I wrote some blog posts yesterday; one was accidentally a “it gets better” post, while the other was about coding. They’re both sitting in drafts up on WordPress, waiting for me to finish them up. The it gets better one was supposed to be about writing on the blog, but ended up being it gets better. I’m not sure about it. I mean, things are better now, and I did work my way through a dark patch just recently. Things are going fine right now.
I wonder if that is a lesson, right there. Before, things were never fine. Things were always a crisis. Before we had kids, it was because we were poor and had no money. And then before my ex, there was the crisis of being alone and unloved. But now I have money, have a stable, easy job, have a nice place. I clean the place, take care of myself and the kids, do my job, pay my bills. How many decades did I live under the thumb of anxiety, the pressure of trying harder, the self-applied pressure.
Yes, there are things I should do. I should get the oil changed in the van. I should wash the blankets. I should go to the doctor. I should go to the dentist. I should go to the optometrist. I should work to pay off this debt. But these things are not causing me anxiety. I was starting to get anxious recently, but I worked through it.
I was hiding from the world. The world changed when school ended and summer began and they were here more often. I was just getting comfortable with the world the way it was when it changed. And my big concern was my time. My attention? My big concern was that it wears me out being the one in charge, the one who drives the bus, the parent. I was worried and anxious that I would burn out with the added time of being in charge, and so I focused on maximizing the time I had where I wasn’t in charge. I used to call it going feral. I’d lock the door, shut myself in, and disappear from the planet for a while, like a day or if you’re lucky maybe two.
So in June, anytime I wasn’t driving the bus, I was hiding. Playing Mario Kart World got me back into playing Grand Theft Auto Online, which in turn led me back to Red Dead Online. Red Dead was where I used to hide, back in the day. Six years ago, Kate took the books to a motel to spend the night and play in the pool, give me a break. Probably where the major crack in our relationship began, but she offered and she did it for me. I drug my PlayStation upstairs and plugged it into the TV, pulled the shades, got high and just started playing, and played for hours.
What I really remember from that session was that there was a point where I started talking out loud. This is shortly after I’ve been formally diagnosed. I’m still trying to process what this means, and I have a partner who is terrified that it’s going to mean that I’m going to change in some horrible way and it’ll just be the way it is, the way I am. So there’s a lot of pressure on doing this unmasking thing “right.” Anyway, I got high enough that I started talking to myself while I was playing, and then I had this intense feeling of joy when I realized that I simply could. I didn’t have to police myself, I didn’t have to apologize for talking out loud, I was alone, I could just talk.
So getting back into Red Dead this past June stirred up a lot of memories. Mostly a lot of negative energy about hiding from the real world. What am I doing with my life? Am I proud of this? And a lot of circled back to my Dad. I would be having all of these negative conversations in my head, with myself but in my Dad’s voice. And it was frustrating because I’d been there before, had these conversations before, and I know how to talk my way out of them. But the heart and the head aren’t on the same page apparently, and things feel different than how you know them to be.
I found myself starting to ruminate again, which is a sign. A sign that the mask is slipping back on, that I don’t feel in control. I was becoming a victim, and I don’t want to be a victim. I don’t want to be a hero, and I don’t want to be a victim. I want to just be. And when I started banging the old gong of maybe you are alone because you are a bad person, I felt really miserable. That’s the gong of if you just try harder you won’t be like this and things will be better, and I used to bang on it all the time.
But then Peter stepped up to the plate and said, maybe you just want someone to tell you what to do. Maybe you just want someone that you can feel ashamed for, because that’s all you know. It was like a lightning bolt. It stunned me, because no, I did not want that.
I started probing the issue. I asked myself, what’s making you sad? And myself answered in spades, so I said, wrong question, what makes you happy? I started pushing myself to seek happiness. Don’t clean your apartment because you feel bad that you live like a slob; clean your apartment because living in a clean apartment makes you happy. I have a hard time simply having a desire. I was trained since I was a little kid that my needs and wants didn’t really matter. If I even expressed a desire, it was questioned, filtered through my mother’s anxiety. So seeking happiness was kind of a radical change.
Things slowly started to shift. I still was spending all of my free time within the game, but I was starting to feel its limits. Any preferred activity can lose its magic if it’s the only thing you do, over and over. The game gradually lost its charm, and then one morning I didn’t pick it up.
Thousand Hour Games
- Destiny
- Destiny 2
- The Division
- Fallout 76
- Anthem
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- No Man’s Sky
I started doing other things. I cooked for myself for the first time in months. I cleaned the apartment. I started coding again, started playing with my Vision Pro again, actually trying to learn how to develop stuff for it. I started playing other games, which was hard, because part of the reason I get into a rut of a preferred game it is because when I think about other games, I think about how they aren’t as much fun as my preferred game. And since I’ve played a lot of games, and prefer to play games I’ve already played, it rules out pretty much anything else.
It is interesting to me that I am now engaging with the outside world. I would shame myself when I would get absorbed into something that I was hiding from the real world. I’m pretty sure I got it from my father, something I heard a lot while I was growing up. Almost all my preferred activities don’t engage with the real world, but engage with internal, fantasy worlds. Even writing, if you think about it. Sitting here and writing about the real world is no more real than sitting here and writing about an elvish kingdom.
But it turns out that the real world doesn’t want that much right now. I am able to give what it asks for. It wears me out sometimes, but it’s not killing me any longer. Being the real world used to be painful, a constant dance with anxiety and fear. When you are masking, you are terrified of being discovered, of having someone see through the mask, and it cuts straight to the core when you are masking so deeply that you are not really aware of it. That was what the real world offered me, and that is why I hid.