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I last-minute decided to try this. Who knows if I'll keep doing it once work starts back up agin, but it says it is low stress. I also would like to readjust some of my relationship to the internet in the coming year. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll be on it less? I've already reduced my active online time from what it used to be. However, it's just kind of this obligatory, needy, weird, displaced thing for me a lot of the time. Dreamwidth feels less like that right now, though, so I am going to try to focus on it and other things that run in line with what i used to actually like about online communities. While it's important for me to look for a way to have a fleshspace community, too, I really have... no idea where to start with that, so this is what I've got.


Day 1

In your own space, talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calms you or keeps you sane. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

The OP on the community talks about what happens if you are having trouble finding your Happy Place, and that part of the post resonated with me. I feel like maybe it was more a mood of the day than it's been the general mode of life for me, but it is something that has certainly been relevant over the past couple of years. Fandom has always been my Happy Place, but it used to be different and easier to find happiness in.

I have always off-and-on engaged in almost deliberate practice of something akin to what is called Maladaptive Daydreaming. This brief article discusses the way in which it can be harmful or disruptive, but for me whatever this was felt salvific. I grew up very lonely, even when I wasn't alone. For the first eight or so years of my life, I had two cousins right next door. However, one of them was older than me to the point that she had different life-stage stuff going on. She was pretty nice, but her main role was as a sort of second-mother to her younger sister during play, and of course she had a bit of a natural preference toward her sibling, though she did mediate some. Her younger sister, a year younger than me, was one of the codifiers for my not particularly healthy social relationships with peers. She was accustomed to always getting her way to the point that I lived under constant anxiety to have any social relationship with her at all.

She would threaten to take toys I had and liked home with her. When I would offer to say she could borrow them, she would insist that she would never give them back. No one ever told her NOT to do this unless my parents heard it. Instead, they just told me that she wouldn't actually do it so to stop crying. She would also try to drive unfair bargains with me. IF my mother gave me a tube of lipstick, she would try to bargain for me to GIVE mine to her in exchange for a single application of the one she had and things like that. I learned to hold my own, most of the time, but this kind of thing developed into a sort of economic system in our relationship. Even if I could find a way to get through it and survive it for the sake of having a peer companion at all, it really impacted my self-worth. Later on, we would become better friends on more equal footing, but that was not before it slipped into even sexual coercion and subsequent rejection.

Anyway, back to what I was talking about: I found myself in a situation where no matter what I did, I had a choice between being utterly alone and in being accompanied in an unequal way. My parents were, of course, my parents and not peers. My peers insisted that I be a doormat or not a part of interactions at all. I know that my parents tried to protect me from this, but often their solution was to remove me from the situation which, while I understand it now, felt like punishment for telling them how I was being mistreated. The only real escape from this was imagination.

First my imagined stories were based on movies and things I saw at home. Then, later, they would expand to involve things with more complex mythologies like Sailor Moon and the Gargoyles cartoon when I managed to see them at my grandmother's house. We didn't have cable at my childhood home, but I remember going out and sitting somewhere alone, often on the roof of our doghouse, and just taking in nature while praying, wishing, thinking, and imagining. I remember that it started out almost as a sort of prayer that a genuine friend would somehow just show up one day and materialize.

While I would eventually meet toxictsukino and a few others over the course of my life, even with religious faith, I eventually came to the conclusion that neither God nor any other wish-granting force regularly went into the business of summoning friendships out of a river no matter how much I wished it into existence. So my imagination turned to stories. I basically began to construct fanfiction narratives in my mind in order to keep myself company along with a lot of imaginary friends some of whom were drawn from fictional sources. I talked to them, and I even had conflicts with them.

Over time, I outgrew the imaginary friend aspect of it, but I never left the daydream narratives behind. Eventually, I started to write fanfiction, but often I found that the narratives in my head were too big for my writing ability to convey to others. I would say that to this day that is true. However, I'm not so sure that it is.

I feel some distress because it feels as though my inner worlds have become increasingly difficult to enter. Even after becoming an adult, I often got through or supplemented my work life with these kinds of daydreams which would guide my fandom creative and social activities when I arrived back at home. However, after sharing some of those daydreams with other people, one other person in particular, and seeing the aftermath of one of those worlds feeling like it was half-torn-apart by the fall of someone else away from it, it kind of... feels like it has become tarnished.

I know this probably sounds crazy to an outside reader. I've started to try to compile a Google docs sort of book about this inner world for my own reference before it dies completely, but for some reason the sad aspect of the Chronicles of Narnia mythology with Peter and Susan becoming too old to return comes to mind.

It's harder now to find that Happy Place in my mind. I often feel like I'm pulled into this Adult headspace that I can no longer escape or find respite from. When I do, the landscape isn't as vivid as it once was. I hope that maybe there is a way back and some kind of balance. I don't think that it is healthy, as the article says, for daydreaming to form a substitute for living, but my daydreams were something to put in the gaps in a life that I've never been able to fill anyway.