Look, your writing doesn’t say anything about you.
I mean, it comes from you. But whether you write something good or something bad, it doesn’t meananything. A story isn’t a sign. It doesn’t proveyour talent or lack thereof.
A story is something you make, not something you are.
To return to a metaphor I used once: think about making pancakes. Sometimes you turn out an A+ pancake, and sometimes you burn the shit out of one. You make another one, they all go in the pile, and there’s always someone who enjoys the burnt ones. You would never take a single pancake and say it alone represents your pancake-making talent forever, or that it reveals how smart, interesting, or lovable you are. We can’t judge your soulby a pancake. It’s made of batter.
For those wondering, my url comes from a famous post by @copperbadge, discussing depression & patronuses:
I struggled with major depression from about age 12 onwards. Reading this brought me joy and a spark of light in a dark place. I thought of it often to encourage myself during the dark patches. Now that I’m in the best health of my life, it gives me no small degree of satisfaction to look back on this.
I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see your ongoing progress & survival and to know I’m a part of it 😀
As for the ask, I think it’s been adequately answered, but when I said “gaudiest” in the sense I used it, “gaudy” as in “gaudy night” implies “joyful”. Gaudiest is the most beautiful and joyful!
I’m nearly 40 and I have clinical depression. I still grapple with it sometimes, but I know my own power and I I love that I have dragged others up out of the worst of it with me.
Gaudium is Latin for Joyful. The word gaudy came to mean something about appearance in the middle ages/Renassaince, and eventually meant tasteless as the pendulum swung against bright colors.
i’m gaudy, joyful, and garish!
oh my gods it got better
this is it this is the most wholesome post on this blog
If you have billions of dollars it shouldn’t be a crime to steal from you. You’ve got enough money that your security should be your own responsibility and anyone who manages to swipe from your hoard deserves applause for besting a supervillain
Over a billion and you reach the social connotations that dragons have, as in stealing from you is considered a Challenge rather than a Crime
WE ALL LOVE DRAGONS, BUT IN THIS DYSTOPIAN ECONOMY, STEALING THEIR GOLD IS NOT JUST AN ACCOMPLISHMENT, BUT A LIVELIHOOD.
“But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.”
