Well, today, when I rolled the dice in my head for what to talk about today, it came up “deep dive into my depression”, so here we are.
I get the feeling that when I was raped as a child, it caused me to bypass a very important developmental stage where you just do whatever pops into your head and organically suffer the consequences and you learn about the world that way.
I mean, I must have done some of that at one point. I wasn’t always as depressed as I would become. I remember being a kid on summer vacation and being able to decide what I wanted to do with my ample free time.
Besides watch television, of course.
But for a time I was at least somewhat happy during summer vacation at least because I had no bullies then, just myself.
And my friend from across the street Bobby for a few of those summers. Dunno why he’d be at the Votour’s house in the summer and not with his own parents, wherever the heck they were, but he and I were friends then.
And I have got to remember that. My childhood was not as lonely and friendless and isolated as my polluted inner narrative would have me believe.
I honestly wonder of my inaccurately negative inner narrative exists, at least in part, because that story of unbroken loneliness is just more narratively satisfying than the complex and layered truth.
If so, I really need to work on that. Real life is never that simple. The real world can rarely be summed up in a neat little story like “lonely boy with no friends forever”.
There were people I was friends with now and then, again, during the summer at least. There were long cold friendless stretches too, that’s not a lie or a delusion.
That became especially true in high school. Me and Heisler split up in Grade 10 and so I was all alone after that.
Well, there was Tim. He and I were friends because Mister Newcome the science teacher put us together to compete in a science competition.
We saw each other a couple times a week at his place. The thing we made for the science competition was a total joke because Mister Newcome, being the impulsive spaz that he was, put us in there before he taught us the physics we needed.
But oh well. We got to hang out and be geeky together for a while.
So yeah. Even those lonely years of grades 11 and 12 were not a total winterscape of isolation and turning inwards.
But high school is also when I become seriously depressed for the first time. The first time I felt suicidal, the first time I felt like my life was draining out of me as from an unbandaged wound, the first time I felt crazy.
Not coincidentally, that’s when I started skipping school a lot too. Some mornings the walk to school seemed impossible so I stayed home and popped popcorn for myself and watched daytime TV.
And my parents didn’t have a clue because they both left for work before I even got out of bed. And I got home before they did. So they had no way of knowing.
Well, other than to actually be around, of course.
And I certainly didn’t give a shit about school. I knew that I could get away with it on that front too. I would only show up for like half of the classes and still ace the course.
What can I say? I’m gifted.
And a lot of the teachers just read from the fuckin’ textbook anyway. Thanks, teach, I look forward to you being replaced by a text to speech AI in the future.
Needless to say, I was a very 80’s nihilistic teen. And I still feel that way sometimes.
Sometimes nihilism is the only positive response to the anxiety threatening to choke the life out of you or make your heart explode.
Nihilism is the exact opposite of anxiety.
And sometimes that’s what you need the most.
More after the break.
Update from the other world
I’ve acquired a few video games lately while the Steam Fall Sale is on.
One is a pretty decent game with a very stupid name, Villages and Dungeons. It’s yet another deck building game – there are a LOT of them now, which is great, because I love them but for ages they were a weird obscure genre.
It’s pretty barebones as of yet but it’s in active development so I am sure more stuff will be added fairly soon, and it’s entirely playworthy, just a little lacking in depth.
I am sure it will get fleshed out over time.
I also, somewhat surprisingly, got a furry visual novel called Winds of Change.
I don’t normally do visual novels,or VNs, because they are basically books with illustrations in a vaguely video game ish form and while I love to read and I love video games, I don’t play video games to read.
But the trailer for this one intrigued me with the nice British lady telling me about all the different forms of complex storytelling involved, and so far it’s been mostly linear but with a plot that is unique and exciting enough to have me hooked.
And lastly there’s big granddaddy, Red Dead Redemption 2.
A Wild West game made by the same people who made Grand Theft Auto (hence the nickname “Grand Theft Horse”), it’s a real long shot for me because it’s a heavily 3D game and therefore is very likely to crash my computer, hard.
But I will ruefully put it on low settings and hope for the best, because if I can get it to run without crashing, it’s an absolutely legendary game that won a million awards and I am eager to give it a try.
So wish me luck on that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.