whatthefoucault | The trouble with having rejection sensitivity dysphoria and a crap memory

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Is you regularly forget that rejection sensitivity dysphoria is a thing and you have it.

THAT’S why waking up to a twitter notification that a dozen people you’re friends with have liked somebody else’s art makes my heart hurt, or why I can’t just FOLLOW PEOPLE on a new social medium because it will hurt if they don’t want to follow me back. That’s probably part of why people branching out from tumblr feels extra hard for me, and in the midst of what was a really exciting creative surge I just feel utterly... I don’t know what I feel. “Just keep creating; it shouldn’t matter how many other people like it” just makes me feel like my feelings are wrong if I get sad when something I spent weeks working on dies with 25 impressions and a like. I can’t switch that off, unless there’s a strategy for embracing your own mediocrity and letting go of your ambitions that actually works with my fun list of neurodivergences :)

*hurls self into the sun*

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mystrana

I relate to a lot of this! Of course it's great to just create, but part of the joy of creating is absolutely seeing people interact with what you've made. Throwing it into a quiet void is blah.

(and I am not a fan of the twitter notification of how many people liked someone else's tweet either! I get that twitter is like "Oh, your friends liked this; you might too!" but there's a definite bit of, but (x)# of people didn't like my tweet soooooo ouch." I think it can be turned off in the push notification section, but I'm waiting to see if I did it right.)

From:

whatthefoucault

Twitter is a great platform in many ways and in other ways it is a pile of pants, to wit: other people's likes don't need to appear in your feed, ever! Likes are a personal expression of interest, REBLOGS are for sharing! You should know this, twitter. smh

But seriously, the void is hard, man. Glad it isn't just me.

From:

dragongirlg

Re: twitter - Oh god, yeah, that's why I've stuck to dreamwidth and AO3. DW makes it hard to do comparisons. I guess you could look at number of comments, but the way I have it formatted the comment link is in a weird corner. With AO3 I just get the "kudos"/"comments" email and don't have to see anyone else's work or how much feedback they get. I actually had issues with tumblr because I'd see the same stuff getting recced and reblogged and "liked" over and over again and I would feel really discouraged when I didn't see that for my own works, no matter how much I told myself mine was kinda niche/not everyone's cup of tea. Anyway, I know it works differently for art vs fic but for me, turning off access to seeing other people's stuff really helped.

From:

whatthefoucault

Yeah - I'm not so quite on board with DW and AO3 exclusively, just because DW doesn't really allow for the option of content sharing, which I do think is really helpful as a creator in getting your stuff out there to a wider audience... or at least the potential thereof, so I'm here for twitter and stuff where there's actually scope for, like, being SEEN. Part of the reason I can whinge openly on DW is I know it's not really going to go much further than my very small social circle. Which also has its uses, certainly.

As for ao3, I'm grateful for the analytics tools/daily kudos email, but with one caveat, and that's if you ever do a collab with anyone and are listed as co-author, specifically when your contribution is visual or rather small, inasmuch as it will MESS WITH YOUR STATS. Especially if the fic is popular. And you're like "oh yay someone commented on... oh, a thing that I agree is amazing but I actually had like no input in, and I'm really happy it's getting a lot of attention, but on the other hand none of this commentary is relevant to anything I myself have worked on and now I feel a little sad that my writing isn't this widely read"

ALSO ALSO I feel the feelings of producing something niche and feeling a bit left out because of that. But. If anyone ever comments to say something like "I never thought about [ship/character/fandom/trope] but now I really love it because of your story!" is the ACTUAL BEST FEELING.