PERSONAL

9

2,207

Mental Piranhas

3 years ago2,411 words

I'M MENTALLY ILL. Did you know that?? I might not have mentioned it hundreds of times before, I forget. It's been worse than usual this week, so here's some venting about money woes, and how toxic communities have and continue to exacerbate the social anxiety that's already prevented me from seizing so many opportunities...

I've been trying to write about this for days... It's not that it's some big reveal or anything like that - I've talked about most of this stuff openly before - and only a handful of people are even going to see it, but, well, I'm depressed, so I've just started half a dozen times and run out of energy half way... Let's see how far I get this time!!

I've done very little work this week. I can take 'mental health days' off if I need to since there's nobody telling me otherwise, but I'd really rather not. I really want to finish Atonal Dreams, since finishing that will address some of the issues that constantly get me down. Either it'll succeed financially and I'll have confidence that I can keep on doing the game dev thing, or it'll be a complete flop and I'll have confirmation that I should give it up (again) and try to do something else with my life. But currently I'm stuck actually doing the work every day - which is a loooong process - and sometimes the constant uncertainty of that piling up with other factors means I can't do anything despite trying. When that happens, taking time off game dev seems the best thing to do to prevent burnout on this project and on life in general.

So I've been spending much of this week doing other stuff instead. Creative stuff, personal projects like drawing or music composition. I can't remember the last time I had a day where I didn't create anything, so that's something... Though those things help alleviate stress only because they're for my eyes only, because I don't have to worry about satisfying anyone else or dealing with potentially negative feedback.

But that's such a shame. I wish I could just put out, say, music regularly or something - I've been wondering whether to at least put those albums, or maybe individual pieces, on YouTube - but I listen to my music a lot, and negative or lack of feedback interferes with its value for me. Plus I feel I have to worry about how to potentially monetise everything, and that's not something that'd make money at all. Unless it somehow attracted new people to my Patreon, which I doubt.

It's looking very unlikely that I'll reach the £20,000 goal I hoped to earn this year. I might earn about half that, if I'm lucky, unless I manage to get another alpha/demo build and run a Kickstarter by the end of the year, which... isn't impossible? But I wouldn't say it's likely.

So money-related woes have been hanging over me. That's one thing.



Another though is the chronic loneliness, which normally lies darkly dormant, but which spikes sometimes, usually prompted by something or another. This week's been one of those spikes.

Dealing with loneliness as an awkward man is hardly rare. I just opened Reddit, and within seconds I saw ∞ this post about someone finally starting to make a friend at work, only for it to end before going anywhere ∞, and ∞ this one, about how men don't reach out to people when they're at their worst, where people are talking in the comments about how this isn't because of 'toxic masculinity' discouraging them from opening up, but because if they do try to open up, nobody - male or otherwise - cares ∞.

I'd say I have three friends currently, maybe? Which is more than I had for years before. But... I've been thinking about what I mean by 'friend'. A lot of gamers seem to have mostly-male friend groups who they play multiplayer or tabletop games together with, or Discord groups they share memes with maybe, which is something I can understand as appealing from a distance, but which I'm not really drawn to myself. What I value - or feel a strong 'need' for - are like-minded confidants I can form close emotional bonds with through one-on-one conversations, mostly about shared mental issues. People I can ramble openly about my deepest woes to - and who'll do the same with me! - and be met with compassion rather than pity, dismissal, criticism, or unwanted advice to 'fix' me. I've been on the lookout for such people for years, and these three friends fall into that category, mostly.

I prefer women for this because they're more likely to empathise than to do the problem-solving thing, but there also seems to be a whole lot more drama and intensity with opposite-sex friendships, at least if both parties are neurotic. With mostly-agreeable introverts, like myself and the like-minds I've tried to form these connections with, this drama is less screaming and gossiping and more furtive fretting born of negative assumptions, unspoken so as to avoid potential conflict or offense... but which fester into something far more wounding in the end anyway.

