just pretend it makes sense to make me happy

I know there is a point when a relationship is unhealthy, and a point when a job is unhealthy, but I had no idea there could be a waterloo in which one's relationship with one's job is unhealthy. Because you know what, I love the job, and that's hard to admit, because I hate going to work and those two things do not go together. And yet, my life. *hands* I have an unhealthy relationship with my job.

In other news:

Things I have discovered; I cannot write after reading linzeestyle at all.

I'm extremely impressionable as a writer; my adventures in Due South were sharp reminder that no, you never really stop picking up things from other people, and I absorb like you would not believe and it takes time to write back into myself again. That's pretty much the only time I have to do hard line rewrites. It's not a better or worse thing--though yeah, she's better than I am, not bitter or anything, not the point--but the rhythm gets in my head and I don't think like that. So there's this really bad translation thing going on, which is problematic, because I'm working through her back catalogue and when I stop to write, horrifying things come out that are like some weird Frankenstein of ficness, and it's all very messy and sometimes obscure, and occasionally I can't even see myself on the page, which I will say now, freaks me out.

Okay, she's not the only one, she's just the one that's causing me cognitive issues atm. Other writers on this list are samdonne and cesperanza, and it's not like, even an issue of I don't like them--they're among my Top Ten Writers I Read Fandoms I Cannot Even Identify Who the Hell Those People Are (fucking Fallout Boy fic, just, I don't even know what the hell is up with that; manips helped, thanks!). It's just hard to write around them when I'm bopping along and then come out on the other side with an existential headache and a sense of violated fic identity.

It's not quite a style thing, I think--again, reference point, my freakout during heavy Due South reading, or only a style thing, or a tone thing, or even a subject thing. It's a combination of things I would not write combined with things I would, but in a direction I wouldn't have thought to go. It's unsettling. I write better when I'm reading, because I'm a fangirl and I work synergetically--I write better when someone will sit still online long enough for me to paste to them--I write better when I'm, you know, writing--I do not write well when I have to stop, go back, and think this is not my story.

Okay, see, when work is stressing me, I hyperexamine my process. It is not healthy, but I have four fics right now that are five pages, maybe, off being done, and every one of them is coming up against the same roadblock. Also, I think jamesinboots and shinetheway are getting tired of being the blunting force of my internal writing crisis and reading fic I refuse to finish or keep rewriting because it feels wrong and I can't explain why.

*lies down* My problems are seriously reaching a no-fly zone of being untenably weird. I need a universal type problem that is relatable. Like, I don't know, drugs. God, if only I had time for drugs. Does caffeine count?

(I also really want to abandon capital letters like you have no idea. Yeah, I know exactly where the blame for that belongs.)