It’s looking like I might have to start over again in Pathfinder : Kingmaker.

Certain plot events have simply failed to happen. It’s gotten to the point where I have done every single quest available to me except for the kingdom building ones, and those are currently a tad beyond me.

I understand all the pieces on the board but that doesn’t mean I know how to play.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

And the worst part is that I don’t have a Treasurer for my kingdom and that is even more limiting than I thought it would be.

There are so many important tasks you can’t do without a Treasurer, including some that are key to keeping your citizens happy.

Hence what happened earlier today : they rioted. Destroyed my kingdom. Presumably lynched my incompetent self. But even if not, game over, man. Game over.

Sorry, but I am too lazy to go find that clip to link here.

I went back to a save game from about five hours of gameplay before the point where my barony collapsed and I am currently still trying to solve my Treasurer deficit, but everything I read online about how to do that seems to refer to characters I’ve never met and places I have never seen, and I have reached the limits of the current map.

There’s plenty of unexplored regions to the west of my barony but I am not allowed to go there yet. When I try, the game basically says, “You realize that you don’t really have a reason to cross that river yet, so you don’t. ”

Um, thanks for that. I am guessing I won’t get to go there until the next chapter of the game. Thanks for telling me what I think.

Geez game, bossy much? Next you’ll be telling me when to go to the bathroom.

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Fuckity fuck fuck fuck

It always feels like a death in the family.

When I lost some of my writing, that is. My computer crashed, and usually that is no big deal. I have my WordPress site set to back things up every five minutes, so usually the worst case scenario is that I lose five minutes of work.

But something must have gone wrong today. Perhaps it was having trouble logging in? I don’t know. But when I left after lunch, I had written 706 words.

After the reboot, only 286 remained, meaning I had lost 420 words.

Son of a bitch! Happy freaking Canada Day.

Life has really been fucking with me lately. I feel persecuted and put-upon. I am just trying to life my life and maybe gather up the wherewithal to try FlexJobs again.

After all, I paid them a whole $3 for a two week membership. Might as well use it.

Of course, I am facing the same ol’ problem as always : every job seems to require me to have training and/or experience I don’t got.

To the point where clearly there are a hell of a lot of HR people who have no idea what the term “entry level” means.

It means anyone can enter, Linda. Which means it can’t also require ten years of experience, a master’s degree in physics, and independent wealth for fuck’s sake.

I am sure I can find something if I just stick with it, though. Surely somewhere out there is some sort of call center or data entry or whatever work for me.

Even just an extra $50 a week would do me a world of good. At least I would finally be earning money and not just wasting away on disability, passive and pathetic.

Yeah, I know I shouldn’t think like that. But so fucking what. I do a lot of things I know I shouldn’t do. I am just trying to express my emotions over here, and figure out who the hell I really am.

And I am not going to be able to stop judging myself harshly until I find a way to end the pain that causes me to lash out (or is that lash in) at myself in the first place.

It always comes back to that big ol’ wound at the core of my being. I am doing what I can to open it up and clean it out so it can heal. I try to redirect my surplus energies into a powerful weapon against that thick cold invisible wall I live behind. I am working on opening up my heart to let the bad stuff out and let the good stuff in.

But it’s a slow process, and I get frustrated sometimes.

I know I need to lose this contempt for myself and how my life has turned out. The real emotion underneath – sorrow for all the years I’ve lost to my mental illness – is valid but it should not be used as another reason to hate myself.

I’ve been sick. Being sick sucks. It has stolen my entire adult life. If I hadn’t fallen deep into depression when my parents took me out of university so they could take early retirement, I might have been able to hang in there back in Summerside till I could get a job and my own place to live and have some kind of life instead of.. this sad life of mine.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all I do is play video games all day.

It’s tragic, but there’s nobody that can rescue me from it but myself and I am not currently up to the task.

I’d love to be able to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, set my cap to a jaunty angle, and go out and conquer that big big world out there, but I can’t.

There’s no solid ground to stand on inside me. Just an endless, silent sea of tears shed for something that happened 47 years ago.

Any time I try to get my poop in a group, it all falls apart again.

So all I can do is heal, and hope.

Maybe some day I’ll get to be a real person.

Maybe some day I’ll be real.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I finally got around to asking Julian if it would be helpful to him if I made a checklist of things to check on in order to keep me happily stocked with stuff.

