Today’s deck is The Anime Tarot Deck.
It’s not bad, it just feels… unfocused? Tarot tends to overload cards with meaning and symbolism and while I’m a bit critical about the noise that can create, this feels like they didn’t so much shave off as they just took a glance at the cards and then made an illustration for it without much thought… that’s how it feels at least, none of my assessments of decks are deep reviews.
Today the reading about creative blocks continues, so let’s talk about that.
You see, I had an… epiphany of sorts today, but to understand it I have to give a bit of context.
Ever since I was a kid I was prone to retreating into an inner world of sorts, it might sound like escaping harsh realities, but it’s more simple than that. For example, If I couldn’t sleep I’d just retreat into some fantasy until I fell asleep (I still do this going over the story of current projects, actually). Boring car trip? The clouds call me. Forced to go to the beach? Let’s make up some random adventure.
This did carry over into coping mechanism, mind you. Growing up I had a really hard time connecting with other kids in any way I felt meaningful, so I’d go back into my head pretending I had friends I wanted to spend time with rather than feeling obligated to.
Sidenote, one of the few times I decided to put pen to paper one of those fantasies some of my “friends” had read it and were mocking me for it kinda redoubling how I felt.
A lot of it wasn’t even complicated fantasy. For example I remember I was excited right before starting college about like “hey what if I meet people that like the same things I do? What would that be like?”.
It was a reprieve, rest. I like reality well enough as-is and I’m distrustful of getting comfortable in some denial that will inevitably at some point crash down.
So anyways, the epiphany is that I realized I’ve been denying myself that reprieve.
I’ve talked a lot about how in 2021 my whole sense of self crumbled. Something I kept deliberately trying to do in that period was stopping myself from retreating into myself, quite literally and then metaphorically pinching myself out of the clouds.
It was a stressful period where by extension I would end up retreating into myself harder, but it was also a period where I was determined DETERMINED to figure out what was “wrong” with me so I saw it important to face reality fully every second.
This was all in all the best move at the time, even my therapist pointed out a couple of times how fast I was Going Through It. I speedran roughly two and a half years of therapy and self-discovery and rather than bragging this is me remembering how my head felt like it was going to split open every day as I tried to come to terms with all the new info thrown my way.
And what’s the epiphany? The revelation that I’VE KEPT DOING THAT BY FORCE OF HABIT, “that” meaning “pinch myself out of reverie and fantasy”.
You see, I’ve had this growing itch lately to make something, anything, that’s self-indulgent to a filthy degree. The word “filthy” is the keyword here because I’m not really someone that denies himself things that much. But it’s the difference between “I’m gonna write a story exploring the idea of self-preservation as a separate self because I love the DRK questline in FF14 that much” and “I’m gonna write something where an ultra submissive brat shorter than 140cm but with tits bigger than her head gets railed while her feet can’t touch the ground”.
I’ve talked plenty in the past about how I’m feeling the itch to write smut and there’s nothing coming out of that because there was a block of sorts, and basically I’m realizing the “block” isn’t moral, creative, or even that part of my brain that’s really annoying about production pipelines. The block is that by necessity I need to retreat into that fantasy brain I’ve denied myself.
And the importance isn’t just creative, I’m realizing that part of why I’ve been so high strung lately and have had a tendency to get high strung is because I’ve outright denied myself a coping mechanism, I’m saying “I’m not gonna sit down” and then wonder why I’m so tired.
Do I have any plans? Not really, not immediately, I’ll probably spend a couple of days de-programming myself from the pinching, but it sure is nice to be able to put into words whatever the fuck I was feeling.
Oh also, I’ve got new neighbors. I assume that was all the stuff going on at the end of the hallway. They rang my doorbell and gave me a small bag of pastries as a present. That was nice, reminds me last year I wanted to make new year postcards and leave them at the neighbors’ mailbox but forgot to do that.