Somebody Cares

(pieced together from accounts sent to various people on the 20th of December, 2022, when the events of this story took place)

Today was a crazy day.

I went to my doctor's appointment... And...

• I checked in about the psychiatrist’s assessment, and apparently I officially have a diagnosis now.
  

• I'm being prescribed an anti-anxiety medication to try for four weeks and see how it goes.
  

• My doctor is on board with making the best case he can for my ODSP application, to help me afford the counseling I'm trying to do and the medications we’re going to try.

I told my friends, while I was leaving the doctor's office:

I feel like I've just been handed a huge golden trophy inscribed with the words Somebody Cares. And a little like this can't be happening. This isn't the world I live in.

I.... Think I might be kind of in shock for the next few weeks. Or months. Or years.

The world isn't like this. Friends, scientists, anybody, run scans on the gold in this trophy. Tell me there aren't pockets of depleted uranium in it, because this does not happen.

Another Line Around the Spirograph

It's time and past time that I came back and wrote something about what has been going on in my personal and romantic life. It has been, shall we say, intense; and gone through another cycle of a repeating pattern in my life.

A relationship breaking, but it might be possible to have the seeds of a better chance sewn into the transition out of this one from the very start.

That is not exactly new. But this seems perhaps not yet old: My heart was, already as it crumbled, an alternating cycle of sorrow on the one side, and hope on the other. Hope that extends beyond the love I am letting go of, hope that I can break these bad habits, break this cling, step back into a different role, and maybe someday, it can be the case that very little in the end was lost, even between us. Maybe, someday.

For now I see Her call another 'beloved', and my insides crinkle and I want the whole world to go away. And it has been so for months, because I'm staying in touch, or trying to. I wonder often whether it would be better for both of us if I were to cut ties and consign Her to the past, or to be not part of my life at all for some years. My conclusion? Inconclusive. It does not seem to matter in practice, because better or not, I do not think I could bring myself to do it.

 

Silent in the Face of Panic and Heartbreak

I attended Unitarian Universalist service today for the first time. I rode in early with a choir member so she could attend rehearsal.

Sitting nervously in the corridor-side edge of a pew, unwilling to trap myself in the middle of one of the long benches, I curled quietly. In waves, I felt exposed. As the people gradually filtered in, the edge of panic at the potential for judgement and the eyes of strangers flickered up, threatening, and ebbing down, and rising up again. I tied part of a macrame bracelet, pinned to my backpack, set on my knee, and turned my eyes down and set my fingers working in their fidgeting work when the anxiety rose, as a way to curl in.

Fearing that others may try to ask me questions I felt I would not be able to answer, but only burst into tears at my own inability, I had the forethought to take my pocket notebook out shortly before service ended and write clearly: "I'M SORRY - I'M NOT FEELING ABLE TO TALK RIGHT NOW."

The one person I handed this notebook to as answer to their greeting questions about whether I had enjoyed the service nodded and took a half-step back immediately on comprehending the words. I did have a bit of trouble finding routes to move around people engaged in conversation, scattered here and there in aisles and in the party area downstairs.

Downstairs for tea and coffee, at the table for writing nametags, I wrote my chosen name, and stood for a long indecisive time with a marker of a second color in my hand, trying to find a way to express succinctly enough for a nametag what I wished be known. I settled for "MAY MIGHT NOT SPEAK", which seemed to serve well enough. Those people speaking to me caught sight of it if I just angled a bit, and then spoke without expecting me to answer in words. One kind lady for instance first asked if I was looking for something, and then upon seeing it, told me where the coffee and tea was. Coffee was, indeed, what I had been looking for, and I was at first looking at the wrong table.

I summoned my nerve to speak when the lady who had led most of the service stepped near. I thought I had already missed my opportunity, or perhaps ought to wait and see more of her manner on another visit first. But being brought so close by chance, I attracted her attention, speaking softly and shy, and asked, given her mentioning a love of collecting all sorts of Christmas music, whether she'd added the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society versions to her collection yet. It seems my recommendation was welcomed with some delight. It brings a smile to my face to remember in order to relate it.

Throughout the service, while panic flickered and was soothed in waves like a tide, as my developed instinct to be averse to ritualized group ceremonies (as they strengthen ties that often lead to groupthink) rose and railed as the people chanted their sacrament, rose and sat, sang, held hands to sway together, and made arches with arms for young ones to pass under. I might have wished to join in better, but the rhythm of the service was unfamiliar to me; still deeply associated with traditions that rankle my thoughts; some of the songs unknown; and as well, had I wished to sing, my voice, I feared, would have croaked and shrilled with sobbing.

I joined in singing "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" in a deep register and some softness, though tears streamed from my eyes. I stood to go and light two candles when the time was called to do so, although with a fear in me that this was something meant to be arranged beforehand or paid for. It seems it was not, though.

Sometimes, it was not really fear that insulated me from the warmth and welcome of the friendly people at the chapel, nor perhaps even my old accustomed sense of distance and barrier from people who are being happy, relaxed people together. It was heartbreak, still thick upon me like dust or fiberglass. Heartbreak, which renders its host profoundly alone although they may be in a crowd of recognized friends.

And so I lived for a time on the edge of panic and in the thickness of heartbreak, and sat crying. And I wished I could have told someone, through my silence, through my sense of isolation, and the intent of the assembled congregation, I know. I know and I need, for this time, to live on the edge of panic and in the thick of heartbreak, and to cry and endure and sit with my tears on my breast.

And so I have, and so I do. I will cry until my crying runs out and is not replenished by water and salt and sleep.

I have been struggling with the question of how much to let go.

Claustrophobic Dreams

"Oh." I came into my room, thought to do some gaming, but realized that I would prefer to just lay down and be still for a bit. Contemplate. Let things surface. Perhaps sleep if it happened, but not make a point of it.

When I lay down on my back and put my arms down at my sides, I thought of morgue drawers, and the idea of being put into a CAT scan, in a metal tubular place with no easy way to get out, and a stricture against moving.

I think, if I ever need to have such a scan done to me, I will need to plead with the doctors to give me something to relax me, to draw me down out of or prevent the rising of a panic attack.

