out what's in my head. And unfortunately for my few readers, that means a blog post.
I'm a fledgling personality type geek. MBTI types fascinate me. Probably because I'm an INTJ and I don't understand people and this gives me a practical, if basic, plan of action when it comes to my fellow man. And also as the 'machine' of the sixteen types, I get a lot of flack just for how I'm hardwired - less than a percent of females are INTJs and people don't seem to like machines, especially female ones. Researching other INTJs makes me feel better about myself and thus probably eases the arrogance that typically comes out when I feel like I have to defend myself and my apparent lack of emotion.
Relationships for me are particularly hard because... people are people. Flawed. They don't work quite right; their pieces don't make them function as they should. They don't make sense. It puts me on edge. It makes it hard for me to like many people, much less like them a lot. It takes a lot to earn my trust, and when I say that, it's not a 'I trust you so I'm going to be emotional and spill my guts to you all the time' that you find a lot in romcoms.
Trusting for some INTJs/me is just deciding that you're steady enough for me to rely on to not screw me or yourself over. That you're mature enough, intelligent enough, or even just intrinsically good enough not to change or do stupid things or - as happens, whether accidentally or purposefully - hurt me.
Basically -
Me: I've determined that you're a more functional human being than most. You're not going to pull the rug out from under me by being an idiot or being cruel; therefore you are a safe place for me to stow my emotions.
Yes, we're wired for arrogance, how could you tell?
Safety. It's all about safety because safety is what intelligent people go for and we like to think we're intelligent.
I'm probably more of a middle-spectrum INTJ. Because while this is true - erasing is, again, the intelligent way to go, so as to save emotional energy - for me, it also really, really hurts before the erasing is complete.
It's confusing, "that dirtiest of all dirty words." Confusion is only a step above boredom on the ladder of Worst Mental States. I'm constantly trying to figure out what went wrong - was it me, or was it them? - where the relationship deviated from the plans. But since the erasure is usually in the works as soon as trust is lost, I just can't get those answers. So it's a Mobius strip of bewilderment. A sentence missing a few vital parts of speech, an equation missing a few variables.
If I could verbalize how much stress this puts me under and how much sleep I've lost and how much I've hated myself - well, I probably wouldn't post it in a blog. Too emotional. But that's all happened. Multiple times. And it's always enough to send me back into the internal world where everything makes sense, sometimes for weeks or months. Because if one person turned out not to work properly, and the human race has been giving proof of its faultiness for millennia, why trust anyone?
I'm blessed with a small circle of amazing friends that always manage to pull me out of that, even if they don't know it. I appreciate them. But I still have nightmares about the relationships that malfunctioned because I've never figured them out. Faulty information does that.
I have another ramble, though. A completely unplanned one that's come about today by a lot of stressful things that makes me want to straighten out what's in my head. And unfortunately for my few readers, that means a blog post.
I'm a fledgling personality type geek. MBTI types fascinate me. Probably because I'm an INTJ and I don't understand people and this gives me a practical, if basic, plan of action when it comes to my fellow man. And also as the 'machine' of the sixteen types, I get a lot of flack just for how I'm hardwired - less than a percent of females are INTJs and people don't seem to like machines, especially female ones. Researching other INTJs makes me feel better about myself and thus probably eases the arrogance that typically comes out when I feel like I have to defend myself and my apparent lack of emotion.
Relationships for me are particularly hard because... people are people. Flawed. They don't work quite right; their pieces don't make them function as they should. They don't make sense. It puts me on edge. It makes it hard for me to like many people, much less like them a lot. It takes a lot to earn my trust, and when I say that, it's not a 'I trust you so I'm going to be emotional and spill my guts to you all the time' that you find a lot in romcoms.
Trusting for some INTJs/me is just deciding that you're steady enough for me to rely on to not screw me or yourself over. That you're mature enough, intelligent enough, or even just intrinsically good enough not to change or do stupid things or - as happens, whether accidentally or purposefully - hurt me.
Basically -
Me: I've determined that you're a more functional human being than most. You're not going to pull the rug out from under me by being an idiot or being cruel; therefore you are a safe place for me to stow my emotions.
Yes, we're wired for arrogance, how could you tell?
Safety. It's all about safety because safety is what intelligent people go for and we like to think we're intelligent.
I'm probably more of a middle-spectrum INTJ. Because while this is true - erasing is, again, the intelligent way to go, so as to save emotional energy - for me, it also really, really hurts before the erasing is complete.
It's confusing, "that dirtiest of all dirty words." Confusion is only a step above boredom on the ladder of Worst Mental States. I'm constantly trying to figure out what went wrong - was it me, or was it them? - where the relationship deviated from the plans. But since the erasure is usually in the works as soon as trust is lost, I just can't get those answers. So it's a Mobius strip of bewilderment. A sentence missing a few vital parts of speech, an equation missing a few variables.
If I could verbalize how much stress this puts me under and how much sleep I've lost and how much I've hated myself - well, I probably wouldn't post it in a blog. Too emotional. But that's all happened. Multiple times. And it's always enough to send me back into the internal world where everything makes sense, sometimes for weeks or months. Because if one person turned out not to work properly, and the human race has been giving proof of its faultiness for millennia, why trust anyone?
I'm blessed with a small circle of amazing friends that always manage to pull me out of that, even if they don't know it. I appreciate them. But I still have nightmares about the relationships that malfunctioned because I've never figured them out. Faulty information does that.
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