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2022 Recap on Creativity & RestElle leaning forward to show off her cleavage with D-cup breasts in black lingerie.

2022 Recap on Creativity & Rest

Published by mightytinygiant on January 1, 2023

(Content tags: this article contains discussion of sex, masturbation, mental health diagnoses, C-PTSD, size dysmorphia and AiWS, dissociation, burnout, panic attacks, grief, and shame, balanced with a variety of positive emotions like gratitude, hope, and determination.)

 

Instructions for Living A Life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

—Mary Oliver

 

Achievements in context

This has been a difficult year for so many. As I see the 2022 retrospectives roll past on the timeline, I feel a mix of pride in myself and my own accomplishments, and a wish that I could put some of it in context for anyone else out there who also feels inadequate. If you feel like you haven’t done enough, or if you’re afraid to take a break because you won’t be productive, this is for you.

This year I wrote more fiction than I ever have in my life, more than 120,000 words. That’s clocking in at 2.4 NaNoWriMos! I published 80,000 words to this blog. I recorded and edited six author-read audio tracks. I also wrote a significant amount of nonfiction, including three free community resources, one of which I presented at SizeCon.

Fiction, poetry, and audio:

Nonfiction:

A horizontal graph showing word counts from 2021 compared to 2022. In 2021, Elle published 21,000 words of fiction compared to 60,000 in 2022. In 2021, she wrote 34,000 words in total and in 2022 she wrote 120,000 total. Please contact her if you'd like a full list of figures to compare.
Such a long bar graph you have, there. Is that a personal best wordcount in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

I’m very proud of this achievement. And a lot of it has only been possible because my life happened to fall apart in a very specific way. There’s some socioeconomic privilege at work here, and other factors I won’t share for privacy reasons.

My life was in upheaval this year. I experienced two traumatic losses, one of which was to due to COVID in spite of vaccines and boosters. When the living situation at our last place became untenable, my polycule moved again for the second year in a row. I burned out completely on my entire nonprofit career, had two full breakdowns, and took five hiatuses from Twitter/writing that amounted to at least six months of “unproductive” rest and healing.

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Kinky Scribbles: First Kiss

Kinky Scribbles: First Kiss

Published by mightytinygiant on January 11, 2020

I have had the good luck to end up with a writing coach for the month of January, and she’s helping me figure out ways to lower the stakes of writing more often, both for erotica and for my mainstream projects.

Step one is to attempt what I’m calling “writing scribbles” that will be quick, short, relatively unplanned, and can have only one round of edits before sharing with the world.

This is basically what I achieved many times over with Tumblr’s format, and what I’ve been avoiding with my shiny personal website for the last year. As if I went from a commuter train full of conversations with friends and acquaintances I see regularly, to a personal vehicle where I make all the decisions of where to go, and I do it alone, and have to roll down the window or deliberately invite people inside to talk to them. It’s clunky, lonely, and it feels like the stakes are higher (silly ideas about identity, success, connection) if I decide to go in the wrong direction or say the wrong thing.

Fuck the wrong thing. Nothing is wrong–it’s either unethical, painful, uncomfortable, or various shades of awkward. I might regret a thing, but who cares? It’s on my website, and I’m in control of whether or not it continues to see the light of day. I’m going to take the steps to make sure it’s as ethical as I can make it, by offering tags and informed consent and giving credit to other writers and artists. As for pain, that can heal. Discomfort and awkwardness are also hallmarks of change and growth. Nobody ever made progress or created something wonderful by staying 100% comfortable.

Scribbles can be drawing, writing, any kind of creative art. The point is that it has to be quick, simple, and low-stakes.

At this point in my process, I’m not allowed to turn it into a big thing or make extra work for myself with extra ideas. I’m not adding it to my mainstream works. I’m sticking to kinky content only, because it’s the one kind of writing that brings me the most joy and escapism right now. And also because it’s a way to keep my scope small.

Ironically for someone with size dysmorphia, I have no idea how to keep my ideas and goals small.

I know how to “go big or go home” in other parts of my life, but over the years I’ve let it become too overwhelming with writing because I get cloudy with assumptions of what it means to be a writer and what it means to be “enough.” (Fuck you very much, Impostor Syndrome.) Even discussing the scribbles concept with the coach and how to fit 10 minutes into my schedule a week, I quickly morphed the discussion into how I could carve out 30 minutes a day, every day. When she pointed that out and reminded me that I am already enough regardless of how many minutes I can or can’t put into my schedule right now, I burst into tears.

Fuck going big all the time, fuck that overachiever mindset that’s burned me out so many times. Fuck the toxic productivity culture of never believing I’m enough.

I want to learn how to go small. I’m a sizeshifter, damnit. This is a skill I can develop, just like any other. I just need to find a way to show up and do the work without self-sabotaging all my efforts with last-minute deadline scrambles and other misguided attempts at staying comfortably far away from risk and failure.

Continue readingKinky Scribbles: First Kiss