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.

 

Heyo, House

I seem to recall a Brer Rabbit story I heard read aloud once, some long time ago, in which the clever rabbit tricks a wolf by asking "Heyo, house; Why you don't Heyo?" as though he were in fact used to the house actually speaking aloud to him... so convincingly that the wolf who is waiting inside to ambush him is fooled into revealing himself by calling out and trying to sound like a house.

It comes to mind, I think, because I have a new house to greet. Well. Quite an old house really, with some of that quirky coziness of a house that has stood a long time and been patched and updated bit by bit. But I have been here only five days.

As to the house I'm leaving... When the first roommate I waged war with there left, it was an uncomfortably novel feeling. It seems it's always me that winds up leaving when I clash with roommates. "But not this time – the ground is mine," I reflected, feeling disoriented. Well, that was then – it didn't survive the next tenant who came and took his place.

But, as I think about it, what was that house to me? What was it really but a room of my own for privacy which I had not had in far too long; and a rent I could afford for the time being; and promising at first, which didn't last past the first month? Wasn't it always intended to be temporary? Why did I stay there almost a full year anyway?

Well, never mind. The place I come to now I choose for the company. The roommate who has lived here for seven years and is determined to stay seems a promising companion, LGBT friendly and understanding. Decorations bedazzle the details - fridge magnets, old stickers and pins - with hints of nerdiness and reminders to challenge all those various foolish expectations that all people be the same and dull and perfect. My room is smaller. My rent is cheaper, but transit is now an expense worth mentioning. It takes an hour to get to work.

Yes, I have work now as well. Good honest labour for a good honest wage, pulling and stocking and tidying non-perishable groceries at a big grocery store in the city. I've been employed now perhaps a month and a half, fifteen shifts in total. I'm still learning layouts and efficiencies, but I'm pretty solid on the basic process of what I'm doing, and I'm gradually getting faster while minding thoroughness and making the necessary concessions to my poor sore body. I am anxious every day that I am not going fast enough, but I know this is disordered thinking. I also know it's okay for me to need more help than just realizing it's disordered to get through it effectively.

This past week has been... tough. My landlord surprised me by not letting me know until Nov 30th that he expected me to move on Nov 30th, not Dec 1st, and not telling me directly at all – It was left to my friendly roommate to tell me. My job surprised me by allocating me sudden shifts which had not been on the schedule the previous week on the nights of the 29th and 30th even though I asked for the 30th off. I didn't even see the change to the schedule until I'd already missed the Nov 29 shift.

And so I contacted New Roommate and made sure I'd be able to move my things to the house early, did some last-minute packing (glad I had been working on this over the previous week and had already done most of it), vacuumed the room I was leaving until it was nice and soft and neat, and took a few hours' nap despite the stress... Then hired an XL size Uber to bring me and my belongings across town. There was plenty of room and I managed the physical labour of shifting boxes and suitcases fine. New Roommate helped me stack them in the living room while their old roommates were busy leaving. I called my best friend for support and comfortable company for a little while and then went to work for the night, and for the following two nights as well, which was my first time doing three shifts in a row at the new job. I certainly hurt by the end of the third day.

Then there was last night, when I unpacked and set up my room. Today I started colonizing and cleaning the kitchen. I've done a little exploring around the neighborhood to find the nearby convenient shops, but I do not know the turns yet without consulting Google Maps.

I am... getting somewhere, I suppose I'd say. Aye, getting somewhere. Getting along in work a bit faster as my endurance and understanding improves, starting to make friends with some of my coworkers and join their banter at 2 AM lunch. Getting acquainted with a new roommate I can talk to and get that lovely sense of being on the same page. Getting back into doing a little bit of cooking, getting to know my new kitchen. Getting back to this blog after a whole disgusting half-year away. Getting all sorts of turned around on my sleeping schedule while dealing with emotions and memories and mood swings and anxiety and the fascinating surges of "nesting" energy that come to me when acclimatizing to a new house. I'll figure it out though.

So it goes. Now you knows.

How Things Have Been

I meant to come post a bloody story I wrote here. I'm not sure whether I thought better of it or whether I just forgot. For all that I post raw and intensely here, I don't typically post gruesome, and perhaps I should keep it that way.

The situation with another nasty roommate continues to deteriorate. I actually shouted at him last night, then cried and felt sick and tasted and smelled acrid for the rest of the night. There is a potential new tenant coming to see my room today. If she takes it, I will move downstairs and not be next to him anymore.

Friendly roommate continues to be friendly and supportive; friends have been accessible, and I have been doing better for the last couple of weeks at accessing them.

I've pushed some regularity into my medication schedule, taking my pills at 10 each morning. I think I might shift that to 8 now that I've been regularly sleeping nights for a few days. Waiting until 11 to eat in order not to interfere with their absorption is annoying. Waiting until 9 would not be so bad I think.

The new stability feels weird sometimes. Like the world is flatter. Not grey and dull and uninteresting, just more level and approachable. Less shaking around, less steep slopes to climb. It's like every footstep takes a little less effort and is a lot less scary. I didn't realize the schedule would make such a big difference, and regardless I don't think I was ready for it before.

I'm paused in the middle of reading documentation for a programming tool so I can try to rewrite parts of it better and clearer, and work on a portfolio to pursue technical writing work remotely online. In light of the pandemic it seems like a decent move, but actually... I took some time to reflect a short time ago and recognize that I don't want anything to tie me to Kitchener.

I want to go back to my friends in the states. I don't want a job that would keep me here any longer than a few months, and even temporary jobs may be... "sticky" that way, tempting to stay on longer. So it's more about that than COVID, really. It's more that once it's safe, I want to go and be with the family of people who support me, give cohabitation another chance. Give dealing with each other another, better chance, more carefully this time.

It's lonely staying alone inside, far from my intimate companions and uncertain of the future. But then, it always has been, really. Not much has changed for my day to day life personally in the light of pandemic except that I feel like I'm not supposed to go out for walks - and when I go to buy groceries and household essentials, there are long discouraging lines a lot of the time.

In a certain tongue in cheek way, I've been occasionally remembering a Daft Punk song which has never seemed more appropriate. I Remember Touch...

Grim November

It has been some time, and so I will explain.

Things began to be sour, I think, in August. Habits which were endurable in the short term so long as they were being worked on and would improve over time seemed to worsen, signs of improving grew sparse or there seemed to be subconscious resentment at the pressure.

Too much responsibility was placed on me.

There was cause, of course; there were extenuating circumstances. My Stars left their job, trusting to another to support us, and then he lost his job too. And there was much discouragement and despondency. None of us were in fit shape to carry the limp weight of the others while we were robbed of strength. And so I did my best at times, but neither was I - and I lashed out and growled and broke down often under the strain, so little rewarded, so little relieved.

I believe I am still blamed for my failure to hold up the heads of my companions during that time, as well as my own, but I plead that it was not within my power, and ought not have been expected of me. I had not enough participation. I had not enough support. I had not enough compensation to see me through it, not enough nor gentle enough reminders; reminders which are invitations, rather than chastisements.

Of course, it is an advanced difficulty to succeed, with me, to my standard, in giving invitation and not chastisement.

