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silveradeptChallenge #9 reminds us that victory comes in many different forms and that celebrating the wins is important.
One of the hardest things about variable attention stimulus trait is that it fucks with your sense of time. There's now, there's soon, there's the recent past, and then there's the undifferentiated mass of time that is the past and the future. The past is mostly marked by moments of strong emotional states, and given how maladapted a VAST person is to the society around them, more often than not, those emotional states are going to be negative ones, because they're all lessons learned about masking, building scripts and systems, and the unwritten rules and failure at something that seems as easy as breathing to those who don't understand.
So we can start with the easy ones: We're still here, to participate in Snowflake. There was enough money to go around and to stay alive, fed, watered, and sufficiently warm. There were no bankrupting disasters. I am one year closer to retiring various debts, even as I take on new ones.
I did not give up when my body and mind decided they'd had enough of the way I was currently failing to handle stress and demanded that I do something about it for my own health. That I have also made some progress in this realm is an additional win, even as we continue to try and make more progress toward harmony.
I didn't default on an exchange, prompt, or auction work this past year. That means about 90k of new words for this year posted to AO3 for those works. I also ported across several more of the book club works regarding Pern, adding new commentary and words to those. They're not so easily counted, but they're also there. Plus the uncounted words of book club and Three Sentence Ficathon and other things that are fannish but not officially in the AO3 stats. I'd probably blanch at my actual word count for the year, if it was every fully and truly counted.
I did some good coding work last year to make my smart home brain do tasks that help my life and the life of the household, including working through a difficult sequence that allowed me to set timers of arbitrary lengths. I bridged a TV whose IR receiver is broken to the house brain, using someone else's code project, that helped me understand piping in Linux a little bit more. And I ventured gently into the realm of Application Programming Interfaces to make the color-addressable lights display warnings about the world outside and to indicate whether there were notifications on social sites to be addressed. All of these things work, which is fantastic and count as wins for understanding and using code for my own purposes.
I presented at several conferences this year, had articles accepted for publication, and several other projects that I contributed to moved forward and closer to actual publication in the world. My work performance review had no major issues (even if the minor one sparked the rebellion.) I hit a milestone year at work. I learned a lot, including how to use a paper cutting machine, read some, put on successful programs, made displays and take and make units, and rearranged some collection spaces that are doing much better now in their new homes. (And mentored and shepherded and am trying to embrace my role as Old Fart more when it comes to questions of institutional memory.) I did a lot to help people get forms, learn devices, find good reading material, answer their questions, make connections, be silly, and otherwise make their own lives better with the resources they and I had.
I maintained presence in many of my communities, even if asynchronously (even if preferably asynchronously) and interested with others in social ways, in person and online, playing games together, watching media together, leaving comments, commiserations, and congratulations to the events of other people's lives, several whom I believe would say they were friends of mine. I keep trying to be more of the person I want to be around others, when I can be.
It doesn't feel like a lot, when condensed into paragraphs, but it was a lot, and that's not counting the mundane daily, just one thing wins that I've been counting in my journals and on![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
awesomeers and in places that encourage us to write something every day. Those are sometimes the most important of the wins of last year, because they force me to think about what went well on any given day, so that I can comment about it. And the daily pages are a record of accomplishments and completed tasks and can be referenced when there's an attack of brainweasels about what did get done or didn't get done, or how a situation went. I am, perhaps, in the process of grieving many of the things I have lost or never will achieve, while also trying to forgive myself for the feelings that come with that grieving, and to work toward acceptance of things as they are now, so that I can continue to put up wins and recognize them as such, rather than putting off their celebration for not being big enough and perfect enough to satisfy the impossible demands of the brainweasel horde.
In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, time you spent in the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.
This challenge is fairly open, and is based on people looking back on the last year and thinking about their personal wins.
What we want people to remember for this challenge is: wins can be giant, small and everything in-between. Did you finally finish or publish that novel you've been working on for years? Did you get those bookshelves reorganised? Did you learn a new skill? Did you do something you were scared of? Did you post a certain number of fanworks at A03? Did you master the perfect gooey brownies? Those are all examples of wins and they all count. Just something you can look back on and think, I did that, and I'm proud of that.