And next I remembered a dream. I think it must have been a dream I had last night, but amidst headache and waking I forgot it completely, until I laid back down. A dream of exploring big metal pipes, like a tunnel to a secret place in Morrowind or something. But they were full of water. I was in a place where I could find one small pocket from which to breathe, but it was only a few inches from the surface of the water to the ceiling. Enough room for my mouth and nose to be above water, or my eyes, but not both at once. And I think when I realized I would not be able to take a deep enough breath and then kick off with enough speed to endure the swim back out, for there was nothing really in the gradual curve of the pipe to kick off of, I shook my head violently, hoping to move my body enough to wake me and so dispel the dream, as has become a habit of mine in some claustrophobic dreams, and the cloying grip of sleep paralysis when it has me.

I think perhaps it worked... But then I came aware of my headache, and waking was gradual, and the dream was lost. Lying still in my room feeling terror claw at me gently, I wished to forget it again, and realized I feared sleep, although I was tired. So I rose again, and began typing, and typed this.

I feel helpless and shaky; as I usually do, when it comes to claustrophobic dreams. I am not enough of a lucid dreamer at this point to control what dreams I have, and when I remember how frightening they can be, it becomes a very frightening thing to surrender to the possibility of nightmare.

Continuing On

"I feel like you imply to me that I'm wasting your time every time I ask a question, in class or outside of it."
"No, it's not that. It's just that we have a lot to cover and very little time to do it all."
"The way you say it upsets me every time."
"Ditto."
"Well, I'm sorry for my side of that."
"Me too. Let's begin again next day."
handshake

-Monday 24th, September

The term is now thoroughly underway, and I have been neglecting my blogging again. I have become acquainted with the chaplain on campus and one of the two counselors, who I am set to meet once a week. I have been feeling busy, with pressure from classes, homework, and financial stability; regular job searching has as usual been discouraging. My several runs of boldly introducing myself and dropping off CVs in person have yielded nothing so far and largely robbed me of the energy to continue making online applications to posted jobs.

I am seeking to break into freelancing, to work on my own terms, and maybe do some tutoring, even in IT Carlow itself. UpWork has rejected my application twice, though, perhaps negating the hearsay I had from a friend of a friend that the application process was pretty much a formality. Having taken ten tests on the site and scored above average on every one and in the top 10% on some, I feel indignant about this, and am wondering whether you have to already be an established freelancer for UpWork to want to support you.

The lecturer I had the above encounter with has been treating me with greater kindness and consideration since. In my Excel-based computer labs, I race ahead. In non-computer lab Management Accounting classes, I have begun to sometimes stop even processing through the problems. Vainly racing the lecturer's Excel with a hand calculator while my mind is crowded with her talking was growing very tiresome, and I feel confident I already get the idea by now. If I could find the time to do more practice on my own it would be great, but my time is mostly spent wondering how I'm ever going to juggle all of the things I need to do.

And then there is archery. It's the one club I've been going to reliably, learning form and stance and hearing encouraging words from the coach, who is acting as a better teacher than any of my lecturers, using effective repetition, class participation and good humour, much like my statistics lecturer back at Fanshawe did, to help us memorise the safety rules and terminology of the bow, adding a little every week. There is also a lot of waiting, since the beginners shoot only 4-6 at a time so that the coaches can observe us and correct mistakes, and the rest queue behind. I have begun to get to know the other left-handed archers; In archery, which hand you fire with depends on the dominance of your eye, not the regular dominance of your hand, and so someone who is a right-handed writer may be a left-handed archer. There are perhaps three right hand archers to each of us lefties, and we share the same line to shoot with a left-handed bow.

I enjoy archery, even though there's a lot of waiting. I have been challenging my social courage to chat to and get to know some of the other lefties. I had an amusing conversation with one young man yesterday who's in the first year of a software course going into cyber security. For the money, he said when I asked, and we talked about different countries and pronunciations, accents and languages. He wondered why out of all the countries in the world I would want to come to Ireland, and expressed a dislike of the Irish accent and disdain for the country in general. He was an interesting conversationalist, although as I said to him myself it seemed in some moments as though we were chatting across from different sides of the D&D alignment table. He laughed.

Between the talking and building my skills and the generally welcoming atmosphere... Well, probably more important than any of that is that when I am at archery club I feel a certain pseudo-obligation to leave school, work and busyness matters mostly aside and just be still for a while, focused almost entirely on other things, and that's just deeply refreshing.

I had an ongoing email conversation with someone who runs the campus's tabletop games club, suggesting some ways he could make his emails and Facebook messages more welcoming and less cynical. We met in person yesterday, and essentially he told me that he wasn't interested in spending the effort to improve his approach for this thing he was volunteering his time toward. I am proud of myself for continuing to speak animatedly but cheerfully with him until we parted ways, although I went away from it feeling stressed and perhaps on a verge of my social anxiety that I am a bit surprised I managed to cling to, and not tumble over. He did thank me for the feedback and admit to some surprise that the way I had rewritten a couple of his messages registered as so much more welcoming even to him.

Also yesterday, a couple of my friends introduced me to A Capella Science, with Entropic Time and Banting's Imparted Years, which has made my Song of the Day list. The single-voice a capella of the latter is a little harsh on the ears at first, but it really grew on me over time, and the arrangements are good.

I had better get moving. It is another school morning and I need to be at school in a little under an hour to book an appointment with the campus doctor to get a renewed prescription of my thyroid medicine. Oh. Also also, I picked up a bottle of apple cider vinegar, which was mentioned in my marketing class, and have begun trying to take a spoon of it every day like a medicine. I don't know how valid are its claims as a health tonic, and I feel a little self-conscious for following a trend like this, but I'll just give it a try, and see if it seems to do me any good.

IT Carlow: Week Two

I am easily embarrassed and may take over an hour to really get over the embarrassment from merely being told my questions are too frequent, or perhaps too insignificant by her measure, by a lecturer. Time really seems to be flying. I had not noticed we had so little time left in the lecture. This must be a good thing. I will try to figure out other ways to approach this lecturer with my questions

-Monday 17th, September

I enjoyed sleeping this morning and clung to it. I arrived late to my first class and unfed. In the second I was continually distracted and annoyed by the man next to me who checked his phone under the desk, wobbled the bench and jostled against me with his arm. In the hallway I wrestled with the anxiety-forbidden temptation to call out to everyone not to block the hallways, in case someone needed to get through. I bought myself a breakfast in the upstairs caf, which helped fuel me through the rest of my classes.

-Tuesday 18th, September

The clubs sign-up was loud with music over a boombox in one corner. I signed up for archery, tabletop and Irish dance. I met some of Rachel's friends for the second time. I gave out 3 CVs with a cheerfulness that surprised me. I slept before midnight and soundly rested until 9 the next day.