But this is how it went on. I carried far too much, seeking not to let others down, but I must in the end. My patience, my spirit, was overloaded for quite some time, and my vulnerabilities pricked when I was gathering enough air and lift to begin to get somewhere, such that that liveliness would easily and swiftly drain away, and I would lie again lifeless in a wasteland of bitterness.

I do not say that I held no responsibility nor blame for these cycles - O, I was part of them. My failure to speak my boundaries while I could still do so without cursing made things worse. I was at times negligent. I was at times evasive.

And so it went, and until I had a room of privacy to myself for a while (the gift of interim hosts in the city of Kitchener, and O my great gratitude to them for the privilege), for six months I had no place I could retreat to which was mine to be alone in, mine to rest in, and not need to share it, neither night nor day. Looking back it shocks me that I lived so long in these conditions, and I did not seem to realize that that was a problem.

Of course, I was caught up in wanting to be there, be present for Stars if they needed physical assistance to get up, and perhaps then, I ignored my own need for privacy, for a crook I could lay in on my own and be undisturbed. There are reasons for this, of course, reasons. But O it was surely a part of my growing twisted and impatient and bitter.

And so it went until a particularly bright-careless and manipulative episode, of some of my love's worst habits. And then I told them I would not marry them. Not now, not like this. And so I would need to return North and leave the country, for I had no other legal basis to stay. And it was sad and sour but felt necessary.

We moved several times, because as everything descended into a slough of despond, we would not organize cohesively enough to close a rental agreement and did not have a place to go by the ending of the old lease. And so there was a hotel one night, and an Airbnb for a half-week, and then another Airbnb for the rest of the month, with our things in a storage locker a long drive outside town, near to where we had hoped to rent a place, but it was a scam. A scam we would ordinarily have spotted, but we were desperate for a place by that time, of course.

Much of our things have been left behind. My friends I leave with less, materially, than they had before, and some bitter memories of my impatience and desperation and the guilt of having drawn it. But still though, my friends I leave in a pleasant place, a roomy apartment somewhat bare but well outfitted with such things as the kitchen that came with it. I leave them in a place with an extendable lease and the flexibility to adjust time there, so that they may be sure of their next leap's landing before arranging to leave. I leave them nearer to some people who have been friends of ours, that we wished to be close to... And still do now, but less so. Less, for there has been loss and grief and disappointment.

I leave my friends and I hope very dearly that I leave them better for having spent time with me rather than worse, for all that they have less materially now and our lessons from each other have been grim. November was a very slow, very sad and waiting and grieving month for me this year.

I hope to pick up my project again. I have not done so quite yet. I have a bit more of ensuring my next living-space to do first. I was in no condition then, really no condition for it.

And that is how it went.

How to Maintain a Healthy Relationship With Your Dark Side

I was asked for advice by a friend of mine about how to make peace with and come to accept their own darker aspects. Here is what I told them.

Things that I think might help:

• Taking some time to sit down and have a serious discussion about it. If you know someone you can trust with the information, you can tell them what you know, or suspect, about the experiences that caused whatever misshapen-ness or scarring of social and emotional growth your dark side stems from. Talking about the causes of our problems can help us understand and forgive ourselves and each other.

• Finding safe ways to indulge in dark tastes that suit you. Sometimes I love dark metal music and appreciate watching or reading visceral horror media. Guess why. Drawing, writing poetry or fiction, playing harsh music on an instrument or finding some other way to give it symbolic expression can be a way to let the shadows out without hurting anybody.

• Personally, I love going for long walks in the evening or at night and listening to a variety of music including things that are metal, gloomy, express alienation, doubt, pain or experiences of having inner demons, and/or include sound clips from dark situations.
  
  And just letting my mind roll and wander and visualize. Wear the horns and claws, or wings, or open wounds and showing bones and rotting flesh, or the metal parts and eldritch symbols, as part of my shifting self-image. When no-one is around me to hear, sometimes I let myself snarl aloud. Sometimes I sprint just to feel my muscles moving and feel physically powerful and predatory.
  
  That is a way that I use to "walk with my demons", and it helps me feel whole and in touch with the full range of myself.

Resume Confessionals

I know I'm not alone when I get so nervous about my resumes. What is too long, too short, too corporate, too personal, too weird? How can I expect or presume to know the culture of the places I'm looking to work? Some online articles remind me to focus on what my audience will be excited to hear... And my sense of the limits of my own understanding of other peoples' priorities and expectations closes in again. It's tempting to throw up my hands and declare myself helpless...
But I am not willing to give up now.

Quantity over quality... I will put forward the attempt and make these applications even if they must be flawed in ways I struggle to judge as well as ways that will seem obvious in retrospect. This is not the time to fear my own imperfection. I will make changes and refine my practice attempt by attempt.

I will push myself to remember why it is that my friends, and sometimes, when I hear them, even I, believe that I am awesome and will be a great credit to the company who hires me. My courage. My insight. My perseverance. My vision. I will find ways to put them into words that fit on a resume, and I will keep doing this until opportune offers come to light and enable me to build plans around them by which I will find my way.

It's exhausting getting over the ugh. It takes a lot of strength and will to fire up my confidence into the blaze it can be.

I steer by the Stars, who help me and remind me. I need to steer by myself when clouds and circumstance come between us.

Dear Diary: Time To Make A Plan

I came in to the campus just to write a Financial Accounting test today. And I sat it, and finished it, taking about 98 minutes out of what would have been an available 120 I think, although that may have been stretched out from 90.

I walked away from the testing hall with a bit of niggling frustration over trying to remember whether it was IAS 37, 38 or 39 which dealt with events after the reporting period. I've never been good at remembering arbitrary numbers and codes like that. I let it fade gently from my mind, and my thoughts settle on something else.

I need to stop not having a plan.

This morning I told my dear Stars that over the past few days, I've come to the conclusion that it's important I come around to admitting that coming to Ireland was a mistake. "And so I've said it," I told them. And so I have. It was a mistake to come here. It may have been a mistake I needed to make, in the situation I was in, needed to make and then learn from. But it was a mistake. Which is the English human shorthand way to say, I suppose...

I need to stop trying to justify this and figure out how to recover. Write it off, sell it for what scrap I can get for it.

What now?

It's strange how much difference that makes to my perspective, when none of my options have really changed.

Well... If I'm not assuming I have to stay, I need to have a plan to go. Plane tickets, dates, an address of someone who'll let me stay with them for a while when I arrive back in Canada, either for rent or otherwise. All of it flexible, ideally, so that if I do manage to get a paid internship here with a company that'll put me through my next year and offer me a place with them, I can pivot to that.
Huh. Using the word pivot that way on a personal blog makes me sound like a corporate dickhead. Well, not pivot, then. Switch to it. Adjust to land there.

So. Refundable plane tickets. Those exist, I'm pretty sure. How much time do I want to give myself? Couple months? If I don't have an internship set up by mid-June, I don't think I'm likely to get one, so let's say late June maybe. April, exams are in May, June. Alright. I can work with that.

Today while I was walking to the campus, I listened to some episodes of the ACCA student podcast, including one episode on Clever Job Hunting which I listened to more carefully than the others. One of the things it says is about networking - that it's important to build relationships up before bringing up jobs at all.

