I am in a fairly good mood right now.
Been going through some serious emotional turbulence lately. Depression, sadness, anger, frustration, and so on.
Fine. Let’s do this shit. Set the controls for the heart of the sun, bitch.
One incident stands out : last night, I woke up from a nap around 11:10 am and got out of bed, and the strangest sensation filled me.
It was like deep within my soul, an ancient tomb cracked open and unleashed the foulest of miasmas, the breath of a thousand corpses, into my spirit. I felt this heavy, oppressive, and altogether unhealthy kind of depression flood into me and try to drag me down to Hell.
It was freaky deaky baby.
This happened once before, and under the same circumstances : I had just gotten out of bed between 11 and midnight, and at midnight I would be Zooming with Le Gang.
I think that has something to do with it. The Zooming. I think in preparation for it certain doors are getting opened inside me and there’s some nasty, nasty stuff locked in there.
I fought this awful new presence on like an instinctual, primal level, like I was fighting to live, and ended up holding my ground until it retreated.
I can’t say I am entirely unhappy that it happened. It was kind of exciting. My depression has never been nearly that dramatic before.
I could handle that happening now and then.
Plus, I feel that this was a new level of processing old emotions for me. Far more potent and visceral and above all efficient way of burning through the old junk that takes up so much space and energy in my mind than all this laborious stringing together of words.
Like I have said before, so far I lack the capacity for transformation that others seem to possess. No sudden transcendent (r)evolutions for me.
I am too damned stable for my own good.
But I may get there eventually. These odd hauntings are a good indication of that. Every day, my grip on my old school pseudo-rational ego dominant ways gets a little looser and I open my mind up to a greater existence just a tiny bit more.
So who knows? Maybe some day soon, I will finally free my mind enough to allow it to do make the huge and completely irrational changes it needs in order to heal.
There’s nothing wrong with not knowing what your mind will do next. I can open my consciousness up to more direct influence from the subconscious. I can teach that oversized intellect of mine to get the fuck out of the way and stop trying to control everything and make it predictable all the time.
I can learn to like surprises.
Well, or at least not to hate them so much.
Recovery is, after all, a process. I’m still trying to figure out this whole id thing.
I might have to go crazy for a little while in order to get the hang of it.
But don’t worry. I’ll be back. Some day.
More after the break.
How fares the spirit?
I’m going to talk some more about the video game Spiritfarer tonight.
I’ve been playing it for a couple of weeks now, and it is an extraordinarily original and wonderful game. I guaranteed you’ve played nothing like it before, and it is wonderfully gentle, funny, charming, and fun.
Also emotionally grueling. But we will get to that.
In it, you play a girl named Stella who takes the job of ferrying spirits to the Afterlife through something called the Everdoor after Charon gets fed up and quits and tells you you are his replacement.
So you don’t exactly volunteer. The role is thrust upon you. But whatever, it’s fun.
The game consists of piloting your boat around the world of the game and picking up various spirits, who all take the form of anthropomorphic animals (whom you can HUG!), and taking them through their individual final tasks before they are ready to go through the Everdoor and on to Whatever’s Next.
That’s my term, not the game’s.
And at first, I went about this task cheerfully. I have always had an affinity for death and end of life scenarios, so this was not morbid to me, it was sacred, and I felt lucky to be entrusted with so tender and important a task,
I would make an amazingly good funeral director.
So I completed tasks for my new spirit friends, and when the time game, I took them to the Everdoor and saw them through it, tears in my eyes but happy they were moving on to the next life.
But that took a toll on me. One I didn’t realize at the time. And at some point, the worm turned, and I started really dreading doing my duty.
Because it sucks to send your friends away all the time. And the game doesn’t help because as you go, the deaths get subtly sadder.
There is always a period at the end where you are paddling them the last little distance to the Everdoor and they talk about their life and how they feeling leaving it.
Those get more tragic as one goes.
And if you’re a sensitive soul like me, eventually it starts feeling like you are killing them yourself. You aren’t – they died before you even met them.
But you’re the one making them go away forever, and that feels sort of the same.
So this sweet and gentle game is taking a heavy emotional toll on me. Not that I mind – it is quite rare that a game engages me on an emotional level like this.
But in a sense, when I said before that I felt like this game was made for me, I had no idea how true that was.
Turns out, that including my connection to death and how emotional I get about things like saying farewell to life.
Oh well. Maybe it will help me learn to cry again.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.