‘My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness’ and the right time to share your story

Fandom, Writing

Like many manga fans, I pre-ordered My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness (affiliate link) and devoured it as soon as it arrived. The autobiographical story of a woman struggling with depression while coming to terms with her sexuality, it’s one many people will relate to. If the purpose of your writing is to make other people feel something, this is your literary role model.

Author Kabi Nagata does not sugarcoat her darkest moments. The sort of thing I’d be too embarrassed or ashamed to share, she exposes in fine detail: an eating disorder that had her binging between shifts as a supermarket cashier, a bald spot she has on the back of her head (presumably from compulsively pulling her hair out) is bared to the world.

But the manga concludes on a high note. Nagata is taking care of herself. She’s writing the manga she’s always wanted to. And best of all, the very autobiographical comic we’re reading has gone viral, opening up new opportunities to her for the first time.

That’s not a spoiler. Even before you open the manga, the back cover accolades gush about its reception. It’s beautifully drawn, perceptive and attuned to Nagata’s moods—from melancholic to hopeful to humorously confused. You can’t do work like this when you’re down. The very fact that we’re holding this manga in our hands is Nagata’s triumph in action.

This manga’s lowest points are made bearable by this distance, too. I’d recommend this manga even to people who are in the midst of depression right now, because it never wallows in the alleged “glamour” of depression. It shows the light at the end of the tunnel.

Nagata wrote her best work at a time where she was finally able to do so. MLEL is successful in a big part because Nagata waited until she was ready—for the right time to share this story.

Jocelyne Allen’s English translation is intimate and colloquial, so the reader feels like a cooperative party in Nagata’s road to recovery. The central action of the manga—Nagata’s hiring of a female escort—is really just a vehicle to show her recovery in action. Her discovery in the bedroom (about how sex is less about having a “working crotch” and more about communication) show that she’s newly self-aware of how far she still has to go, pondering questions about human interaction and happiness she was too low to consider before.

What’s more, she didn’t ask permission to share this story. She just started drawing her manga and putting it up on the online art community Pixiv. “Don’t ask for permission” is exactly the advice I’ve been giving aspiring writers for years. Editors are vital for refining your idea, but not for instigating it—do you really think some editor you’ve never met knows your story better than you do? Only the author can decide when it’s time to share a story for the first time.

And predictably, Nagata’s decision to bypass approval worked in her favor: “… at that point, I didn’t have to push my work out into the world. The publishing world came to me,” she says in the manga. And she wouldn’t have been ready for it a moment sooner.

By the time Nagata was ready to share this personal story, she knew what she was about: “I want to write… Stuff that shakes people up. Stories about my true self!”

Despite the cute colloquialisms saying otherwise, life isn’t anything like a story. The only real beginning is when you’re born and the only real end is when you die. In the meantime, you can choose to segment bits and pieces into stories to own and share wherever you like. That’s the real triumph of My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness: our perception of Nagata’s agency. She’s framed her lowest life experiences as a transformative success story.

The only difference between a good ending and a bad one is when you choose to share it. If you’re in the middle of a rough spot, consider that perhaps you’re not at the end yet. Even if you’ve been through bad experiences, you can choose to tell your story from a high place, giving you the perspective to observe (and even laugh at) your shortcomings.

If you want to tell stories that move people, you already have the material you need in your own life experiences. It’s up to you to frame them from any position you want.

Photo by Fredrik Rubensson

Otaku Links: Forgotten fandom

Uncategorized

Screenshot via Gainax’s Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise.

May 2017 Monthly Income Report

Income Reports

Welcome back to the monthly income report, after a one-month hiatus! I just planned badly last time. I like to write this post in advance, and May 1 was a Monday, so I couldn’t write about April’s income until that day. The following week I had just come back from a very fandom-topical experience I wanted to write about instead, and here we are.

After a very profitable March, April and May have been… not great.

Reason #1: I started a low-earning, time-intensive project. Anime Origin Stories made $5 this month, but it’s not a big deal because I didn’t start it to earn money, but rather to answer my own questions (and hopefully yours, too) about how people got into fandom. It got me thinking a lot about the value of work—and how work’s value doesn’t always come from money.

Reason #2: I became a full time writer for a bit. After a bunch of web projects in quick succession, I didn’t have any for a while. When you’re a freelancer you have to divide your time between paying work, and courting the chance of paying work by doing a bunch of self promotion. I had a lot of writing jobs secured so I figured I’d just focus on that. This is changing in June though, as I have picked up more web clients again, mostly by word of mouth. You can see a tiny web design paycheck I already received on the pie chart.

Reason #3: While not earning as much, I spent more. In the free time I had not getting as much work, I spent a bunch. I bought a ticket to a business conference this fall, which was still several hundred bucks even at a discount. I bought tickets to Japan, again! (Though I did get them for $700 round trip per person.) I paid my estimated taxes, which fortunately didn’t cost a thing, because I overpaid last year and just used part of my tax refund. I’m lucky I didn’t have any unexpected expenses, because I wouldn’t have stuck with any of my savings goals.

I put money in my emergency fund, retirement fund, and travel fund, but this month I did not put money in my new computer savings account. I told you about the other savings accounts, but I just started this one in January in case my now four-year-old Macbook doesn’t make it through the year. It’d be a lot cheaper to just suck it up and get a PC laptop, which my husband could actually repair and upgrade for me as needed, but I’m so used to working with a Macbook (I got my first one for grad school) that I’d rather save up all year than buy a PC.

