This Year, Last Year, and my Character
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Stress (or at least accept it)
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Stress (or at least accept it)
I’ve been going back and forth on whether to start a scrapbook for a while now, and certainly whether this should be my first post. I've wanted to articulate my thoughts for a while now though, so I figured a scrapbook was the best place for, well, scraps.
Like many people, I’m sure, I lurk in Gossamer’s scrapbook. While I enjoy reading what’s going on in people’s lives, her new years post in particular got to me and is in part what inspired me to write this post.
The Spring
As it seems it was for a lot of people, last year was extremely hard on me, possibly the most stressed out I’ve been since my final semester of college. The ‘highlight’ of the year was my future in-laws coming to stay with me and my boyfriend. I talked about that difficult time a bit in my scrap as Magpie, but I’d like to summarize again in the grand scheme of how the year went. On the surface, visiting inlaws shouldn't be so bad right? Except:
- We have a small, one-bed room apartment, which now had to be split among 5 people. For a month.
- None of them are huge fans of me and the fact we’re living together before marriage. They are from India, where it’s still very much a taboo. Only a couple months prior to the visit did they even acknowledge that we were actually dating, despite our, at the time, 2+ year relationship.
- Of the three, only their daughter speaks English. This was the biggest problem. Despite my best efforts to cram, I was woefully unprepared for a full-time language switch. They spared no speed in their speech and made no allowances for my slow understanding. By the end of the trip, I was able to follow what was being talked about at least, but my few attempts to speak in Hindi failed spectacularly and either my boyfriend or his sister had to translate.
May was a miserable month for me and anyone around during that time may remember I had to take a hiatus from Mizahar to get through it.
The Summer
Even after the month ended, much of the rest of the summer and early fall went into travelling, amounting to almost every other week apart from my boyfriend. The single trip we’d planned as a break from it all and our first real trip together completely fell through due to visa problems and an exorbitant amount of money was lost on it.
Between spending a lot of time apart and ever-present money issues, the summer time only compounded on the stress that was still lingering from the spring. It was during this time that I had a stupid fight with my only real good friend on Mizahar…and left. I washed my hands of the site and told myself the stress of being here wasn’t worth the minimal benefit I was getting anymore. I’d long since been unable to motivate myself to post to my PC and the responsibilities of being an ST paralyzed me from being remotely useful. So I left and it became my mantra that it was for the best.
The Fall
By the time things started to get back to normal, around October, I was profoundly missing Mizahar. I started stopping in every now and then to guiltily lurk around. I tried to make it work on other sites, even created a different incarnation of Rosela on one. It didn’t quite work – I missed the character I’d made here and the environment I’d spent so much time learning. So in November, I made the decision to come back, coincidentally, and it was entirely coincidence, during NaNo.
It was hard. I felt guilty down to my very bones about how I’d been unable to at least leave in a mature manner. I still feel guilty for that, and probably will for a long time. I know people leave in a huff all the time, but I never thought I’d be one of them. I came back though, and I hoped I could rebuild.
It hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be. People I had relationships with have left; I had to make up some IC excuse for being gone all this time, which spun up to be a lot more dramatic and complex than it probably should have been; and halfway through my ‘re-entry’ solo, I discovered the personality changes in Riverfall had taken from me the character I’d missed. I’ve since learned to incorporate the personality changes into some great character development, and I’m enormously excited for the backlash when they reverse, but getting into it after so long gone was very hard.
Nowadays
Which brings me to the present. I’ve been back just a hair over 60 days and while I may never return to the level of comfort I had in my first year here, I’m starting to settle in again. My time away gave me some perspective on my character and the direction I was trying to take with her. Given her violent pre-creation past, I was pretty well set up to take her in a very dark direction. I love writing dark, violent characters; I always have. In every other incarnation of Rosela, she has been that way. In this one, however, every time I tried to take her in that direction, I always came away unsatisfied with the results. Granted, I got to scratch my evil-character-itch, but the result was Rosela’s personality swinging wildly from a prissy princess to the whip-wielding blood-monger I’d always dreamed she’d be. It wasn’t natural. I was forcing her to sprint before I’d barely taught her to run.
So I made the decision to switch gears. The plotline that had always felt most natural was her connection to her clothing shop so I settled in and made a point to progress that. I decided that if I felt regular shop threads were boring, then I needed to do something to make them better. Maybe an Akalak streaks through the shop while she’s trying to make a sale. Maybe a stray dog wanders in and swipes a hat. If I wanted it to work, I needed to make it.
And that’s the plan. I’ll keep inching Rosela down the rabbit hole of violence, but I’ve stopped making her darkness anything but a long-term goal. We’ll get there.
This isn’t to say the hard part’s over. The coming year will be very difficult too, but I need to keep my wits about me this time. I’m still learning my in-laws’ language, in extremely inefficient patches despite my desperate need to impress them next time we meet. I’m told I will have to visit India to meet them on their turf sometime this year, and that the topic of marriage will be very prominent. And at some point, we’ll be moving ourselves as my boyfriend finishes his PhD and gets a permanent job. There will surely be breaks from Mizahar again as I lose time for it. There will surely be stress. Instead of letting it get the better of me this time though, I’ll try to meet it and incorporate it into my life like anything else.
And so concludes the mind-dump. Thank you to anyone who actually made it all the way through for a fairly useless look at the inside of my head. Hopefully future scraps will be more pleasant.
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