Sometimes people hit a place in their life where things are going really well. They like their job and are able to be productive at it; they have energy after work to pursue the relationships and activities they enjoy; they’re taking good care of themselves and rarely get sick or have flareups of their chronic health problems; stuff is basically working out. Then a small thing about their routine changes and suddenly they’re barely keeping their head above water.
(This happens to me all the time; it’s approximately my dominant experience of working full-time.)
I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.
It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice – they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”
When you know what’s important to you, you can fight for it, or at least be equipped to notice right away if it goes and some of your ability to thrive goes with it. When you don’t, or when you’re thinking of all these things as ‘nice things about my life’ rather than ‘load-bearing bits of my flourishing as a person’, you’re not likely to notice the strain created when they vanish until you’re really, really hurting.
Almost two weeks after reading this, and I’m still kind of blown away at what a ridiculously fruitful definition this is. Like I had no idea that load bearing things were a thing that needed to have a word for them, but now I’m like holy shit I’m so glad that there’s now a word I can use to refer to this really important class of Thing.
This is astounding. Load-bearing. Forget spoons, this concept is wonderful. I’m going to update my Spear Theory with this.
i just wanted to take the time to say that i love ao3’s exclude feature so much
Oh god, please delete the extra spaces between paragraphs in your fics on AO3. Please. I know it takes ages and it’s really annoying to do, but it is an immediate backspace away from your story if I’m on mobile because I get one sentence per page and acres of white space.
I can help! There is an easy way to do this if you have a word processor! Instructions with screencaps follow:
1. Before you paste your text into the Ao3 text box, make sure “Rich Text” is clicked.
2. Paste your story into the Ao3 text box (like you usually do)
3. Instead of hitting post, go back and click “HTML.” Your story will suddenly show the HTML markup, including all those pesky extra spaces:
4. Open a new, blank document in your word processor. Copy all the text from the Ao3 window and paste it there.
5. Do a find / replace for all the lines that say “<p> </p>”, replacing them with nothing.
6. Now you have a document with HTML markup and no extra carriage returns.
7. Copy this and open up your Ao3 window again. MAKE SURE “HTML” IS CLICKED. Paste your nice new text into this window.
8. When you click “Rich Text” again, your story will look beautiful and have no extra spaces!!!!!!
9. Now you can post your story!
10. Congratulate yourself on your amazingness, win $100,000,000,000,000, become best friends with Idris Elba, roll around with a pile of happy puppies
oh look! @thepurrbutton i may be able to give you chapters with proper spacing again!
Also! You can stop it from doing this in the first place by using the right settings in your word processor. From the Rich Text Editor (RTE) help text (linked from the question mark next to “Type or paste formatted text.”):
Press Enter once between paragraphs. Pressing Enter twice will insert a blank paragraph, creating additional, and likely unwanted, space between paragraphs when you paste into the RTE. The Archive uses top and bottom margins to create the appearance of a blank line between paragraphs; you can use the paragraph formatting options in your text editor to create a similar effect without adding extra <p> tags.
In Google Docs, you can go to the “Format" menu, choose “Line spacing,” and then choose “Custom spacing.” It will let you set how much space you want before and after paragraphs.
In LibreOffice, go to the “Format” menu and choose “Paragraph.” Under the “Spacing” heading, there will be options for Above and Below paragraph.
Those are the only programs I have handy, but generally, you want to look in the formatting menu for something about either paragraphs or spacing, and you’ll find a similar option there. You can then use any amount of spacing that’s pleasing to your eye and it will still have AO3′s usual amount of spacing between paragraphs.
(I could teal deer about all the whys involved – why did fandom start hitting Enter twice, why do paragraphs on computers and paper have different amounts of vertical space, why does the RTE not know what to do when given text where someone hit enter twice, why don’t we we change the parser if we can’t change the RTE – but that’s probably a little more detail than necessary to be helpful.)
To set paragraph spacing in Scrivener (Windows), go to the “Tools” menu and select “Options.” Select the “Editor” tab. Click inside the window with text, then click the line spacing menu:
Select “More…” and you’ll see this pop-up:
Set “Before” and “After” in the “Spacing” section to whatever you want. They start at 0.00 and I just increased them until I liked the look of the text. There, now you only have to hit Enter once!
If you do end up having to go back and backspace the lines, it’s a great opportunity to do one last edit as well!
just moving along like everyone else 