Breaking through the logjam

[elwinfortuna]

A lot of what I've been feeling, mentally and physically, in the last couple of years, is "stuck," just surrounded by too much, both in my head, and in my house, to really be able to move forward properly. In a physical sense, it's the aftereffects of having to deal with everything of my mother-in-law's, which has been an impossibly slow process, hampered by health issues and Covid worries.

Two days ago, I got a load of things removed from the house, including my mother-in-law's bed. Lot of emotions around that, but ultimately I'm glad to be free of it and able to move forward. I'm actively working on clearing things up, getting things donated to charity, selling what I can, and just plain allowing myself to throw stuff out. I sometimes struggle with getting rid of things that could be useful but if it's sitting in a box or a drawer not being used ever, then it's not very useful, is it?

There's a lot more to do, but this feels like the start of really being able to get things looking like how I want them to look, have my house the way I would like it to be. My ultimate reward is getting my own office space, as we don't need a spare bedroom anymore. (I'm planning on putting in a sofa that converts into a bed, in case we have guests, but that will likely be a very rare thing.) I have a huge collection of various kinds of merch (mostly Word of Honor/Junzhe themed) that I'm planning to plaster my walls in, and really make it the sort of space I will enjoy and can relax and work in. I'm going to mount my computer monitors on the wall, and have space for doing crafts. I'll have a couple of good bookshelves as well, a cozy chair to sit and read or to play games in, and a cat bed on the windowsill for my cats to sit and look out.

So that's all good, and I'm so glad to be able to breathe a bit more easily. But even more difficult than the physical logjam is the mental one. I've really struggled with posting to social media for a long while now and I've been trying to figure out why that is. It's not a simple question.

I think on some level I'm worried that my life is kind of boring right now. Let me be clear, it's not boring to me in the moment as I live it, but I can see from the outside how it might be perceived as boring. It's not really moving forward in any clear direction. I'm still unemployed (and not likely to be employed anytime in the near future). I'm studying, yes, but I'm in the first year of what's likely to be a six-year course. I have a lot of mental and physical health things going on, but I worry that talking about them too much comes off as being complainy or whiny or consistently negative.

It's important to note that I don't feel this way about anything I see from anybody else! In fact it's the reverse, I love hearing about people's real lives, no matter how mundane the content, I don't find talking about mental or physical health issues to be whiny, and all this is just a massive set of double standards that I'm applying to myself and nobody else.

So I guess what I need to do is just break that logjam with a giant hammer, and start talking about my life, in all its mundanity. And Dreamwidth feels like the safest place to do that. I've always loved the LJ style anyway, more than any other social media. Twitter is, well, I don't think I need say much there. And Tumblr is not really a good place to talk about personal stuff. Facebook, though it's important to me, as it's the one social media pretty much everybody I know in RL has, it's such a mixed audience that I feel unable to be truly candid there.

Also Dreamwidth, as an organisation, has values and ethics I agree with and support. It's a small business in a way that none of the mainstream social media companies are, certainly not Twitter and Facebook! I feel like I can talk about anything here, in a way that I absolutely can't on Twitter and Facebook, and to some extent can't on Tumblr as well (less to do with policy and more with culture).

This is just to say, then, that I'm going to try to post more here, and just talk about my life, along with what I've been watching, reading, etc, and also doing in fandom. I remember back in the LJ days I never had any worries about posting whatever randomness came into my head, and I want to get a bit of that attitude back.

Comments

[mrs_redboots]

Yes, sometimes it's really difficult to say what you really think on FB (I seldom use Twitter), simply because someone is bound to say something negative about your post! I did start posting a daily thankfulness post, but even there was getting too much snark, so stopped. Whereas here, which is semi-private, one can be far more real.

[elwinfortuna]

Facebook and Twitter are both places where people seem to object to ideas and opinions for the sake of it or to try and look cool. Twitter is especially bad for this, and getting worse all the time; I've honestly felt sometimes that if it disappeared into the void, I'd just feel a sense of relief. Facebook for me isn't too bad; most of the people I know are pretty reasonable, even old high school acquaintances, but it's exhausting to read just because there are so many ads and things that I'm not interested in taking up the view.

I have a rule that if I'm on Facebook or Twitter and I find myself getting increasingly worked up or annoyed, I have to stop engaging and step away for a while. That's helped, but it's a shame that I have to have a rule like that. I've sometimes needed to use that rule on Tumblr too, but never so far on Dreamwidth.

[mrs_redboots]

I've certainly unfriended one or two people on Facebook who were either relentlessly negative or compulsive virtue-signallers telling me I shouldn't be doing whatever it was I was thankful for, because climate change, or plastic, or fairy dust, or something! So irritating! I once unfriended two people - the first apologised profusely and I refriended her at once; the second thought she'd apologised, but made it all about her and what she wanted or did in the circumstances. No thank you!