Which, in my case, is the feeling that all my deficits are at least canceled out by my enormous talents to the point where it averages out to an average person.
most people’s character sheets are evenly balanced and the character points are spent all across the board, with a few specializations so they have a career path.
Me, I spent it all on what I will (very) broadly as intellectual skills, and to get those I had to take some pretty major disadvantages,. and so far it’s been a raw deal.
I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all I do is play video games all day.
Speaking of which, I am close to the end of the one I have been playing,. Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s an old-style RPG type game of the sort that SSI used to put out, like Eye of the Beholder, which was a real beauty of a game, and Pool of Radiance, about which I do not have a pun.
I had trouble adjusting to the game at first because in that era of RPG, the standard model is based around a main character and his party of NPC companions fighting evil.
And that would be fine by me if it were turn based, like other games in the genre. But with Caldur’s Gate 2, they decided it would be more exciting to have things happen in realtime, otherwise known as ALL AT ONCE.
And I cannot do that shit. When too much is happening at once, my brain shuts down. I can’t track that many variables at the same time.
It’s the main reason I can’t play what are known as Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Or rather, I can play them, but only as far as my abilities to plan, manage resources, and design defence will take me.
If I have to command my troops in realtime battle. my brain goes TILT and I have an anxiety attack of sorts.
And I play video games to escape that shit.
Anxiety is the reason I don’t play anything Massively Multiplayer either. The sad truth is that even being around real people’s virtual avatars sets off my social anxiety and I start feeling like everyone knows how bad I suck at the game and views me with contempt.
How fucked up is that? Three. Three FUU (Fucked Up Unites).
I can see how some people solve a problem like that by externalizing it and blaming the people themselves or humanity in general for making them feel so bad.
That’s more or less how crankiness and misanthropy work. There are many ways to turn fear into anger and thus vent it. and misanthropy is one of the simplest because it doesn’t bother to identify any partitcular group of people as the cause of your pain.
I mean, if all people make you feel scared, inadequate, small, sad, and lonely, well then it must be all people’s fault, right?
It just makes sense!
That’s the sort of “all my emotions are justified and correct” thinking that I go on about now and then. These people make me feel bad, therefore they are bad.
Things are always exactly as they feel, essentially.
To realize that this is not always true requires a basic level of metaconsciousness. You have to be able to imagine a feeling not representing reality and both grasp and accept that your emotions and perceptions can give you false information.
If you can’t do that, then you have no conscious access to the highest of the higher brain functions. In many people, this causes them to fear and mistrust those brain functions because they blame those functions for evil things like doubt and uncertainty and having to think hard about things instead of just “going with your gut”.
But you don’t have to be a Dubya type to fall prey to this. We all do. One very old definition of neurosis is “emotional delusions” – like my feeling like everyone is judging me and hates me and wishes I would just die already.
I am lucky enough to have the level of metaconciousness to realize that these feelings do not represent reality at all. Most people who know me like me, and I have very few enemies in the world.
That doesn’t make the feelings go away, but it does keep me from being way, way crazier than I would be without it.
Like, random acts of violence crazy.
And yet, there are times when I wish I was that crazy. Kind of. What I am really thinking of is how nice it would be to stop having to exercise such a massive amount of restraint and discenment. I have to constantly fight those crazy feelings just to live the sort of sad existence I live and it is very, very tiring.
But I am never truly tempted to let go and go crazy because I know that if I did so, I would lose all sense of myself and who I am, and I have so little sense of that to begin with that I would never risk it.
Plus, I like, don’t want to end up in jail for something that humiliates my family and brings shame to all who know me.
But mostly it’s the sense of self thing.
I am trying to bridge the distance between the two extremes, total restraint versus total anarchy. It’s hard because the system is under so much pressure that it feels like I have to ,make the adjustments very slowly and carefully or the whole thing will explode.
That’s probably not true and it’s probably only my fearful and controlling “never stop on the road unless you know where it goes” nature that makes me so cautious.
I have only recently even conceptualized that it is possible to have faith in a process or even just a direction instead of relying on computable outcomes.
Translated, that means it is okay to follow that road simply because it might take you where you want to go and it at least is going in the right direction.
It always comes down to faith in the end, doesn’t it?
I need to get me some of that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.