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Don't Send Me To The Shame Gulags!!!

5 years ago2,209 words

My particular mental illness is defined by an intense fear of being judged by other people, yet I'm aiming to publish my potentially unpopular!! project as publicly as possible. This leads to a lot of anxiety about how that might turn out for me, which takes up too much time and mental energy! Will I just end up being destroyed in some awful spiral of shame??? I've talked about that a lot already, but it's been getting more intense the closer to I get to release, so here's another vent about it so then I can get it out of my system and focus on adding the final touches...

I was really hoping to have an updated, 'final' version of Sindrel Song ready by yesterday, for some more testing before the release, but annoyingly I'm not there quite yet despite spending all the time and effort I can muster on it. I've done almost all of what I planned to do last week, which was dialogue mostly, but I still need to add an ending. I know how I'll do that, but it might take two or three more days based on the rate I've been going (it could be done in a day, but I'm guessing it won't be). I considered uploading an update without it, but I feel like I might end up wanting to edit some of the earlier bits based on how it turns out, so we'll just have to wait a bit longer.

Overall, the story and characterisation are a bit scattered and rough because of the organic way the game's come together, and how the dialogue bits are accessed. It's not like some linear, well-plotted story with growth and development and foreshadowing and twists and a climax and denouement in typical Proper Storytelling fashion. There are hints of all those things, but it's hardly on par with a good novel. But that's alright. I think it has a different kind of appeal, more like getting to know a group of new friends than watching a slick narrative thread satisfyingly unravel. There are some new dialogue bits I really like a lot, and I think there's appeal in that even if it's not perfect. Doing better would take more time, people, years of skill development, and less mental illness, probably.

Mental illness... That's why I've not finished what I set out to yet. It's been particularly bad recently; it feels like it's getting worse. There's the depression, which robs me of energy much of the time, but the worst bit is the stabs of shame I get when remembering my failings and embarrassing memories. I've talked about this before, and how it's a normal part of the human experience that most people would be familiar with, but for most people I assume it's an occasional thing. For me it happens many, many times a day, and it really does feel like being stabbed in the mind each time; I cringe physically and audibly because it hits me so severely. Most of the memories are so petty too, they're not worth that reaction, but knowing that doesn't soften their blows. I mean I can adopt that mentality after the stab so as not to run away with it, which works; I don't let it start a spiral into a panic, like I used to. But since they come so suddenly, apparently triggered by so many minor things, I can't exactly prevent them from occurring in the first place. (Instead, I end up thinking things like "ugh, THAT triggers one too??")

I met up with a friend from university last Wednesday, the one I met up with a few months ago... which was also the last time I had meaningful human contact, SIGH. It was okay, it's nice to spend time with someone who actually likes me, and to realise I'm physically well enough now to endure a few hours out in the real world, but the experience really accentuated how severe my mental illness is. It's hard to really adequately describe, but I 'felt insane', like there was this dark force constantly crushing me, compelling me to feel shame, to constantly apologise for being so broken. I controlled it, barely, but I envy people who don't have this frantic inner demon that they have to exert a wearying amount of effort trying to control.

Then, after getting back home, I had some shiny new weapons in my shame arsenal with which to repeatedly stab myself. More 'mental scars', which I usually try to avoid accumulating by avoiding experiences. What a lovely souvenir.

I talked with this friend I apparently have about Sindrel Song, since it pretty much is my life at the moment, and about my concerns with releasing it. She asked "what's the worst that could happen?", apparently assuming something along the lines of "it won't do too well, but I can always move onto the next thing". Instead, I said that the worst thing that could happen is that it could do incredibly poorly, leave me with huge wounds to my self-esteem and motivation, and that it could attract trolls and psychos who'll delight in tearing me to pieces, either with their words or even by some sort of hackery with consequences beyond my brittle feelings. At which point I'd probably just commit suicide. Reasonable!

That's something that seems to flood my mind most of the time these days. Not suicidal ideation; that's always there, nothing new. No, this paranoid fear that either this game will do so poorly I can't recover from it, or that by stepping into the spotlight, I'll be inviting monsters to savage me. And I'm not sure how realistic that is. Apparently anyone with a sizeable audience is going to attract some malicious, disturbingly tenacious people; that's just statistics. I have in the past, and most of my fears about this are based on the very real pain that's caused me. And I feel that my weirdness and social ineptitude, combined with the sorts of things I open-heartedly make and write about, is a combination that invites attack in a way that might not be the case for someone just putting on an impersonal show.

I also feel like I've done and written about quite a few cringey things since the MARDEK days. I've hardly had a squeaky clean life of purity and innocence! I say, though I imagine the terrible things I've done are ridiculously tame compared to what what makes up the lives of the majority. It's just that I'm so stupidly sensitive to shame that making someone half-frown feels like a crime worthy of beheading ("I drew some boobies, ready the firing squad!"). So I can easily imagine scenarios where, for example, some obsessive psychopath decides that because I've not released MARDEK 4, he'll make me pay, so he looks through everything I've ever posted online and dredges up a whole load of embarrassing stuff and... ugh. Not that I need reminders to cringe about all that!

