Writing about yourself: both terrifying and rewarding

The odyssey goes on. It’s not easy to find the time to write, stream yourself doing it and everything, but, for now, everything seems to be going fine.

Every time I’m about to start the stream, I feel some butterflies in my stomach and ask myself if I should really do it. Not just the stream, but the whole idea surrounding the book. It’s scary but I keep going.

And, at least for now, I’m glad I’m doing it, I’m glad that every time I feel like giving up, I have this amazing husband telling me not to and I’m glad I’ve been listening to him.

This whole experience was about helping other Aspie women and parents that might be dealing with such a problem with their kids and might be scared and lost, but it has also helped me out quite a bit. Talking about it, getting me to stop hiding was one of the best things I could’ve ever done. It brought some blogs about the subject, some people on Twitter and basically a whole new world into my life. Into the spotlight, so to say.

So many things are becoming clearer as I keep talking with other Aspies and reading about their experiences and struggles, as well as sharing my own. It feels great.

Despite the incredibly little amount of time I have in which to write, the book keeps evolving and my enthusiasm about it does not dwindle.

Thank you. All of you!

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Writing LIVE: A challenge

Here I am, talking about my new project again. When I first decided to start doing it, I already knew that it would be a great challenge and that I would have to deal with a lot of things at the same time. But now, after completing the first chapter and some more drafts on a few of the other ones, I have a more accurate idea of how challenging this will be.

The first chapter talks about my childhood and it made me remember a lot of small things that I thought I had forgotten. That’s not the bad part though, it actually helped me understand some of my past choices and made me think about my evolution as an individual, realizing how I became the person I am today.

But, it also made me realize that there are a lot of people implicated in this book. People who knew me, people who, even if I hide behind a pseudonym, will recognize the story and identify me and the situation I’m talking about. People who might want to remain unidentified.

I knew this would be a reality as soon as I published the book, or whenever someone who knew me dropped by Twitch and by pure chance stumble upon one of my broadcasts, right? Right? No. Actually, I was focused on so many things, but never on the fact that some people who are closer to me in real life, would see or know that I was working on this and it might contain some information that concerns them (even if anonymously). Therefor, it’s harder to exposed myself to these people than to the rest of the world. I can’t really give you a detailed explanation as to why, but it is.

So, I started to think “What am I really afraid of here?”. Was it the fact that some people would not believe some of it? Or the fact that they would, or at least might? Do I fear that they would start treating me differently? Am I afraid of what they might think about me, or is it about the fact that I decided to expose myself and somehow, in some way, expose a part of themselves as well?

It’s everything and it’s nothing. It turns out that it’s just really scary.

But that’s not the only challenge. After 5 minutes LIVE on Stream, I realized how hard writing here can be, knowing people are reading at the same time the ideas are popping out of my mind. It’s a lot of things to worry about at the same time, really.

First I tried to write with the camera. It was hard. I felt the need to talk to the people who were watching, explain what I was doing, and at the same time, keep writing. It was exhausting and the ideas didn’t seem to come so naturally. I tried to write, explain, answer the chat’s multiple questions and comments and, in the end, I had written about 2 or 3 pages, full of tiny mistakes and lacking quite a bit of information. It clearly wasn’t working all that well.

I tried to think about some alternatives and eventually the idea of giving up on this definitely crossed my mind, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I have a goal with this book and I really want it to work, so I looked for other streamers that were writing LIVE, in their own broadcasts.

Despite the fact that their work is quite different, since it’s mostly fiction, they didn’t seem to share some of my concerns or feel some of my issues. Since the truth is that they were writing as well, I decided to see how they went about it. I quickly noticed that some, quite a lot of them, didn’t use a camera.

I decided to try it this way, and guess what… it helped! It actually, made me feel safer in my own environment somehow. But, it has some other problems too. When you have a camera and a microphone, you can often keep people entertained, even in the moments you are not doing anything. You can think out loud and sometimes they even interact with you due to those thoughts, or even interact and exchange ideas amongst themselves, but this way, without any visual feedback of what YOU are doing, the human being, there was a lot more dead time or dead air. Nothing was happening, because I was often thinking, not writing…

This was really frustrating and, for a while, I thought that this was a really bad idea and I should give up before it was too late. Next day I thought: too late for what? Get over it!

