I am having a hard day (in large part self-inflicted, due to incessant picking at brainscabs) and I'm going to try to do the gratitude thing more deliberately, trying to breathe in and really think about-- and expand on-- the things I write today.

1. This isn't new, but I am still and always grateful for fandom flow. I have been working on a collaborative project for a couple of months now, a kind of form I've never tried before, and it is so wonderful and rewarding. I love having fandom friends because I know they'll never get tired of it if I want to randomly bring up Legolas and Gimli in the middle of conversation, and I especially love that magical feeling of the back-and-forth when one person's creativity inspires another and you come up with things together that you couldn't have made alone. And I love that that mutual creativity also inspires me on my solo projects - and that I have a friend who's willing to let me talk about them for as long as I do.
2. I am grateful to be in a place where I can take walks in my "backyard Ithilien" and rejoice in the fresh air without feeling like Taking A Walk has to be a production I prepare for.
3. I am grateful to be the kind of person who leans into learning uncomfortable ideas, who doesn't want to ignore the things I don't like. Sometimes I need time and distance after taking in something new to absorb it and figure out what I think about it, whether I need to change my opinions or whether I do truly still feel the way I did before. That time and distance is an uncomfortable thing to take, and it is hard in the current world, where everything feels hard and angry and there is an undercurrent of shame beneath every choice and thought. It's uncomfortable and difficult to lean into, but I am grateful that I haven't fallen so far into my own echo chamber that I'm not able to do that. I have to learn how to give myself grace on that, and this is my attempt.
4. I am grateful for wonderful new fic that allows me to take some of that space and distance and work on feeling okay again after a foray into discomfort.

I'm just a simple girl with simple needs, and if those needs happen to be Gimli in physical distress and Legolas in emotional distress such that conditions are right for much hurt/comfort all around, then you know what?

...YOU KNOW WHAT?

...yeah, okay, you can feel free to judge me.

Okay, so now that I've calmed down from the wave of bad feeling, I find myself having to deal with the fact that I've posted rants in various places. And I'm lucky that people haven't responded angrily at me thus far, even though it's entirely possible that I deserve it, because I did essentially vaguepost an anti-ship rant. And I have to deal with the fact that even though I am entirely pro people-can-ship-what-they-want, and people-aren't-morally-worse-for-shipping-something, I have to deal with the fact that I have publicly written about how I am annoyed by people shipping a thing.

To be fair: It is not the shipping that bothers me so much as it is the anti-ship content that so constantly comes along with the love for this ship. It is the fact that the anti-content sinks so deeply into my blood and feels like it's poisoning me such that I need to say something about it, even if that's detrimental to my public presence.

I posted on Tumblr a few months ago about how we sometimes feel the need to anti things. How sometimes I have to complain about a thing, even though I don't want to offend or hurt the people who like it, simply because otherwise I can't function, because otherwise it sits inside me like a parasite that will eat my okayness and my good mood and my general ability to be a person. But I don't know how to do that without putting something out there that will be misunderstood, that will hurt others, that will make me appear unreasonable. I don't want to be too concerned with how I appear to others, but I also don't want to put them off simply because I was having a Moment.

I try to keep the complaining out of the tags to certain things; I try to be up-front about my feelings and my reasoning for doing it; I try to explain that it's individual things that bother me and not people themselves. But inevitably I am unable to be fully rational when I have poison flooding through my veins, when my main purpose is simply to get it out. So how do I deal with these things? How do I reconcile these coexisting needs? And how do I deal with things in a way that allows me to be okay, while also not infringing on other people's comfort and affecting them in the same way that's affected me?

I don't have a good answer. I just... again, I just needed to say it.

I've decided to work more on being more explicitly grateful for the readers I have, and also for sharing how awesome comments are. There's a wonderful blog on Tumblr called Ao3 Comment of the Day that features something like this, but I decided I want to do something similar for myself. So I'm going to try, each week, to post a comment that has made me particularly happy that week. It doesn't have to be one received that week, but just one that I've reread or thought about that's been particularly gratifying for whatever reason.

(I also have to say that unfortunately, due to fairness to everyone else, I won't be able to showcase comments from katajainen every week, but they are the Gold Standard.)

So, this week's comment is under the cut.

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