Goyavoyage's den

Mid-Februaryuri 2025 check-in

Hello!
I'm sorry that the last two weeks turned into radio silence. I have been struggling with bad mental health since December, and it blew up particularly hard at the start of February; and though I pushed through to make Februaryuri 2025 happen, because I really wanted to, it ate at me more and more and I ended up needing the rest. I'll probably need more here or there. But I wanted to write this post, still.

It is going to be some kind of metablogging reflection, a jumble of thoughts I somewhat need to get out there, some stuff on how Februaryuri has been going so far, and overall something probably not really polished. But I want to post again, so here we go.

Posting has become scary, somehow, for my brain. It's always been, a little, and I remember spending long periods of time away from the social website cohost last year because... I don't know. Putting things out there for everyone to see (though probably for not that many people to see in actuality) was always a bit frightening, and I needed to gather the necessary spoons to do so again? It's always been some kind of experiment on myself, to try doing that still. To find, unexpectedly, people enthusiastic about it, and sometimes with different opinions, but in a constructive way - very scarcely with an actual adverse stance.
But it's always been there: the trap of "what if I write something or do something that really hurts someone else? What if I write something plainly wrong?". Sometimes for no real reason. Often for no real reason. But sometimes I want to care so much, and I'm so afraid of doing wrong, that it paralyzes my every action. That kind of spiral hinders a much healthier mechanism of learning by acknowledging mistakes when they occur, and moving on.

There's also a perfectionism to this that I can only overcome in bursts. A need for the right word - without necessarily knowing what that would look like - that makes me reread and rerereread everything compulsively to the point of obsession sometimes, for little actual gain. That form of obsession has been particularly prevalent this February.

For instance, I compulsively added to my post on Simoun throughout the week that followed its posting, because I felt like it was missing something. Like it didn't convey everything I wanted to, like I was maybe too harsh or not nuanced enough on some things. Adding to it never exactly sated that feeling, never entirely brought satisfaction. I wanted my polished, definitive stance on it in one go; and that's... really unrealistic of me, actually.
Yurikuma somehow caused this too, to a lesser extent.

I think part of the difficulty here has been the act of recommending works of fiction with things I'd really reproach them. It's been a struggle to find a balance between being enthusiastic about them - because I am, I really am - and being sometimes angry at their flaws, while still being clear that there's interesting things to be found aside from and within these very flaws, and lots of interesting discussions to be had on them. I didn't want to have a prescriptive stance about them, I wanted to give other people the room to like them a lot too! But I also wanted to acknowledge how they may rightfully drive people away from these same fictions. And I've never been really been taught how to do that, and it's a really difficult balance to find, I think.
And, I don't know, there's this whole cognitive dissonance, this whole conundrum of liking things a lot - and recommending them to people, more specifically - while still being "yeaaah, there's also all this in them that's really iffy".

This is something I had been faced with much less during Februaryuri 2024 - not that it's been entirely absent, though - and it's been tough to experiment this to this extent here.

With this, I've also been surprised at how much of this first half of the 2025 batch made me write much more per post than last year's. I suspect part of it is due to the whole blog format, where I'm a bit more unhinged about lengthy posts. But part of it is probably also due to the fact that most of my previous recommendations had been sapphic romances, and I could talk about them with that general framework, highlighting what they brought to that genre that felt new or different. In anime exclusives, it's been much more diverse and chaotic. Which has been really interesting! But a surprisingly different experience, too.

Anyway.

What I mean to say with all can be summarized with the following:

Now I'm going to post this post without trying to make it some kind of polished façade. Come on, little fox brain, do that now.

Thank you for reading.

#februaryuri 2025 #metablogging