So do I have…

1. Baby carrots or celery
2. Fruit, apples or oranges
3. Cans of pop in the fridge
4. 2L of pop in the fridge (I have such a soda habit)
5. Microwave popcorn in my cupboard
6. Bread, though that’s more of a communal thing

That should just about cover it. I might think of more items later.

What I would like to be able to avoid is running out of my essentials. I am a little ashamed to admit it, but when go to the fridge and what I want is not there, it has a deleterious effect on my mood.

It bums me out and makes me feel neglected, which I confess is a feeling that is never very far from the surface of my consciousness and is very easily triggered.

And it bugs me that I have to bug Julian to do and get these things for me. I really miss the level of independence I had before my legs went boom in the summer of ’22.

Like the lady sang…

I mean, I know it is impossible to be grateful for every single bad thing that is NOT happening to you. There’s way too many of them.

A functionally infinite number, basically.

So I am going to resist the urge to tell people to appreciate having legs that work just because mine don’t.

I mean, go ahead, appreciate that if you like, but don’t feel like you have to take on a greater burden of gratitude on my behalf.

Just stop and think of what it would be like to need to use a walker to get around now and then and maybe give your legs a nice rub for continuing to do their job.

That’s all I would ask of anyone.

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I kept putting off suggesting that checklist to Julian because I was afraid he would find it insulting or inappropriate or even presumptuous on my part.

On the other paw, I need to have some sort of power over the care I get. Being passively helpless to even advocate for my own needs, let alone getting them met, is an awful like my “never ask for anything” childhood.

That’s why it was so hard to bring this up with Julian. My deeper programming insists that asking for anything will get me in big trouble, SO much more trouble than it is worth, and so my only choice is to mutely hope someone thinks of me eventually.

And that’s really sad.

And it’s no way to live. It smothers the soul to never be able to get what it wants or really take an activate part in its own standard of living at all.

You can’t live your life like a dog sitting under the dining room table hoping someone will eventually drop something.

Being perpetually broke is a big part of that passivity. Money is power, ergo poverty is helplessness, and that is very bad for your spiritual health.

That’s what middle class types don’t get about poverty. It eats away at your soul and makes you depressed and saps your will to do anything that takes effort, such as, say, looking for a job.

Job hunting is a really harsh process. Most of us are not cut out for that level of constant rejection, especially us sensitive artist types.

It would be far better to have a central government agency that has your resume on file and submits it for various jobs you are qualified for and only contacts you if you at least get through the first round of qualifications.

Kind of like having a Hollywood agent, but for everybody.

Imagine how awesome that would be for both employees AND employers.

A businessperson would be able to find a dozen qualified candidates for whatever job they needed to fill without having to do a single interview.

And we used to have that exact thing when I was a child. It was called Manpower and its job was to get you a job.

We need to bring that back!

More after the break.

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The problem with generation

So why can’t I generate my own tasks? Or set goals for myself, or follow my ambitions, or any other form of directed action towards a goal?

Why do I need some outside entity, like school, to give structure to my life?

It’s like I need something to adapt to. Without it, I am a boneless blob of protoplasm with no ability to act on my own.

And that’s just so wrong. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and yet I am stymied on the most basic of levels by this strange weakness of mine.

The glib, easy, and incomplete answer would be to say it’s because I had so little order imposed on me as a child that there was nothing for me to internalize.

But there’s definitely more to it than that. There’s also the fact that what I did internalize was the idea that I don’t count, I don’t matter, and I am not worth anyone’s time and effort or even inconvenience.

And the heartbreaking truth is that I still feel that way today. I neglect myself in the exact same way I was neglected as a child.

Ergo, anything I want or need is just not important enough for me to bother doing. That’s why I can’t set goals for myself and I live my life compulsively doing the same things.

Plus there’s the fact that there is this massive untreated psychological wound taking a huge amount of my mental resources and as a result, there is a part of me, a big part, that has been silently weeping for 47 years.

And I don’t know what to do about that. Psychological wounds are not the kind of thing one can think their way through.

All I can do is try to be good to myself and try to take away whatever is preventing my mind from healing itself properly so I can get that big part of myself back.

Maybe then I will have the strength to take myself seriously.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.