So, we're blogging now. That's a thing we're doing.
Who the eff is this?
Let's start with a brief introduction. My name is Briston, or that's what you can call me, anyway. I'm a married 26 year old and a little bit devastated about it because aging is the scariest thing I can imagine. I'm biromantic, if you're into that model, and identify somewhere on the ace spectrum. I have two beautiful children that some people may call "cats." They're names are R2 and D2. I also have two dogs, who my husband loves more than I do, and they are named Solo and Revan. I'm a certified adult. I have a mortgage, a stable job that I can't stand in theory, but love in practice (who doesn't love health care and a stable income?), and the most patient, sweet husband in the world.
I have intense OCD that manifests as hypochondria if I don't work at it. I've also got ADHD and GAD that work together in a way that makes me one of the most manic human beings you'll ever meet in your life, which can actually manifest, occasionally, as productivity. I take pride in who I am, and I know that my mental illness have shaped who I am. There is nothing romantic about mental illness, but I embrace how I've coped with them up to this point, since I have a family who "doesn't believe in mental illness" and sure doesn't believe in medicating it. I've done therapy. I've worked to be who I am, and I'm still working to be better.
I love personality quizzes, so needless to say, I'm a Slytherin (even though some days I feel more Ravenclaw). I'm an INFJ, I think I'm Enneagram Type 4w6 . Melancholic. I'm also a writer. Like, if any one word could ever define me. It would be writer. Not because I'm great it, because that's what matters more to me than anything. That's what I /want/ to be. Who knows if I actually am? Not me.
Now what I'm gonna say may sound indelicate...
I don't use this site much, mostly because I'm terrible at self promo and can't even begin to give advice on "putting myself out there" because my self is about as out there as that kid's shoe you passed on the freeway the other day. You know the one. Or maybe you don't. That's the angle I was working. But I've decided that I might have a little bit to say. So I'm going to start blogging about them, aka, screaming into slightly less of a void than the anxiety-filled abyss in my head.
Mostly I want to do it because writing is the only time I feel important. Even if no one reads the words I'm writing, when I'm doing it, I feel like I matter. Even if afterwards I sit and stare at the screen, crying internally over the insignificance that is my existence. Writing helps. Speaking helps. Talking helps.
I'm an INFJ, which means I'm an Fe. And for those of you that don't know, that's Extroverted Feeling. Which means that I have to talk about things to understand them. I have so much going on in my head that I can't possibly begin to sort them all out until I vomit them onto either a page or a person in front of me. I form connections with people a lot, and easily, because what some people probably think is sharing intimate personal details about myself is me just running my mouth. And that's what the internet is, really, that's what social media is, anyway. A way for people to be heard without having to be heard. To talk and scream into the chance that maybe someone will listen to you.
I'm a writer of fiction, generally. But when I write fiction, I completely disengage from the world. We talk about #ownvoices and writing your own experience, but it's something I truly struggle with. When I write fiction, my experience isn't something I want to tell. Not that way. When I write fiction, I want to leave my tiny, white, cis-gendered bisexual lady shell and float into something different. Something new. And that could be a whole blog topic on it's own. And I'm writing it here so that I won't forget it. I already just forgot something else that popped into my head. See, this is why I hate writing my experience, because too much crashes into my head all at once. Having ADHD is horrible.
But back to the point, I'm blogging because some part of me does want to tell my story. And the thing is, despite being an INFJ, I don't work well with symbolism. I don't want to talk about my story through the eyes of someone like me, but not quite me. I want to tell my story. If I'm going, then I'm going to go big, so I'm either blasting straight to another planet or I'm staying right here. And this is my way of staying right here. I'm going to blog about myself, because maybe it'll help get myself out there or maybe it'll just help me understand more from what I want.
I've got a lot of self improvement I'm trying to do. I've changed so much in the last five years it sometimes makes me a little dizzy to look back on it, and I still have such a long way to go. There are so many things about me that need to change, that I can't figure out how to change. People say therapy is work for a reason. Just because you want to do something, want to change a habit, doesn't mean that it's easy to. And mental habits are even harder to break. it's so much easier to become addicted to things in your own head, and it's so much harder to unravel all that. If you want to stop eating chocolate, then a start would be stop buying chocolate and physically staying away from it, but if you want to stop competing with every single human being who walks across your path, what do you do? Just stop it? Well, anyone with a mental illness knows that phrase is enough to burn hell itself to the ground.
How do I stop something? The best remedy I've seen it calling attention to it, to taking myself by the shoulders when I see myself doing these things. And the thing is, some of them are fun, and some of them are coping mechanisms, but that doesn't mean it's okay to do them. That doesn't mean that on some level, they aren't making my life worse. So I want to use this space as a way to hold myself accountable. Or, at least, to write things out to get a more complex understanding of them.
Because the more I understand about something, the easier it is for me to do what I'm trying to do. And sometimes, the best way for me to get something, is just to write it. Research, of course, has its place in any writing, but sometimes, when it's in your head, you've just got to write it. So often in fiction I won't know where I'm going, or what I'm doing, or I'll be so nervous about the execution of a scene or a plot point, and then I write it and the words just burst off my fingers. (Are they good? TBD. But nevertheless, they're there.)
So, here's the blog. I have several topics I'm going to cover, or want to cover. Topics that are going to be much more cohesive than this total word dump, but I had to get started somehow, and this is what happened. I'll probably also do book reviews, because that's a thing I enjoy. I have goodreads, but why not do it here too? You can't answer that because there's no reason.
-Your Obedient Servant
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