Hi, Eoin.
I feel very close to you today, dear memory. I have been listening to your voice. It has been... over five months, I think... since the last time I listened to your voice, and that sound, so familiar, carries an amazing weight of nostalgia now.
I know you must be doing okay, for now, because you're part of a podcast now. Maybe later, I will come back and add a hyperlink to it into this post, but not yet. Not today. I'm a little afraid that you'd see the back-link somehow, and find me here, watching you, and that that would make you uncomfortable. So as much as I would love for you, for this person you are now, your voice still familiar, your jokes told with the same friendly sass... but not to me... As much as I might love to see you turn and see me watching you, I do not rustle the branches. I stay quiet and hidden and permit you not to be any more likely to notice me than you already are, for I've posted links to my blog sometimes on Facebook and I think once, the preview line visible from there held your name.
It's so good to hear you laughing again. And Gearoid and Troy, too. I miss hanging out at your house, listening to you banter with them like this, at home and happy and comfortable. I miss listening to you talk about the games you love, and shows you love, and things you do. I hope I will one day be welcome again to stand awkwardly at hand, listening. Trying sometimes to find something to contribute by saying. Even feeling self-consciously out of place there, but still allowed to be there, listening, enjoying the stories... and talking to you about them afterwards.
Maybe someday I will play games with you again. I hope so. You're so fun-loving. It's... relaxing just being around that, sometimes. It... was, I mean.
While looking through Steam today after nabbing a game which was released for free as an anniversary promotion, I stumbled across something I had remembered only dimly for some time. The Beginner's Guide... And I remember, like vision, like the physical world coming back as a dream fades. I remember sitting and laying on your bed and exploring it, rapt with attention. I remember the prison cell which ostensibly would originally have trapped the player for hours. I remember the trick-door which kept coming back or something, although I'm not sure I remember the trick to it. I remember three figures with blank faces, asking questions about how I got there, and how to move forward. I remember a huge room full of bubbles with comments in them. I remember a combination lock without any clues to the combination. I remember a man standing at a podium. I remember a red curtain around a stage, and a gun which shattered the scenery into blank whiteness... I remember a house full of little things to fix. Little chores to keep up, maintenance to be done. I remember liking that part. It seemed... peaceful.
I remember sitting with you and speaking aloud back at the narrator about the point I thought he'd missed. I remember... rising above the maze. Do you know, Fish...? I still keep that screenshot among my wallpapers. And whenever I see it, I think of you.
I listened to your podcast while I took a long walk today, and bought some ramen. Many times, I laughed at your jokes. Not just yours, Eoin, I mean Troy's and Gearoid's too. I'm glad you're okay. I'm glad you're talking about things that you love. I'm glad that I can listen to your voice without getting in your way. If you keep doing this, then there may be a way that I can have your good humour and your cheeky cleverness in my life even if you don't want to talk again when I land.
When I land. Dear memory... I haven't written this here yet. But last week, I got my first offer of placement back from an Irish college. Dear memory, the only condition set out in that offer is that I successfully finish my diploma and hand in my transcript by May 30th. Dear memory, I don't even have to get good marks in my classes, I only have to pass them. Dear memory...
I am coming.
I hope I will get more than one offer. I hope I will have a reason to contact you and ask which one I ought to choose, a lapse in the silence that's existed between us for more than five months. But even if this is the only choice I am given... I am coming. It's gone from "hope" and "maybe" and "trying" to something more solid.
The day after I received the email, I woke up in my bed, and squirmed gradually to consciousness, and my first conscious thought was to repeat, in my mind, I could buy my plane ticket today. I'm going to Ireland. Where to head after I land may not be set in stone, but I have my confirmation now. There is at least one answer available to that question. I'm going to Ireland. Coming to Ireland. I'm coming back, and I'm coming for you. It sings in my heart so intensely it turns almost to a shriek when I think about it. Like a perfect tone, sweet and high and pure and so loud it could shatter glass.
There is still much to be done first, but the greatest hurdle, the most doubtful issue has been cleared. The rest is details. Details which will fill my days, my nights, my schedule, until mid-August.
And this is why I felt it was now an acceptable time to look through your Facebook page again, and see a couple sorta recent pictures. And I found your new podcast there, and I've been listening to it. It's close enough now, somehow. It doesn't feel distant and stalkery the same way it did once before, because I expect I may have cause to actually be in touch within just another two weeks.
It all comes down to this... and now I hear you laughing and joking with your friends, just like you used to. And something in me that had worried that you might be somehow a very changed person now, someone less likely to like me... something of that fear melts away. You will very likely have changed somehow... but you laugh the same. In your most recent pictures on Facebook, your smile is as I knew it before I left. That's Eoin alright. And that's something right about the world. Something happy. Right now, it must be night time in Ireland, though it's yet early evening here. Goodnight, Eoin. May you rest healthfully and wake happy. I love you.
