mobsession

September 1st is such an easy to remember date, I kind of wish it wasn't.
It made it so that even now, I'm still constantly counting how many months pass in which I still don't have myself together.
Well, maybe that's also why I somehow managed to try and start engaging with fandom again, at least. I'm not positive that's the reason, but the 6 months mark did feel pretty terrible to me; the thought that I had now wasted half a year of my life being in this miserable state. It was a really weird time. It's weird even to think about it now.

Maybe that's partially why I want to talk to the void about it. Dreamwidth seems a nice place for that, I do think it would benefit me to have a place to put down my thoughts sometimes (even though I'm not sure it will happen, I must re-learn to sit down and spend time on my personal thoughts like this...) & this public-but-I-don't expect-anyone-to-ever-read-it situation suits my issues. Being that I'm equally terrified of being invisible as I'm terrified to be perceived.

Anyway.

What even got me to have a mental breakdown & leave fandom aside, the time after was really exhausting. Not all was bad, there was a long weekend in Paris that was fun. Actually in the beginning, I had a very positive outlook despite the mental breakdown & thought rl would be able to give me happy distractions. I had just gotten a new job and we were due to adopt a rescue dog at the start of October.
Spoiler alert: Of course both didn't turn out so well.

Well, the dog was only with us for a few days before he tried to maul me, haha. It was a pretty scary experience, he'd been super friendly until then. By accident, a bunch of dog treats landed under my leg when I was sitting on the floor and when he couldn't get to them he started to attack me, and not just a snap. He bit my arm first & when I tried to shimmy away he came after me to bite me again & even when I kicked him in the face in self defense he wouldn't let up and bit my leg and foot instead. I was lucky that one, I was wearing thick clothing so there was no severe bleeding, and two, my wife was there and could pull him away into the other room & put a door between us, because even while being pulled away he was still trying to get to me.
After that my wife at some point jokingly started saying I had Dogholm Syndrome, because I actually wanted to keep him. Looking back now that there's half a year in between I do have to agree that I must've been kind of insane.

I was bruised all over after that, especially my right arm, which made working the new - physically demanding - job, harder... And then the physically demanding job gave me it's own health problems on top. These things combined caused my right arm to lose its strength on random occasions. Like, I would hold a cup of coffee or even just a pen and suddenly my arm just went numb and fell down.
At work people didn't really care when I told them I couldn't raise heavy things above my head right now. It was "okay do the light stuff first then" & then the same people did easy work I could do as well & left the heavy stuff for me to do at the end of my shifts nonetheless. It was very frustrating, because after repeating myself a number of times with nothing changing it became pretty clear they either simply didn't care, or believe I had health problems. They were unhappy with me, I was unhappy with them & as quickly as I had gotten the job, before December I'd lost it again.

The problems with the dog had just begun, too. Every single walk was terrible stress for us; we were told he didn't like other dogs much, but we hadn't been told he would try to go for every single other dog he saw, much like he had gone for me. And we live in an area with tons of dog owners, where it is almost impossible to not meet any at any given time, even though we did our best to walk at the least busy times.
Even worse than that, he reacted the same when seeing young kids & we have a kindergarten & an elementary school on this street, as well as tons of playgrounds.
A 25kg dog is not huge, but if it puts all its power into trying to get somewhere & you are a 5'2" person with your main arm injured, holding it back isn't fun. The fact that he tried to eat kids & we didn't want to potentially be responsible for a severely injured child in the future was also one of the main reasons we eventually decided we had to give him up.

Getting there cost us lots of resources, though. A whole bunch of money, the stress & also emotional strain in my & my wife's relationship. We were constantly trying to arrange around the dog, constantly talking about him & often torn about how to go forward.
We were communicating with the organization we had him from the whole time and eventually decided we will try to rehome him & were willing to take the strain even if we knew it would surely take a whole while to find someone experienced enough for such a dog. But while he def still snapped and we had to be careful around him, it didn't get as severe as the first time so we thought we could handle it.
And 90% of the time, he was a super sweet and friendly dog, that should be said.