-Wednesday 19th, September

Yesterday I found an organising toy, lifeRPG, for goal setting and tracking, with EXP gained for completed tasks. I woke to find a rejection from UpWork and a bunch of forms to fill out for my new clubs, plus obligations to further support Tabletop. It was a bad first impression. Missed counselling appointment, and didn't realize it until 9 at night.

-Thursday 20th, September

I had a sluggish morning. I helped Rachel practice categorising costs for Management Accounting and felt that I had neglected my need for leisure, so once I got home I watched a bunch of old shows of sfdebris and bought and enjoyed a game that was on sale on GOG. But I dropped off four more CVs on the way.

-Friday 21st, September

Saturday was a day of job searching work. I made a particularly strong and hopeful application to a health food store looking for a weekend shop assistant. I improved some of the phrasing on my CV and made a new version which I hope will be relevant to waitress work. I handed out four more CVs, including one to an actual bar. The approach was intimidating, as I have never felt comfortable in bars, but having overcome my mounting fear to come in and talk to two friendly counter staff was one small victory. I visited another and heard that the manager to speak to would be in on weekdays, but was not at that time. At the end of the day, I reviewed my progress and found that of all the CVs I had dropped off, positions I had applied to online and employment inquiry emails I had sent, one entire third of them had been over the last four days: Wednesday to Saturday.

Tuesday I had gotten an email from the school office reminding me of the urgency of my job search: appointments for the immigration meeting at which I would need to show evidence of 3,000 euro in a bank account to stay were beginning. Over the few days that followed, I gathered my friends and spoke seriously about the choice between returning to Canada and forfeiting the deposit my father was generous enough to let me talk him into paying for me... or staying on, although if I became financially unable to stay through the end of the year and finish the courses, I would be out by thousands more. Still, the real need of finding work is a challenge that my past self knowingly threw my present self into, determined that I should grow to meet it. Incidentally, this fits well with a new determination song shown to me by a new friend: "I'm now becoming my own self-fulfilled prophecy!"

Sunday I woke up feeling utterly done with job searching. I spent the day lazy and played Theme Hospital for most of it. Chatted with Iris, and stayed up almost all night. It set me up to wake to my alarm so hazily that I thought I had multiple alarms keyed to different states, and go back to sleep after turning it off, feeling confident another one would ring. I slept in and missed my first class, but only the first one. I was in attendance for the second.

IT Carlow: Short Notes, The First Two Days

I feel a bit like I've been blindfolded and I'm trying to make my way through the days, but every time I bump into someone I feel ashamed. And it seems as though others are calling back to me, irritably, to keep up, but I just keep bumping into people and it feels as though every day teaches me the same lesson that I'm bad at talking to people... or understanding what I am supposed to do.

- Thursday 13, September (first day of classes)

The first crowded class of our crowded day, I step into the crowded room and spot a scant few open seats. Only one near the front, and when I approached it, the student sitting beside slid her bag over and lifted the folding seat to block me. Incensed, I went elsewhere, and watched...
When another new arrival scanned the room and approached that place, she moved her bag aside.

-Friday 14, September

I have connected with counselling services on campus and may wind up regularly seeing one of the counsellors here on Thursday afternoons. I have also begun reading The Leadership Skills Handbook: 90 Essential Skills You Need to Be a Leader, by Jo Owen. It has made a truly excellent first impression, with wise reminders, some frank insights that I had not thought about before and a great deal of wit. It is broken into very short, succinct sections which makes it easy to cover a whole section even if I only have five or ten minutes, and makes it easy and inviting to keep reading one more bit. Reading the first handful of sections on Thursday really cheered me up by reminding me that the courage to try things even when I don't know how I'm supposed to go about them is a strength, and that I am not the only person for whom that takes courage.

It is too easy to be overwhelmed and caught up in the mistakes, and forget to value the process of learning and finding one's way that demands making some mistakes. Maybe I am not bad at talking to people; being a foreign student, even speaking the same language, is simply hard. That doesn't account for all of my recent mistakes, however, and it still shocks my system and my blood pressure to be intentionally kept at a distance by fellow students at school with gestures of disrespect... even, perhaps, repulsion. I had hoped I was done with that.

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.

Rationality: Mitigate the Loss; Fight for the Living

This post is an addendum to Rationality: A Different Prisoner's Dilemma. It is another scenario with which to demonstrate the point.

Imagine that you are a person in a horrible and traumatic situation. The love of your life, the parent of your children, has been burned to death, deliberately. Capital punishment, imposed by a culture that believes some sins are so horrible that they demand this gruesome torture to balance the scales. The whole future you dreamed of having together has gone up in flames, and you are sick with grief and loss and pain.

Some people would be tempted to fling themselves into the flames as well. You probably do think of it, at least once, as you stand there, watching the pyre blaze. Some people will even think that this is the morally right thing to do, and will judge you for not committing suicide. They will think that you didn't really love the one you have lost, if you are able to stay standing and move on without them.

If it is your aim to reduce suffering and death in the world, however, then this impulse and any social pressure behind it is your enemy. If you leap onto the pyre to be burned as well, or hang yourself from a beam at home, or stop taking meals and waste away into nothingness, regardless of the method of your self-destruction, what will it achieve?

Your friends will be hurt. Your community will be hurt. Anyone who depended on your skills and experience and work ethic will be hurt. You will be destroyed, and your children will now have lost both of their parents. It will not bring your lover back.

Furthermore, you will have validated the idea that your suicide was moral. You will have set an example of surrendering to grief instead of coping with it. Others may be tempted, they might believe it was right, to follow you just as you followed your beloved spouse, directly into the grave. Is that something you could possibly want for your children?

You wail. You gnash your teeth and flail your arms and cry late into the night and hold your vigil. Death and suffering have struck you especially close to your heart, and you feel the loss, and you need to express it, but you must not let it consume you as well. If you let that happen, death wins. It claims two casualties for the price of one, and there is one less person working to prevent future suffering.

If you understand this, and you gird up your heart and throw yourself into your duties and refuse to distance yourself from your children... and cry and grieve, yes, in quiet moments, alone under the moon... the people around you may be shocked. They may persecute you, calling you cold or unnatural. They will say that you do not understand what it is to love.

They will be wrong.

It may seem to you, for a time, that life is not worth living to you anymore. But you will keep going because your spouse is not the only person you love, and is not the only person who needs you. Even if you believe it is a fact as normal and obvious as the sun rising tomorrow that you will be together again in heaven after you die... You should not then believe that the right thing to do is to hasten that reunion. There are still things left to do here first, and the right thing is to get them done.