Thursday, April 19, 2018
Sunday, April 15, 2018
The Old Storyteller Barney McCaffrey
I've been watching a sort of mini-documentary on old stories from the valley where I grew up, presented by a man I remember from my childhood, Barney McCaffrey. He's dead now, but I remember him as one of the things that I think contributed to my feeling so attached to my own Irish heritage. He was a great local character, a story-teller. Half-Irish and half-Polish, so he adopted the area by Killaloe and Wilno as his home. Whenever there was a party or a significant social gathering about Wilno, he'd be there. Playing his accordion and singing songs and telling all manner of stories.
My father would take me to those sorts of things often enough, and sometimes my mother would too, when I was young. So much so that the sound of people playing live music some distance away or old classic rock through a radio makes me a little sleepy even to this day, because it reminds me of falling asleep in my mother's or father's car after I'd got tired, but they still wanted to stay and keep having fun.
I wonder now how much my love of stories and the tradition of telling them in songs and poems may've been shaped by Barney McCaffrey and characters like him.
My father would take me to those sorts of things often enough, and sometimes my mother would too, when I was young. So much so that the sound of people playing live music some distance away or old classic rock through a radio makes me a little sleepy even to this day, because it reminds me of falling asleep in my mother's or father's car after I'd got tired, but they still wanted to stay and keep having fun.
I wonder now how much my love of stories and the tradition of telling them in songs and poems may've been shaped by Barney McCaffrey and characters like him.
Sunday, April 8, 2018
Needing To Be Useful
This tale of my past is derived mostly from a long conversation I had with my friends yesterday. I recreate it here, slightly edited for better reading and accuracy. May it help anyone who wishes to know me, to understand some of my perspective. May it help anyone who is currently suffering similarly, to know that they are not alone.
I was an outsider, in my mind, for most of my life through elementary and high school. I did not expect anyone to want to be around me, even when I was at home. I grew to escape my fear of social rejection by getting caught on blades in my mind. I was considering dying for a long swath of it, because I thought it would remove me as a burden of unwelcome obligation on my parents, and on society at large. So I tried to imagine nonexistence... which is impossible. And I tried to imagine hell... which is vague enough that it can be endlessly iterated on as progressively worse forms of torture.
I do not recommend this strategy to anyone.
My parents did not deny me by rigidly insisting that I should be Christian, or Muslim, or a doctor, or any such thing; they were simply busy with their own affairs and generally seemed to want little more of me than to not to get in the way, and to not spend more hours than they felt was permissable in front of a television or computer screen. I felt that they neither noticed nor cared that I was suffering.
Although, when I came back from my year of travel to Australia at the age of nineteen, my father confessed to me that he had been concerned sometimes that he would lose me to my shadows.
I was kind of exasperated that he hadn't said that at the time, and I believe I told him so.
For the most part, I consider my parents to be a feature of my past. To a large degree, I consider them to have failed me, and myself not to owe them much of anything. Family is those who understand and support me, wherever I find them.
However, I am still open to visiting my father again to say hi and try to catch up before I leave the country. I like him, in some ways. He is very expressive, and good at explaining and describing things. ...Sometimes people have said I talk like him.
Anyway, I couldn't bring myself to die. Both the consequences and the means were too terrifying to accept. I saw the potential, but it made me horribly squeamish. I squirmed whenever I looked at a sharp knife, or even when someone close to me was holding something as innocuous (but potentially lethal) as a sewing needle. Sometimes, I still do.
And also, I have to admit, I was not actually convinced that it would be doing the world a favour if I died, since I recognized that a lot of heroes in stories came from outsider status, and hoped that I could be like them, although not with much confidence attached to the hope. Perhaps it seemed to me at the time that this could have been desperate denial of an unpleasant truth. I think while I was so young, it did not occur to me to believe in cynical denial of a hopeful truth. At least not in myself.
I became deeply obsessed with proving my own worth, establishing my own right-to-exist. A cognitive habit which is so ingrained, its shape is still reflected in many of the ways I think that were built and updated around it, even if the existential urgency that originally drove that obsession is weakening now as I heal my mental habits.
I tried to do what heroes in stories would do; hold to good, in whatever form I could see it, and to helping other people. I felt hopeful... desperately, pathetically hopeful... whenever I could do so much for my classmates as throw someone's ball back to them to save them the effort of walking to get it, even though I knew my status as a scapegoat would mean they would never invite me to play.
And I spent a lot of time walking on my own. I would walk the big track-and-field running track during recess, thinking to myself. Knowledge and wisdom derived from contemplation were useful, in theory, so if I could develop more of that... it must add to my value, my right-to-exist.
And I had a period of life when I communed with spirits. Although who can say, now, whether there was any reality in that outside my own perspective? I think even my former self at that time was in the habit of wondering whether there was any reality in it outside of her own perspective, and might have readily admitted this if anyone had ever asked her what she thought about it. Almost certainly, though, she would have been overwhelmed by that same desperate hope, because someone was actually expressing an interest in her perspective... paired with fatalistic near-certainty that the one who was asking would use anything she said as something to yell and catcall back at her later.
