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The Shitpost Calligrapher

@theshitpostcalligrapher / theshitpostcalligrapher.tumblr.com

NEW REQUESTS ARE CLOSED ATM4 Confusing Future Archivists since 2015. 27/she/they. Linktree:linktr.ee/theshitpostcalligrapher pfp by tumblr user @husband

Twitch Schedules

Mondays, 8pm to midnightish est are Minecraft Mondays, where I work on an absolutely ludicrous survival world build of a 1pixel:1 block map art of my infamous MS Paint Rose Lalonde drawing. There is a lot of resource gathering, hope yall enjoy the sounds of shears and blocks breaking. Music requests are live. @ghostchilismoothie has helpfully created a faq google doc which you can view here

Fridays, 4pm to 7 pmish est are gamin’ Thursdays where I play a properly continuous game all the way to the end. There’s usually cocommentary from a cavalcade of jesters in my discord. I need to figure out which of my unplayed new games to get through, but for now I’m working through the Potion Craft Update

Saturdays, 3pm to 6ishpm est are queue card streams, where I write up the 28 cards that go up throughout the week, these are backlogged from the askbox. Music requests are live. If you sub or donate bits during the stream you can skip the queue and get your card done live

Misc days but usually from any point between 2 am and 7am est are I am Terrible At Minecraft streams, where we try to beat the game but comedically die in hardcore worlds over and over and over again. Chat helps me choose names for these worlds. This is entirely contingent on if i feel like vibing in the middle of the night and want folks to come along with me

Also on Misc late night dates at random I will do Redactle streams, where we solve Redactles together. Redactle is like wordle but with a redacted wikipedia article that you’re trying, via keyword entry and context clues, to find the title of. There’s a multiplayer mode, it’s a lotta fun.

I also show up on a bunch of my streamer friends’ twitch channels in voice channels so that’s a thing to look for

streams are done on twitch under the exact same username here, theshitpostcalligrapher.

Tax Hell

just got out of a tax liaison meeting and holy shit everything is so much clearer

but i was just in a call

for two straight hours

0)-(

(fr though if you're Canadian and run a small business I cannot recommend booking a CRA business liaison meeting enough, it's free and after the one-on-one webinar that provides you with a slideshow you can keep, you can ask whatever relevant tax questions you'd like to someone who DEFINITELY has the answers)

Speaking of therapy, I say, as though we're old friends, and you're not a stranger trapped in this metaphorical elevator with me and you can hear the suspension wires starting to fray.

I've been doing a lot of work recently that's focused on imposter syndrome and the feeling that no matter how well or how much I do, I'm not good enough. That I'm somehow tricking everyone into thinking my work is actually good.

Some days it's a minor niggle in my head that I can gentle and soothe with logic and affirmations. Or smother, depending on the mood. Other times it's loud and all-consuming and the mental anguish it causes me is so real I can feel it twitching in my muscles. This desperate fight-or-flight instinct with nowhere to go and nothing to fight but myself.

Anyway, because I'm several types of Mentally Unwell™, I was switching between workshop sheets ahead of next week. Filling in different forms. (Trying to get a good grade in therapy) And I got my "recognize your harmful ADHD coping mechanisms" worksheet mixed in with the "you're not actually lying to people, you just feel like you are because your brain is full of weasels" worksheet, and seeing them side by side made something go topsy turvy in my head, and I just had to sit and breathe for a couple of minutes until the urge to scream passed. Because it clicked, it all suddenly clicked.

The reason the imposter syndrome workshops and therapy sessions aren't sticking was because I do routinely trick people into thinking I'm someone I'm not.

Because I'm masking my ADHD for their convenience.

I've always known there was something wrong with me. My neurotypical peers made it abundantly clear I didn't fit in or was failing in some way I couldn't see nor remedy, no matter how hard I tried.

