I gotta milk Every Bit of my lacking creativity for all it's worth, y'all

On the one hand I've been supremely tempted to name the whole series of the things I'm writing after the one Extremely Clever metaphor that crops up in, like. Fic 7 once I get that far ("Jumping from high places (growing wings on the way down)") because like. We all know who the protagonist is when Van is Writing Characters They Relate To, and that's a pretty fucking apt description of the protagonist.

And also that particular metaphor just lends itself to a lot of beautiful imagery and a lot of clever ways to work it into the stories at various points (b/c ohohoho guess who loves their Metatextual Bullshit, guess who loves motifs, guess who loves paratext) and... I mean, it's an idealised image of what love is like, sure, but the ability to make a leap of (or into) faith is... a significant goal for characters with deep-rooted trust issues.

But then again, entirely by accident I tripped over a series of metaphors about defusing "trauma bombs", trying to explain my own goddamn story to myself, and now I feel like I need to use them somewhere. I don't want to waste them, they're clever as shit and also the most literal statement of intent with this fucking whole mess of thing I've been writing for over eleven months now 8'D

(Or I'll just name the series "Half a Same Mind" because that's much shorter and snappier. IDK, I'm not the boss of me.)

Plucked from yesterday's conversation with my best friend and the most patient person on the planet

Regardless of whether I "should" or "should not" be writing about the few specific forms of trauma I keep coming back to write about, I'm still prolly gonna keep writing about them because that's a less invasive way for me to deal with... the "consequences", for a lack of a better word.

I don't know how people experience these things, I have zero interest in talking about this with someone for whom it's a lived experience b/c my brain does not react well to the complexities of "lived experience", but I do want to know about the experience and so reading and writing and researching, even if those things are deemed "inappropriate"/"appropriative" for me to do, are the best way to go about it.

Therapy for abusers is also a thing. If it's therapeutic for me to do this and it doesn't harm anyone else, then I really don't care if it's an inappropriate way for me to deal with my own issues.