There was one time, she was walking the track as usual, having turned her heel and walked out on a social situation that was growing unworkable, but was followed by a whole tribe of children. My memory has likely inflated the numbers, but it seemed to me like most of my grade was following me at a short distance, booing and screaming.
And I kept walking. What else was there to do?
Someone had run up to me... it must have been winter, because they got their boot caught in the snow. When I didn't stop to help, but kept walking, I was declaimed as selfish and having "lured" them out here into the cold to die, or something like that. That may have been what set all the booing and screaming off, now that I think about it... but it is all very fuzzy.
And I came to hope, throughout this time, and through hope I came to believe, that in taking this kind of abuse on myself, someone else, somewhere, was spared it. The attention of the bullies was distracted from someone else who might otherwise have been a target, and may have had less resilience to bear it.
That, at least, would be something useful. So I thought I could live with it.
My social life drastically improved at sixteen years of age. My mother plotted with a family we knew to hold me a really nice sixteenth birthday party, away from all the kids at school I felt obligated to treat as friends whenever they would let me, even though they were not.
My mother, in a surprising display of respect and consideration, drove me far from our little village to a larger town, and drove me around the town to look for a present I would actually want, because she didn't want to waste money on something I didn't, an attitude with which I agreed wholeheartedly, and still do.
Gemstones of my birth-month? No, I wasn't really interested in gems. They were so girly and ostentatious. A bicycle? A good idea, but I already had one, my father's girlfriend had got it for me.
I didn't find anything else I particularly cared for at any of the other shops we went to either, and my mother was growing frustrated with the failure to find an appropriate gift, so I recommended we go to the used book store. There might be a book there by Terry Pratchett or Spider Robinson that I hadn't read yet, and although it would be a small thing, I knew I liked those.
In the used bookstore, I found two large, hardcover books that quickly drew my fascinated attention. They were two of the three core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons, edition 3.5. And I knew I had found The Thing. They were expensive enough that my mother was very reluctant to buy them for me, especially given that there was one missing, and I would need to have all three. But maybe she just didn't understand why a set of three hardcover books should be worth so much.
Here, I feel I need to back up and explain the context of my desire. I had been trying to invent Dungeons & Dragons from scratch since I was six or something. I had made a habit, from a very early age, of drawing mazes, and putting dots in them with different colours of markers, to represent monsters and treasures, and trying to get my half-brother to play the adventure with me.
I knew to call the person who built the maze and filled it with monsters the "dungeon master", so I guess I must have picked a lot of that idea up from things I'd heard some older kids saying. Almost certainly Levi and Nathan, the two boys closest to our age (although still older) of a farming family we knew, and which my father would often visit, bringing my half-brother and me along. We would spend time with Levi and Nathan whenever our family was visiting theirs, often running off to play in the woods near their farm. We especially liked the game of trying to dam up tiny streams, and keep building and repairing the dam as the water that was pooled behind it grew wider and higher.
But anyway. Although I suspect I must have seen or heard the older boys playing or talking about it, I don't think I had ever actually realized that Dungeons & Dragons... really existed? I thought they were just talking about video games, maybe, or trying to recreate video games without a computer. I did not realize at the time that the video games had actually been recreations of D&D.
So finding these rulebooks, to me in my teenagerdom, was a little like discovering the tomb of King Tut. I managed to convince my mother that yes, these books were something I really wanted, and it would make me very happy to have them, as long as she could get me the third one too. She bought them, and I started reading voraciously as soon as I got back in the car. She actually had to prompt me to look up after we had pulled in and parked in the driveway of the other family's house, so that I would notice that they had put up a big paper banner across the front of the house, that said HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN EMILY. It was, I have to admit, a really nice gesture.
My mother and the mother of this family were friends, and I got along pretty well with her two children. There was a boy named Victor who tended to be very loud, so much so that between us we named a measure of volume someone was shouting at, "the Victor scale". There was also a girl, whose name was not connected to such a mnemonic, and so I do not remember it. Possibly it was Tammy. I remember her being small, slender and creative in ways that reminded me of a pixie.
We spent a weekend there. We had KFC on my birthday (a rare luxury), and I spent most of that weekend reading and plotting, and convinced Victor and Tammy to play the game with me, even though we didn't have the Player's Handbook, which is the most important one. But we would need dice. They brought me to a hobby store in town that sold the right kind. My mother didn't want to spend any more money on me, but I couldn't play the game without any dice, so I presented the greatest compromise I felt I could. I would get just one die, and I would choose it out of the factory seconds box, which was cheapest.
I looked through the box for a 20-sided die that I liked. I think it was a black one with red numbers. We would have to make do, but we could, because you could simulate rolling any other die with fewer sides by rolling a d20, you just had to divide the numbers up evenly, and roll again if you got one of the leftovers. I drew a conversion table for this purpose. In retrospect, my sixteen year old self, in her excitement about this, registers to me as incredibly cute.
