This is all about me and the place I am in re: ace activism and may be entirely composed of whining. Hence the read more.
Seriously, I burned out pretty hardcore on blogging and projects and organizing period last year. Rin, if you read this, you can probably testify to just how much I avoided anything that felt organizy last fall. While I really love paneling and the stuff I did do (including the Asexuality Panel which was an amazing experience), I loved that in part because all it really required out of me was to show up and talk at people. And then in an hour I was done and then I got to go home and I could be as uncommunicative as I wanted.
For one thing, I hate advertising a lot. Even when it’s just a matter of posting a little blurb on a forum or Tumblr going “hey, this is a cool thing! come check it out!” I hate doing it. I think I made Ily and Kaz do most of it for the Spectral Aces blog carnival we jointly ran, in return for writing most of the Call to Participation. I have weird irrational anxiety issues about it. It was pretty easy to deal with when I was running linkspams—I could just plug anything I wanted to promote at the top—but I burned out strongly enough that for right now I don’t want the pressure of running linkspams.
A lot of this is a function of my job and other career-related things—I’ve been working pretty hard to get everything wrapped up before I leave my lab and get my paper sent out for publication before I go to grad school, and I’ve gotten used to fairly crazy levels of obligations. (Seriously, current undergrads: if you decide that it would be a grand idea to take a full load of courses, complete your senior thesis, apply to grad school, and apply for an NSF GRFP all in the same semester, take it from someone who knows: DO NOT DO THIS.) I have also not taken a proper break since… ah, last summer? Wait, no, that would in fact be last spring break, in 2011. Also there was the whole “last year I have been working through fairly major personal stuff including the jettison of almost my entire existing friends circle” thing.
So: burnout, it happened, because when I had my blog that was just another obligation to fulfill on top of SO MANY OTHERS. And also, I tend to take personal responsibility in my head for just about anything I want to keep going (whether or not it’s entirely my project) even if I don’t really have the resources to do that properly. Need to stop doing that.
I am hoping that giving myself a break has given me the momentum to maybe start blogging again on a semiregular basis. I continue to promise nothing on that front, not least because I am expecting nothing out of myself until my new program starts in late August. I am, however, beginning to miss the discussions I got to have throughout the blogosphere when it was up and going regularly. I’m beginning to get interested in having new discussions. Hopefully community-building and having these discussions will start to feel like fun again, and not “oh god someone expects something out of me and I’m LATE.”
