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This is going to be a whole lot of jumbled thoughts that have been percolating in my brain for a while now. I don't really have anyone to talk to about this stuff and I don't want to burden people with incessant whining which tends to be how these things go. One of the reasons I'm doing this on DW is because I'm pretty sure no one will read it and therefore I'll have gotten it out of my head but won't have alienated anyone I know at the same time.
Critiques/Beta reading: Why do people accept a critique/beta reading request if they have no intention of ever fulfilling it? Or taking months to get it done? I know there are people to accept requests with good intentions and things just get in the way but I seem to be a magnet for these types of people. What gets me is that they don't then have the courtesy to tell me life is happening and they may not be able to do it after all. Maybe it's my fault because I'm not assertive enough afterwards in reminding them to get back to me. It's just frustrating when I write so quickly to be sitting for months waiting on feedback before I can edit.
Neglect of the strongest: This is a phenomena that has happened to me my whole life. Current post notwithstanding, I am not generally a complainer. Or I might comment about how difficult/annoying/impossible a situation is but then I will just get on with it. And because I've never been the squeaky wheel, people tend to dismiss me whenever my insecurities do surface.
At school my teachers actually denied my requests to meet for extra support just before exams. One teacher told me I didn't need help and that they needed to focus on the kids who were struggling. Which was fair enough but a lot of those kids were struggling because they didn't do any work. I was killing myself studying and got overwhelmed. But I sucked it up and go on with it.
At work I have somehow become that "go to" person who others dump their problems on. I am constantly being battered between the old school workers who are inching towards retirement and conveniently forget how to do things they've been doing for the past twenty years and the new kids who want to progress to management level without doing any hard work. So whilst everyone wants to network, none of the actual work is being done. I know I should wash my hands of it and just let the chips fall but then the people who suffer are the clients who are already disadvantaged, non-English speaking and generally mistreated. So I do the work for them. But I wish I could do it in a basement somewhere so I don't have to listen to other people's self postulating.
At home I am having a "disagreement" with my older sister at the moment. She is your classic victim personality, the complete opposite of me, and attempts to cry bullying to get sympathy from the rest of my family when I don't do what she is effectively trying to bully me into. My parent's, being the traditional Vietnamese parents, want me to "yield" to her because she's older. This is despite admitting that she is a difficult personality to get along with and that she is wrong. But instead of saying anything to her for fear of upsetting her, they just want me to suck it up because I'm the more reasonable one. Needless to say I am spending a lot less time hanging out with my family right now.
Writing Stuff: I am doing camp NaNoWriMo at the moment. I'm a fast writer and I can sometimes bang out 10k if I'm having a good day. But nobody knows what that 10k involves. It means I wake up at the same time as I would if I were going to work and I sit at my desk for 12 hours straight and do nothing but write. I know it's not healthy and everything hurts afterwards and it's a choice so I shouldn't complain. That's not the part that upsets me. It's when I try and talk about my writing insecurities and everyone is like "WTF? What insecurities? Look at your word count." What they don't understand is that fast doesn't equal good. Especially not for someone like me who is already writing from the perspective of an outlier. If anything it's worse because I'm writing quickly with the awareness that despite giving up whole days off, no one will probably want to read what I write because I'm not adhering to tropes and my heroines aren't the fun, damsel in distress types.
The other drawback is that because I write so fast, it's hard to find anyone else who is also just as serious as I am about writing to commiserate with. So writing ends up being a really lonely process with very little reward in the end.
Having said all that, I will press on. Because I have no choice. Because I don't know how else to be. And because giving up is just not an option.
Critiques/Beta reading: Why do people accept a critique/beta reading request if they have no intention of ever fulfilling it? Or taking months to get it done? I know there are people to accept requests with good intentions and things just get in the way but I seem to be a magnet for these types of people. What gets me is that they don't then have the courtesy to tell me life is happening and they may not be able to do it after all. Maybe it's my fault because I'm not assertive enough afterwards in reminding them to get back to me. It's just frustrating when I write so quickly to be sitting for months waiting on feedback before I can edit.
Neglect of the strongest: This is a phenomena that has happened to me my whole life. Current post notwithstanding, I am not generally a complainer. Or I might comment about how difficult/annoying/impossible a situation is but then I will just get on with it. And because I've never been the squeaky wheel, people tend to dismiss me whenever my insecurities do surface.
At school my teachers actually denied my requests to meet for extra support just before exams. One teacher told me I didn't need help and that they needed to focus on the kids who were struggling. Which was fair enough but a lot of those kids were struggling because they didn't do any work. I was killing myself studying and got overwhelmed. But I sucked it up and go on with it.
At work I have somehow become that "go to" person who others dump their problems on. I am constantly being battered between the old school workers who are inching towards retirement and conveniently forget how to do things they've been doing for the past twenty years and the new kids who want to progress to management level without doing any hard work. So whilst everyone wants to network, none of the actual work is being done. I know I should wash my hands of it and just let the chips fall but then the people who suffer are the clients who are already disadvantaged, non-English speaking and generally mistreated. So I do the work for them. But I wish I could do it in a basement somewhere so I don't have to listen to other people's self postulating.
At home I am having a "disagreement" with my older sister at the moment. She is your classic victim personality, the complete opposite of me, and attempts to cry bullying to get sympathy from the rest of my family when I don't do what she is effectively trying to bully me into. My parent's, being the traditional Vietnamese parents, want me to "yield" to her because she's older. This is despite admitting that she is a difficult personality to get along with and that she is wrong. But instead of saying anything to her for fear of upsetting her, they just want me to suck it up because I'm the more reasonable one. Needless to say I am spending a lot less time hanging out with my family right now.
Writing Stuff: I am doing camp NaNoWriMo at the moment. I'm a fast writer and I can sometimes bang out 10k if I'm having a good day. But nobody knows what that 10k involves. It means I wake up at the same time as I would if I were going to work and I sit at my desk for 12 hours straight and do nothing but write. I know it's not healthy and everything hurts afterwards and it's a choice so I shouldn't complain. That's not the part that upsets me. It's when I try and talk about my writing insecurities and everyone is like "WTF? What insecurities? Look at your word count." What they don't understand is that fast doesn't equal good. Especially not for someone like me who is already writing from the perspective of an outlier. If anything it's worse because I'm writing quickly with the awareness that despite giving up whole days off, no one will probably want to read what I write because I'm not adhering to tropes and my heroines aren't the fun, damsel in distress types.
The other drawback is that because I write so fast, it's hard to find anyone else who is also just as serious as I am about writing to commiserate with. So writing ends up being a really lonely process with very little reward in the end.
Having said all that, I will press on. Because I have no choice. Because I don't know how else to be. And because giving up is just not an option.