Later that summer, after a copy of the Player's Handbook had been provided to me and I had thoroughly studied all three core rulebooks, I started to prepare a real game, for more than just a weekend out of town. I pulled out a book and craft set I'd been given previously about proper forms of writing with quill-pens and practiced the art just so that I could write prop documents, and place-names on my maps, with the proper medieval flair.
I painted an overworld map on a big piece of newsprint that I had deliberately stained with coffee to look old, and tore all the edges so they'd be ragged. And I planned an adventure and where it would begin, with an opening scene like a cinematic from a video game, and a great big complicated wonderful dungeon to be the first adventure. I invited the other kids my age at the youth group I usually spent time at to come and make characters so they could play with me, and nagged at the ones who expressed an interest until I succeeded in dragging them away from playing Halo on the x-box to come and do it.
And I ran my game.
It became an established feature of the Thursday youth group, every week.
Sometimes, the players would even invite me over to their houses so I could run the game on the weekends.
And my heart was full of joy and validation, because for what seemed like the first time in my life, there was a reason people wanted to have me around.
Even if it wasn't because of who I was... just that I brought the game.
My morale and creativity improved tremendously. I would draw battle scenes and characters and maps in the margins of worksheets at school. I embraced that role as hard as I could over the next couple of years.
I told this story to a couple of my friends over voice chat on Discord not all that long ago, and I think I could hear one of them choke up a little when I got to the end, because in the end, it comes around again to how all this happiness was due to the relief of a loneliness and sense of worthlessness so unendurably desperate that even though I still didn't think my players necessarily liked me, it changed my whole life.
And it is sad. I get it. I agree, and in fact I'm really glad I have friends who can understand how sad it was. But when I look back, I can't help but remember the happiness too, and smile a bit.
The heart celebrates, when it finds a situation which is even marginally less bad.
I was an outsider, in my mind, for most of my life through elementary and high school. I did not expect anyone to want to be around me, even when I was at home. I grew to escape my fear of social rejection by getting caught on blades in my mind. I was considering dying for a long swath of it, because I thought it would remove me as a burden of unwelcome obligation on my parents, and on society at large. So I tried to imagine nonexistence... which is impossible. And I tried to imagine hell... which is vague enough that it can be endlessly iterated on as progressively worse forms of torture.
I do not recommend this strategy to anyone.
My parents did not deny me by rigidly insisting that I should be Christian, or Muslim, or a doctor, or any such thing; they were simply busy with their own affairs and generally seemed to want little more of me than to not to get in the way, and to not spend more hours than they felt was permissable in front of a television or computer screen. I felt that they neither noticed nor cared that I was suffering.
Although, when I came back from my year of travel to Australia at the age of nineteen, my father confessed to me that he had been concerned sometimes that he would lose me to my shadows.
I was kind of exasperated that he hadn't said that at the time, and I believe I told him so.
For the most part, I consider my parents to be a feature of my past. To a large degree, I consider them to have failed me, and myself not to owe them much of anything. Family is those who understand and support me, wherever I find them.
However, I am still open to visiting my father again to say hi and try to catch up before I leave the country. I like him, in some ways. He is very expressive, and good at explaining and describing things. ...Sometimes people have said I talk like him.
Anyway, I couldn't bring myself to die. Both the consequences and the means were too terrifying to accept. I saw the potential, but it made me horribly squeamish. I squirmed whenever I looked at a sharp knife, or even when someone close to me was holding something as innocuous (but potentially lethal) as a sewing needle. Sometimes, I still do.
And also, I have to admit, I was not actually convinced that it would be doing the world a favour if I died, since I recognized that a lot of heroes in stories came from outsider status, and hoped that I could be like them, although not with much confidence attached to the hope. Perhaps it seemed to me at the time that this could have been desperate denial of an unpleasant truth. I think while I was so young, it did not occur to me to believe in cynical denial of a hopeful truth. At least not in myself.
I became deeply obsessed with proving my own worth, establishing my own right-to-exist. A cognitive habit which is so ingrained, its shape is still reflected in many of the ways I think that were built and updated around it, even if the existential urgency that originally drove that obsession is weakening now as I heal my mental habits.
I tried to do what heroes in stories would do; hold to good, in whatever form I could see it, and to helping other people. I felt hopeful... desperately, pathetically hopeful... whenever I could do so much for my classmates as throw someone's ball back to them to save them the effort of walking to get it, even though I knew my status as a scapegoat would mean they would never invite me to play.
And I spent a lot of time walking on my own. I would walk the big track-and-field running track during recess, thinking to myself. Knowledge and wisdom derived from contemplation were useful, in theory, so if I could develop more of that... it must add to my value, my right-to-exist.
