Played a whole bunch more Assassin’s Creed : Brotherhood.
Man, is the game fun. There’s tons of different kinds of quests, plus neighborhoods to liberate, renovate, and appreciate.
I am having so much fun that I haven’t gone anywhere near the main plotline in ages.
I mean, I am sure I will get back to it soon. There’s only so much dicking around I can do before I get bored and want to get back to the plot.
Plus, I am out of investment cash. So there’s that.
But I just spent an hour just roaming the Centro district of Rome just reopening businesses like a financial Johnny Appleseed, and had a great time doing it.
Best part is that each business adds to my income, so they pay for themselves eventually and after that, it’s pure profit.
Which I will use to buy more businesses.
I swear, I am going to fucking own Rome.
Take that, you Borgia bastards!
Still trying to figure out how to get out of this lousy cage of mine.
Had therapy yesterday. Ended up being a good session because instead of being my usual reasonable (to a fault and beyond) self, I ended up talking about how trapped and hopeless I felt and how hard it was for me to do certain things and how much pain and fear and rage I have blocking me from getting out of myself and enjoying life.
Speaking of which, I realized that I never quite got my point across when I talked about the joy of suffering before.
I talked about how I think we cause ourselves more pain while trying to avoid pain than the pain we are avoiding and how it really comes down to the fear of the pain.
And I talked about how I wished I could just radiate my pain out into space.
But what I meant to talk about was how to get myself to stop dodging the pain. How to just lay there and suffer till I felt better, more or less.
It’s too complicated to solve logically. There are far too many variables, many of them hidden. By this point in my life, I have so many overlapping layers of aversion and evasion that a whole new branch of calculus would have to be invented just to describe the resulting Venn diagram.
So that leaves feeling my way towards release. I am getting more comfortable with letting my emotions guide me.
After all, I have always been highly intuitive, and that basically means being led by your emotions. It’s just that I have always kept my intuition tightly harnessed to my rationality before now, and that is an extremely powerful combination and a lot of my wizardly powers stem directly from it.
But it doesn’t always have to be that way, I can leave reason behind and follow my intuition directly. I can seek answers only emotions can bring me.
It’s still a little scary and not exactly easy, but I can do it.
I got this.
Let’s go exploring.
More after the break.
Exploration and me
Cor, what a segue.
Friends of this blog know that I have never been much of an explorer. Even in my preschool years, I didn’t have a strong urge to explore, especially outdoors.
And after I got raped by a stranger when I was 4, I was even more timid, fragile, and shy, and so what exploratory urge I had was severely suppressed.
I remember occasionally wandering the neighborhood aimlessly in the summer, looking for someone or some people I could be around and not be lonely without consciously realizing I was looking for anything or even that I was lonely.
To recognize one’s own loneliness, you need to have something to contrast it to.If you are always lonely, you become numb to it.
I remember when I first organized the first meeting of the local furry community I founded. We went to a restaurant then to the el cheapo movie theater, and after the movie we were standing outside the theater, just chilling.
And it was at that moment that I realized just how incredibly lonely I had been because now that said loneliness had been relieved, I had something to compare it to.
Once I was in school, the bullying finished the job of killing my urge to explore and established the pattern of going straight to and straight home from school like I was the product of a strict religious background of some time.
All my urge to explore turned inward. It might have looked like I was just sitting there staring at the wall, but in my mind, I was hard at work thinking about stuff.
This was the skill I developed in order to deal with the stultifying boredom of the classroom. Most of the time in school I was bored out of my gourd, and so I escaped into my own mind and became a very thoughtful kid.
Like I needed another reason to withdraw. But I had no choice. It was the only escape allowed to me.
I mean, most teachers wouldn’t even let me read.
Can you imagine that? Telling a child to stop reading.
Looking back, I think i got into conflicts with some teachers because they knew they did not control me. I didn’t fear them or respect their authority or feel awed by them.
Perhaps that’s because I was usually smarter than them,
I didn’t fear them, and yet I was mostly a well behaved kid not because I felt I had tobe but because I chose to be.
And some teachers just could not handle that.
(I’m looking at YOU, Mrs.Mcnally, you Nana Mousskouri lookin BITCH. )
I didn’t mean to constantly defy authority even when I wasn’t even doing anything. I didn’t know I was setting myself apart from the other kids by reserving and retaining my right to withdraw cooperation at any moment. I had no idea that there was any other way to be other than how I was.
I mean, I guess I knew on some level that other kids were scared of adults and did whatever they were told without question, but I didn’t know why.
I have always gone my own way not out of sheer rugged individualism but because I wouldn’t have known where to find other people’s ways even if I wanted to.
And true, I don’t want to. That might seem antisocial to some and I suppose it is, but it’s not something I do on purpose.
I’m just being me.
Weird, alien, unnaturally calm and mature me.
It’s all I know how to be.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.