Let’s talk about those belated April money goals:

Now, what will I do this June?

  • Work more, earn more. I’m my own boss and I need to act more like it. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be pitching and promoting more often.
  • Don’t throw money at problems. Earlier I wanted to hire an editor for Otaku Journalist. This led to more work/problems for me. I also considered hiring a Japanese tutor long before I considered the simple solution of studying a little more on my own between classes. I have more money than time, so now it’s time to do the work.
  • Paying work first. It’s tempting to create a big backlog of scheduled posts on Anime Origin Stories, and it really does feel like I’m being productive when I do it! I can’t believe I still have to tell myself this: but do work you’re actually paid for before you do that.

How did your May go? What are your plans for June?

Otaku Links: Bye forever

Uncategorized

Writing this post in advance as I prepare to get out of here for a bit. I hope you can do something relaxing this weekend, too!

Screenshot via Akira.

How to decide how much you should share online

Tech, Writing

I’m 30 years old and for the first time in my life, I got acne.

My immediate impulse was to share a before and after for my 6,666 Twitter followers. The before: me two months ago with my usual, youthful skin; the after: a scarred wasteland of regret (OK, maybe it feels worse to me than it really is). It’s a temporary situation brought about by a bad reaction to my new birth control, and I’m approaching it with humor. I feel like being able to laugh at myself when life sucks is relatable, and I wanted to share that with people.

But after logging into Twitter and doing my usual morning housekeeping (muting people with phrases like “deplorable” in their display names), I remembered, “Oh yeah. A lot of people in my online bubble don’t like me and are always looking for new ways to justify that dislike.”  

Which is fine. I mean, to an extent—I’d rather people don’t tell me when they dislike me, because their opinions about me are none of my business. But I don’t need everyone to like me or even know who I am, and I don’t spend any part of my day trying to win them over.

It’s a reminder though: social media is not just a hangout for me and my friends. It’s a place where more people than I’ll ever meet can follow my life if they feel like it. I know this well, because I follow and interact with many people I’ve never met in person.

Personally, I am more likely to follow and connect with people who know that even people without their best interests in mind will pass judgement on them, but stay vulnerable anyway. I love reading personal essays. I love bloggers who put their successes as well as their setbacks on display. I like living as many vicarious lives as possible.

For example, my favorite podcast right now is Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn. There are a dozen podcasts about personal finance, but I like this one because I identify so much with host Gaby Dunn. She shares everything—from an anecdote about crying on a sidewalk unable to pay her rent (boo!), to landing a huge payday and putting $8,000 in her retirement fund (yay!), to getting a therapist after her boyfriend dumped her (boo to the breakup, yay to the therapy!). These ups and downs remind me of my own life in fast forward mode. Day to day, I can only see one up or down at a time. But scrolling through a stranger’s feed (or listening to their podcast, or reading their personal essay) is like reading an amazing story that renews my faith in life.

Yes, sharing the negatives about my life gives strangers with bad intentions ammunition to justify their negative opinions, but they also give my readers authenticity. I don’t regret opening up to my readers about struggling with anxiety and depression in the past—even though trolls still like to dig that up as “proof” that I’m “crazy.” The community connection by far outweighed anything outsiders said to me. 

Also, sometimes it feels really good to get things off my chest. I recently blogged for Anime Feminist about my privilege—through a combination of scholarships and gifts from my parents, I do not have any student loans. This is especially important for me to share because whenever I talk about how I earn, spend, and save, it’s important to remember that my situation might be different. In this case, not sharing that part of myself is actually disingenuous when I offer advice, even though it is immensely personal, and technically nobody’s business unless I choose to share it.  

TL;DR, I advocate sharing plenty about your life—with a few caveats. Here are a few pieces of advice from spending more than half my life online:

You’re not a brand, you’re a person. I consider my account my digital identity more than my brand. I follow hardly any brands on Twitter, except Crunchyroll which is hilarious and frequently off-topic. I really like when people are willing to take a break from promoting whatever it is they believe in to make time for humor or personal stories. Recently, I shared a conversation I had with my 90-year-old grandmother, a story that has nothing to do with fandom or the other things I care about most. It was gratifying to share something so far from my “personal brand,” and reveal another side of my thoughts and beliefs in the same space.

Consider your own safety. Last year, after I wrote about a situation where I was harassed at work, my harasser was emboldened to send additional threats to me, my friends, and my family. You can “own your narrative” but remember that people who want to hurt you can own theirs, too. Never write about where you physically are, or where you soon will be, just in case.  

Find a middle ground. I like to share a lot online. My husband doesn’t like to share at all—he even has a locked Twitter account! So because we file taxes jointly and my finances affect his, I don’t include numbers in my monthly income reports. I still can talk to people about my business, but I can do it without making somebody I care about uncomfortable.

Take a break. Sometimes when I’m feeling strongly about something, my impulse is to tweet something immediately. I find that if I first take ten minutes to think about and process my thoughts, I regret it less. I’m also more articulate that way. 

This just might not be for you. Some people aren’t cut out for sharing anything, and maybe you are one of them. Don’t force yourself.  

Photo by Anthony Rossbach