Well, I fucked up again, and was in risk of getting a big fat zero on my movie script. 

You know, the one I poured my heart and soul into over the last three weeks. The one that I am actually pretty proud of, to be honest. It’s certainly the thing that took the most out of me to write, and writing it was a truly intense experience. I think the scenes I wrote are very powerful, maybe too powerful to be honest. But my default setting appears to be “turn everything up to eleven”.

Plus, as discussed, my mentors seemed to like it.

So that’s what was on the line, and all because of my bete noire, my absentmindedness. I forgot that the finished version  was supposed to be emailed to Steve Toms, one of the teaching assistants (and reluctant tech support) at the VFS Writing department, instead of posted to the course’s forum like the previous two steps had been.

Now relax, it didn’t happen, everything is cool.

But here’s what makes this major fuckup different than all the previous ones was that I was fully prepared to defend myself. And not out of fumbling desperation like usual, but out of (almost) total conviction that I was in the right.

Because honestly, how ridiculous would it be to give me a zero on a thing which is one of the major projects I will do in my time at VFS and possibly wreck my (I like to think) promising career over a minor clerical error?

I mean really. If this had been a job instead of school work, it’s not like the people paying me to write the script would say “Wait, you sent it to the wrong email address? Then NO MONEY FOR YOU, and you’ll never work in this town again!”.

Mental note : that would be a hilarious thing for someone in a really small town to say.

No, in the real world it would be a matter of a very short phone conversation and then you’d never hear about it again.

And the thing is, I had proof that I had actually handed in my script (virtually speaking) last Wednesday, in the form of the forum post, and that means that I can prove that I completed the assignment on time. In fact, I completed it five days early.

I just misfiled it.

And I am happy I was so ready to plead my case. It means I am forming the proper reactions in order to protect myself in this mean ol’ world. It’s long overdue. I think the formation process got interrupted by a severe sense of abandonment when I was a kid. Part of me, I suppose, was still waiting for someone to notice how broken I was and come in and save me and protect me.

And I am still there, kinda. I am getting over it, but I am not out of the proverbial woods yet. I know that to continue in life I have to rescue myself from that snowbank where I laid down and willed myself to die a long, long time ago. I will have to accept that, whatever injustices lay in my past, I am an adult now and the only one who can look after me is myself. I have to stop waiting, “let them get away with it”, and move on with my life.

But it’s a long, slow, painful process. I kind of gave up on myself in that snowbank. In a sense I did die there, because that’s where a part of my soul died and I am still trying to warm it up and bring it back to life. It’s where despair took over and rendered me passive and helpless and a little dead inside.

It’s where all those miles of frozen tundra inside my soul came from. It’s where that glacier atop my heart came from. It’s where I detached from life in a very dangerous life.

I’d like to be the person I was before then again. I was such a cheerful kid before school came along and threw me to the wolves.

Anyhow, back to the school thing.

So, once more, I narrowly escaped oblivion due to the kindness of strangers. That bete of mine just keeps noiring up the joint. Being absentminded seems like it’s an easy problem to fix, but it isn’t. Not for me, anyhow.  It requires more or less rewiring the way I look at the world and how I encode memories, and that is not going to be fixed with a few lines of code and a quick recompile.

I have tried to come up with solutions that actually work with my particular model of brain, but I think I lack the necessary self-knowledge. Plus I am just not used to creating my own unique solutions for problems yet.

A rather unfortunate tendency to use methods that seem “sensible” or “practical” to me and then hate myself when they don’t work is sitting in the way like a fucking Snorlax.

He’s the fat one.

And I feel so scraped raw and frostbitten inside. Like I have been dragged naked over frozen, rocky roads for a couple hundred miles.

But, slowly and painfully, I birth my ice and let it melt. And the more I do that, the more thing I can feel. I am just beginning to reach into the world in search of joy and pleasure and all the others things I need for healing. It feels weird after all those years of having to generate the bare minimum for survival by myself, but that’s what giving up on the world does to a person. You just barely manage to make it through each day, and you self-medicate with your preferred high reward to effort ration activity.

Like video games, reading, and food.

For a long time I didn’t even think about the future, because when I tried, I felt this enormous annihilating despondent terror and a sensation of a dark grey nothingness stretching out to infinity, with me in the middle.

Now that I have a future, I can at least imagine that there is a place for me in the world.

Now I just have to get there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.