Well, there's the kick, isn't it? Don't look desperate, ever, especially when you feel desperate. Don't ask people for awkward things. Smile. Shake hands. Talk small. Make friends.

I've never been good at that. I hate feeling like I'm confined to safe, inoffensive subjects. And I'm quick to get annoyed with people's bad habits. I have to admit, though, I get it. Swooping in and expecting the attention of people who don't know what makes me great looks pretentious, entitled. Because it is. I fly around the world, leaving places and people behind me, looking for a break... And then who's there to help me or vouch for me?

Anyway. Book a ticket to leave in June, then. Get through the rest of my classes and exams. Shift emphasis away from menial work for the summer - it seems even mushroom harvesting positions are looking for people who intend to stay longer than a year. Keep throwing out applications as I can bear to for internships, try to learn about companies that might be a gateway for me, here or in Canada. Maybe look into the US a bit, but since I've no claim there and no degree so far, don't expend too much effort on it.

Wrap up the story of the tabletop campaign. Does everything just go to hell because the death of Isabet Carol was only the first sign of things going very, very wrong, and the PCs didn't actually investigate enough to stop it? Sounds plausible, and may offer them enough closure to satisfy. It would be nice to have a tabletop story actually end in a way that feels like an ending for once.

Continue the conversation with Fanshawe and maybe other colleges in Canada, look at continued study... Maybe. I'm tired of going to school, though. Look for work in Canada, yes. If it's something that can get me starting to do work that aligns with my strengths and studies, great. If something that aligns with EA, even better.

Alright. Go and set it up, then, Serp.

The Broken Throne

So. It's been a week and two weekends. I have felt I've been doing surprisingly well. I have reflected on the happiness of working toward a goal that I have enjoyed over the past year. I have cried, have sought comfort in the words and company of my friends back in America and found it. I have felt confused, and hopeful, and empty.

I have searched for work, intermittantly, between sessions of passivity and fatigue bordering on depression, but not quite depression. I have despite this managed to submit resumes or reply to job ads to the tune of twenty in the two weeks I have been here.

I wrote a song. I got into a conversation on FetLife and was disappointed and alienated by an uncanny scriptedness of the advances of another human being, even though his script was polite.

I came into the campus this morning to job search, but wrote "love thyself" on my checklist, consciously, intentionally, a note of gentleness and will toward peace and joy.
(Context: There was a time, during a panic attack that I documented here, that I wrote "LOVE THYSELF" on my checklist as I was leaving class, like a compulsion, in jagged and accusing words, and visualised myself in a round room, curled up in a fetal position, with those words wrought across the rounded wall. It was one of the most direct and straightforward messages I have ever gotten from myself through my visualisations and compulsions.)

I came into campus this morning to job search, and listened to favourite OCremixes on the way, enjoying a variety of the songs that impressed me enough while I was combing through the vast collection that I wanted to keep them and hear them again. A few that I may want to remove, being not as impressed with them now, or feeling I had only liked them in comparison to other songs I liked less. Still at home, I felt a little downcast at the memory of Turks in Pursuit. A fine track, but one that Eoin had pointed out to me, based on an original track he liked, back when I showed him my habit of Audiosurfing these remixes. Now I sit down to a desk in the campus library, access the wifi, and another remix is next to come to my ear. It is one that's always struck me hard and driven me to thoughtfulness, and worse, it also speaks of Eoin. He knew the original duet, and we had planned, once, to sing it together. A 'Kid-pella, a touching a cappella rendition of Setting Sail, Coming Home from Bastion.

I take your hand; now, you'll never be lonely...

Tears come. I had hoped to be professional today. And I still hope I will be. But if I need to cry, it's well that I do it, and the sooner I can get over it.

I imagine the million things I want to say to him. To say I wanted to believe better of him than to think that his having said I would always be special to him last year, having said he liked me, and thought he would like to stay in touch a week ago, was empty words to placate. I still want to. I feel angry, although my wisdom counsels patience. I feel angry that I have heard nothing from him, after promising I would let him come to speak to me if he wished to.

I wonder, in my reeling thoughts, when I think of this, whether that was a mistake. Whether I might be able to claim him as friend quite readily if I'd been willing to lead the overture, but that he will be too intimidated to start a conversation with me, will not know what to say, and so will say nothing, until it eventually feels like it has been too long, and it would be too late now, and so will continue to say nothing. Should I rescind my promise? But that would be weakness. Desperate weakness, and would make me a clinging thorn if the truth is he would rather not speak with me.

I wonder if I should wish there was enough submissiveness or enough apathy in my nature to live on without much thought to it, and let him speak to me in his own time, whenever it strikes him to do so, even if it never does. I cannot wish for apathy, though.

The challenge of staying in touch with my loves across the ocean is upon me. It is quite natural for me to stay up late, but it makes it difficult to get any sleep. I am woken most mornings as my roommates rise, a neighborhood dog barks, a child with some developmental disability hoots a now-familiar loud cry. Perhaps I will be able to sleep in the evening, wake for company, and sleep again through the morning until it is time to wake. Perhaps, but then when will I work? There is so much to answer. It is difficult. But the voice of my dear Iris is comforting, in that blind, desperate way that something can be comforting even though it does not necessarily make any of the things that are wrong better. I remember that I wanted to talk with my friends about my future. I want their advice to help me figure out what to make of it. I realised through this experience that I build myself more to be what I think the people I love want me to be than I may have been willing to admit before.

I smashed the throne I built for Eoin, but the pieces, heavy as marble, still weigh in the center of me. I have not cleared them away, and it is hard enough even to resist the temptation to rebuild it. The throne room is a sad place now, deserted and despairing after the hope that had lived there. "My heart is wrapped in cold sorrow", I remember thinking to myself, as I marched home that Saturday afternoon, after that Friday evening, and my train back to Carlow.

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.

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.

Honest Friends Don't Tell Comforting Lies

If your aim is to believe the truth, if you believe that anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be, then all illusion, even comforting illusion, is your enemy.

However, when we as human beings encounter things that are painful to us, when we are disappointed or heartbroken, those who care about our feelings (generally including ourselves) will have to fight not to reach for anything that makes the sting a little less painful.

You're crying and inconsolable because your boyfriend dumped you. The best friend you called in order to have someone to talk to about it wants to tell you it'll all be okay. That he'll be back next week, just you wait. Or he was a real jerk and he was never worth your time to begin with. Anything that will let you stop crying, or make it a little easier to get through the day. She wants you to feel better, because she cares about you. That's why she's the one you called.

But if your now-ex-boyfriend was really a nice person, and you wanted it to work out but for whatever reason of life circumstances or incompatible goals or different religions or whatever it was it just wasn't working and it's gone now... Believing anything else, even if it's just to ease the pain, is an illusion. Believing that he'll come back or you could still make it work if that isn't the case can also hurt you all over again next week.

If you know this, and your friend knows this, and she remembers and notices the flicker of wrongness on her conscience when she thinks about telling you your ex boyfriend was a jerk, then although she might want to say all these things to comfort you, she won't. Maybe she'll invite you to go out and have ice cream and watch a movie marathon, or let you sit on her couch and cry on her shoulder for a few hours to help comfort you instead.