And I had a period of life when I communed with spirits. Although who can say, now, whether there was any reality in that outside my own perspective? I think even my former self at that time was in the habit of wondering whether there was any reality in it outside of her own perspective, and might have readily admitted this if anyone had ever asked her what she thought about it. Almost certainly, though, she would have been overwhelmed by that same desperate hope, because someone was actually expressing an interest in her perspective... paired with fatalistic near-certainty that the one who was asking would use anything she said as something to yell and catcall back at her later.
There was one time, she was walking the track as usual, having turned her heel and walked out on a social situation that was growing unworkable, but was followed by a whole tribe of children. My memory has likely inflated the numbers, but it seemed to me like most of my grade was following me at a short distance, booing and screaming.
And I kept walking. What else was there to do?
Someone had run up to me... it must have been winter, because they got their boot caught in the snow. When I didn't stop to help, but kept walking, I was declaimed as selfish and having "lured" them out here into the cold to die, or something like that. That may have been what set all the booing and screaming off, now that I think about it... but it is all very fuzzy.
And I came to hope, throughout this time, and through hope I came to believe, that in taking this kind of abuse on myself, someone else, somewhere, was spared it. The attention of the bullies was distracted from someone else who might otherwise have been a target, and may have had less resilience to bear it.
That, at least, would be something useful. So I thought I could live with it.
My social life drastically improved at sixteen years of age. My mother plotted with a family we knew to hold me a really nice sixteenth birthday party, away from all the kids at school I felt obligated to treat as friends whenever they would let me, even though they were not.
My mother, in a surprising display of respect and consideration, drove me far from our little village to a larger town, and drove me around the town to look for a present I would actually want, because she didn't want to waste money on something I didn't, an attitude with which I agreed wholeheartedly, and still do.
Gemstones of my birth-month? No, I wasn't really interested in gems. They were so girly and ostentatious. A bicycle? A good idea, but I already had one, my father's girlfriend had got it for me.
I didn't find anything else I particularly cared for at any of the other shops we went to either, and my mother was growing frustrated with the failure to find an appropriate gift, so I recommended we go to the used book store. There might be a book there by Terry Pratchett or Spider Robinson that I hadn't read yet, and although it would be a small thing, I knew I liked those.
In the used bookstore, I found two large, hardcover books that quickly drew my fascinated attention. They were two of the three core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons, edition 3.5. And I knew I had found The Thing. They were expensive enough that my mother was very reluctant to buy them for me, especially given that there was one missing, and I would need to have all three. But maybe she just didn't understand why a set of three hardcover books should be worth so much.
Here, I feel I need to back up and explain the context of my desire. I had been trying to invent Dungeons & Dragons from scratch since I was six or something. I had made a habit, from a very early age, of drawing mazes, and putting dots in them with different colours of markers, to represent monsters and treasures, and trying to get my half-brother to play the adventure with me.
I knew to call the person who built the maze and filled it with monsters the "dungeon master", so I guess I must have picked a lot of that idea up from things I'd heard some older kids saying. Almost certainly Levi and Nathan, the two boys closest to our age (although still older) of a farming family we knew, and which my father would often visit, bringing my half-brother and me along. We would spend time with Levi and Nathan whenever our family was visiting theirs, often running off to play in the woods near their farm. We especially liked the game of trying to dam up tiny streams, and keep building and repairing the dam as the water that was pooled behind it grew wider and higher.
But anyway. Although I suspect I must have seen or heard the older boys playing or talking about it, I don't think I had ever actually realized that Dungeons & Dragons... really existed? I thought they were just talking about video games, maybe, or trying to recreate video games without a computer. I did not realize at the time that the video games had actually been recreations of D&D.
So finding these rulebooks, to me in my teenagerdom, was a little like discovering the tomb of King Tut. I managed to convince my mother that yes, these books were something I really wanted, and it would make me very happy to have them, as long as she could get me the third one too. She bought them, and I started reading voraciously as soon as I got back in the car. She actually had to prompt me to look up after we had pulled in and parked in the driveway of the other family's house, so that I would notice that they had put up a big paper banner across the front of the house, that said HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN EMILY. It was, I have to admit, a really nice gesture.
My mother and the mother of this family were friends, and I got along pretty well with her two children. There was a boy named Victor who tended to be very loud, so much so that between us we named a measure of volume someone was shouting at, "the Victor scale". There was also a girl, whose name was not connected to such a mnemonic, and so I do not remember it. Possibly it was Tammy. I remember her being small, slender and creative in ways that reminded me of a pixie.
We spent a weekend there. We had KFC on my birthday (a rare luxury), and I spent most of that weekend reading and plotting, and convinced Victor and Tammy to play the game with me, even though we didn't have the Player's Handbook, which is the most important one. But we would need dice. They brought me to a hobby store in town that sold the right kind. My mother didn't want to spend any more money on me, but I couldn't play the game without any dice, so I presented the greatest compromise I felt I could. I would get just one die, and I would choose it out of the factory seconds box, which was cheapest.