So I compressed myself into a workaholic box of hyper-competence in the hopes they'd stop noticing the flaws and exploit like me instead. And then subsequently lived with the daily fear that if they looked too close, they'd realize I'm a monumental fuck up with enough personal baggage to block the Suez Canal.

If you ever need someone to burn themselves to ashes for your comfort and convenience, I'm your gal.

Or I used to. Until I had a bit of a breakdown, and the rubber band holding my brain together snapped and pinged off into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.

Unfortunately, the trauma of living like that didn't also fuck off and instead left a gaping maw where my personality ought to be, so now I get to deal with that aftermath.

And it's that aftermath that's affecting the imposter syndrome shit. Because yes, I am hyper-competent and good at what I do-- but it doesn't feel real because that is how I mask.

And the truly frustrating thing is I am good at what I do. I am not pretending. I worked hard to be good at this. It just feels like I'm dicking around because 90% of my personality turns out to be trauma masquerading as humor in a trenchcoat, and having people genuinely like something weird I'm doing is so foreign my brain has decided it's just another form of masking.

I'm pretending to be a good author so people will think I'm a good author, and my brain thinks we are in Danger of being found out. We are in Danger, and writing is Dangerous because then people will know I'm Weird and not whatever palatable version I've presented myself as for their NT sensibilities.

Like the neurotic vampire with a raging praise kink wasn't an obvious giveaway.

Anyway. I got nothing else. Thanks for listening.

I'm going to go be very normal in another room and not stare into the abyss of my own soul for a bit.

I brought this post up with my ADHD therapist today (who also has ADHD), and she got so still that I thought our Zoom call had frozen.

Turns out she just needed to stare into her soul for a bit and it looked like this:

retrieving a mug of sleepytime milk and desperately trying not to think of a white gilgamesh

every time new people come into the monday streams it takes a few minutes before they realize that the MASSIVE 970x1440 block piece of minecraft pixel art I’m working on is done in survival

and then everyone has to roll for psychic damage

buddy there’s a reason one of my only concessions are to turn on cheats so i can give myself tnt

the amount of terraforming I’ve done over the course of this project would blow your hair back

(but yea if yall ever needed an incentive to come check me out on twitch on mondays…)

guessss what day o the week it is!

see yall in a few hours for some niiiice relaxing block placement

as usual song requests are open see yall later

[image description: A very tall white-haired fellow in a grey suit with black shoes sits on a throne of books, with an open tome resting on the leg he’s crossed over his knee. He is bearded but - like Abraham Lincoln -  has no mustache. 

He is haloed in a light violet light and looks up from his book in an expectant manner. Text reads, “262 LONG HAL – SMALL GOD OF FINISHED PROJECTS”]

•••••

Beginnings are easy. Everything begins.

Endings, though—those are hard. Seeing something small and fragile from conception to execution can be the next best thing to impossible. The world changes while you work, you see. That idea that seemed so brilliant a hundred thousand years ago is played-out and dull now, or you get bored, or Netflix releases a show that has just enough superficial similarities that you know you’ll never be able to convince anyone you didn’t rip off your whole beautiful nightmare from someone else’s dream.

Middles, though—middles are the worst of all. People get lost in middles, never to be seen again. people wander into the swamps and snarls of the undefined center and sink into the muck. The road between inspiration and completion is littered with the bones of those who never escaped the middle.

He comes after you’ve made your beginning, and no one sees him arrive; you just look up at some point and he’s there, walking beside you, eyes on the horizon. As long as you press forward, he presses forward with you, and if you sink into the swamp, he won’t save you, but he will grieve. He grieves for all the ones who fall along the way.

And if you make it to the ending with him, if you get there, he will take the dream you have walked into the world in his long-fingered hands, and he will smile at you, and he will tell you your creation is safe with him. If you’ve been a good companion, traveled well, enjoyed the road, he may tell you where Anna is waiting. Because she’s always waiting, and he has always loved her, fickle, brilliant creature that she is. They are two sides of the same coin, morning and night, and they are never once together, and they have never been apart.