That's the kind of friend I want to have. Someone I can trust to only give me genuine reasons to feel better when I'm feeling miserable. Someone whose words I don't have to comb and double-check for comforting lies, or at least not as vigilantly, because I know they do that themselves. It's also the kind of friend I want to be, for other people.

However, many people who have established a belief that it's right to comfort a miserable person, and it's right to be patient and tolerant, and don't see a problem with it if they have to tell a half-truth to do that.

The most insidious comforting lie I've encountered in my life is "no, really, it's fine" in its vast plethora of different variations. And particularly, I have encountered a whole lot of "you aren't bothering me" repeated as a comfortable lie. A lie that lulls me gradually back into comfort... But there's a phrase for that kind of comfort. It's called a False Sense of Security. Emphasis on false.

So I keep behaving the same way, and I try to ignore the niggling doubt that arises in the back of my mind. It wouldn't be right to doubt the honesty of my friend, right? We're friends. I trust them. That's a big part of what friendship is. And down the line, that trust blows up in my face. Suddenly someone is screaming at me. There's a list of flaws and mistakes going back months that had never before been admitted to be offenses. And all too often, it ends the friendship entirely. Someone I cared about was polite about it, and polite about it, and polite about it until they couldn't be polite anymore, and all the stored-up ugliness is thrown back in my face all at once. It hurts, but there's a certain element of solace, a little tiny ring of satisfaction, buried in the pain, as some of the tension I've noticed over the weeks, little moments in which I was confused, unanswered questions that go, "If that wasn't offense, what was it?" resolve into a coherent model of the past.

If I had known... I could have done something about it. Would have assigned a higher priority to doing something about it.

This has happened to me personally so many times that sampling error and human trauma have kicked in. I intuitively expect that people who want to be my friends are lying to me so that I will feel better, are hiding the ways that my habits annoy them. In particular, the annoying habit of asking whether I am annoying them. Because that itch at the back of my mind has become nearly constant. The cycle self-perpetuates as people who mistake it for a one time fit of anxiety at first and give me their sincere reassurances are gradually worn down by the repetition, and they don't tell me they're running out of patience (because that would obviously trigger another mess of anxiety that they might be asked to help clean up)... until it's too late.

It is the phenomena of comforting lies that has wounded me. It is the lack of acceptance in society in general of the idea that comforting someone isn't always the most important thing, and if you let it become an excuse for dishonesty, you may be doing someone harm in the long run, especially if it works and they believe you.

My internal model of the world at this point is that, if someone has a problem with something I'm doing, especially if it's a small problem, the chance that they will respond by telling me that they have a problem with something I'm doing is waaaaay under 50/50. Likelier responses are saying nothing at all, changing the subject, or turning more of their attention to something else and waiting for me to go away on my own.

But when a friend of mine gets distracted from a text message conversation by talking to somebody else, they also say nothing at all. If someone honestly forgets what we were talking about, or just has something else they really want to share, they also change the subject. If they are distracted by a video game or even if they just don't realize I expect an answer, they also turn more of their attention to something else, and it doesn't mean they're waiting for me to go away on my own.

But I notice the correlation. I become anxious. Am I bothering this person? Do they want me to go away? Should I ask? But if I'm already making them uncomfortable, surely the question would be even more annoying... Especially if they have to deal with it every day.

I'm pretty good at reading body language, but I also know that my fear of being rejected (again) skews my judgement.

I want to have friends I don't need to second-guess. They're rare, in my experience, but there are people out there who are committed enough to truth that they feel a tickle in their conscience when they think about saying something to console someone else that isn't quite true, and won't lie in a situation in which they expect to be taken seriously unless they feel they really have to. They realize that untruth can be damaging even when the danger isn't obvious or immediate. They realize that a comforting illusion is still an illusion.

It is written that two rationalists cannot agree to disagree. Illusions are anathema to them, even if those illusions are composed of a best friend's cognitive biases. They know that even though it would be painful for someone they care about to have to confront their flaws, it is the only way to overcome them, and become stronger.

For this reason, it is important for someone who desires to become stronger to have honest friends. I have been making a concentrated effort to notice the signs when someone is deliberately not lying to me, even though the tension hurts them too. I have been making a point of reacting to this realization by bringing those people closer to me, and thanking them, and doing everything I can to convince them that regardless of what the rules of polite society dictate, I want the truth, and will cherish their willingness to protect it, even from the need to reassure me that everything is okay.

Dear Memory: Panic Attack

I have continued to be largely passive, skipping a fair few of my classes, playing video games with most of my time. I feel some pressure about school responsibilities, and more pressure about dealing with the applications to Irish colleges, but it is rarely enough to move me to action.

On the other hand, yesterday I had a visit with my counsellor. It cheered me up quite a bit at the time, just being listened to as I discussed some of the issues in my past that I had been unpacking with a new friend as well, who I have come to call Stars. I also did quite a bit of talking with my landlord about the matter of my roommates semi-regularly bringing people into the house late at night and talking loudly without any forewarning.

Then I played Don't Starve Together with a friend of mine, and watched GrimithR streaming Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion. I participated quite a bit in chat and enjoyed the stream. I experienced waves of fatigue several times, but at the end of the stream, I nevertheless spent another bunch of hours gaming on my own before I slept.

I slept long and through the morning, through my morning class and my early afternoon volunteering hour, although I woke up for brief minutes twice when someone slammed the door coming or going. I woke just as one of my one-hour classes would have been starting. I did not elect to rush to attend it. I prepared some soup. I went to my last class of the day, and participated somewhat in discussions, trying to keep up and catch up with information I had missed from previous classes. Sometimes my questions had a fairly obvious answer. I shrink in my seat, I rub my arms frequently, once I make a soft whining noise without meaning to. I feel intensely self-conscious and uncomfortable. I feel myself come close to hyperventilating a little, but I think unless someone was staring at me instead of the lesson, they probably would not notice.

It is tempting to flee home and into the distraction of video games, and the soothing of familiar voices preventing my brain from doing much with words, and some nice hot soup. I stay for the class, feeling panicky and feeling as though forcing myself to stay is almost a form of self-flagellation. Yet, at the same time, I am learning, becoming acquainted with some systems of accounting which are worthy of my attention. Pity my attention is scattered and split. Why is my capacity for enduring my classes so decimated lately? What's wrong with me...?

I stay, I follow along with the work. I comprehend what we're talking about, although I am extremely distracted and feel somewhat nauseous. I turn my mind tentatively to the question of Ireland and wonder a little whether I will really make it. I suppose there is room for doubt. It is a component of experience. This does not mean, necessarily, that I will not. I just feel so feeble right now.

Why do Monsters Make Me Happy?

Hello, world.

My slump seems to continue. I missed several classes again last week. I overcame some reluctance-towards-everything in order to attend a session I had booked almost a month ago with my counsellor on Friday. I spent just about the whole time venting and ranting and voicing my assessment of the great streak I had been on for a while, and the restfulness, and then restlessness, of my disengagement since February 19th.

The next day, I went back to the gym. I had a headache, that ebbed and returned while I was working out, and part way through my strength exercises, my willingness to exert myself gave out. My muscles seemed to be doing alright. It wasn't pain or pushing near the usual shaky intolerance that made me stop one of my sets at eleven, and the next, when I elected to try it again, at ten. It was something closer to boredom, or apathy, or reclusiveness.

