It’s never been particularly…. stable.
How could it be, when my inner life dominates my outer so strongly?
Today, I realized that when I retreated in response to being raped when I was 4, it didn’t just make me awkward and timid.
By cutting myself off from reality to such a large degree, it left me in a permanent state of mild dissocation. I am never quite all here, wherever here is.
Even when I am out in the world and talking to people and interacting with reality to my fullest extent, I am never more than around half present.
The rest of me is still hiding inside the labyrinth of my mind, extending puppets on tentacles who pretend to be me.
View in this light, it is no wonder my personal reality has always been somewhat unstable. Not to the point of psychosis, thankfully…. it’s how reality feels to me that changes all the time.
So far that hasn’t bled over into actual hallucinations yet, knock on wood.
Although I dunno. I might go for the occasional psychotic break if I felt better the rest of the time. It’s this constant dangling on the brink of madness that wears me out.
Maybe one of these days, I’ll just jump.
The thing is, it doesn’t take Freud to figure out that if one’s personal reality is unstable, it tends to make one rather insecure. I honestly don’t know how the world is going to feel to me at any given moment, and that goes double in regards to how it will feel when I have just woken up.
That’s made me a very conservative (as in risk averse) person. When your interior landscape is constantly in flux, you end up in the conservative trap of focsing on safety above all other concerns.
That always turns out badly. The great irony is that focusing on safety is very dangerous. A healthy life involves a certain degree of risk, and concerns for personal safety must be balanced with other concerns or you end up in a very bad space.
Like I am in right now. In order to be “safe”, I isolate myself rather severely and cut myself off from a lot of vital emotional nutrients, and that leads to my living in a state of near constant starvation.
By any rational definition, my current life is anything but “safe”. But it feels safe because it’s familiar and has extremely low physical stimulation and so it is “safe” only in the sense that is does not provoke anxiety.
Well, not much, anyhow.
Anxiety riles up my chaotic inner world,and causes it to demand even more of my mental resources, thus pulling me away from reality all the harder while I desperately cling to whatever connection to the real world remains.
This happens all the time. To me, it’s normal. Fighting the forces inside me that try to drag me down into my own personal hell of no more connection to reality is something that I do without even thinking about it.
Like I have said here before, my absolute worst fear is to be trapped in my own mind, with no more connection to the real world to use to stabilize myself and reassure myself that it, and I, are real and not going anywhere.
Kind of puts my hardcore rational materialist POV into perspective, doesn’t it?
I don’t just use illusions to escape reality.
I use reality to escape my illusions.
I will be back after a break.
I don’t know what to do with all this.
I feel so frustrated and angry at this moment that I could scream.
Relax, though, nothing serious has happened. It’s just my fucking video games.
In Neverwinter Nights(NWN), everything was going swimmingly as I made my way through Hordes of the Underdark, an official expansion module for it. My little female dwarf kung fu monk was kicking amazing quantities of butt along with my compansions, a half-demon fighter and the cutest little lizard-boy bard/sorceror ever, Deekin.
I am seriously attached to that little guy. Here’s some of the reasons why :
Anyhow, everything was going great, then suddenly the game got way, way harder. As in, one minute I could take out damn near anything as long I was cautious and played my cards right, and the next even the most basic monsters could take me out fast.
That should not happen. Gamers like me hate that shit.
Over the last few days, this has given me more than a few moments where I felt like the fight I was on was impossible for me and I was tempted to quit my current campaign and start over with a different kind of character.
Like a sorceror, for instance. With fireballs.
Today, that culminated in a fight I have no idea how to even begin to win. My mind boggles at how frigging unfair it is. I get jumped by five super powerful characters with no chance to avoid them or escape and I have tried so many things but still, nothing.
It doesn’t help that before that, I was playing a recent acquisition, Lords of the Fallen (LOTF) , which is made in the style of a series called Dark Souls (DS) which is notorious for its sharp learning curve. LOTF is not as hard as DS, but it still ain’t easy.
I die a lot. This is normal.
After rage-quitting NWN, I stupidly decided to play Doom (2016) to blow off some steam, having forgotten that my current game of Doom is stalled at a super hard fight just like my NWN.
Then, to top it all off, Joe pokes his head into the room to tell me that he’s talking with Felicity about us leaving to hang out with her at 6 pm when the last I had heard was us leaving at 7:30 pm.
Don’t DO that to me. Patient readers know how badly I react to sudden changes. That kind of disruption can throw me off for a whole evening.
I told him I couldn’t go before 6:30 pm as I still needed to do Blogging Part 2.
As it turns out, I am almost done, and it’s not even 5:30 pm yet. So 6 pm was doable after all. But better safe than sorry.
I feel better having told you nice people all that. So I guess I did know what to do with it.
Write it out.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.