I looked through the box for a 20-sided die that I liked. I think it was a black one with red numbers. We would have to make do, but we could, because you could simulate rolling any other die with fewer sides by rolling a d20, you just had to divide the numbers up evenly, and roll again if you got one of the leftovers. I drew a conversion table for this purpose. In retrospect, my sixteen year old self, in her excitement about this, registers to me as incredibly cute.
Later that summer, after a copy of the Player's Handbook had been provided to me and I had thoroughly studied all three core rulebooks, I started to prepare a real game, for more than just a weekend out of town. I pulled out a book and craft set I'd been given previously about proper forms of writing with quill-pens and practiced the art just so that I could write prop documents, and place-names on my maps, with the proper medieval flair.
I painted an overworld map on a big piece of newsprint that I had deliberately stained with coffee to look old, and tore all the edges so they'd be ragged. And I planned an adventure and where it would begin, with an opening scene like a cinematic from a video game, and a great big complicated wonderful dungeon to be the first adventure. I invited the other kids my age at the youth group I usually spent time at to come and make characters so they could play with me, and nagged at the ones who expressed an interest until I succeeded in dragging them away from playing Halo on the x-box to come and do it.
And I ran my game.
It became an established feature of the Thursday youth group, every week.
Sometimes, the players would even invite me over to their houses so I could run the game on the weekends.
And my heart was full of joy and validation, because for what seemed like the first time in my life, there was a reason people wanted to have me around.
Even if it wasn't because of who I was... just that I brought the game.
My morale and creativity improved tremendously. I would draw battle scenes and characters and maps in the margins of worksheets at school. I embraced that role as hard as I could over the next couple of years.
I told this story to a couple of my friends over voice chat on Discord not all that long ago, and I think I could hear one of them choke up a little when I got to the end, because in the end, it comes around again to how all this happiness was due to the relief of a loneliness and sense of worthlessness so unendurably desperate that even though I still didn't think my players necessarily liked me, it changed my whole life.
And it is sad. I get it. I agree, and in fact I'm really glad I have friends who can understand how sad it was. But when I look back, I can't help but remember the happiness too, and smile a bit.
The heart celebrates, when it finds a situation which is even marginally less bad.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Dear Future: Remember to Be Awesome
This post isn't written to Eoin, it's written to me, Serp, in the future when I look back over my blog, with someone else or alone. Hi, Serp.
I've been doing pretty sweet, despite a long stretch of repeatedly very little sleep. Today, I found myself listening to a very cheerful song I like on repeat, and went a surprising length of time without getting sick of it. Instead, I built a happy fantasy around the song. And like last week, I decided that instead of chiding myself for my fantasy and the expression of something I cared about but might never achieve... I would see where I could follow it. In this case, I followed it into the big empty football field near my house where I could expect other people not to hear me talking to myself, imagining something delicious, and deliciously plausible, if not necessarily likely.
I paced, and thought, and recited, arranging the words of a speech. And then I turned back to the song and practiced singing it, until I got through the whole song once or twice, along with the short speech. I came back home, and wrote the speech down.
Serp, I don't know whether you made it back to Athlone or wound up somewhere else. I don't know whether Eoin is with you, or whether he ever will be. But no matter where you are, or who you're near, remember how delicious that idea was. Go back and reread it, if it helps. You have the capacity to dream beautiful dreams. And I know that someday, if you keep trying, you will be able to make some of them a reality.
Maybe the plot I schemed up today doesn't work for you where you are now. Maybe you've seen a flaw in it that I don't see. If this particular one never happens, that's alright. You can think up something else. Something better. Just... remember that it's not a waste of time to dream beautiful dreams. It's not. It gives you ideas about how to get to them. You just have to be willing to look at them in the right way. You need a little hope for a brighter day. A little love to find the way.
And remember the vlogbrothers. Remember ToadyOne. Remember Elon Musk and Eliezer's Harry and Dave Moreland and all the other people who have inspired you. Remember that you don't need to be afraid of them. Follow their lead. Don't Forget To Be Awesome.
I've been doing pretty sweet, despite a long stretch of repeatedly very little sleep. Today, I found myself listening to a very cheerful song I like on repeat, and went a surprising length of time without getting sick of it. Instead, I built a happy fantasy around the song. And like last week, I decided that instead of chiding myself for my fantasy and the expression of something I cared about but might never achieve... I would see where I could follow it. In this case, I followed it into the big empty football field near my house where I could expect other people not to hear me talking to myself, imagining something delicious, and deliciously plausible, if not necessarily likely.
I paced, and thought, and recited, arranging the words of a speech. And then I turned back to the song and practiced singing it, until I got through the whole song once or twice, along with the short speech. I came back home, and wrote the speech down.
Serp, I don't know whether you made it back to Athlone or wound up somewhere else. I don't know whether Eoin is with you, or whether he ever will be. But no matter where you are, or who you're near, remember how delicious that idea was. Go back and reread it, if it helps. You have the capacity to dream beautiful dreams. And I know that someday, if you keep trying, you will be able to make some of them a reality.