The story I have just told is a story about the Sunk Cost Fallacy, applied to human life.

If you were to turn a blind eye to the needs of the world as it continues to turn, if you forget your duties in the pain of being robbed of something that was precious to you. If you couldn't let go of someone or something you loved, even though there was no way to get it back. That's the sunk cost fallacy leading you to neglect the people who still need you, and ignore the importance of things you still have the chance to save.

If, reading this, you can understand how much it hurts to let the dream that you could have been together with your loved ones forever fall away from you as something that can never happen; if you can understand how it could be tempting to follow that dream and step into the fire... but you can also understand why you have a duty to let go, for now, and focus on what can still be done... then take a moment to notice how it feels. The feeling of facing a lose/lose scenario, and having to make the best of a genuinely terrible situation.

Watch out for the moments in your own life when your heart sinks and you see something falling apart and you really, really, really don't want it to. Remember your duties to the people that still rely on you. Remember that even if you can't feel happy about it, there are other things you need to get done, and try not to let your despair cloud your vision while looking to see how much you can salvage out of the situation. That's the key to overcoming the sunk cost fallacy.

Rationality: A Different Prisoner's Dilemma

There is a certain kind of person who notices that the world is full of suffering, and after they have noticed this, they feel obligated to remind themselves regularly, even to great personal detriment and into depression. These people cannot bring themselves to turn away from suffering even to maintain their own health... not until they are so overwhelmed by compassion for other peoples' pain that they are at risk of breaking down with stress and illness. Why? ... Likely guilt, because they would perceive it as selfish to deliberately ignore someone else's suffering in order to feel better themselves, even if there is nothing they can do about it right now. Likely also fear... that if they did turn away, they would be making themselves into monsters, joining the complicit majority of people who do not act to prevent suffering, who do not seem to care.

I am one such a person, and the kinds of people I make friends with are often prone to this phenomenon. Jennifer Freed calls it "The Empath's Dilemma," but I am not under the impression that it's a term in common use.

A friend of mine came to me tonight stuck in a mental spiral of concern and guilt I recognized as the state of someone being overwhelmed by the Empath's Dilemma, and I swooped in with my own concern, to reassure and comfort them, to shake off the undeserved guilt and help them toward a mental condition from which they would, hopefully, be able to get a decent night's rest.

And then they asked me, "How did you get through this sort of a dark night of the soul [...] whenever that night was for you?"

This is my answer:

I constructed a question. A scenario that might be put to people by which to judge their preferences in a pinch, like the old standard one about pulling a switch to route a train onto a track where it would hit only one person rather than five.

The scenario was this:

Imagine that you are a prisoner in a terrible prison. In your current position, you are almost completely helpless. Your contact with the other prisoners is minimal, and tightly governed. You cannot, now, save them... But you do know that they suffer. If you don't cover your ears at night, you can hear them screaming. If you don't turn your eyes away, you can see how the guards habitually beat and torture and belittle them.
Taken metaphorically, this is not far from the truth.

Your own condition is good compared to most of the other prisoners, but very bad compared to the free citizens who live outside of it. You do not, now, have the power to do anything that would stop the atrocities that happen here. You think you could grow to have more power, though, after your sentence is up, assuming you actually are released. And assuming you survive that long.

But you also know, because the prison is still here, that the free citizens, who have so much more power than you do, have found other things to do with their time than campaign and publicize and get this prison torn down or reformed. A lot of them don't even acknowledge that it's a real problem. You might worry that you will become like them, after you're free. Stuff all your memories of this place into a bag in a closet in the back of your mind and never dare to touch it, because it would hurt.

Well then? Every night, you effectively have two options.

A: You lay down with your ears uncovered. You listen to the screams, and harden your resolve that you will never, ever, allow yourself to forget or to deny what has happened here... but at the cost of your sanity, and a greater risk of not being able to hold a job or garner any respect after you leave.

Or B: You cover your ears, you close your eyes, you do whatever it takes to swallow your meals and nourish yourself despite the sickening surroundings, and you push away the pain and the fear enough to survive another day in as healthy a state as you can. Maintaining your self and your capacity, but increasing the risks of falling into a habit of denial and inaction.

