Evenstars have a cocooning response to percieved danger. When something is scary, our instinct is "avoid!"
Unfortunately, our life contains a lot of scary things. As a group of girls in a boy's body, news regarding politics south of the Canadian border has seriously sucked for a long time now. I might not be American and trans, but I have girlfriends who are American and trans.
For this reason, I've been avoiding the news of late. Much like I also avoid appointments in town (including dentist's appointments and eyeglasses appointments), phone calls with other people (such as ones to keep pushing back my dentist's appointments), any game that has even a tinge of horror to it, and generally existing in any way that could possibly be obtrusive to anyone.
I learned this general pattern in university, where avoiding my father's ire often kept me out until late at night. I think we all develop habits around our personal damage, but they can persist even when there's no good reason to fear.
Certainly, being constantly afraid of everything is not healthy, especially when many of the things I am afraid of are actively good for me (such as my girlfriends!)
I recently saw a post on Tumblr that underscored the difference between harm and discomfort. Harm sensitizes you to discomfort - what if something awful happens to you? - but discomfort is importantly not harm.
It is for this reason that I checked the news coming out of America today, deliberately and thoughtfully. The news was bad, and worse than I had last checked; at this point Trump has had the State Department sign a new rule that makes it possible to deport any trans person with a different gender marker on their visa from their gender at birth from the United States, and of course also provides a pretext for ICE to generally harass, detain, etc anyone who "looks trans" on the pretext that they may have committed visa fraud.
Nonetheless... I feel stronger for having experienced some discomfort, and it is for this reason that I relate the news item in relative detail rather than abbreviate it. Some of you out there may also be avoiding sources of discomfort in your lives - what else can you do but face them?
The process of flinching from discomfort is complex. Sometimes the fear can be half-suppressed because you don't want to look that direction.
For example, today I tried to work on the Soft Wings CYOA, got not very far, but felt uncomfortable with putting it down. So instead I spent an hour shuffling the metaphorical deck chairs - not really working so much as perseverating on the work.
I think the fear that I have with artistry is always that I will abandon the work completely, that it will languish incomplete. To overcome it I need to trust in my own future actions, and that's difficult for me to do. Moreover, looking a little deeper, I've been instilled with a deep fear of being "useless", and as a result having to step away from work is uncomfortable for me - even when it's because I genuinely need rest. The appearance of being busy was often enforced with shouting & threats of being turned out onto the street when I was younger, and that fear has never quite left me.
So, the same inability to tolerate discomfort that drives us to avoid news and understate our kinks also drives us to bury ourselves in work. There is an obvious conclusion here: the underlying fear is of stepping out of line, doing something not approved of by our family or by society. And the more you become accustomed to and internalize that gaze, (ceaseless watcher cast your eye upon this, /The Magnus Archives) the worse off you are as a person, the more you're forced into a cramped little box which isn't shaped to strengthen or support you but instead is made to make you Follow The Rules.
These rules are stupid and poisonous. They've wrecked my health and made my life suck badly. But I still listen - because being uncomfortable is visceral and immediate and often justifies itself, spinning reality in the direction that justifies the fear.
Exposure therapy for anxiety consists largely of putting people in situations where they are uncomfortable for long enough that they habituate to the discomfort and have it diminish. This increases the patient's life scope and makes the fear less incapacitating. Sitting with discomfort, just in general, seems to be an important life skill to practice and develop.
I don't mean in the sense of forcing yourself to burnout - but instead in the sense of questioning why you feel obliged to work to burnout, anyway. Sometimes even saying "I feel uncomfortable doing X" can immediately make the problem leap out starkly. Fear likes to go unacknowledged. Bring it forward into the light and actually calculate the risks and often it's far less intimidating than you believe it to be.
This was as far as I got with my first draft of this post, which was around March 18. At the time of writing it's April 21. What brought me back? Another instance of this pattern in my life.
One of the things about social-media content is that it always provides something to do. It makes you never have to sit with boredom or empty spaces in your life. It's often addictive - it provides something to fill voids in your life. But the kind of fast content that sates boredom and keeps you scrolling isn't the kind of thing that actually satisfies you. It's potato-chip-like - tasty, enjoyable in the moment, extremely moreish.
The act of disengagement from something momentarily enjoyable is uncomfortable! Trying to regulate your social media consumption is uncomfortable, because it involves dealing with the facts of your actual usage and not what you think is going on. Anything that dissipates a comfortable illusion requires you to be able to not be comfortable for a moment.
Establishing a new focus account on discord, which doesn't have access to all the Social-Media parts of the service but does have access to the actual friends I like and know - that's something that involves looking at your habits and saying "maybe there's something not so great here." Admitting a flaw. And looking more in that direction, asking the questions of "Why are you spending so much time on Reddit?" and similar - that kind of thing also involves discomfort.
To have to sit with boredom for a little while sucks! I'm an ADD girl, give me my instant gratification! But it also lets me get together the activation energy to do something more fun, more satisfying, more real than most social media content. Because the main thing that you do with social media is watch other people go about their days. Why do that when you could do something interesting yourself?
I'm not saying that being on social media at all is invalid - I met all my girlfriends through discord! - but there's a difference between real friends and para-sociality and the latter is almost always a drain.
The easiest thing, the path of least resistance, is often comfortable. It's less trouble than doing the satisfying thing, the ethical thing, or the friendly thing. So it's worth considering what your life makes comfortable for you and asking yourself if those things are what you would actually like to be doing.
This is different advice from "immediately put yourself in as much discomfort as you can handle." But a little push can sometimes help. Consider this a little nudge, from me to you. Maybe there's something you haven't been looking at. If you're scared of being seen, maybe turn your eyes onto your fear and make it scared of you.