Maybe the plot I schemed up today doesn't work for you where you are now. Maybe you've seen a flaw in it that I don't see. If this particular one never happens, that's alright. You can think up something else. Something better. Just... remember that it's not a waste of time to dream beautiful dreams. It's not. It gives you ideas about how to get to them. You just have to be willing to look at them in the right way. You need a little hope for a brighter day. A little love to find the way.
And remember the vlogbrothers. Remember ToadyOne. Remember Elon Musk and Eliezer's Harry and Dave Moreland and all the other people who have inspired you. Remember that you don't need to be afraid of them. Follow their lead. Don't Forget To Be Awesome.
Dear Memory: Back and Forward
Good morning, Eoin. I've had a pretty crazy week. If I were to presume I were bipolar, I would conclude that I have begun to shift back into the manic side of my cycle. I have slept relatively little recently... Although, naturally, it doesn't help that yet again I am in a house where I have grown to resent some of my roommates, and just about every noise I hear from them, which frequently happens late at night.
On the upside, much of the effect comes from happier things. I am attending more of my classes now... Although, still not all of them. I have grown closer and more intimate with some new friends, and have done some batches of writing. A sequence of three posts here which were explicitly about rationality for once. I plan to repost them at LessWrong (I can do that, apparently; it's a community blog now, with many contributors). A short story, a little over 900 words, which captured an idea that I got caught up in my head while I was out walking. I have been out walking a lot again, too. That also feels good. I have been very happy with the success I had in capturing and conveying out the idea. I got a prettier story out of it than I expected. It's viscerally violent, and yet transhumanist and optimistic.
I joined a bunch more Discord servers, and have been actually spending some time discussing things with some people who confuse and intimidate me with their high standards and down-to-business modes of communicating. I have been managing to resist the temptation to stop and ask for reassurance that I'm actually wanted there. Partly because one of the most no-nonsense of the bunch told me frankly that I was too valuable to discard just because I was weird, and was also very open about being annoyed with me a couple of times. I haven't always understood why. But he's not making a habit of hiding it if he has an issue with me.
Besides that, I find myself thinking... If I were to ask, and he told me that I was appreciated and welcome, it probably wouldn't help me for very long. If he were to tell me I wasn't, or that it was a stretch, it wouldn't help me at all. It may simply be that he projects an attitude of such greater knowledge, and engrossed preoccupation with greater and more important affairs, that I find myself instinctively assuming that it would genuinely be a colossal waste of his time. Or perhaps, more accurately, I would expect him to find it annoying again and get another minor swat to the ego because I ought to know better. And I kind of do.
I still think it's still important I have friends I can be vulnerable with, away from this high-tension scene. And again... I do.
I finally submitted my college applications to five of the six ITs in Ireland that I had planned to. Just to wait for responses now, on that front.
I think of you often. I have often had trouble getting a half-hour of work into my applications, because facing the task brought you to mind as thoroughly as ever. I imagine singing duets with you. Dancing with you. Cooking with you. Walking with you. Do you know what I remembered, the other day?
When I first showed you my little facial expressions ice breaker game, and you decided to read your subjects first, and the first one was "OK Go". And I think I must have looked magnificently baffled. "What? I thought you were going first...?"
Do you remember it, Eoin? Ah, such fun and silly times.
In... about three hours, at 10 AM, I have a Law test to write. I actually spent a couple of hours studying for it, for once. Although, to be fair, we have a really good practice resource for this course, in the form of a bunch of content quizzes with questions of exactly the same sort as will be on the exam, which auto-grades itself and can be taken as many times as we might wish. We also get a single page of notes we're allowed to bring in with us. So I did all of the quizzes relevant to the content, and I took notes on all the questions I had a hard time remembering the right answers to, or got wrong the first time around, and the principles on which they were based.
I haven't slept, although I am tired. I might actually manage to get some rest for two of those three hours, and then more after the test. I tried laying down, but my back was stiff and sore and my mind not particularly conditioned for sleep. I had been searching through my paperwork, looking for documents relevant to filing my taxes... That may have had something to do with it. Or, then, perhaps it had less to do with that than some of the things I found that had nothing whatsoever to do with tax.
I still keep scribbed notes and poetry, and especially drawings, from many years ago, even some of the ones that just seem dumb to me at this point. I happened upon a piece of writing that wasn't fiction. It was a little bitter reminder of just how insane I've been, at my worst... the times when I felt myself and my control, slipping, slipping. If we do get back together, and I read you these blog posts... Remind me, sometime, to read you my notes from The Day Everything Changed. It is not a pretty story. It is not a proud story. But it is a true story. And I remember hearing you voice your fears to me once, when I was in one of the worse fits I ever had while I was with you, that you weren't good for me. That you might be making things worse.