But, we know life can be hard for us all at times, so please don't think you have to only share big, memorable wins. If you look back at last year and all you can think to say is, 'I survived' well that counts too.
You don't have to share details if you don't want to. But do celebrate yourself, look back at those wins, big to small, and say, I'm amazing and I did this.
One of the hardest things about variable attention stimulus trait is that it fucks with your sense of time. There's now, there's soon, there's the recent past, and then there's the undifferentiated mass of time that is the past and the future. The past is mostly marked by moments of strong emotional states, and given how maladapted a VAST person is to the society around them, more often than not, those emotional states are going to be negative ones, because they're all lessons learned about masking, building scripts and systems, and the unwritten rules and failure at something that seems as easy as breathing to those who don't understand.
So we can start with the easy ones: We're still here, to participate in Snowflake. There was enough money to go around and to stay alive, fed, watered, and sufficiently warm. There were no bankrupting disasters. I am one year closer to retiring various debts, even as I take on new ones.
I did not give up when my body and mind decided they'd had enough of the way I was currently failing to handle stress and demanded that I do something about it for my own health. That I have also made some progress in this realm is an additional win, even as we continue to try and make more progress toward harmony.
I didn't default on an exchange, prompt, or auction work this past year. That means about 90k of new words for this year posted to AO3 for those works. I also ported across several more of the book club works regarding Pern, adding new commentary and words to those. They're not so easily counted, but they're also there. Plus the uncounted words of book club and Three Sentence Ficathon and other things that are fannish but not officially in the AO3 stats. I'd probably blanch at my actual word count for the year, if it was every fully and truly counted.
I did some good coding work last year to make my smart home brain do tasks that help my life and the life of the household, including working through a difficult sequence that allowed me to set timers of arbitrary lengths. I bridged a TV whose IR receiver is broken to the house brain, using someone else's code project, that helped me understand piping in Linux a little bit more. And I ventured gently into the realm of Application Programming Interfaces to make the color-addressable lights display warnings about the world outside and to indicate whether there were notifications on social sites to be addressed. All of these things work, which is fantastic and count as wins for understanding and using code for my own purposes.
I presented at several conferences this year, had articles accepted for publication, and several other projects that I contributed to moved forward and closer to actual publication in the world. My work performance review had no major issues (even if the minor one sparked the rebellion.) I hit a milestone year at work. I learned a lot, including how to use a paper cutting machine, read some, put on successful programs, made displays and take and make units, and rearranged some collection spaces that are doing much better now in their new homes. (And mentored and shepherded and am trying to embrace my role as Old Fart more when it comes to questions of institutional memory.) I did a lot to help people get forms, learn devices, find good reading material, answer their questions, make connections, be silly, and otherwise make their own lives better with the resources they and I had.
I maintained presence in many of my communities, even if asynchronously (even if preferably asynchronously) and interested with others in social ways, in person and online, playing games together, watching media together, leaving comments, commiserations, and congratulations to the events of other people's lives, several whom I believe would say they were friends of mine. I keep trying to be more of the person I want to be around others, when I can be.
It doesn't feel like a lot, when condensed into paragraphs, but it was a lot, and that's not counting the mundane daily, just one thing wins that I've been counting in my journals and on
awesomeers and in places that encourage us to write something every day. Those are sometimes the most important of the wins of last year, because they force me to think about what went well on any given day, so that I can comment about it. And the daily pages are a record of accomplishments and completed tasks and can be referenced when there's an attack of brainweasels about what did get done or didn't get done, or how a situation went. I am, perhaps, in the process of grieving many of the things I have lost or never will achieve, while also trying to forgive myself for the feelings that come with that grieving, and to work toward acceptance of things as they are now, so that I can continue to put up wins and recognize them as such, rather than putting off their celebration for not being big enough and perfect enough to satisfy the impossible demands of the brainweasel horde.