I saw the coach who had originally set me up with my work out as I was heading up the stairs, and he asked cheerfully how I was, but I had nothing cheerful to say back, so I only waved. It was nice to see him again, since he was a positive acquaintance and very energetic and understanding from the beginning, but it was uncomfortable to be seen.

I noticed the other day that I had completely forgotten to pay rent to my landlord in February. In a fit of profound embarrassment, I immediately sent him an e-transfer for two months' rent to cover February and March, and filled the comment box and another email beside it with my apologies. He was gracious, and made nothing of it except to thank me for the messages. This landlord has been uncommonly good to us. I count that a dear blessing.

The kitchen continues to be wretched. The stove covered in grease and burned debris, the floor just dirty enough to be slightly sticky sometimes, and slightly slidey with a layer of dirt which is not secure on the floor at others. It is an unhappy, weighing thing to see.

Friday night my roommates had friends over. I have been trying to sleep at night again, and have been having some limited success, sleeping in late evening and remaining awake five hours before waking up on my own. However, I cannot measure my progress very well when I am not left to myself to wake up. I woke Friday night to the sounds of people, coming and going and loudly talking. I did not have the energy, or perhaps simply did not have the will, to move. I only lay in the darkness, awake and tired or perhaps sometimes vaguely approaching sleep again for a while before the voices roused me. Someone laughs. Someone swears, and my tension ticks up another little notch. I do not know how long I laid there before I found whatever I had been lacking and moved.

I should note, it was not paralysis this time. Sleep paralysis feels very different. I was stuck between rest and motion, not between my nerves and the waking world. It was very tiresome, but was not claustrophobic in the same way.

Eventually I stirred, rolled over, groaned, and turned on my laptop to check the time. About 1:30 AM. My thoughts grew darker, but were still tired and predominantly wordless. I wrapped my housecoat around me and staggered out to boil some water and fetch a snack, casting dark, empty looks toward the corner where those two roommates and their guests sat or stood or lay variously on and around the couch, talking loudly and not seeming to do much of anything else. I did not talk to them. I did not have the grace or the desire. In the short term, I was already woken, and in the long term, I no longer felt any inclination to believe my words would make any difference at all to their behaviour. Perhaps they do not understand the affect this has on me, but I have tried to make it clear to them before.

The loud speaking continued until 3:30 or 4 or so. The next morning, the area was scattered with pieces of chips, an empty chip bag, a large empty vodka bottle. The common area thus decorated was slightly worse than usual. Since then, the bottle and bag have been tidied away, but the pieces of chips have not. A few days ago, I left out a note on the counter that only said, "The STICKINESS on the floor is GROSS. Please CLEAN it." It has shifted around and been pushed toward the section of cabinets I reserve for myself, and the marker has been smudged with wetness and the paper spotted with grease, but so far as I can tell nothing has been done.

This afternoon I confronted one of my roommates in the kitchen, toneless, dark, not feeling enough of myself to give of myself. I greeted her and said, "Does it not bother you to see the kitchen like this?" She said quickly that it does, and that she would clean it tonight when others were not in the house. I heard it listlessly, almost feeling this gambit were unfair. I told her that if she did not, I probably would, and that I had a friend I wished to have over tomorrow.

I do not particularly believe her, but I will look to see whether anything is done. She also told me, the other day, when I sent out a text to the household and the landlord complaining that the thermostat had been turned to 78 degrees, that the landlord had set it so after she had complained of the cold, and it automatically reset to 78 if they changed it. I heard from the landlord in response to the same message that he would put a lock box on the thermostat.

I went out and bought some groceries, mostly frozen things to heat in the oven. The freezer I share with another roommate is mostly full. I send her a text message offering to make room if she needs it, and saying she shouldn't worry about it if she needs to rearrange the freezer or anything. I have generally gotten on well with this particular roommate, although she is rarely here. The kitchen bothers her more than it does me, and she has a boyfriend she can spend time with away from here, so I suppose why wouldn't she?

While at the grocery shop, I bought Monster energy drinks again, and had one as soon as I got home. I had been feeling deadened, disinterested, wondering whether my slump had degraded into depression. Shortly after the drink, though, as generally and bizarrely seems to happen, I felt... better. Cheerful, in a way I have not been. Why does this happen? What is it about the energy drinks that sloughs away the misery in a way nothing else does? I find it... concerning. I have a sense that I ought to be able to feel this alert all the time, without having to rely on a drink to trigger it. Why is it that they make me happy, even if I still feel tired and sleepy? Do I really feel my fatigue more as emotions than fatigue? I do know that nothing saps my energy like getting upset, but I didn't expect it to work so thoroughly the other way around. I know tiredness manifests as a form of sadness, but I do not expect energy to manifest more as happiness than as perceptible energy.

Storming Phase

I spent much of today feeling very annoyed with my new roommates. Yesterday I discovered that a jar of quarters I had kept near the washing machines had vanished completely, and I was unable to do the load of laundry I intended until today after going out to get some more. Further, the kitchen counters have been a mess and the sinks piled high with their dishes.

I was soothed a bit when I asked one of the trio who cook together and talk so much together when I could expect them to have cleaned it up, and was told they could have it done in an hour, but when I came back from my errands to find the house empty and the kitchen still a mess I was angry.

Nothing steals away my energy and motivation to do cool stuff like resentment. After plunging away the blockage that had formed in my ensuite bathroom's toilet and cleaning it, putting my laundry on and into the dryer, I just could not find the inclination to study, although I had already been delaying. I watched YouTube for a while and eventually fell into a mid-afternoon nap... only to be woken by the trio chattering gaily away and returning to the house.

Almost nothing infuriates me like the ongoing distraction of unwelcome noise, and being woken up from tired slumber by it makes it even worse. For some time, I turned this way and that, flopping onto one side, burrowing in my blankets looking for my socks, for I'd fallen asleep clothed. I was angry and exhausted, and knew I would not be able to be polite to my roommates. Eventually, at last, I got myself onto my feet and resolved to go out, get myself a coffee (being caffeinated seems to help my mood as well as my focus) and perhaps seek somewhere quiet where I might get something done on the campus. I still fumed away darkly at the feeling of not having quiet space to enjoy within my house, though.

It occured to me to check the area where religious gatherings and discussions generally took place, just in case there might be somewhere there this Sunday evening whom I could plead to advise me toward patience and diplomacy, because I was out of it... but it was closed up and locked with a note on the door about how to book the space.

I found my way to the library, remembered that the homework I wanted to do would require me to have my headphones to listen to sound, and immediately left again to get coffee and headphones. The landlord was in when I returned, mending a cabinet in the kitchen. I had been strongly considering walking in and demanding of the noisy trio that they keep quiet so I could do my studying, but the presence of an unexpected person took all the wind out of my sails. I collected my headset and walked back out to the college, waiting for a moment outside, as the landlord was leaving at the same time, thinking I might mention my frustration to him... But he was bustling around putting his tools away, so I did not.

I checked out the B building and D junction computer labs, but one was full of more students than I would like to be around, and in the other some people arrived talking noisily to one another, the last thing I had patience for just then, so I made it back to the library lab, and set myself down to work.