I think, perhaps... you will not think so anymore, after I tell you a story, not from memory, but from a record written on the same day, and never edited or changed since, about how bad it really was, once, quite some time before I met you. And yet, still not really all that long ago. You cannot realize how far I've come, until you can see the depths where I've been. I have to admit that I had almost forgotten how very little time has passed, and how truly awful it used to be. The feeling of slipping, slipping... and being afraid, a kind of visceral, in-the-moment dread, that I might not be able to maintain control of my own actions. Not even in my usual fallback manner of shutting them down entirely.
It's amazing to me how far I've come, these past few years.
On the upside, much of the effect comes from happier things. I am attending more of my classes now... Although, still not all of them. I have grown closer and more intimate with some new friends, and have done some batches of writing. A sequence of three posts here which were explicitly about rationality for once. I plan to repost them at LessWrong (I can do that, apparently; it's a community blog now, with many contributors). A short story, a little over 900 words, which captured an idea that I got caught up in my head while I was out walking. I have been out walking a lot again, too. That also feels good. I have been very happy with the success I had in capturing and conveying out the idea. I got a prettier story out of it than I expected. It's viscerally violent, and yet transhumanist and optimistic.
I joined a bunch more Discord servers, and have been actually spending some time discussing things with some people who confuse and intimidate me with their high standards and down-to-business modes of communicating. I have been managing to resist the temptation to stop and ask for reassurance that I'm actually wanted there. Partly because one of the most no-nonsense of the bunch told me frankly that I was too valuable to discard just because I was weird, and was also very open about being annoyed with me a couple of times. I haven't always understood why. But he's not making a habit of hiding it if he has an issue with me.
Besides that, I find myself thinking... If I were to ask, and he told me that I was appreciated and welcome, it probably wouldn't help me for very long. If he were to tell me I wasn't, or that it was a stretch, it wouldn't help me at all. It may simply be that he projects an attitude of such greater knowledge, and engrossed preoccupation with greater and more important affairs, that I find myself instinctively assuming that it would genuinely be a colossal waste of his time. Or perhaps, more accurately, I would expect him to find it annoying again and get another minor swat to the ego because I ought to know better. And I kind of do.
I still think it's still important I have friends I can be vulnerable with, away from this high-tension scene. And again... I do.
I finally submitted my college applications to five of the six ITs in Ireland that I had planned to. Just to wait for responses now, on that front.
I think of you often. I have often had trouble getting a half-hour of work into my applications, because facing the task brought you to mind as thoroughly as ever. I imagine singing duets with you. Dancing with you. Cooking with you. Walking with you. Do you know what I remembered, the other day?
When I first showed you my little facial expressions ice breaker game, and you decided to read your subjects first, and the first one was "OK Go". And I think I must have looked magnificently baffled. "What? I thought you were going first...?"
Do you remember it, Eoin? Ah, such fun and silly times.
In... about three hours, at 10 AM, I have a Law test to write. I actually spent a couple of hours studying for it, for once. Although, to be fair, we have a really good practice resource for this course, in the form of a bunch of content quizzes with questions of exactly the same sort as will be on the exam, which auto-grades itself and can be taken as many times as we might wish. We also get a single page of notes we're allowed to bring in with us. So I did all of the quizzes relevant to the content, and I took notes on all the questions I had a hard time remembering the right answers to, or got wrong the first time around, and the principles on which they were based.
I haven't slept, although I am tired. I might actually manage to get some rest for two of those three hours, and then more after the test. I tried laying down, but my back was stiff and sore and my mind not particularly conditioned for sleep. I had been searching through my paperwork, looking for documents relevant to filing my taxes... That may have had something to do with it. Or, then, perhaps it had less to do with that than some of the things I found that had nothing whatsoever to do with tax.
I still keep scribbed notes and poetry, and especially drawings, from many years ago, even some of the ones that just seem dumb to me at this point. I happened upon a piece of writing that wasn't fiction. It was a little bitter reminder of just how insane I've been, at my worst... the times when I felt myself and my control, slipping, slipping. If we do get back together, and I read you these blog posts... Remind me, sometime, to read you my notes from The Day Everything Changed. It is not a pretty story. It is not a proud story. But it is a true story. And I remember hearing you voice your fears to me once, when I was in one of the worse fits I ever had while I was with you, that you weren't good for me. That you might be making things worse.
I think, perhaps... you will not think so anymore, after I tell you a story, not from memory, but from a record written on the same day, and never edited or changed since, about how bad it really was, once, quite some time before I met you. And yet, still not really all that long ago. You cannot realize how far I've come, until you can see the depths where I've been. I have to admit that I had almost forgotten how very little time has passed, and how truly awful it used to be. The feeling of slipping, slipping... and being afraid, a kind of visceral, in-the-moment dread, that I might not be able to maintain control of my own actions. Not even in my usual fallback manner of shutting them down entirely.
It's amazing to me how far I've come, these past few years.
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