Strangely enough, now that I have gotten some more sleepy, I feel a lot better about my situation re : my new hobby.

I am learning to set boundaries. Every time I find myself thinking “the wrong way”, the addict’s way,. I gently stop myself and tell myself to relax.

Specifically, if I find myself feeling panicky because something in my life is going to take away from the time I spend pursuing my new hobby. I tell myself that it’s fine, that it will still be there when I once again have free time, and that my life does not have to be about maximizing my time doing this very fun thing.

This maximizing pattern has come up many times in my life, although never in so potent a form as all the fun I am having right now. It has, however, almost always involved a video game of some sort.

I get a new game that I am really enjoying, and that plus the anhedonic void left by my depression plus my inherent resource maximizing skills means that this new game threatens to crowd out the rest of my life, and I begin to divide my world into “playing the game” and “all the lesser things I have to do in order to get back to the game”.

Before I discovered my new hobby, the effect was never very severe and I had no trouble chasing thoughts out of my mind. Some part of me might wish I was playing the new game when I was doing other things, but the effect was mild and easily dismissed.

And besides that, when I am out in the world, part of me is always wishing I was back in my small safety zone where there’s a lot less physical stimulation and I feel calm and secure and safe.

Inasmuch as I ever do, anyhow.

But this new hobby of mine is of an altogether different scale than any video game I have liked playing in the past. In fact, I am not sure what I like more : playing my marvelously perverted form of Skyrim, or the hunt for more mods to make it even more fun for me.

The hunt really is fun. I page through websites dedicated to the sort of mod I enjoy, think of new search terms to find other things I might be interested in, and occasionally agonize over choices between two fun things that can’t be installed at the same time.

And the thing is, these are just the adult oriented mods. They are but a subset of a much larger Skyrim modding community that makes all sorts of non-erotic enhancements. New spells, weapons, characters, followers, pets, enemies, environments, and ways to make things more realistic or “immersive”.

And then there’s quest modules that give you more adventures to have. Some of those are so big, they are practically an entire new game.

Even bigger (in scope) than that are the massive conversions that do things like turn Skyrim into the Games of Thrones world, Westeros, or transform it into a science fiction adventure, or turn it into a world populated by Simpson characters.

There is even one that turns every single character in the game into an anthropomorphic furry version of themselves based on race. ^[1]

So basically, it turns Skyrim into Zootopia. Astounding.

I have downloaded that mod but I haven’t tried it yet because I have too many other things installed and this furry mod is MASSIVE.

Turns out there’s a limit to how many animations you can have installed at the same time. That limit is 8000..

You can see I’ve been busy.

There’s an expansion that raises that limit to 12000, and I will probably get that at some point. But for now, I am rather nervous about what it might do to my computer.

Nothing permanent,  I would hope, but still, I don’t want this game I love so much to start ugly-crashing on me. That has happened a lot as I have experimented and it is very distressing to me.

What can I say, I am prone to “oh no, I broke it!” panic.

So yeah.  The hunt is fun. So many amazing things to explore. You can see how I could become addicted to such variety, and how I end up spending hours looking around for new fun stuff to get.

And that would be true even if the adult stuff didn’t exist.

But I am sure glad it does.

I have recently discovered, though, that the pursuit also causes me a lot of physical tension. I guess I get so excited and overstimulated by all the possibilities that it translates into a background panicky feeling.

And well, patient readers will understand why getting myself all stimulated in a sexual way is problematic because relief is not always at hand, so to speak.

I might not “get there”.

Plus there is always something new to discover, so I tend to rush around trying to experience as much of it as I can instead of stopping to smell the metaphorical roses and taking care of myself.

Then again, taking care of myself has never been my strong suit. I have all the intellectual hardware to be a sensible, orderly, tidy person, but the truth is that while those might be my ideals, they are not my personality.

My personality is that of a silly, fun-loving, self-indulgent artist. A real dreamer who walks around with his head in the clouds and therefore is at the mercy of the puddles in the road. That side of me is at least as strong as the smart and pragmatic side, and so, as in most things, I tend to inhabit a twilit realm somewhere in between.

Some of us, due to our indecisive natures, are destined to always dwell in the space between things. That’s why we get so mad at false dichotomies.

It’s because we don’t want to have to choose unless it’s absolutely necessary.

So do I have a problem with indecision?

Well yes and no…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.