*weak smile* Salutations.

I know I said I'd have the next one shot ready by the fourteenth. I know it's the sixteenth now. I can't promise that it'll go up tomorrow, or the day after, or even this week. Probably not even this month. If you care to know why, read on. If you don't care, which is perfectly valid, thanks for reading my work, and have a lovely day, as always!

To put it as simply as I can, I need a break. My mental health, which is never great in the best of times, but not awful, has been deteriorating hard and fast over the past week and a half.

Disclaimer: I know this runs the risk of being seen as a sob story. Remember that I am in no danger, only unhappy and frustrated with myself. I've tried to be as forthcoming as I can, because I know I can't be the only one struggling, and as writers, we can all support each other.

I don't talk about what goes on in my head a lot, but I have a few things working in conjunction. The first are my unreasonable expectations for myself. Holding myself to an incredibly high standard is sometimes useful, but for the most part it only makes me feel like a failure if I don't meet them, or sometimes I will meet them, but I don't surpass them, and it's not enough for me.

Second, I have a very low self-esteem and I find that I often ground my identity in things that aren't stable, such as my own intelligence or abilities. If I fail to meet the expectations I set up for myself, then it shakes me to my very core. I tell myself that I'm a failure, and that I don't deserve to have my friends love and value me, and that I'm a dead weight to them, and they're just humoring me. Which on a base level, I know is not true. And yet, I believe it anyway.'

Third, I chronically procrastinate. Because for my formative years, I never struggled in school, I never developed good study habits and if I'm not immediately good at something, I get mad at myself, and lose interest and/or don't try and improve because I don't want others to see me as something less than the perfection I hold myself too. This in particular is the reason for this break. School has been tearing at my expectations to myself, and because I have such a lack of motivation to improve, for fear others will see that I'm not good at something, I procrastinate doing homework I don't understand because I'm afraid of even showing myself that I'm not good at things. My grades have drastically decreased in a few classes, and bonus three, my anxiety for leaving you all without anything grew worse and worse, and things came to a head.

justapercyjacksonfan, you say, none of those are actually mental illnesses. They may be toxic mindsets, but they aren't a legitimate mental illness, you're being overdramatic.

Maybe I am? You're absolutely right, they aren't mental illnesses. But they are the major contributing factors to making every day feel like shit right now. And maybe those aren't mental illnesses, but I do have a legitimate mental illness, in my literal phobia.

Side note PSA about phobias: people often use the words fear and phobia interchangeably, which is inaccurate. To put it simply, if I see something my brain judges to be the object of my phobia, I go into fight of flight mode. Instantly. If I hear something that reminds me of a sound I once heard when in the presence of my phobia, fight of flight. If I smell something (usually a specific hand sanitizer, actually) that I smelled when near my phobia, fight or flight. If someone starts talking about it, I'm in survival mode. My brain misfires fear into one specific thing. And while I'm not going to name it, because I don't want to give anyone I don't trust on a personal level that sort leverage over me, this particular object is in pictures and being talked about all the time nowadays by everybody. And while someone with a phobia of shark can simply stay away from the ocean, I, once every few years, have to seek out my phobia. It's as bad as it sounds.

Usually, that's all fine, I deal with it everyday. But now everyone around me has been telling me I need to be thinking about the future, and what I want to do with the rest of my life, when they treated me like nothing more than a silly child barely a few months ago. Being aroace, my personal goals in life don't follow 'get married, have kids' heteronormative convention, and my only passion is in writing, an incredibly unstable career. Going into something more viable would mean doing something I hate every day of my life, but there's a suffocating sort of pressure around me to pursue it anyway.

The hiatus might be until the end of February, it might be a few months. I just need time to myself to decide what my next few years are going to look like before I can think about fanfic.

I treasure each and every one of you who read that all the way through, especially because I'm just some girl on the internet who writes fanfic you sometimes enjoy.

XOXO

Maggie

PS, if you need more content while I'm gone, Camp Jupiter - War Games! contains more one-shots that are pretty similar to these ones. And I know what I'm doing-The Sacrifice of a Child was indeed posted on Valentine's Day.

Finally, Milkshake and Cookies, just make whatever changes to the doc in FFN and save changes. Then go to publish; manage stories; select the right story; Content/chapters; replace/update chapter; then select the chapter you want to replace and the updated doc. There you go!

I'll replace this with the next chapter whenever I come back. And I will come back/

Have a lovely day/week/month everyone!

It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could. But you were still alive.

-Terry Pratchett