Then I tried again. This time, I made some preparations before stream. I fed my baby right before starting the stream (so one less thing to worry about), wrote some ideas that I wanted to explore on a piece of paper and decided to hit that start button. The ideas on that paper worked like a guideline and before I had even realized, it had been almost 2 hours of relaxed writing! Actually, for quite some time there, I think I actually forgot I was LIVE.

Though this was easier this time, it still didn’t prove easy. But I’m pretty sure, that in the end it will be worth it. Next chapter: adolescence.

New project: a first, in so many ways

Today, I’m here to talk about my new project, which is different from everything I have done until now and it has been making me really proud because it takes me out of my comfort zone.

For starters, it is a non-fiction book, which is, in itself, a first, since my passion is to construct imaginary stories, people and all sorts of events and reactions to them. But this one has no intention of entertaining, this book intends to make a statement and show people a different reality, all through the POV of one who is different.

I thought a lot before I, myself, could even accept that I should indeed write it. It would demand a lot of self exposure from me and I was afraid. But the truth is, there are other people out there who are also afraid, who are perhaps lost and I feel as though this book might help them.

Children, teenagers and even adults with Asperger’s Syndrome face many a hardship and difficulty along the way. I have what I can call, just a slight degree of Asperger’s, but I can certainly understand these situations better than the so-called normal people, if there even is such a thing as normal people.

I thought this might be a bad idea, since I can’t deal with the pity, curious eyes and confused looks, not even those that mean well, trying to be supportive. I don’t need support, I need understanding, so that people might leave me alone whenever that’s really all I need. I need peace of mind and a lot of personal space. Don’t we all?

And this is probably the main message of this book. We aren’t weird, we aren’t so different from all other people. We just have some additional challenges and difficulties dealing with frustration and crowds…

Every single thing around us, even the ones you can probably easily ignore because they aren’t important, we can’t. So we’re over-stimulated all the time. It causes headaches, dizziness and an overwhelming feeling that makes us want to scream aloud all the time. Sometimes, we feel like the world is trying to suffocate us. Are these descriptions so hard to understand? I wouldn’t think so, instead thinking it’d be just a matter of unfamiliarity and usually most of the things we don’t know, scare us… But then again, I don’t really know. I too, don’t walk in your shoes.

Still, I decided that I would be selfish if I could end up helping someone and I didn’t even try. I truly believe that reading this book will help not only the people with the syndrome (Asperger’s), but also those close to them, especially the parents, because sometimes, they are the ones who most need this help.

Since I became a mother, I have grown really understanding and supportive of parents. Any little thing, let alone some condition, is a worry, and Asperger’s Syndrome raises some tough questions about the future of the child. Will be my son or daughter become independent? Will he or she have a normal life? What’s going to happen when I leave this world? How will he or she survive?

These are the questions that most of the parents, myself included, sometimes ask themselves when looking at their sweet babies. So, I hope I’ll somewhat help in answering some of them and thus remove, or at least diminish, some lingering fears. Those terrible enemies of parenthood, fear and doubt.

The other big reason why this is a completely new project for me is because I’m writing it LIVE, as in, broadcasting myself, my workflow and thought process, all while writing the book and I’m doing it on twitch.tv.  It wasn’t an incredible new thought, actually I had already wanted to do something like this before, but never had the guts to go through with it. Yet, somehow this project sounded like a good idea to start holding my #writing_streams. That’s a new and exciting way of reaching people, allowing them to ask questions and share some fears, worries and experiences.

It’s a lot of work and I’m not sure about the final result of the whole experience, but if it ends up helping even one person, it’ll have been worth it.

Sombras – Shadows

Aqui fica um pequeno vídeo sobre o meu mais recente livro. Espero que gostem. 🙂

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Check out this video about my latest book. I hope you enjoy it.

Shadows – Sombras

There were no need for words between them, in order to know what either of them was thinking.