Which one will you choose?

~~~~~

That's the Empath's Dilemma, the way I see it. People we call empaths will choose A far more often. Some will choose A any time they think they can do so without the pain killing them.

I contemplated this long enough to realize that neither extreme was "right". Given a choice between someone who always chooses A, and someone who always chooses B, neither one is necessarily better. This may be difficult to accept, because it's a very emotional question, and it can be hard to imagine, if you are particularly driven to choose A, for example, that someone could choose B and it wouldn't make them a worse person than you are. Knowing whether someone is more driven to choose A or to choose B could, however, offer some useful insight into that person's strengths and weaknesses.

The optimal solution does something vaguely analogous to maximizing the area of a rectangle which is SANITY units wide and COMMITMENT units long. If you let your sanity fall to zero, your capacity to help anyone will also be zero. If you let your commitment fall to zero, your willingness to help anyone will also be zero. In either case, the prison stands just as tall, and the suffering goes on.

So, sacrifice enough of your comfort to maintain your commitment, until your commitment is sufficient to fuel the most effective actions you could take. Do not sacrifice more.

Sacrifice enough of your emotional urgency to maintain your sanity and health, until they are sufficient to support the most effective actions you could take. Do not sacrifice more.

And recognize that knowing the perfect balance is functionally impossible. There are just too many variables in the environment. Calibrating your model to be more accurate is a fantastic excuse to be neither properly maintaining your self NOR acting effectively in the moment.

Err on the side of overestimating the cost of tweaking the model if you possibly can (because you will probably fail in the attempt anyway), and if you find yourself outside the prison, if you see an opportunity to act which is likely to help and unlikely to hinder, heavily weight your preferences toward taking it, rather than trying to make sure you should. Quantity over quality; it is a provably better cognitive habit to make many mistakes than to wait until you have a perfect plan.

The time that passes as you do things other than actively and visibly and tangibly fighting death and suffering in all its forms is a sunk cost. It is a fallacy that will drive you into irrationality and error to weight it so highly that it outweighs all the factors you actually do have any control over in your decision making.

The only choices you can really make are between the opportunities you actually see, to influence outcomes you actually have the power to affect.

And, actions taken to sustain yourself, your life, your sanity and in fact also your morale, are instrumentally necessary to preserving your own capacity to fight death and continue to fight death into the future.

You cannot stand to fight if you have laid down to die with the first of your fellow-soldiers to fall, out of compassion or love for them.
So get up. I will not tell you not to remember the dead and the dying.
But we fight for the living.

I decided to borrow that line from a video game trailer. It's been used in other contexts as well, but this is the one where I personally first saw it. a damn good line, in my opinion. Hell, it's a damn good motivational video.

I would not have communicated it in quite these words when I first built the question over five years ago. I had not even read HPMoR up to the Stanford Prison Experiment arc (where a call-to-action is realized in pretty similar terms) yet at that time.

If I had, I probably would not have constructed the question this way, as it would have felt like a form of plaigiarism.

Dance-X

(after Unsupportive, same day)

I had registered in advance to try out a Dance-X class at the gym today. In the state of anger I was still in when I left for it, I had a sense of dread about the whole affair, worrying about the factors that led to my dropping out of the dance club at AIT. I was determined to push through it and give it a good honest try, though, despite feeling that I was in a mood in which I might not be capable of fair judgement.

I left at fifteen to and got to the class on time, introduced myself to one other person who was also new to it and waited, in some nervous excitement, for the class to start. I wasn't sure what to expect. The instructor is a small, bouncy woman who wore a single, long braid and seemed very cheerful. There was no practice at slow speed, she simply set a playlist to going and launched into energetic dance, with a lot of quick cross-stepping and jumping about. The first song and dance on the list was Gangnam Style. That dance takes a hell of a lot of energy. I think I tried too hard. I could feel the roughness in my lungs at the end of it. I sat down, but was encouraged to remain standing even if I was tired.

Songs continued. They were mostly recognizable pop hip-hop, including Timber and Put a Ring on It. I continued. I tried to figure out what the moves were and get in step, but it was extremely difficult to register and try to learn the steps at such a fast pace, and difficult in an entirely different way to perform them even when I did have a sense of them. If I was standing, though, I felt pressured to dance if I were at all capable of it.

25 minutes into the 45 minute class, I left, deciding that I was at my limit and needed to stop. I had leaned on myself up next to the fan and the instructor called out a bit to me asking if I was alright. I said nothing, but walked slowly and unsteadily to the door and quietly let myself out. Tears were leaking out of my eyes as I changed my shoes. The slick of sweat across my shoulders meeting my synthetic jacket felt greater than it had ever been before. Before heading home, I walked across a little hill, still covered in snow, and carefully and intentionally fell over onto my side. I lay there for a minute or two, occasionally coughing somewhat raggedly, feeling the cold and wet seep into the side of my pants, thinking very little.

The main thing I was thinking, and have been thinking, seems a carefully audited stream of thought:

Yes, it was sort of fun. Stopping part-way through is not failure. Showing up and putting effort into it is a success. Perhaps my weight-based workouts will go better the next time I come to the gym for my giving those muscles a little more chance to recover than usual. This definitely counts as having worked out today. It's been a hard couple of days. Perhaps it was time to cry. I should try this again next week, but pace myself more conservatively.

I brought myself home and showered. I brushed away the most recent accumulation of sand and fine gravel which accumulates by the door, and thence gets in my bedroom, and thence into my sheets; and I lay down, and I began writing this.

I am trying to do a set of online quizzes within a trial period again. I might end up trying it for two different classes, one having been activated later than the other. My Information Systems class has simple SAM Cengage labs for learning Access and if I get the chance to access all of them within the trial period, I think I can ace them easily. The more challenging and more serious one is Managerial Accounting. I've already worked ahead, and have finished four of the quizzes. One of them, I didn't actually study for. I had mistaken which one it actually was, but having started it without preparation, I did my best, and my best without studying earned me a tiny fraction over 80%, a little better than a similar quiz I had studied for. I think I'm probably losing some marks on rounding. I find the instructions on which numbers to round obtuse and confusing.

There are six more quizzes. It is currently Thursday evening. I will need to finish them by Saturday evening to complete them during the trial access. I have a class tomorrow, and a project actually due on Saturday evening to contribute work towards. I am not sure I can do it, but I'm certainly going to try.

Feeling Small

Perhaps things have come to a head. I do not want to write at this moment. I do not feel as though I want much to do anything, but I will write. So as to reduce the burden on my friends, or any anxiety I feel about their being unavailable, I will write. Because it has been a few days, and because there are a number of things on my checklist that I am leaving fallow, I will write.

Yesterday was some kind of homecoming party. My roommates went out to party around nine or ten and came back around midnight, boisterous and chattering with a party of friends as guests.

I had been excited nearly to trembling to meet the representatives of the Limerick, Sligo, Carlow and Tralee Institutes of Technology. The meeting had come, had been carried out, had passed. I was tired from early evening, but did not expect to be able to sleep while others in my house were preparing to go celebrate. I spent my time watching YouTube, my mind tired and my current goal met, not feeling up to doing much of anything that was not restful.

