Giving

“If you think you’ve given other a lot but they are still unhappy with what you gave them, then you need to start thinking about whether you’ve given what they want/need.”
~dialogue from the Hong Kong TV drama, Between Love and Desire.

Does this resonate with any of you? It certainly does with me, especially in light of recent events.

I’ve put in oblique references to these events before in earlier blog posts but let me talk about them directly here to provide the context for how this quote relates to me on a personal level. But before I do that, let me start at the beginning, which is the collaborative epub venture started at the Citadel – my chosen virtual writer’s home, a site for writers and gamers (or most likely writer-gamers). It started some time towards the end of last year and we released the first issue of Excursions from the Citadel on 1 March this year. We are now working on issue 2 and I will exit this enterprise as a writer after the publication of issue 3.

Why am I exiting? The predominant reason is that I find myself a bad match to the enterprise which needs a writer that can produce a short story that’s ready for public eyes within a set time period of about 3 months. I am just not that type of writer. I talked about this before but what I’ve never made clear explicitly is that there is a secondary reason that has at least 20% weighting in terms of pushing me towards the decision of leaving the venture that I had helped to build from the ground up and invested substantially in both in terms of time and emotion. By the way, I know this to be true of the original circle of 3 who were the only contributing authors towards issue 1 of Excursions. And yet despite this common passion, periodic rows always erupt between me and a specific person out of my two collaborators. Both of us had exploded at the other, one each across the two issues respectively. Big and small disagreements and arguments have peppered all throughout our collaborations and it just made me absolutely exhausted. But this is not a rant post and I will stop here in terms of talking about contexts. Also, the good news is that despite this personal disagreement, I parted from the epub and this particular collaborator of mine in peace.

Now, onto the actual meat of this post. I’ve been reflecting on this rather nasty turn in the communication and relationship between me and this collaborator of mine (who I actually considered friend at one point). There were multiple contributing factors of course but I really feel that the crux of the matter lies in the opening quote. I think that each of us believe in some sense that we had done a lot for the other that was underappreciated (he specifically said this in one correspondence between us and I must say that I echoed this sentiment too and told him so in my own way later on). I would say that we are correct in thinking that we each had given a lot to the other in terms of support in our respective creative endeavours and tolerance of unintentional bad choice of wording etc. But what I now feel is that each and both of us should take the opening quote to heart as the lesson to be learnt out of our disagreement and parting. When we peel back all of our emotions and just examine cold hard facts, I think we will find that we have each compromised on the other’s behalf but what often happens is that we ‘forget’ this about the other’s efforts and sacrifices in the heat of our emotions and unconsciously revert back to demanding having what we each wanted fully. But this means that we each become stuck in our subjective realities and that’s not a way we can operate on a long term basis as collaborators. The opening quote gets me out of this unhealthy mindset and now I would share it with everyone.

Anyway, this is the end of my own reflection. What about yours? Care to share below?