In the end, I did about 2 hours and 45 minutes of diligent homework, study and organization tonight at the campus, with a break in the middle to use the bathroom and take a brief walk around the halls. They were so empty, I took up karate stance and a couple of steps, then finding the purchase very slippery, ran and slid across the floor a few times just for fun.

The trio were still awake when I returned home at half past eleven. One was still talking on the phone, although doing so in a soft, low voice. I portioned myself some soup I had made yesterday and a toasted bagel, washed my soup pot (finally empty) and returned to my room where I now write.

Once while I have been writing the girls reconvened and started talking to one another more loudly. Braver now and feeling more justified and more capable, I walked out to firmly hush them: "Excuse me; please; quiet. It's late." I was given an understanding smile and apology in recognition. Perhaps things are not so bad. The state of the kitchen, and seeing them only tidy up in time for them to start cooking and fill up the sink with a whole new batch of dishes is still a major annoyance. I will try to bring it up with them later, when I have more energy and more patience.

Amusingly, yesterday while I was out on a long walk, I listened to a couple episodes of the Accountancy Ireland podcast, and one of them brought up the four stages of team building: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. Well, I guess this is bound to happen. At the very worst, I should on most days, or at least most weeks, be able to find somewhere on campus where I am able to focus on schoolwork. If it comes to that. I will have a great deal of complaint to make if it does, but I will not be rendered entirely helpless nor allow myself too make too much of an excuse of it if my home environment is unhelpful.

Another thing I did while walking was listen to Oceans again on loop for a while, and think of Eoin...

When it comes to love, you've dipped your toes in the river, but I've got oceans waiting for you...

It even uses a metaphor of catching fish in there somewhere. Heh. Sigh.
Don't let me fool you. I still love you, Eoin.

Tabletop Story: Rogesh the Spy

The last time I played D&D was a cameo in a Pathfinder game while I was visiting an old friend in Northern Ireland. He suggested I make a character to join the party in his game for the short time I was there, so I asked about their current situation in order to make a character who could arise out of it. They were a party at around level 10, I think, and they were on a mission to find various pieces of the true name of a demon who'd been established as a nemesis of theirs. This had taken them most recently to a city of vampires, where they had been tested in battle by the vampire god Malkav (Vampire the Masquerade reference, there) and defeated his avatar, thereby earning his blessing on their quest.

My character was a half-breed (dhampir) called Rogesh who'd grown up in the city and made a name for himself as a thief, spy and assassin. He was a casual worshiper of Malkav and identified with the vampires of the city, but knew he was street trash. He lived a hedonistic lifestyle funded by selling his skills to the nobles in their petty power struggles. He was a rogue/shadow dancer and pretty much all of his powers had to do with shadows. He could step between them, hide well in them, bend them into illusions, and (fun fun flavour) the shadow companion he relied on to scout and sometimes flank for him was his own shadow - as a half-vampire, his human half did cast one, but his studies and powers gave it sentience and independence. When he wanted to stay subtle, he kept it near him, walking with him footstep to footstep as mortals' do, but he would whisper to it sometimes while stalking the seedier streets of the city.

Anyway, he'd been hired to spy on the arrivals to the city who had crashed through the gates a few days earlier, and see what they were up to. He tracked the party to where they were entering the sewers (vampire city sewers, full of blood and viscera), but his stealth was matched by the intuition of their drug-addled seer, who sensed that someone was watching them. This led to an awkward confrontation. Rogesh surrendered immediately (his advantage is stealth - once that's broken, he doesn't have much) and admitted he'd been sent to spy on them, but was somewhat awed when he saw the mark of Malkav's favour which showed magically behind their eyes and was eager to join them when they explained they were on a quest approved of by the vampire god. After all, he could still report back to his employer, and give even better details if he was observing their work from the inside.

In their trek through the sewers, Rogesh helped them fight, earning some trust and respect from the others, and his shadow was destroyed by an unknown danger after he sent it out scouting down a side path. He snuck past a gigantic otyugh embedded in the sewers, and when the rest of the party attracted its attention, he shouted threats at it and shot it in the inside of the mouth until it was convinced it would be better not to eat them, and let them go by.

Finally, they found a fleshy spire covered in writing, which they were sure somehow held the piece of the name they were looking for, but it was trapped, and the demon showed up in an avatar form built of blood from the sewers and fought them. The demon had prepared a strategy for fighting them, but was not expecting Rogesh. It was wearing the shape of a humanoid whose body it had taken over. Apparently she was a relative of one of the party members as well, and was known as a vampire hunter who had once posed enough of a threat to the city's undead population that Malkav rose up and claimed, or proved, his divinity in order to drive her off.

Before the fight, she offered Rogesh that since he was a half-breed, and had no part as yet in their fight, he could join her and serve her forces - or, he could stand against her with the party and be tormented horribly after she won. Rogesh stood uncertain for a moment, then realized he recognized the shape, and made up his mind. He fell to his knees, and for perhaps the first time in his life, he prayed aloud to Malkav. He had never been particularly devout, but he lived his life for life's pleasures, as was Malkav's way, and had always belonged to the city and the vampires. He prayed to Malkav to give him the strength to fight for the love of life and the joy of going down fighting. It seemed his prayer was heard, somehow. As a response to his passionate plea, his shadow returned. Normally it would take a month to grow back after being destroyed, but it came back immediately, visible against the chamber floor, and it looked subtly different, with long, flowing hair as would often be seen in depictions of Malkav in his role as the handsome prince-god of vampires.

The shadow wasn't any more powerful, but it was back to help him fight anyway, and Rogesh dug into the fray, leaping at the demon along with his new companions and digging blades into its back. In the end, they won, and Rogesh survived, falling to the floor of the sewers and laughing manically at how his life had suddenly become entwined in the affairs of gods and demons.

Denouement:
As the adventuring party left the city for their next destination, Rogesh returned to report to all the important vampire nobles (though his client first), and the church of Malkav, what had been happening, and that the demon had sought to usurp Malkav through the religious uprisings of the city's mortals. The uprisings were quashed in a bloody slaughter, Malkav himself taking the form of a gigantic ugly beast to rampage through the streets, supported by priests and warriors.

Rogesh watched the fighting from hidden alcoves in towers, in awe, and later asked a priest at one of the temples why Malkav took the form of an ugly monster when he was fighting. The answer given was that slaughter was an ugly thing, and Malkav did not think it fitting to offer it any of his beauty. Rogesh, who had never been beautiful and had always been a mercenary, found this to be a somewhat validating explanation.

His shadow retained its handsome new shape, although its personality and knowledge remained the same as ever. He was honored as a hero for warning the city of the danger; his reputation was greatly improved, earning him more prestigious contracts; and he told stories of the adventure in the city's bars and brothels while showing off the image of Malkav in his shadow to attract ladies.

Life Across the Sea

The Irish winter is mild compared to Canada. It was particularly mild when I arrived and for a few days then, and felt like spring, but now it's quite bitterly cold enough to be irritating. Being outside and moving is really not a problem in winter clothes, but inside, my apartment is not heated efficiently enough to cope well at all.