Come midnight and the return of my roommates, I asked them if they could arrange for everything to be quiet by 2, and left for the college. There was something I could do that would not require much presence of mind; scan textbook pages which had problems for practice.

I came back slightly past 2 to find my roommates and their friends still (or again) around the kitchen table, chatting happily, but asked them immediately to bring it to quiet, and went into my room and came out again a few times in quick succession to repeat myself when they continued talking at a conversational volume.

After twenty minutes or so they had gone and there was quiet. I watched and listened to some more YouTube and played a little bit of Binding of Isaac while I calmed and relaxed toward sleep.

In the morning between 8 and 9, I was woken by my other roommate's car having been started to warm and make ready to leave. Its muffler is cracked and nonfunctional; my room becomes a chamber full of pressure and low-pitched car noise when it is idling out front. I caught the roommate whose car it was on the way out and told her so. After she left and after laying down a while, turning this way and that way, I slept again, until I was woken by talk between some of the first set of roommates again, and went out to tell them that even at the volume they were at, it was enough to wake me when I were already asleep.

Here, I had some comeuppance for my complaints. There was confrontation, politely spoken, and they told me that some of the sounds I had thought quiet enough not to be heard outside were room were not, that they needed more co-operation and consideration and forgiveness from me; and somewhere in there that it was normal to have little disruptions like this, and that they were entirely willing to take themselves downstairs at night when it was only them, but their friends had thought it was weird of me to be so insistent at them.

I think something in that struck at me somewhere; although of course, I had not been sleeping well and was not at my most stable. I began to leak a few tears, silently. One of my roommates did see, and was alarmed and apologetic, said she was only trying to have a normal conversation about it. I said that I cry easily, and not to worry about it, that it was important to talk about it if there were problems with anything I were doing, too, and I thanked her for doing so.

I have not had the will to write my follow-up emails to the representatives from Ireland today, though. I have not been willing to do homework or work out, or even really to go back out into the cold (it is quite cold and windy today) to buy bread. I am feeling weak, and sad, and small. I have returned several times to crying.

I miss Eoin. I feel conflicted. I feel guilty and self-conscious and yet still slightly, in some ways, indignant. I think some part of things is that I had been so focused on the meeting with the reps, and I suspect some stresses I had been putting off processing are out now that it's done. I decompress. I feel sadness. I remember all the things recently associated with sadness, and I feel a little helpless, listening again to voices talking in a language I do not understand, through the very slight muffling of the wall, and I miss Eoin.

I will pick it all back up again later. For now, I remain small and curled inside myself, hiding from the conflict I do not know how to deal with gracefully, hiding a little from the responsibilities I must return to in time. There is time, there is time.

Christmas Crash

After my last post here, I decided to look back a ways and revisit what my feelings had been in November, when I was just setting up my resolution to return to Ireland. I was a little shaken to see how uncertain I had been about how I might expect Eoin to feel, and how much more confident it seemed that I had become.

Of course, I have been careful to avoid developing any sort of certainty that I would be welcomed, and every time I think or speak on it, I at least pay some lip service to the possibility that for some reason or another I would not be welcomed back. But by often envisioning him hugging or kissing me, by remembering his smile and his affection, I think I have further reinforced the notion to myself that I will be greeted with love of some kind.

Upon observing the distinct change in my confidence, a crumbling came on me that was probably well due. I had been working hard, catching up and keeping up with my schoolwork in one thing or another, for a solid stretch and I was tired. My spirits had been flagging uncertainly, waiting for the fall for some time, but I kept pulling them up again. This observation, though, and an opportunity to doubt and wonder if all my confidence had been built up by self-conditioning and wishful thinking, was just the slip I needed, and the fall came.

However, as these things go, I will say it was short. I spent almost all of a day in bed or idling, watching YouTube videos to fill mental space with noise, sleeping in frequent bursts. The next day, I reached out to my friends, although wretchedly and in an awful conflict, grumpy from social neglect and fatigue, feeling the stresses of ancient habits of self-doubt and deprecation bending but not entirely broken. I was surly and rude and plaintive to those who took the time to listen, but...

Throughout it, I acknowledged that I was in a crash at the end of a long streak of positivity. I spoke through all of my feelings and complaints over everything from my doubts about Eoin to procrastination of tasks I found intimidating or dull to feeling fatter than usual, but at every point I spoke of feelings and imaginings, and did not say that any great flaw I saw in myself was fact. I managed some gruff apologies and excuses to those friends I leant on. I held my tongue for vital moments some moments, and pointedly avoided some opportunities to pick fights even though I had to wrestle with my impulses and irritability to do so.

I was invited to play Jackbox 4 games by one of my dear old friends and enjoyed them, although the way we played over stream and without voice chat was less intimate than I used to enjoy from Jackbox games and had an irritating delay. Still, being welcomed into the fold for social fun was something I acknowledged that I badly needed, and had gone too long without.

I did not expect anything for Christmas, and did not get much. One friend bought me a game soundtrack that I had put on my wishlist at some point. I was happy to have been thought of with such a gesture, and made a point of saying so and giving my thanks.

With the patient ear of one friend, some friendly invitations and thoughts from others, and the vital acknowledgement that although not perfect, my judgement in times of happy optimism is probably better than when I am breaking down with doubt and fear; that so long as I do not presume to be infallible, sustaining my spirits on a reasonable hope is a fair and fine way of carrying on, I recovered fairly quickly. This morning, I woke and got back to some schoolwork pretty much first thing. In the early afternoon, I made a point of going outside just for the sake of my health.

Having come back here to write, although I have paused uncertainly many times, will be the last thing on my list of things I have set myself a duty to do today. Having done this, I will be free to relax, or to work up the courage to do something a little more intimidating, like returning for a brief refresher to my JavaScript lessons, or working on my resume to send to companies that might be my key to get back to Ireland. Ah... Breathe, Serp, breathe. It is still intimidating, that. Taking a solid step toward a desperate goal usually is, I think.

Validate Me Please

Have I been born or at some point rendered unable to detect an important tell between incredulity expressed out of pure and simple confusion, and incredulity expressed out of anger; frustration; exasperation?

Is there not a valid associative tie between incredulity and annoyance, then? I've seen a correlation too often for that to seem right.
It may have been emphasized harmfully by Mother.

Could Mother really be innocent after all, my understanding of her passive aggression false? No, I doubt it. There is some burden of responsibility that a mother should bear the brunt of maturity for with her child. That a lover should not have to bear the brunt of maturity for with a lover.
What, exactly?

I have felt a desperate need for, and lack of, validation for my interpretations of social interactions all my life. Having thought about that for a moment, yes, I believe all my life within useful memory.

Where is the sense that the validity of interpretation is to be assumed supposed to come from? Certainly, with my upbringing, it was undermined if not entirely destroyed. If I were to be allowed to assume that my interpretations were valid, Mother would have allowed me to defend myself from her passive-aggressiveness with logic. Which of course I did anyway, but it was continually invalidated at the point of my observations so that no argument I made could stick to her.
