I am feeling somewhat better than I did yesterday.

But I still ain’t happy.

Part of the problem, and it shames me to admit my life is this shallow, is that I have gotten pretty burned out on that game I have been playing a ton, Elder Scrolls Online, and I have yet to find a replacement.

So now there is this big empty void in my life where the fun used to be. It’s tragic that this is what my life has become, but it’s the truth.

My mood is highly dependent on whether or not I have a good game going or not.

Seeing as I currently do not, this is a good time to start talking about why I need one so bad and what I could do to maybe try to transfer my emotional dependence from video games to something a little more productive.

If only I could re-imagine writing as a video game, and feel as safe, comfortable, and confident doing it as I do video games, as well as finding it just as rewarding.

Rewarding is the big thing. Everything we do, we do to stimulate our reward center.

But of course, life is not like a video game. Like Jane Mcgonigal said, reality is broken. In the world of video games, effort and reward are nearly always equal, persistance always pays off, everything is geared to keep you motivated with continuous small rewards leading to occqasional larger ones, you can take on roles of great status and importance and even wealth that are totally out of reach in the real world, and indeed the whole reality of the game is custom made to make you happy.

Life ain’t like that, in case you haven’t noticed.

When I am playing a good (by my standards) game, I am transported. Mundane reality ceases to exist (for the most part) and I escape my highly unsatisfactory mundane existance and go to someplace where I am important, powerful, valuable, and above all, where I can be a hero, righting wrongs and kicking the crap out of evil.

With a setup like that, why wouldn’t I prefer that world to the real one? It’s not like the real one has been especially kind to me. My real existence is a depressing drag through time where the minutes and days are to be endured, not enjoyed, and where a good day is one where the game I was playing was so good that I barely noticed the passage of time at all.

Yay, I made it through six whole hours without thinking about stuff! It’s almost like I skipped those hours entirely!

Truly, my greatest goal seems to be to make it through the day as seamlessly and effortlessly as a champion swimmer cutting through the water with their body.

That can’t possibly be right, can it? That can’t be healthy. There has to be more to life than trying to get through it with a minimum of pain.

And as patient readers knows, I do want more out of my life. I am sick to death of this sad existence of mine. I want to earn and learn and love and LIVE.  I am tired of living my life as if I am in cold storage somewhere, waiting for an ineffable something to happen in order to activate me and bring me back to life.

Whatever the fuck it is I have been waiting for, I think it is safe to say it ain’t gonna happen and whatever happens in my life, it is up to me to make it happen.

And that…. makes me sad. Which is sad.

Presumably, I had my emotional development interrupted at some crucial stage and a big part of me is simply waiting for the emotional inputs I never got in order to be able to move on to the next developmental stage, and then the next, and the next, and so on until I actually grow the fuck up.

I don’t have a solid read on what those inputs might be, but I definitely know that it has a lot to do with nurturing. I did not get the care, comfort, support, and above all the sense of safety I needed when I was a kid abandoned to the wilds of elementary school, and that fucked me up in a very big way.

And there is no way to get those inputs as an adult male. None. Adult men are viewed with unmasked contempt for even hinting that they might want that. And it’s worse if you are big and tall because you look like you “should” be able to take care of yourself.

Well I can’t. I think my life amply demonstrates that. And that’s just too fucking bad, because there is nobody out there to look after me either.

My therapist keeps telling me that I need to learn to provide these inputs for myself. But I don’t see how that can work. You can’t pick yourself up and carry yourself. It’s physically impossible. There is no part of me that is strong enough to be the inner parent that I so desperately need.

If there was, I wouldn’t even need one.

So I am fucked, more or less. Can’t help myself and nobody can help me and I can’t do jack shit without help, so fuck ME, I guess.

It’s a hell of a catch, that Catch-22.

I guess all that is left for me is what I started with : A life that is meaningless and irrelevent and inane where the best that I can hope for is a video game good enough to make me forget how much I hate myself and my life for a while.

And maybe, every now and then, when the stars align and the portents are fruitful and all the hens in the coop lay sideways eggs, I can do a little something to push against the walls of my cage and maybe get myself a tiny bit more room.

It ain’t much, but it’s all I have got.

And it’s fucking pathetic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.