The Problems Thread

Wall.

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So I guess I just feel kinda sucky in general. Boy, where to begin?

Mostly I feel trapped by the amount of work I could be doing, but.... I'm not. I'm sitting around and doing what amounts to nothing. I'm starting to sleep a lot. My grades are slipping a little.

I suppose I can pool my work into two categories; stuff I do for school, and stuff I do for my creative outputs, namely, my adventure, and my ask blog. Those are the manifestations of my will to draw and to write right now. And I feel like it's poop. Its been over a year since I started Great Haven and already my art has improved a lot, but I update it so infrequently that it feels like I shouldn't even bother. And should I bother? Damn right I should, because the creative process isn't to let something you've poured hours into just die, you're supposed to, at the very least, see things to completion! I love the world I'm building, and I love the direction that the story is going, and I love drawing and working on it in general, so why is it that I don't want to do the very simple steps it would take to push that endeavor forward?

I guess if I look at it on the base level that btp laid out for us, I don't feel affirmed here, I don't feel chosen here, and I don't feel included here. And there are plenty of reasons for that, I'm sure. I could go the "blame myself" route for an explanation, knowing that I don't post here very much, and naturally, I would have less of a presence here in this community as a result. I hate reading walls of text, so I don't read any of the text adventures or join any of the intimidatingly large Grand Battles; I'll just let those slide past the peripherals of my being, and in the grand scheme of things, that's not such a terrible thing. What about, say, the incredibly long adventures of the people who have made their peg in the community, who have dozens of readers and hundreds of pages? ....Welp, each of those respective things will take days to read, so I guess I'll never get around to it. Oh well. How about... any of the threads in the chat sections, where people literally just sit down and talk about whatever? Ehh, jumping into a conversation as it's progressing is hard, so I'd rather just watch. Nobody will miss me. Wanna hop in the IRC channel? ......Nah. It's either dead quiet, or the current conversation is about nothing that interests me.

So I've run into a problem, then. Something unique to this area of my life, on the internet, and on eagle time. The community that I've idolized over the years and so desperately wanted to reach out to and touch and cling to again, for old time's sake, just like I did back when everybody was doing their thing on the MSPA forums, and I was among them. But how can I expect to get something from a community that I won't even give to? And I feel like that's a selfish, skin-deep desire to have, to want to have people AT THE VERY LEAST read what I create, and talk about it, and make it a part of their lives just as I've made it mine. But that's what everybody wants, isn't it? It sucks. I want that more than anything, and I can't even fulfill that same need for someone else. I'd rather just give up for today and go back to sleep.

Thanks for making this thread. Your advice rings true.