Narcissist. What have you done to me.

So I crave explicit validation of my interpretations as at least reasonable or understandable, and I crave it constantly. I become anxious and aggravated if it is not present and I begin to feel doubt.
What has this to do with incredulity? Mother often spoke to me in incredulous tones. From her, it seemed to mean that I was an unbelievably bad child. That my inconsideration and selfishness were so great that it was almost inconceivable I even existed. And so when she was angry at me, she would shout at me incredulously. How dare I question the love she undeniably had, while she complained at every juncture of what I was costing her and how much trouble I was that she put up with, and no matter how hard I hurt and raged and explained, trying to make her understand that she was hurting me, she never stepped down. Not once. Because she loved me, clearly.

So incredulity became the badge of "you horrid thing", to not back down became the abuse I was most used to, and letting me have my way became the golden grail I sought that represented the love I never got at home?

Perhaps, but of course I left home horribly twisted, and did not get my way often.

Things to learn and clarify:

To let me get my way is not what loving me is.
One can love me and not let me get away with shit.
One can not love me and let me get my way.
I know this, but the assumed lie may still be deeply ingrained in my emotional responses, moreso than for most.

Confusion is not inherently condemnation.
Confusion is not inherently condemnation.
Confusion is not inherently condemnation.
There are things someone may not understand about me other than how horrible I am.
An unfortunate number of people have the bad habit, but not everyone thinks something is bad just because they don't understand it.

What else?
The validity of my interpretations is assumed to be present, not absent, where no remark of it is made.
Gods, it's going to be a nightmare to reverse engineer that one. Geesus.

Sinking, Stewing, Waiting, Procrastinating

Hi, blog.

I, uh... I'm feeling pretty down on myself right now.

I've decided to start looking for a place I could move into on my own and afford by myself for a while but that Robby could also join me in after a few months. But I haven't started looking yet. When I'm not at work, I'm lying in bed, watching YouTube videos and doing largely useless things. My floor needs vacuuming, but I haven't done it yet. My clothes need washing, but I haven't done it.

I've started talking to people about the route toward more interesting duties and positions within Goodwill. Maybe my ambitions are making me scared again, and the fear is making me shut down and stop everything. I certainly am afraid. Of the risk, I suppose. I would like to move up, learn new things, make more money... But I'm afraid, so I haven't done it yet. What I have done is kept working, and otherwise remained mostly passive. I'm probably burning myself out.

My body... feels... weaker, these days. I become sore more easily. I am less eager to walk places. My left wrist often hurts at work. I feel fat and I feel as though I waddle slightly when I walk. It's probably due to poor diet, I suppose. I think I am fairly active at work, where I am always on my feet and usually walking about.

Three times I've phoned the psychologist who originally prescribed me my psych pills, seeking a follow-up appointment. I have received no calls back. I am beginning to think I may have to depend instead on getting a "family doctor", who may be able to make appropriate judgments on my drugs that the clinic doctor is not allowed to.

I've saved up a fair bit of money over the past several months, perhaps one advantage of my passivity, though I'm sure I could save money as well or even better and be more active by choosing activities that aren't costly.

I feel... weak... and uninspired...

I'm in another little rut, I guess.

I will wait for a way out.

Eventually I will pick up a search for a place I can afford to live by myself, with a kitchen I don't have to share, where I can be naked in my living room if I wish, a cheap place I can make my own. Maybe even still conveniently close to work, although I am starting to think a longer walk to and from work could do me good.

Hold out hope for me, readers.

Frustrating Day

I spent the last several days with my love, recovering from a deep abyss of sleep deprivation and fatigue that I'd fallen into over the previous week or two. I started staying up all night over my Christmas holiday, and couldn't seem to break the habit. I've had troubles like this all my life, and unfortunately, the more important it is to get to sleep at a reasonable time, the less it happens, because the importance only creates urgency and anxiety, which does not induce restful slumber, but only adds to insomnia.

I started prioritizing sleep, and thought I'd managed to get it back into pattern. But now I'm back home... and although I've been in a muzzy, confused haze of blah all evening, now that night's come and I should be sleeping, I'm wide awake and my chest feels coiled tight like a spring, and alert as a hunted mouse. Through the haze, I suspected there might be something I'm avoiding facing, because I felt an urgency to keep myself occupied; moreso than usual, though I have rarely found it easy to really relax. Now, after a shower in which I briefly wandered off into relaxed fantasy, but only became tense again at the thought that tonight, it's actually important I get to sleep, because I work in the morning... I think I may understand why my body is registering this sense of panic or grief.

A couple of days ago, my boyfriend called me after work, while he was getting to the bus to get home, and told me that he was being retired along with all the other seasonal staff at EB Games. The higher ups were determined not to keep on any of the seasonal staff. On the upside, he had made a fantastic impression and was now at the top of the list of people that his branch would call on if they needed someone... But that still means that after his last couple of scheduled days, the last one being tomorrow, he's out of work until he finds another position - with EB Games or otherwise. Now, at this point, I think he's proven sufficiently that he can find work, and I don't need to worry to much about his ability to support himself in job searching and in the mean time... But it does mean that according to our plans, I won't be moving in with him for another five months at least, probably half a year, and I have been looking forward to it with aching intensity. It has been extremely annoying having to wait. The place I'm in is certainly not all that bad, but it doesn't have my boyfriend in it, and the place he's in is rather awful. We will be able to save a lot of money living together, too. Everything is inefficient now. Spending time together takes too much arranging. Ensuring that Robby is well fed, heck, even cooking for myself, is complicated by not having my own kitchen (I share mine with my landlord). The next few months may be tighter for finance, with my after-Christmas hours scheduled to be reduced, and Robby's earning opportunities completely unknown as yet.

Aside from all that, in parallel, I think I am deciding to be done with the Pup again... And having once taken him back after such a final decision, I think and hope that I will not be so foolish again.

All things considered, I suppose I do have fair reason to be stressed. That helps. Feeling that my pain is significant even from an outside perspective helps me to forgive myself for getting caught up in it, and forgiveness is the key to freedom...

I do not know what to say now.

Goodnight... Though I do not know when I will sleep, or how many more nights I will be restless.

Quiet

In the last few hours of my work day, I found good feelings again. The fog seemed to lift just after Leah asked me to sweep the carpets at the end of the day. Though she ended up arranging to borrow a vacuum cleaner from her sister that worked better than any of the ones we'd had in the store before. They keep getting lost or sold or broken or something.

I told Helen about my worries about not having a place to live. She seemed kind of shocked, and insisted that we'd find something and I wouldn't have to go back to the Center of Hope, but I think she was saying it because she didn't want to believe in the reality of that happening to someone she knew.

I walked home feeling feeble and regressed. In my mind, I am lucid - I can think fine, and can describe how it is I'm feeling... in text, anyway, speaking comes difficult... But I feel like a lost toddler, trying to be brave, but confused and scared. My sense of self seems to float, disconnected from things. I have an impulse to reach out to people, but also an impulse to hide and retreat from them, especially if they might not have time for me. I am keenly self-conscious, and afraid of doing something wrong.

