Second weirdest post I’ve ever made. Third maybe? Idk. My best attempt to kill you with secondhand embarrassment alone. It’s the lamest trauma anyone has ever had.
Hi chat, so I’m kind of weird when it comes to fiction, big fan. Oftentimes being a big reader goes hand in hand with being a writer, and yeah that’s in me somewhere. I’m not super far removed from Ao3 users writing sweaty gay fic about whatever show they like, I guess. Recently though thinking about writing gives me huge panic attacks.
I’d written in bits and pieces through my childhood and stuff, but (yes, again, I swear ot’s important) when I read Nevada by Imogen Binnie it really completely busted my brain. Not just in that it alerted me that there were books with queers in 'em, not just in that I swore an oath to search out every fictional trans sapphic I could find, not just in that Maria Griffiths became like half of my personality, not just in that I still can’t shut the fuck up about it a decade later. On my 77th re-read of Nevada, I was like “Yeah but what if it was t4t and also a romance and also the leads were younger than sad thirty year old transbian. That would be rad!”
Through my last year of high school, I wrote like 70 pages of a novel manuscript (the formatting was apalling) for that, and even worse than that I started showing it to people. It must have been the autism, but it just never occured to me not to show off this freakishly weird too-personal work-in-progress I was writing. I started by showing it to my awful girlfriend at the time, and then to my parents, and then to people in the writing class I was in at the time. If people didn’t know what .odt was, I’d print a copy off, which horrifically means there is still evidence of this Out There Somewhere.
I got nothing but positive reactions, which to be real was probably all of these people trying to be nice to the absurd little autistic trans kid. It was nice except that nobody ever discouraged me from sharing this, so when this older (like 50s-ish) lesbian showed up at a queer youth group I was at and talked about publishing novels, I obviously asked if I could send her my dumb story to look at, and the response I got was the .odt file with so much red pen that the wordcount had more than doubled.
I didn’t even get past the first few pages, I get that what I was writing was bad but I was sixteen ma’am, please be a little nicer? My instinct is that a lady in her fifties could have been a little nicer to my bright-eyed, painfully unaware self. I think that’s unironically where I got all of my rejection sensitivity stuff from, or at least when it crystallised. I quit writing that shit right there and then, and did not write any fiction from then on. I still wrote giant rambling analysis posts or essays or whatever on video games or movies or books I liked, trying to keep the writing muscles from weakening, but I think the idea that that could eger happen again, and that some random fuck would just completely viciously shred anything I write, before it’s even done, kind of messed me up.
By the time I got the guff up to want to write again, I couldn’t really do it. I’d sometimes get struck by the lightning bolt of “WRITE SOMETHING” and scratch out some notes, a plot plan, or maybe a page or two of actual story, but nothing ever got far. Always felt stilted and awkward somehow - the shit I wrote in highschool was bad, but I really envy that little bitch for her total lack of self-consciousness. I feel like I’m pre-emptively policing myself all the time or judging and critiquing my own writing as I’m writing it. It stops me all the time, in the last eight years I have successfully completed one short story, six pages and I did not like how it turned out. I’m worse than the “haha I have ten unfinished stories on my hard drive” person; I have like 20 different concepts for stories and maybe five .odt files with less than two pages completed.
It just gets worse and worse it seems, like I have tried showing people my writings since then but the rejection sensitivity is so fucking jacked that I just can’t. At this point even when I do get a good idea, and my brain starts the process of boiling over with ideas and dialogue and stuff, my body goes into fight-or-flight mode and my breathing gets unsteady, my chest gets sore. Shit is exhausting and it’s why I’m awake now. (3am!)
So, uh, do you have experience with getting over internal cringe response and rejection sensitivity with regard to writing, I guess? It would be cool if I could just idly type out big long stories about women kissing, that’s what I’d want. Idk any advice is welcome I guess, not sure what else the point of this is.
If this gets no replies 
I will delete the fuck out of this post
tbh if it does I might still, this hurt to type and its weird lol
No fuck that, because those writers can at least write things and then put them out. If my only problem was “My writing is bad” I would not have posted this, as per the title and body I cannot even write. This is not just “the stuff I make is bad”, I wouldn’t even say the last short story I wrote was bad tbh. I write stuff I kind of like now and then; this is “I am so wracked with anxiety and self judgement that I’d need to drink heavily to even be able to write at all”.
I can appreciate that nobody stomped all over your work and crushed your dreams in your teenage years, it’s very good that you have supportive friends and loved ones that will support your work. Surely one of the advantages of poly is more love & praise whenever you make a thing
I could not give less of a shit about being published, not now anyway. I’d have to self publish because nobody is gonna print what I want to write. “Just do it” is good advice unless it causes accute emotional pain to you and produces stilted trash anyway, which is what always happens when I force myself.