Worse, it's heated by metered electricity and that inefficiency costs a not insignificant quantity of money. At least now I know how to turn it on if I decide not to suffer numbness of my toes and fingers anymore for a while, but if I were to keep it on and keep my room a comfortable temperature with it (it does take a fair while to spread the heat sufficiently through the room) it would cost me 2-3 euros in electricity charges, per day, by itself.

I learned to my unhappiness that I would not be provided any blankets either and the first night I was here, I shivered impotently, huddled against a wall heater in the living room to no avail. The building was colder still while most of the students who would regularly inhabit it were still away on the winter holiday.

For the first five days I was here, I walked roughly three kilometers to the Athlone Castle in the center of town. It is just what it sounds like, a great old stone castle with a cobbled cart road up into it, and up at the top they have kept some cannon and stocks as historical artifacts. Each time, I sought out the St. Vincent de Paul's outlet I had seen existed downtown on Google Maps. Some of those times, it was closed, and its signage calls it Vincent's, with new and unfamiliar branding. However, I did buy sheets and a towel my first trip, and blankets on a couple of subsequent ones. I went back later for some more clothes, hoping to find something to wear to a nightclub, although that's another story; and finally, shorts and athletic capris. Regardless the place, a thrift store is my personal lifeline.

In the first two weeks of school here, I've learned that the Irish are more relaxed about time (less monochronic, as my earlier classes may have put it) and the proper time to arrive for classes is right on the hour. The lectures will actually begin 5-10 minutes later. Several of my classes were cancelled because it was so early in the term, and one was cancelled just because the lecturer did not show up.

I went out to Eddie Rockets (a local diner) and the cinema with some of the other New Internationals. This is not an official term, it's just what I'm calling those students who, like me, arrived here as transfer students for the second term of the year and with whom I was inducted and shown about the school. There are some from Germany, some from France, some from the Netherlands. The film we saw was Passengers. It was not perfect by any means, not an immediate favourite like Amelie, but it was visually absolutely gorgeous, and it was acted very well. I did however find myself internally facepalming at the movie at several moments though (Goddamnit, John, you should know better than this. You do not cross that line until you have had that talk. Could we maybe at some point consider having a romance movie which doesn't depend on someone doing something incredibly stupid and unethical for all its tension? Although, to be fair, he has pretty much descended into a personal hell. The extreme circumstances having affected his mind at least makes sense.) (Look, it's a science fiction movie... We know this guy is going to die because he's not one of the two protagonists who have to pull things out of the fire. Did you have to make him black? Really? Lawrence Fishburne does a fine job, but the adherence to the trope is embarrassing.) (and worst of all... What? Excuse me, what? You can't do that, that's cheating. She stopped moving while immersed in water. You made a point of showing her ceasing to struggle and going limp. No-one else is there to rescue her. She's dead. She is not going to get up from that no matter how much she's jolted around. She's dead, goddamn it.) ...but for the most part, although it was full of tropes played straight and pretty predictably, each one was played sincerely and with impressive style. The eye candy didn't get in the way and was absolutely beautiful. I was actually sitting in a cinema, noticing the tropes but not minding all that much. I found myself thinking... Well, would you look at that. In this moment, I'm damn near acting and feeling like a normal healthy young adult.

The New Internationals who were with me laughed at my comments on the film afterward, and split up, some going home, some heading out to the nightclub Karma. I was wearing thin and anxious, but elected to give it a go. The atmosphere when I stepped inside though did not agree with me, and I was already feeling tense having walked around for some time with a trio who were primarily speaking French to one another. I tried some of my learned high school Canadian French, to the encouragement and appreciation of Sana, but every time I opened my mouth, I felt deeply embarrassed by the knowledge that my ability with the language is so patchy. Perfectionism is not helpful in learning new things.

At the nightclub, the fee was 8 euro just to get in. Then inside there was a bag check that cost another 2. A youth slung himself around a corner hollering, and the throbbing music from inside did not appeal. Annoyed that I was already facing being milked of my money stage by stage, I defied the sunk cost fallacy, turned on my heel and left, stopping to ask the lady at the ticket gate whether I could get my 8 euro back and just leave. She said no. I wasn't going to argue.

Triggered, I walked towards home, around midnight downtown in an unfamiliar country. But then, being triggered is often like that. I despaired that I didn't have Lonely Digger on my mp3 player anymore, nor my mp3 player with me, and more than anything I despaired for being alone, far away from any of my close friends, and especially the closest, she who I dream will travel with me, my Ashlynn. Reaching a peak in my desperation, I sat on the sidewalk, took out a notebook and pen, and wrote. I do not, however, recount that writing here.

Since arriving, I have made contact with the Tabletop Society (board games, Magic, D&D players; a lot of familiar and friendly culture, gathered loudly in one room Thursday evenings), College of Kingeslake (SCADIANS! ♡), the Dance Club and the Archery Club (brought to us by College of Kingeslake on Friday afternoons). There has been much to learn and friendly people to meet.

An international student who has been here since September, Anni from Finland, was a quick friend, greeting me in one of my first classes and inviting me to come to Tabletop Society. It is good to have met someone I am comfortable asking questions and asking to work with me on group projects. She's taking accounting as her elective. Perhaps I can help her with the knowledge I already have.

I'm sure life in Ireland will continue to be new and challenging. Goodness, I didn't even really mention the rustic, eccentric architecture and the plentiful unfamiliar birds and how remarkably green the fields are... It will have to wait. There are things to attend to.

Term Hectic

Life has been a combination whirlwind and sinkhole for me recently.
I only just noticed I had not blogged in over a month. It's really no wonder that during the school months, I neglected it last year. I have my courses to handle, and right now assignments are getting on top of me. I have arrangements for my foreign exchange term to make, including lodging, furniture storage, finance and course selection. I have my primary and secondary relationships to juggle. A good problem to have, admittedly, but trying to stay sane while negotiating fights with one and jealousy with the other has been very draining.
In amongst all this, the biggest thing is trying to cope with my mood, my intense cravings for sleep, my utter not-willing-to-put-up-with-this feelings about the tumbling and crashing that keeps me from sleeping during any of the hours that the landlord and his family upstairs are awake (I'm so glad I'm moving at the beginning of December - oh, right, add that to the list of things I need to do and prepare for!). The schoolwork would not actually be much to get through if I could maintain my morale and just sit down and do 'em, but between exhaustion and exasperation, loneliness and pressure, it's a lot to manage and can easily leave me dazed and unproductive.
I'll get through it somehow or another. I have to, after all. I look forward to Ireland and the new term, after the arrangements and preparations and moving is all over. A new beginning, new lessons, a new setting. Europe! And when I come back, seeing Asha again in the summer months.
Well, why not dream far ahead, I suppose, right?

The Ayn Rand Effect?

I wonder if there is a scientific name for this effect:

That in any situation in which a system is put in place to help a group of people who are presumed to need it, some people who do not "need it" will seek to take advantage of the assistance anyway, and some will succeed. Then, a large third party will equate every single person who utilizes the help to be cheating the system by taking its assistance on false pretenses, creating a social and political situation with loud, vocal deriders claiming that these people are (all) leeches who could get by fine on their own, and any and all users of the systems become stigmatized. It happens with welfare, it happens with food banks, it happens with the LGBT community and supports therein, it happens with trans people and feminists and ethnic minorities; any group of any kind that is partially or wholly disadvantaged in some way, and which people seek to help out of that disadvantage by giving them focused support.
The stigma generally does not start because they are given help, but is deepened or shaped by it.
I wonder what that would be called? Perhaps the Ayn Rand Effect?

