Nevanna's Forest of Stories

Handed in classification assignment. I know I did poorly and guessed on most of the answers, and I'm just going to have to live with that. I am having the usual anxieties about whether I'm competent enough or committed enough to pursue this degree or this career. My housemates and friends were, as usual, nothing but kind, supportive, and understanding during my freakouts, and so certain vampiric voices in my head who've insisted that my friends would not want to be around me after seeing me at my worst? Can shut right up. No, I mean now.

Yesterday, while I was working on the assignment, I was wearing my pink T-shirt with the heart-shaped "Recycle" symbol on the front and the words "Bring Back the Love" on the back. Some of you already know the story behind that shirt. I bought it back in 2009 because both the symbol and the sentiment reminded me of a fandom-related project in which my closest friends and I were investing a great deal of creative and emotional energy. During that year, I also maintained a full course load (including a math class, a subject that has never come easily to me), as well as a part-time job, for both my spring and fall semesters. Over the summer in between, I took an online class and worked full-time. I made straight A's all across the board.

I'm not saying that I was never frustrated or distracted, but the point is, I was more than capable of balancing my work with my fannish/creative pursuits. In fact, the latter probably complemented the former and gave me the strength that I needed to deal with my academic and everyday challenges. Both were immensely important to me, just in different ways, and this was all right. This was the best of all possible worlds.

I don't know why I've had so much difficulty maintaining a similar balance throughout this past semester. But I know, because I remember, that it's not fundamentally impossible for me to juggle multiple priorities in different realities. I often tend to look back on my fandom experiences in terms of mistakes that I try (with varying degrees of success) to avoid repeating, and while I accept the value of learning from the times I've stumbled, that doesn't mean I can't also learn from my successes. So maybe it's time to look back and try to figure out the things that I did right, because it's pretty obvious that there were a few of them.

And just for the record? Even after all this time, I still look back on the fandom-related project in question with a profound, if occasionally bittersweet, fondness. The love never really left.

Okay, so, Recycled Notes, because it counts as a whole 'nother fandom by now, and is kind of immensely important to me...

It is, as previously mentioned, an InsaneJournal/LARP game in which a few friends and I have been engaging; it is based on the reincarnation RPs that, to the best of my recollection and mllelaurel's, were khirsah's brainchild: The Phoenix Effect, Eternal City, Shadowlands... mllelaurel was a participant in all three, around 2005-2006, and shared various themes and details with me, and - perhaps more importantly - with wired_lizard.

The premise: The cast of Death Note has been reincarnated in the modern-day United States - new bodies, new lives, new names, new memories. Most of them do not know each other at first, and all of them begin this life without any knowledge of the previous one. So far so good?

Until, that is, a particular set of circumstances - meeting someone whom they knew from before, for instance, or an experience or thought process that hits a little too close to home - "awares" them; that is, triggers the return of the memories.

( The characters... )