That’s my short term goal.

Dare to dream, that’s my motto.

Probably should be “dare to act”. Dreaming big is easy. I do it all the time. Imagination (and its cooler older brother, “vision”), has never been my problem.

The will to act, that’s my problem. Problem is, when you are really good at dreaming, you start to prefer dreams to reality.

Dreams are always exactly what you imagine them to be. They can’t fail you, disappoint you, or surprise you with unforeseen complications.

Reality, on the other hand, is hard. It requires so much effort and it’s complicated and it’s scary and it’s loud. Worst of all, it does its best to pull you out of the secret garden of your mind and make you deal with things.

So you deal with the absolute minimum amount of reality you can, and maximize the time you spend in your safe and cozy world of dreams and the mind.

By, say, playing video games all day.

I know I have a lot to give the world. I know that I could do a lot of good in the world if I had the balls to get out there and kick butt.

But that deep and terrible sadness inside me keeps me locked in a cage I built a long time ago to protect me from the world.

I try to imagine actually engaging with the world, for real and not just in theory, and the sadness wells up in me and I just fall apart inside.

In many ways, it is worse than the fear. The fear, at least, reminds me that I am alive. The sadness, on the other hand, feels like the opposite of life.

Not death, exactly. Even death has a certain vitality to it.

More like… the opposite of living.

And the only way I know of to do with this sadness is to turn away from the world and do what little I can do while it slowly drains away.

And when it’s gone, I feel empty and hollow.

And once more, the lesson is reinforced : don’t go anywhere near the edges of my tiny comfort zone. Doing so only makes things worse. I am better off staying in my lame little lane instead of drowning in my own icy cold tears.

I don’t exactly want to die.

But I don’t exactly want to live, either.

Or maybe my problem is that I want to skip the awkward and painful journey between my current level of woundedness and true mental health.

Or maybe that I find the fundamental truth of my situation – that I can do nothing to make myself better except keep going to therapy and writing on this blog – so fundamentally unacceptable that I would rather think that I am failing at life rather than face the fact that I am, in fact, doing all that I can and it’s not enough.

After all, you can’t fail if there was never chance to succeed.

More after the break.

---

Where were we? Right, my inability to accept the fundamental truth of my situation.

I wish I could adopt a healthy, one day at a time kind of attitude. It seems to work for other people, and I admire it in them.

I mean, it’s not like having a head full of dreams and grand ambitions has ever done me any good anyway. In fact, it’s mostly caused me pain, both by giving me a world to escape to that is more attractive than real life, and by causing me to feel like a failure for failing to live up to my ginormous potential.

And there is always that nagging sense of what I “should” be doing with my life right now. If my life had gone as planned, I would have been a successful therapist with a thriving private practice by now, possibly with some research or hospital work as well.

The hospital work would be more likely. If I could help people with very serious diagnoses find a little island of sanity in the midst of their neurochemical chaos, that would justify my existence, as far as I am concerned.

Research work would be too clinical for me, I think.

Viewed that way, my dreams don’t seem particularly grandiose.

Of course, post-VFS, my dream was to be a writer in the writer’s room at a TV show, and that’s a lot more grandiose, but certainly not impossible given how impressed everyone was with my talents at VFS.

But somehow, being amazingly good at the actual job of writing for television wasn’t good enough to get them to actually recommend me for stuff, and that rejection crushed me in a way that I didn’t even comprehend at the time.

Everything went OK right after graduation. I was on UpWork, doing jobs, making money, building up a rep. Then I got the Uno writing gig, and that went fab for like 18 weeks, otherwise known as 90 episodes.

But then I fucked that over by asking for more money then asking for more money again like a week later.

Seems insane now. But then again, so am I.

And then I made the mistake of taking some “time off” between gigs, and that was the opportunity my depression needed to drag me all the way down again.

Then Skyrim happened, and everything got so much worse.

And so here I am, at the bottom of the very deep well of depression I fell into after that. I must have gotten hurt pretty damn bad in the fall, because that was many years ago now, and I still haven’t recovered fully.

Every day, though, I get a little stronger. I am not the person I was when I finally got rid of Skyrim. I am stronger, tougher, smarter, and above all, saner than I was then.

I’ve come a long way and there’s a long way to go. I know that no matter what, I will keep putting one foot in front of the other because one of my biggest talents is my ability to just keep going no matter what.

I will leave this dungeon of mine one day.

I will walk in the warmth and the light.

I will live free and healthy and strong.

And there will be more to my life than endless fucking video games.

To this, I swear.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.