For the moment, I feel okay, but very delicate; I am held together, but not very strongly, and I feel I could fall apart very easily; I am balanced for now, but I could very easily fall.

I wonder how long this will last, and what will happen next.

And I prepare myself to move back into the Center of Hope. I have so nearly accepted it as inevitable that I am almost determined for it to be the next part of my story.

Fear

I've been reading Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl. It's probably not been the best idea for keeping a positive attitude. I haven't mentioned it here yet, but I had my three months' probation end meeting, and it was a rather difficult awakening for me. My punctuality and my attitude both needed work, but my managers seemed to think I could do it. I've been doing well, and I think I generally can, too.

Today... yesterday, I heard from our most recently applied to potential landlord that he probably won't have an answer for us regarding whether we have approval to stay there until mid week at the earliest. We have gotten two rejections so far. There will be little to no time after this week for even one more chance. Today... I woke up sluggish and took the bus rather than walking, for the first time in a while. Today... I spent the first two hours at work mostly cleaning and mopping...

And I feel... so tired. I can think of nothing except the dread of going back to the Center of Hope, the place from which I was taken to that little room with the port-hole window and the straps on the bed, because I was so upset and stressed I could not speak... Where even if I can get a private room, paying for my lodging, which is not, as far as I know, guaranteed, it seems likely I would still have to get my pills every day in the morning in the narrow time slot alloted for it or ask for an extra dose for the following days. Have to confirm and clear my schedule through someone else every day, in several ways...

I've been doing reasonably well before now at keeping a positive attitude. I've been getting lots of rest and eating fruit and enjoying the music here at work. Today, I feel haunted, and dread the thought that I will fail my extended probation as well, and lose the job I've worked hard to get, and keep.

I don't feel able to smile right now...

Indomitable

My feet are still recovering from the intense soreness of wearing unaccustomed shoes for six hours, most of it spent walking at work and walking home from work. My boyfriend was laid off yesterday and I have no idea whether our rental application for the house we want to live in together will be approved in light of this. I'm not sure whether my own job with Goodwill will end with my end of probation assessment like Robby's did, or continue. And yet. I'm smiling today.

I was smiling even before I got online and discovered that the solo play-by-post D&D game I've been participating in for two years on and off has reached a head in the most awesome of ways. I was smiling while I was walking home noticing that the seam in the left side of my left shoe was starting to hurt my flesh and thinking to myself I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I took it off to see blood there.

Somehow, this time of trials is only waking me up and making me feel strong and ready for the adventure. I have faced worse than this, and I will face this too. I will be there for Robby and help him find work again. I will support us in the interim, whether we have to look for a different place from the one we were hoping for or not. Even if I lose my own job... I'll find another one. The stakes are high. The race is staggering. The stage is set...

And I am afraid...

And I will be victorious.

To Share The Cup That Runneth Over

Someone on FetLife was asking for peoples' perspectives on the influence of our past parental abuse on those of us who have been abused and how it relates to our own desire to have, or to avoid having, children. Her voice was impassioned and full of a great deal of understandable internal conflict. It's clear she wants the good things that come with having children, and desperately wants to love and care for someone, but realizes that her scars may get in the way, and doesn't want to be a bad parent.

I would like to share my response with you all.

The best way I feel I can answer this is to tell my own stories related to it. 

I was inspired by the subtle, psychological abuses of my childhood to be vehemently vocal about bad parenting when I see it, especially when parents become frustrated with their childrens' natural curiosity and desire to learn, seeing virtually anything other than quiet obedience as disobedience, even when they only the actions of a young, inexperienced human engaged with the world and trying to gain the experience required to be a wise, functional adult.
And then later, I found VHEMT. 

I am not convinced that the human race has no chance of improving and willfully evolving socially and morally to progressively better states, and therefore don't think I actually want us to go extinct, but I definitely would prefer to see a smaller human race, with more quality, and less quantity, of life. The fewer people there are to share resources with, the bigger everyone's fair share can be. 

And this is why I've decided never to give birth, even though the thought is a fetish of mine.
However, it doesn't mean I don't want to be a mother.
I am still scarred and rendered dysfunctional by my own past abuses. In many ways the wisdom and sensitivity gained from my suffering has made me a generally very patient and level-headed person, but I am also prone to fits of anxiety and rage. Furthermore, I am young, and at the very beginning of my career. 

But someday, if I have greater financial stability, and if I have healed further and feel less controlled by my overpowering emotions, I will almost certainly want to participate in the growing and nurturing of children who were not born to me. I may foster-parent, or adopt. Or I may find my way into a nurturing role in my profession, or find my way into a household that accepts me in a role as a supportive carer and guardian to the children of someone else. 

Personally, I find it hard to believe that any child, even in the best and most well-adapted of families, could not benefit from one more loving, supportive adult in their life to encourage them to be the best that they could be; And equally hard to believe that any parent, even with the best luxuries and availability of resources and time, would not benefit from one more loving, supportive adult who could share the stresses of caring for a child when they become taxing, and thus prevent the build-up of frustration that can lead to that frustration being inappropriately taken out on the child. 

But to answer the question that stood out most to me in your post...
"If you feel, like you have love and tender loving care to give, who do you direct that energy to, if it is not kids?" 

Why... To everyone, of course. Neighbors going through hard times. Co-workers. Friends. And definitely lovers, whether they be short or long term. Absolutely everyone, not only children, and to be sure not only our own blood children, can use some Tender-Loving-Care. It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our Western society that we tend to forbid one another from taking responsibility for one another, and in turn, we forbid one another from asking for badly needed help. 

If you have love and Tender-Loving-Care to give, and you find no-one receiving it, if your cup runneth over with no-one to drink... Go to your best friends and congenial workmates, go to your lovers and partners and crushes, and if it is permissible within their circles, then go to theirs... go to those people with whom you can easily empathize, and encourage them to draw from your well of kindness whenever they are thirsty. 

All too frequently the only socially acceptable answer, to create a new life in to nurture and build up, because for some incredibly stupid reason we have been forbidden to nurture and build one another, is the only one that comes to mind. But especially for those of us who are damaged and who runneth over, but sometimes also run dry... We know in our doubts that creating a life for our love and care, and then becoming overwhelmed and filling it up also with our frustrations and tempers, becoming bad parents... Is all too real a possibility. 

Before you forge a new cup that you may not be able to fill all by yourself, then... I encourage you to seek out all of those cups near to your heart that are beginning to run low, and ask gently and patiently for permission to refill them. Break the stupid rules that forbid us from caring, mothering and looking out for one another. It is, of course, a delicate dance, and important not to be overbearing, but simply to be loving and available. But it's a well-known fact that parenting isn't easy. And this holds true whether the people you're parenting are children, or blood family, or not. 

I hope this helped.