vampires, spaceships, and fantastical worlds—the tales of L.E. Teetzel

Okay, first up, I realize the… hypocrisy? of posting this right after my last post where I talked about all the projects I’ve got cooking, but I had a sort of epiphany last night while trying to fall asleep (and failing). I realized that I’m always tensing, always looking for time to work on things, always bouncing between projects (which makes me more anxious). I’m starting to reach a point where the constant tensing is causing me lasting pain and I’m working on paying more attention to my shoulders (which should not always be around my ears) so I can stop hurting myself, which then makes it more difficult to sleep, which then makes everything worse. So, clearly, I need to abandoned some projects. Maybe it’ll just be temporary, maybe it’ll be forever. The point is, I need to take my mental and physical health into account more than I do.

I don’t really know why I feel this need to always have a bunch of projects on the go; that’s something I’ll tackle in therapy, probably. I’ve felt it for a long time, maybe as long as I can remember. It’s gotten worse lately, with the idea that I need to find ways to make money because everything is so expensive and I’m still not great with money (that’s a long story). But I realized when I visiting my mom earlier this summer, that I was wholly, completely relaxed, and I couldn’t remember the last time I felt like that. I don’t know if I’ll be able to achieve that feeling on a day-to-day basis (since I didn’t have to cook while I was visiting, and some days doing the bare minimum to take care of myself is still a lot), but it made me sad to realize how tense and anxious I was most of the time (and how much worse it used to be, since I’m on meds now that have made it a lot better).

I also realized that whenever I work on stuff for myself, I feel guilty. Which is just, so dumb.

And with self-publishing a book this year, I realized that I want to do more that makes me feel like that did.

So, yeah, less projects.

Unfortunately, the Axaurius Project will be one that gets abandoned for the time being, maybe forever. It requires a lot of creative energy I should be putting into my writing that I want to publish. (Finding/making more time to write is a big thing I’m going to focus on.) All the projects I hadn’t started posting yet will also be abandoned, but I’m the only one who cares about those since no one else had seen them yet.

I’m still going to do Three-Thoughts Retrospective because it requires very little energy and I can watch stuff for it while I’m knitting or crocheting—and lets me get my thoughts about the stuff I’m watching out when I have no one to talk to them about. I love making and giving gifts, but my goal going forward is to make the stuff for myself that I want to as well. And maybe I’ll slowly build up a stock of things I can sell online or at in-person events. But that’s not the goal. I’ll also still write occasional essays when the thoughts get too big. There’s one about Borderlands and video-game movies that’s percolating right now.

But my main focus has to be my original writing. It’s starting to make me bonkers not working on it much, so it’s time to change that.

I feel this to the point where I’m thinking about trying to get up early to write before work. And I hate mornings.

I don’t know how well this will go, but the fact remains that I need to have fewer projects on the go, I need to focus my creative energies, and I need to stop doing things that get in way of reaching my goals. It’s a little annoying, since I wish I had time to do everything I want to, but with a day job and freelance work, plus all the normal taking-care-of-yourself stuff, there just isn’t enough time in the day to do everything I want to and I need to stop trying.

I’m sure most people learned this long ago, or never ended up in this position to begin with, but I’ve always been this way as far as I can recall, and I’m only now really learning how to understand, work with, and better my definitely neurodivergent, probably autistic brain. I need to develop better habits or I might drive myself into another anxiety attack or worse and I really, really don’t want to do that. Again.

I don’t even know if a lot of this makes sense, but I hope you understand where I’m coming from, and I’m sorry if you’ve been following the slow progress of the Axaurius Project. I really wish I had time to make it what I wanted to. Maybe I will one day. We’ll see.

But for now, I really, really have to stop overwhelming myself to the point of freezing and doing nothing.

Take it easy, hot dogs, and take care of yourselves. 💙

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