Anyway, start of December he attacked again, this time both of us, but he got me worse again. Ofc. Was a Saturday night and he gripped & shook my foot & I just. Stood there and waited until he let go. While my wife realized super late how bad he got me, because I reacted so little, lol. (Well, the first time around trying to get him off only made him angrier, so...)
Foot was bleeding pretty bad & my wife bullied me into going to emergency reception (which was a good call in the end, even if we spent the whole night until 5 in the morning there) while I messaged the rescue organization that we couldn't do this anymore after all.
Long story short, a week later he was on the way back to his shelter with his favorite bed & his favorite toy. And while I wished it would've all worked out better, I think both of us had rarely felt this much palpable relief.

Sadly, Nero's story didn't end happy either. He had to be put down for severe tumor growths in his stomach, which had likely been there for a long time, in January... Naturally, it could be that this had amplified his aggressive behavior, but I think he was a dominant dog who was used to independence, in the first place.
He was very sweet at his core. I hope his last few weeks with the people who had cared for him for years were happy for him, but, in all honesty, I was also very relieved that he wasn't with us, for his final days, even if it might sound cruel... Finding out how ill he was was sad from a distance, but I think it would've been much more difficult for us up close.

Other than these things, in the back of my mind was also my disenrollment from uni being finalized, meaning I'll never be able to go back to studying Japanology here again, which was very much a dream subject for me & the fact that my gaming laptop broke, to which I'm very emotionally attached. So not even my daily games routine was left.
I felt very uprooted with all these things and without fandom. I still do, in many ways, even if many of these stressors are now resolved one way or another, more or less.

During all this time, I was crying over missing fandom every few days. (Later it tapered down and recently, I managed a full month of holding back tears, yay.) But I was unable to go back, I felt like I had no place to go back to. And honestly, that hasn't changed. I don't have a place in this fandom community to go to anymore, not any I'd be able to feel comfortable in at this point.
Now I simply try my best to engage where I can, post on bluesky occasionally even though everybody has left, now & then again, even if I've become awfully rusty & don't really post any of it for the time being. I need to get comfortable with my sketches again first.

I've also been struggling to get back to writing, but about 2 weeks ago I joined a pro-fiction fanfic writers server & there's someone sprinting there at most times. It's not a place to talk about specific fandoms but at least it was a great aid in getting actual words down. Without it, I wouldn't have managed to finally get that fic from last year done.
For a moment there I was really euphoric. I had this fic on my mind for so long & then I spent so much time in a row on finally finishing it up, several days just rewriting things (so many deleted bits, oof) because I suppose I've also gotten a bit unsure in my writing & had a hard time finding direction.
I was pretty proud of myself once I uploaded it tbh, but I can't lie, seeing how it went was pretty disappointing after all.

I know we can never expect anything in fandom, but the first chapter got so much positive feedback in so little time despite being only 3.6k words long, I did kind of hope some more people would have to say something about the second part. 8k words for chapter 2, 200 hits in the first 2 days (much more than on the last 3 things I uploaded & even the nsfw snippet from Valentine's only has gotten about 200 hits between upload until now, nearly 2 months later...) & by the fact that barely any more kudos were added it must've been mostly people who had already left them for part one. & yet barely anyone had anything to say about it...
I can't help that it does make me a little sad to not hear much back, even though I rationally know I only got attention for the first chapter because people wanted a part 2. Commenting now won't benefit any reader.
Or maybe I just have a whole bunch of hate readers. That would make me feel a bit better, honestly.

Anyway, I'm now left in this state of feeling kind of lost again. I was so happy to be writing, but now it's finished & if that one went largely into the void after being so well liked, probably anything else will too.
I do think I'm slowly gonna look into some of my other WIPs. There's a small one I'd like to finish for Mob's birthday.

And I do want to try that event thing, the gift exchange...
Honestly, it's an attempt at doing something for my mental health more than anything, a very hit or miss thing. I'm prepared for it to flop, because I think there's quite the high probability for that, but at least like this I'll be able to say I tried. I don't want to be miserable forever.