I wonder how often that kind of thing actually happens to people who have many online eyes on them, though. Is it something that youtubers have to worry about, or which some are destroyed by? Do they have internet randoms trying to hack into their computers to leak their collections of 2-hour-long HD artfully lit videos of them tenderly bumming their dogs or whatever? Maybe they've all led pure lives of innocence and have no filthy, filthy dirt to uncover, or maybe this does happen but I haven't heard about it myself? I wonder. Or maybe they're just good people so nobody would want to do that to them but I'm not so they would!!

I feel I've talked about this sort of stuff many times over the years, since I suppose it's a big thing to someone interested in getting into the public eye in some small way despite crippling fears of judgement that prevent me from even going to the corner shop. Whenever I go outside, I worry way too much about people in passing cars judging me for the way I'm walking, so that's the mental place all this fretting is coming from (rather than, say, knowing I've got a murderedly dead body in my cupboard slowly rotting and I'm desperately hoping nobody finds it... which they probably would because that'd be a terrible place to keep the body! I mean a body, hypothetically). I don't doubt that a part of me is avoiding adding the full stop to the run-on sentence that is this game because when I do release it, I might be killing any feeling of peace I currently have.

Though my exaggerated fears border on paranoia, it's not as if it's completely unfounded. It feels like we currently live in the sort of world where someone could cure cancer, but be seen as no better than Hitler for having inappropriately fingered a girl's earlobe ten years ago, or something. People in the media have their careers destroyed for fairly minor mistakes made ages ago, during a whole different era of their personal development, or even just by the accusation that they made those mistakes. There are a bunch of examples; I imagine you're already thinking of a few.

Forgiveness, redemption, and growth are such wonderful things, but I suppose people feel better about their own mistakes if they can condemn others for theirs. Or it helps them feel 'safe' if these big baddies are taken down because they can't see beyond their own ego. Or maybe it's just the feeling of having power over another? I really don't know. I try to understand it, but it's so alien to me.

It's easy to see how things like that could get into the head of someone for whom fear of social judgement defines their life experience.

(Hmm, I wonder, if an eccentric scientist single-handedly developed a working cure for cancer, but in his private life he was sexually active with his 10-year-old daughter, would the world accept that cure? Which side would the media announcements focus on? "BRILLIANT SCIENTIST CURES CANCER and also does weird stuff in private" or "INCESTUOUS PAEDOPHILE RAPIST EXECUTED (page 10: cancer's now cured)". What do you think?)

I can't change the world or how other people act; all I really can change is how I react internally. And I do intend to work on that. But even if I were completely impervious to vitriol, I could still develop an awful reputation which would affect how well anything else I'd make would do. Or maybe it could turn out that I've done something so inappropriate that I end up in jail for it or something?? That's the ridiculous conclusion my mind runs away with. But I also used to worry a lot about having a brain tumour, which I was told was ridiculous, so is it any wonder I can't dismiss these thoughts so easily?!?!

(I don't think I've done anything worthy of that, and I say that after thinking about it way too much, but it wouldn't be the first time something I thought was innocuous actually wasn't. Or maybe I've failed to do something because I didn't even know I had to? I'm feel like I'm quite naive, and it's obvious I'm extremely sheltered. I also always used to be the timid "but we'll get in trouuubuuuhhhle!" kind of child, deathly afraid of doing something wrong.)

Bleh... It's irritating because I'd never hurt anyone on purpose, and there are tons of people out there who would - I'd bet it's more common than not - but I do seriously wonder whether I'll be the one destroyed. By them, I suppose. And I'm scared of it.

I'm just trying to push through this obvious mental illness, hoping that at least someone will get something good from what I make, so it'll feel worthwhile. And of course getting money and feeling like I have a purpose would be nice too. I'm hoping once I make the initial push and get a game out there more 'officially' than the Flash games I released in the past, the dull reality of it will help silence these "what if? what if??" thoughts based on hyperbolic hypotheticals. It's almost always the case that things turn out far less bad than the mind worries they will, yet the demon never seems to learn.

So yes, I know I'm taking forever with this, but I'm doing as well as I can considering what I have to cope with. I'll get there eventually!

(As usual, it helps a whole lot to type all this madness out. These things tend to go around and around in my mind for days on end, then as soon as I post about them here, they mostly subside. I realise how delusional they are, too; after getting all this out, I realise how unlikely it is that anyone will care enough about some random games developer to actively try to ruin my life. I'm reluctant to post this because it seems so insane to me now, but I will anyway because maybe there's something of interest in how broken minds like this work, especially since this demon-wrestling very clearly inspires my work.)