Starbeam wrote: ↑Mon Oct 05, 2026 12:45 pm
I'm truly struggling right now. I lost my job recently and it's not been easy to find a new one. If anyone wants to help me out, i can DM a Gofundme, but it's not a demand from me or anything. I guess this whole situation has depressed me a lot. When you're broke, you're just not a complete person.
I’m really sorry to hear this. I’m sorry that I can’t personally help right now, but I hope you find some support soon. And that you have success finding a new job.
If I might offer some advice that has helped me: there are some constants that nourish and are free or very close. The air outside, sunshine, natural beauty. If you can get somewhere that isn’t exclusively the modern built environment without too much money for a bit of time to reflect and simply be, outside of your normal day to day, it might be helpful, if my own personal experience is transferrable here.
I keep resenting people who have had hobbies and talents for many years. Meanwhile, i'm almost 30, and i barely have life experiences let alone skills. Yes, i get it, talent is worked at not inborn. I have heard that a thousand times. That doesn't change how i seem to constantly see nothing but people who have had interesting lives and complete skills for many years, and i want to just catch up. The only exceptions seem to be people who don't mind living a more plain life, which isn't me. Like, what have i done besides conlang? Not even conlang all that well.
I hear you, and this is familiar to me. The comparison thing... Remember that the internet is a bizarre, warping lens. The same life that looks remarkable through it may not, in fact, be so sparkling, or easy, to lead. “I googled your name and was delighted to find that you are thriving in every possible way” ‒ words that I read from an estranged friend in the same week I was in the lowest depression of my life.
Your conlanging might seem great to someone else, by the way. Who is the objective arbiter?
Ultimately, I believe that you shouldn’t be evaluated purely based on a measure of your output. You’re a person, not an economy. You
are something of value: living consciousness. You
are remarkable, and you are enough.
Something I try and do when I get this way, which again I offer in case it help: hypothetically list things I
could be grateful for, if I were going to try and max out on gratitude. The abstraction means you can engage in this even when you don’t feel it. Often, though, it has ended up making me feel pretty lucky to be alive. You can always start there:
1. I am alive. (Statistically, and objectively, this is a pretty big win.)
The continuation is up to you. I hope it may help.
In less gloomy venting, how do you all manage to conlang if you have aesthetic holdups? To me, conlanging is first and foremost an art, so there will always be a focus on style that only exists in natlangs by accident. I start a lot of conlangs that i quickly scrap because i think they're ugly in some way- from orthography, grammar, semantics, the conworld around them. And yes, i've read that one Ira Glass speech about having good taste despite making nothing. In this case, i think finding my work ugly is an active inhibitor sticking thru my work because i cannot trust the process. Alternatively, maybe i should start work by blatantly ignoring aesthetics and just add them later. I can't be the only one who has had this thought.
I used to
realllly struggle with this. In the end I started to think that an aesthetic is like a patina, or a lichen, that grows over continued connected work. If you try and go directly for growing the aesthetic, you end up with little samples in petri dishes. If you keep attending to and growing an initially lumpy, ugly structure, however, the aesthetic grows over it.
I’ve read a bit about Hokusai recently. His woodblock prints start off as mere polygons sketched roughly on paper. They pass through stages including gouging meaningless shapes out of wood, and no doubt spilling and smudging much ink over paper that we don’t see. The end result may be an aesthetic triumph, but each stage is significantly ‘uglier’ by itself. And some of his prints, it must be said, are much lovelier than others.
Another artist who delved into ugly so far it became (sometimes!!!) beautiful is Harry Partch. Who was actually homeless for many years, before becoming a highly respected academic and the father of a whole field of microtonal music.
I hope you start to feel more centered soon. Money really helps, but you are infinitely valuable without it, too.
