I relate to a lot of this.
While I am way too proud to ever pretend to be stupid in order to better relate to people, I can completely relate to that feeling of being “locked out” of social closeness by a force you do not understand but can clearly feel.
And feelings are the answer, for the record. The difference between you and them is that they are somewhat blindly following the emotions of their social instincts and you are far too cerebral for that.
So despite how it seems, they don’t exactly know something you don’t.
They feel something you don’t allow yourself to feel. And they follow that feeling. Your cerebral mind treats things like instincts and drives as noise and filters them out.
But as we keep discovering in astrophysics, there is no such thing as noise. There is only signal we don’t understand yet.
Now as patient readers know, I was a very weird child. And by that, I don’t just mean that other people thought I was weird.
I mean that I was not like other children in most important ways. I did not engage in imaginative play with toys, making the story up as I went. I never had an imaginary friend. I never had a stuffed animal or blanket I carried with me everywhere and treated, in some ways, like it was alive.
I didn’t see the point of toys. After all, they didn’t DO anything. In a world that had TV, video games, and cats to play with, toys could not compete.
The imaginary friend thing was never going to happen. I was too clever and logical for that. I couldn’t have an imaginary friend because I knew they weren’t there.
Same goes for stuffed animals. I knew they weren’t alive. So what was the point? I had real cats to pet and play with.
Most of what the other kids did seemed pointless to me. Running around, playing in the sandbox, climbing the monkey bars, playing rough games.
I wanted to know why I would do such a thing.
They didn’t need to know. They did them because they seemed like fun and/or because other kids were doing them and they enjoyed them so they kept doing them.
They were following instincts that my mind treated as noise.
And once more, I am suffused with the feeling of a deep and terrible wrongness about my childhood. I look back on the cold and lonely boy I was and I can feel the gap between him and the other kids very keenly and it sounds, in my mind, like a jangling, discordant alarm bell indicating that something is very, very wrong here.
And it feels very, VERY cold.
It’s a feeling I need to work my way through, I think. It’s a summation of a million different instances of feeling alienated as a child, and I feel that if I can bring the feeling up and stay with it long enough, I can thaw out that part of my frostbitten psyche and maybe even come out the other side of it a saner, more whole, healthier man.
Or at the very least, a warmer one.
More after the break.
The slow thaw
I wish global warming would hurry up and melt MY permafrost.
Just kidding folks. We’re all going to die.
The more I think about my idea that my recovery so far has actually been a long con by my depression, a delaying tactic designed to feed me just enough of a feeling of progress to keep me from doing anything more drastic while, realistically speaking, not threatening my depression’s supremacy at all because at this rate, I would be lucky to make significant progress against it three weeks after I die.
So clearly, this war needs to accelerate. To hell and back with all these petty skirmishes. Fuck this slow attrition. It’s time to launch an all-fronts offensive with one goal in mind : unseat the enemy for the purposes of regime change.
Now if only I knew what that meant.
In practical terms, I mean. Actions. Obviously I know what the words mean.
Once more, I am faced with the illusion that is the Infinite Corridor of Infinite Doors, wherein my depression tries to convince me that there are far too many possibilities for action for me to ever be able to choose among them.
But I am on to that con. Sure, if I had to calculate which option is the “right” (read : safe and pleasant) one, that would be impossible.
But I don’t have to do that. I just have to pick something that seems fun and/or interesting and/or meaningful to do, and try it.
Because in the end, it doesn’t matter what the “right” path is. All that matters is finding something that might improve my daily life.
And finding some kind of hobby or job or the like should do just that.
I’m kind between games right now.
I have games. I have the aforementioned Final Fantasy XIV Online, which I impulsively bought for $25 and can’t return.
And so far it’s pretty…. meh. The setting is colorful and fun, and the systems seem very well thought out, and it runs like a dream on my PC.
But meh. Nothing about it makes me want to play it. The basic truth of MMORPGs is that they are mostly endless grind with tiny bits of plot to try to make it seem less grindy.
It does not work.
But the thing is, it worked for me with the two MMORPGs I played to death, Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76. So I am left wondering what they had that FFXIV Online seems to lack.
Better writing, I suppose. Writing that made me excited to grind through the enemies in order to see what happens next.
And a much better grind-to-story ratio. FFXIV has a lot of “go kill 8 of these and 8 of those” and not nearly enough “bring the sacred bones to the Shadow King so that he may read your destiny!”.
The same goes for another MMORPG I have, Genshin Impact. I got it because it is massively popular and I figured I would see what the fuss was about.
But yawn. It’s aggressively anime, which means little to me, and there seems to be some decent worldbuilding going on, but ultimately, meh.
I guess after a top notch game like Baldur’s Gate 3, and before it another excellent game called Kingmaker : Wrath of the Righteous, my standards are set very high.
Maybe I will reinstall one of those.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.