Author: Lauren Orsini

Most of the time, I love my career. I get to review anime, report on fandom, and write about all kinds of interesting topics for a living. But it’s only during episodes of burnout that I realize there are a lot of expectations that come with enjoying your hobbies in public.

For the past five years, I’ve been getting paid to watch anime. Most of the time, this is also something I do for free, minus the 1,000 words worth of weekly review copy. But over the summer, life happened and I felt burnt out for the second time this year. At the peak of it, I was just watching three shows: my two review shows and Gundam Build Divers, so I could edit and post Tom’s Gunpla 101 series on the show. I was, for the first time in my life, treating anime like a job—if I didn’t absolutely have to watch it, I just didn’t.

Oddly enough, I didn’t stop watching TV. It was almost like watching Terrace House occupied a different part of my brain. And if I’m really honest with myself, the difference is that I’d never use it as essay material for Anime News Network, Anime Feminist, or any of the other sites I write for. Sometimes people ask me: does watching anime for work alter your enjoyment of it? If I’m honest with myself, absolutely. Even if I’m watching a show for fun, I never forget about the possibility that it might turn into a review or a personal essay someday.

In February, I had my first burnout episode the year. I have some theories as to why, but long story short, I had very little motivation for work. Somehow, at the same time, I wrote a 10,000-word Yu Yu Hakusho fanfic under a pseudonym. Even writing articles about current anime felt like a chore, but with my fake name fanfiction the words just poured out.

I felt similar in September, after dealing with health issues, moving house, and more. I had difficulty doing anything creative without a strict deadline in place. But at the same time, I also started working on my first cosplay in years. I didn’t tweet about it and I only shared my progress with a few trusted friends. I still think that if I had shared everything about my cosplay up front, I would have chickened out before I actually took pictures or anything.

Both times, I wondered if I was burnt out because I was tired of anime. I do watch a lot of it—anywhere from five to ten shows each season! But now I don’t think that’s what’s wrong. Even during episodes of burnout, I still pursue anime-adjacent hobbies. The difference is the pressure to perform. While I may be a professional reporter and reviewer, I’m an amateur cosplayer and everyone is an amateur fanfic writer, so there’s no need to be great at it.

I just read an opinion piece about this in the New York Times called In Praise of Mediocrity: “When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?” Parsing this, I feel like it’s not fandom that is burning me out per se, it’s the demands that come with my public consumption of it.

These days, I try to treat burnout not as a wrench in my schedule, but as a natural part of the creative process. Burnout can be an opportunity to be creative in a way that has nothing to do with work. For example, as October draws to a close, I’m getting revved up to start NaNoWriMo, a creative exercise that I completed for the first time last year. I never shared my novel and I’m sure I never will—at least, not in the version it is in now. But even if I never share it, I’m beginning to realize that wasn’t the point. Writing it was a valuable creative exercise for me. Sure, I’m used to having something to show for my effort, but sometimes that isn’t the end goal. 

Because I want to share my passion for anime with others, there’s always going to be a degree to which my fandom is performative. But I’m beginning to realize that in order to be a happy, healthy creative, it’s OK to not share everything I write or do. 

P.S. If you’d like you can join me on NaNoWriMo as a writing buddy. I won’t be sharing my novel anytime soon, if ever, but you’ll be able to see my word count progress as I go.

Screenshot via Himouto! Umaru-chan, the quintessential anime about enjoying fandom in private.

Styling a wig in my kitchen. This thing is 50% hairspray.

2018 is the year my body betrayed me. I’ve had some health problems, lost hair, lost weight. After a lifetime of clear skin, I’ve had acne so bad I sometimes dread leaving the house.

My recurring feeling in 2018 has been that I’ve wanted to put things off until I look like myself again. Until I feel like myself again. But of course, that’s impossible. So I got better at makeup and arranging my hair around bald spots and did the things I signed up to do. I went to Japan, spoke at the Japan America Society, gave panels at AnimeNEXT and Otakon. I retouched photos or didn’t take any, trying to just forget about the way I look.

I’m focusing on just physical symptoms, but I also have been dealing with insomnia, anxiety, and (obvious to blog readers) a lack of motivation. One of the things that has brought me a lot of joy this year though, is the Danganronpa franchise, and more specifically, exchanging lengthy email chains full of theories about it with my friends.

Having played them all now, my favorite character is Kokichi Oma, the deceptively childlike liar-manipulator from the third game. (Please don’t google him if you’re planning on playing; here’s a spoiler-free picture.) Kokichi is a trickster who makes enemies quickly, but what’s incredible to me is that he doesn’t seem to care if people hate him (and they certainly do). It made me realize my concerns about how I look, how I act, and what I do or don’t write all come from an overabundance of worry about what other people think of me. For once, I’d like to be someone who doesn’t care about things like that.

