I wrote this in response to a post on Tumblr, but i'm putting it here to preserve it and because I think it stands on its own:
Recommended listening: Ren - Bittersweet Symphony
I keep having this battle with my own soul every time I try to create something.
The climate of the world of late so often presents us with only two options: the purest light of hope shorn of all conflict, or the darkest, bleakest shit, stripped of any humanity.
Everything is either wholesome or grimdark, everything must be a line in the sand, a volley in the ongoing battle of light vs. darkness.
But it's not political in the way that you think. This binary thinking is rife on all sides, even within our own progressive enclaves. The fascists come both as withering church ladies and as hard men making hard choices, but so too do us leftists demanding both "hopepunk" and angry polemic.
And so with all this swirling in my mind, I will set down to try and create something, and all this pressure on my soul to represent the side leads down the path to stories of similarly singular, binary focus.
I end up fixating on either "I need to write something super hopeful and inspiring" or else just some grim bloody shit about fighting the bad ... and then I don't finish them because I fucking hate it.
I can't fucking write like that, y'all.
I just fucking can't.
I just wanna write about humans. Because I am a human.
We're all just messy bitches, hopefully doing the best we can, probably failing at it.
So I don't finish those projects; I burn out on them every time.
It's not that my work isn't political, it's unavoidably political. It's just that I'm not a superhero, so I don't know how to write one. I'm not a pure ideological warrior, or a hypercompetent hero of the people, I'm just a scared, dumb tran.
I don't know how to write the kinds of stories people seem to demand now because I don't know how to be the person they seem to insist must exist, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Instead I write about sad, scared people, doing their best in a bad situation. I write about trying to do the right thing while holding down a shitty corporate job, I write about complicated people who aren't good, or evil, just ... folks.
'Cause we're all of us just folks.
The real danger comes when we forget that.