Thinking on this got me taking a second look at her philosophies. Some of it's quite sensible if I look at it to understand, rather than outright seeking conflict. I think I can see precisely what she's talking about and warrant her her insight on it, and then see exactly where she makes an oversimplification and calls something an absolute that isn't.

For instance the assertion that sex is "not possible in self-abasement". I read what she's describing about sex, and I know what she's talking about. To see in one's partner's surrender the glorification of one's identity... Suggesting then that I love and desire another person because they, as I understand them, are a complement to my own self-image; because taking them (and them in particular) as mine to please and please myself upon glorifies what I am. I don't actually have any objection to that; she's right, it does. But she stumbles, I think, it defining that as "Sex". It is Ideal and Idealized Sex, as she sees it, and I do not disagree, but it's only one subset of the many possible acts called sex. Sex IS possible in self-abasement. She talks about that as well, and in so doing contradicts herself; but only because she has stooped to making a battle cry of an oversimplified absolute statement and an emotional trope, because one cannot easily make battle cries of the complicated, grey-shaded and fiddly truth. Amusingly, if I am reading this right, that act is against her own philosophy, but nevertheless a mistake she is frequently prone to.

That and a tendency to really overblown patriotism, and perhaps a blindness to downsides of decisions and ideals that she cares for strongly. Common problem, that. Significantly worse problem for a philosopher than a member of the general populace to have. More damaging there. Ah, but of course she speaks of her vision of Idealized America, just as she speaks of Idealized sex. Its victories, without its failures, as though those could be separated and held in different histories. Disregarding the times, and the frequency of the times, that it has failed to live up to its own ostensible vision, and to uphold its own ostensible values. Or indeed, the places where its apparent victories were attributed to glorious virtue, but were as much the result of, for instance, oppression and literal slavery.

Ha. I feel like doing a bit of my own political-sounding speechifying, so I will:

"I disagree with her. Altruism and selfishness, for all that they seem often to pull in opposite directions, are not enemies and are not mutually incompatible any more than the expansion and the contraction of a person's beating heart are enemies and mutually incompatible. They can be balanced. Indeed, they must be balanced, or the individual quickly collapses and dies.
I believe that it IS possible to construct a society in which there is a bottom absolute limit, a floor, to how far a person's wealth and quality of life is allowed to fall, but with no corresponding absolute limit to how high it may rise; if only it were to be agreed that this state is desirable, and to then construct it with this goal in mind.
I believe that giving to others and keeping for oneself are both forces that belong in every life, are both sources of happiness and joy, and that they complement one another as such. To find a healthy balance between them is one of the necessary steps to create a happy and purposeful life, without resentment or hate or shame."

What brought all this on?

Well, the study of and comments on Ayn Rand were of course off of the thought that her name and reputation might fit the effect I was describing, and the thoughts on that effect are a repetition of something I find myself mulling over from time to time. In this case, it was all prompted, somewhat indirectly, by a SciShow video on the Taboos of Science. In the comments, biological and formative differences between different ethnicities and sexes was a (fairly obvious) subject discussed as a taboo of science, as it has become faux pas to admit or suggest that there are meaningful and significant differences there due to some irritating exaggerations associated with the equality movements.

There was also mention of the classification of gender dysphoria as a disease, which got me thinking about the way some people question the existence or legitimacy of trans people and also sufferers of things like Aspergers and Bipolar Disorder, and on from there to an old recurring series of thoughts on how youth who are acting destructively or poorly are frequently dismissed as "just seeking attention," as though seeking attention when one is lonely, hurt, or confused and facing something they don't know how to solve is inherently wrong and shameful, which is obvious bullshit. While acting out destructively is not an acceptable means to it (albeit sometimes true that suffering people do not know how to ask directly), seeking attention should not be seen as a wrong. The "just seeking attention" tends to imply lying and making up ailments or exaggerating them in order to get the attention that may actually BE needed.

Admittedly this actually does happen a fair bit because lesser problems or less severe cases of problems are often dismissed, mocked or ignored, making exaggeration sometimes (tragically and socially destructively) necessary to get help of any kind. And then those who do truly suffer from the ailments most often used as excuses suffer further from stigmatization and an impression that their ailment does not exist because the false complainers reflect badly on them. That's an example of the broad effect I was talking about, which I think also holds true in this broader sense.
That's what brought this on.

How My Mind Works

Hello. Good afternoon. How are you?
Huh. Cool. Quick to be promoted.
Oh heavens I'm sorry but I think I'm drunk on conflict. I'm feeling like a dark euphoria or something.
Or... maybe...
HmmmMm.
I've been restraining myself so thoroughly and effectively for the last few days... that I really, really want to do something reckless and risk fucking up something beautiful apparently.
Is this what it's like realizing that you're addicted to failure? That's hilarious.
I think... I feel like I am a whimsical entity, this reactive, animal conscious-mind, caught in a moment in which gears larger than itself are shifting. A decision is being made around me. To take responsibility for my own actions. I'm barely even the thing making it any more. I'm just in the high. Loopy, feeling the gears grinding. Wondering what bits of me that I once cared about are the dust, dirt, roots and chips coming off and falling away.
Bye, me! Bye, excuses for being unfunctional. Look ma. I'm loopy. But I am still here.
And you? You're dead. You're dust. You're... you're going to start leaving me alone now.
♥
HmmmMm.
Sorry it was you. It couldn't be anyone in my regular social group. The person I am having to restrain myself with is there, and I have to wait for him to be ready to walk into the group presence with me and ask for their help with our peace accord together.
I do hope that I am not causing you much distress.
Perhaps I am entertaining. Or simply obnoxious.
Let me know, sweet?
Oh, I am such a tease, aren't I, being incomprehensible like that. I guess it's one of the habits I'll have to kick. It's more actually intelligent and more actually difficult, a greater, nobler challenge, to speak succinctly but clearly enough that one is not a challenge to follow.
But permit me this indulgence. For now. Still, if you wish, I can explain... any part of this... more clearly.
No, it's only my fault I'm being incomprehensible.
Do you hate me for it? Oh, do say you'll hate me for it, that you'll never understand me, that you'll look back on this moment and realize that it's not worth talking to me. Ha. Hahahaha. You know what? I think I get it. Yes, that needling would be awful annoying, even in small doses.
♥
Hurf. So... can I not care? Not caring seems... HmmmMm. Not caring about the bad, but being grateful for anything good? It always seemed like such a double-standard, didn't it little starfish, hmmm...
But what do you lose? A few chips off your shoulder that were really only keeping it from a full range of motion. Go on. Throw it away. You... you can be new.
You can be whole. Don't you want to be whole? Capable? Prove yourself and WIN, for once?
Mmm.
Again, Sorry miss, I never could talk to myself worth a damn without an audience.
Because then who am I talking to? Or something like that. Having someone watching... Something about it... makes it... real.

So. How are you?

(She left. I don't know yet whether she's going to come back.)