One day, while looking up the character on the game wiki, I noticed that Kokichi’s physical measurements almost exactly matched my own. While I definitely don’t believe you need to look like a character to cosplay as them, it made me think for the first time that maybe this body I’ve grown to dislike so much could give me an advantage. I don’t like myself much right now, but I like Kokichi, and if I could be him, maybe I could like myself a little more. And so, even though it’s been ten years since I last cosplayed, I decided to give it a try.

Did you know that with contouring makeup and medical tape, you can change the shape of your face?

Because I wrote a book about cosplay, I knew that you can put as much or as little work into cosplay as you want. I decided that if I was going to do this, I was going to go all in. I ended up spending a lot of time on cosplay forums. I bought a wig on Amazon and watched YouTube tutorials to style it. In the end, I used heat, hairspray, and hair curlers I made myself to give it Kokichi’s long flips. I shampooed the wig twice while going through this trial and error.

I went to Sephora and nervously asked an understanding makeup artist to help me look like a 2D character. “That’s actually a pretty common request,” he told me. Cosplay really is becoming mainstream. He helped me find a full coverage concealer and later, showed me how to change the shape and color of my eyebrows to an expressive deep purple.

This whole time, I didn’t share my progress on social media. I was still afraid I would chicken out. I’ve spent this entire year trying to ignore my physical appearance, and suddenly I was, ridiculously, doing something that would draw attention to it. But when my purple contacts arrived and I decided to do a wig and makeup test, I was so happy with the results that I decided to share it. For the first time all year, I actually liked the way I looked.

This is eyebrow attempt #1 with wig attempt #2 and no costume yet, so definitely a WIP.

Now I’m getting my cosplay together to debut at Magfest in January. I keep wanting to self-degrade and joke about how I’m pretty old to be doing cosplay, but then I remember I wrote in a book and said on international radio that “anyone can cosplay.” That applies to me, too.

Obviously, cosplay hasn’t made all my problems go away. But it has reminded me that when things suck, our fandom can be healing. I’m not the first person to turn to a fictional character when I’m confronted with my own weaknesses. Chances are you, too, are drawn to certain characters because they seem to possess something you lack. Cosplay is perhaps an unusual way of “borrowing” a character’s confidence, but I’m enjoying it so much.  

This summer has been difficult.

I’ve been grappling with grief one year after a loss, and the meta-guilt of still being so sad after this much time. I think about her every day. Some days I don’t think about her until I’m falling asleep, when I think, “I haven’t thought about her today yet.” What’s scary is thinking that one day, I might not think about her at all.

I’ve also been dealing with health problems of my own. I’m not ready to share more information right now, but I am aware that I look sick. I am just trying to show up in public, at anime cons and Japanese class and conversation group, while ignoring it. I am trying to focus on the present until I have more information about what my life will be like in the future.

I’ve been living in the liminal space of being moved out of my apartment of the last seven years into a condo that needs a lot of time, effort, and furniture to feel like a home. This is the first place we’ve owned and we are paralyzed by choice. Drilling through the wall is no longer off limits, for example, so we’re carving this place out to better fit our extremely online lives. It’s fun, but it can be exhausting to live in an unfinished space that still needs so much from me.

I’m not sure if it’s just one or all three of these things that have led to my current dilemma: I’ve stopped watching anime for fun. Everything I started this summer, no matter how great it seemed at the beginning, has lost my interest. I’m still watching the shows I need to review (Harukana Receive and Free! -Dive to the Future-). But I have to stop myself from saying that every episode sounds forced or fake or emotionally hollow. Even the most acclaimed shows this season just feel strained to me. I know this isn’t reality; this is burnout.

Anime has always been my escape when times were hard. When I felt burned out about work and studying earlier this year, I watched anime to relax and recharge until I felt like myself again. I didn’t know I could burn out on my favorite thing.

Anyway, this is a big reason I haven’t been posting. I love to write about anime and how it makes me feel as a fan. But it hasn’t been making me feel much of anything lately. So I’m trying to treat it like any other kind of burnout. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t force it. Take a break. (I can’t believe I’m the same blogger who in 2013 wrote the bragging blog title: “Burnout, what burnout? A year in anime consumption.”)

I’ve been running Otaku Journalist for almost nine years now. My writing voice has grown up a lot over that time, and I’ve changed a lot as a person. My periods of productivity have far outnumbered my hiatuses, but it’s a reminder that I’d like to make it easier to crawl my archives in the future. There’s some helpful content here in between the “sorry I haven’t been posting” stuff. That might mean seriously expanding the Start Here page, or running a series of posts collecting different categories of advice over the years. Every time I think, “Where do I want this blog to go?” I always land on the same answer: to help geeks launch their careers.

Thanks for bearing with me. I may still be standing still in 2018, but I have a roadmap planned for when I’m ready to move forward.