PERSONAL

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Soul Hole

4 years ago1,814 words

Some scattered thoughts about the soul holes that loveless childhoods can leave us with. Cheery stuff, as usual!

I've been working on Atonal Dreams all morning, trying to fix bugs. It's annoying, since I didn't plan time for bug fixing, and it's taking longer than it usually would since the issues aren't even throwing errors. They're the result of the tangled web of code behind battle interactions, and I might have to rewrite or at least revise it as a whole rather than just tweaking one line in a single script.

So since that's a daunting prospect, I'm taking a brief break to write about a few disjointed thoughts that have been swirling around my mind recently.



I was hit quite hard by the demons over the weekend. I'm okay now, but on Sunday night I felt like I'd run a marathon or something. While lying in bed fiddling with my phone - as it seems many people do to end their days these days - YouTube's apparently-psychic algorithm thrust this surprisingly relevant (5-minute) video in my face:



It's not anything that I didn't already know, but I like things like that because I seem to have some strong desire for other people to understand what I'm going through!!, or something. To communicate that. And this does a good job of getting to the heart of the issues, so I wanted to share. I suppose it helped me to realise what was going on too, to some degree.

If our childhoods were without parental love, we carry that hole in our soul for the rest of our lives. I was neglected as a child - and relentlessly bullied by my older brother - and a whole lot of my current issues can be traced to that. My chosen path, too; the video points out how love-starved children can grow into audience-seekers, hoping that many eyes on them might fill the void and help them feel complete and worthy of being here. I know I always hoped that if enough people liked my games, perhaps then I wouldn't feel so empty and alone. Perhaps my life might have meaning.

I've been obsessing for a long time now about the awkward not-even-a-relationship I had back in university, just because it was the last taste I had of having this deep need maybe fulfilled... plus I was abandoned in the end, which very much triggers a whole lot of abandonment issues I have, likely due to having divorced parents.

I hate that I still think about it, that I can't just move on as other people do, but I've had so few close, meaningful connections that it's hard for any to just fade away. I mean, after school, I spent years trying to make games from my bedroom, meeting nobody, trying the whole frustrating 'join groups and clubs!' thing fruitlessly until eventually the frustration of the isolation became unbearable and I went to a university place to do a games course in the hope I might make friends. I didn't, though; I spent a year there feeling absolutely isolated, and it was hell.

I dropped out for that reason, and did that Psychology course instead, where I found a couple of friends I had close platonic in-person emotional connections with for the first time ever. Girls who seemed to like me a whole lot - such an alien experience - whose lives became intertwined with my own. Messaging each other for hours a day, going to classes and shops together and just meeting up to socialise... The sort of stuff most people probably just take for granted, but for me the difference between what I'd had before and what I had then was like night and day.

But now I'm back to where I was before all that. Back in this same house, with nowhere to go and no possibility of meeting anyone in any meaningful way. I go days or maybe weeks between brief text exchanges. Plus I'm old now, and I feel like I've completely missed my chance for any connections like that. Now everyone's a busy adult, spending their time with their partners and at their jobs, with no time for anything else.

Even if I wanted to just 'get a job', that's not a trivial thing to do since so many come from connections, which I don't have. It's something I might consider in the future, but it's not exactly something I could do right now, especially with the pandemic still hanging over us all. I could do volunteering or something, but I live in a little seaside village full of old people where most of the opportunities seem to be things like entertaining those old people or giving them sponge baths or whatever. That wouldn't scratch the itch I have; not all social interactions are equal.

But I suppose my longing is more fundamental; I feel that were I to find someone to really bond with, then I'll no longer have this soul-hole, then I'll feel complete and at ease at long last, but that's not the case. Even if I were to find what I think I need - as I did in university, sort of - it wouldn't be a cure to the pain in the long run. If anything it only agitates it, opens the wounds.

I almost killed myself because of that in university. That's something that's difficult to get over, too. It's embarrassing to remember I dropped so low, to the point where I feel I should pretend it never happened, but it did, and it's left its scars. I've not been suicidal for a long time, but over the weekend I was thinking that I'm literally spending all my time stuck with someone who almost murdered me. How would anyone feel stuck with someone like that? Especially if that person was themselves.

I'm wondering what the best way is to just make peace with all this, the pain of it all. To just accept that hole is there, to calm the aching urge to fill it and be complete. Taming the desire itself. Making things seems to help a lot... though all that's muddied these days by the need to monetise them.



I've followed a few indie devs on Twitter, and I've been less avoidant about that lately, sometimes checking what they're posting and trying to learn from it. It's been like a month since I wrote my first and only post in the Promotion category (I still don't know why that got a weirdly high number of views when they're drastically falling on the other posts), but I've been doing more research in that area, just not writing about any of it. I should, when I find the time.

Something I consistently notice though is how distant and I suppose professional most people I see seem. It feels as if everyone's wearing suits - or at least unobjectionably fashionable outfits - while I'm sitting around naked, pointing out family of spiders that live upon my nadgers. Personally I wish I could get at least a snapshot of the mind of any developer I see, but I often wonder how many other people feel similarly. Maybe most people are put off by it, and just want people to keep all that private.

Maybe it's tied to the preference for people or things which seems to vary between individuals, with most nerdy males preferring things while I'm more attuned to people (despite all my crippling anxieties surrounding interacting with them). It's why I felt more in my element in Psychology than talking about technical games mechanics or playing games wholly based around those.

Or maybe it's just a result of this profound longing for human connection.

I don't know. I have been paying attention to things like follower and like counts, and my tweets often get around 20-30 likes while other indie devs I see get around 10 or less on theirs even if they have more followers. So maybe I'm doing something not-too-terribly-wrong. I 'only' have 543 followers at the moment, and I wonder what people do to get more.

I feel like this website is my home on the internet - I've been meaning to rearrange the main page like someone might rearrange their living room - but maybe most people live on social media platforms like Twitter instead? By that I mean that if I have something I want to say, I'd post it in a blog post here first, but all the Twitter stuff feels like an afterthought, while to other people it might be the other way around. They're mostly on Twitter - or Discord? - but write blog posts as afterthoughts. I notice that whenever these indie devs link to a blog post, their sites are often quite impersonal, and the blog posts have few or no comments, or don't even have comments enabled. Maybe your experiences have been different, though, and you follow some more personal blogs.

I feel like I should get more followers so then I can have any hope of earning enough money from my games to get by, but maybe it's just always a slow process? Maybe I need to start using hashtags more often? Probably.



I am getting more used to it all, though, slowly. Being less completely sealed away in a bubble. I feel like I've come a long way with the avoidance issues this year. It's just a slow healing process, overcoming the trauma that made me so avoidant in the first place.

That video is about how criticism can be particularly wounding to the love-deprived. I know I responded so badly to the criticism on my old communities for reasons like this.

I still need to make the discord server public, but haven't yet because of it. I'm calming down about it though, gradually. It's a process. It'll be interesting to see where things are a few months from now.



I know I should probably be seeing a therapist or pumping myself full of drugs, but I've already done the therapist thing several times and drugs only address the symptoms, not the underlying issues.

Still, it's something I'll likely look into... once the pandemic is less of a factor. At the moment it feels like going out to go anywhere is a bad idea. (I need to go to a dentist, but I'm putting that off for now too...)



ANYWAY, this is a bit of a ramble, and I know I've talked about all this before, but as usual, it does help just to have a place to get it out since it does keep coming up in my mind. Though I always wonder what posting things like this does for my overall reputation, if we are all supposed to be clothed in professionalism in anything we say publicly!