One of these three friends - who I met in my third year of university - has been doing a Master's, and needs to find somewhere else to live soon. We got talking about finding a place together! Nothing romantic, or permanent; just somewhere she can stay while she gets everything sorted out, which might give me the push I need to find a place myself.

But we also agreed to do some video calls, with an appointed weekly time to fit into our schedules and to work around our social anxieties. I did a couple! I wrote about at least one a while back. But I ended up cancelling a couple of others due to anxiety, she cancelled a third, and then a fourth didn't happen either...

Now I think she's just given up on me, and it's looking very unlikely that we'll find a place after all. So that's another thing.



I've been thinking a lot about why I've ended up here. I suppose it's hard not to, with so much time to just think. Why did I chicken out of those calls? If I hadn't, might things have gone differently?

A lot of it's to do with poor upbringing and biological factors - that's why I have the anxiety in the first place - but there are specific life events that have conditioned my mind to expect negative reactions too.

After school, I worked on games rather than getting a 'normal' job because MARDEK had been relatively popular and it seemed like something I could do without having to face other people. But I had to face a lot of other people, online at least, on my websites, and the toxicity of all that has left lingering scars.



I've continued following the UFO stuff, mostly via subreddits, and recently there's been some... thing that's been discussed a lot in those. Basically some woman claims to have met aliens in some mountain base who gave her a message about love and peace and how humanity needs to transcend, and other generic spiritual stuff, and she's aiming to go back in there with a team to gather proof that they exist and their message is true (∞ this post has a summary in the comments ∞). She even did ∞ an in-person 'press conference' in the US capital this week ∞, which I watched a livestream of as it happened; it started an hour late, about a dozen people showed up, and the content was mostly the same as what she'd already posted on Reddit, other than her openly doxing herself to show how serious about it all she was. Bizarre.

Since that, people on UFO/aliens subreddits - mostly the one that spawned following the Throawaylien 'larp' I talked about a while back - have been basically tearing her to shreds... and (disregarding the actual topic) it all reminds me so much of the Fig Hunter days. One person dealing with a swarm of critics, well-meaning or otherwise, who chip away at their patience, revealing frustration, which the critics calmly, probably smirkingly pick at further as signs their prey's no good. They only have to deal with this one person, but that one person is having to deal with dozens or more of these critics all at once, and those critics don't get why she's not as composed as they are.

(As for how I feel about that specific situation, I suspect she's mentally ill, but I'm curious to see where things go.)



Chris Chan also came up in the news recently, as you may already be aware. Last couple of weeks? Feels like forever ago, with how transient news is these days. Absolutely bizarre, seeing some infamous internet weirdo making international mainstream news (it was reported here in the UK too; my mum literally asked me about Chris Chan).

That person's a mess. I remember becoming aware of him - he only declared himself a woman to hopefully have sex with lesbians, or so I've read - many years ago; I even mentioned to a counsellor that I was terrified maybe other people saw me like they saw that joke of a human. I'm hardly a shining example of a live well lived, after all. Or if I wasn't there already, maybe I was on the path that would take me there.

He was arrested for raping his elderly mother. I haven't done anything that bad, I hope!! Or as bad as much of the other stuff he's infamous for. Still, while he's probably the most extreme example you could ever give, I suppose it gets to me since I'm worried in general about how anonymity allows for swarms of internet piranhas to gleefully pick apart any weirdos who dare attract too many eyes to them (as if they're such saints themselves).

So reminders like that have sort of built up the insecurity pile.



After all the Fig Hunter mess, I again spent years trying to get out there, to find people, fruitlessly... until I finally went to university and found the first close platonic opposite-sex friendships I'd ever had. I had a 'best friend' and everything!!1 But that turned sour eventually, with her ghosting me in the end while accusing me of a bunch of terrible things that very much confirmed a lot of negative thoughts I already had about myself and added a bunch of new ones too.

That continues to traumatise me every day, especially since I often browse Reddit while procrastinating and many posts there are apparently triggers for me. Reddit overall isn't kind to certain kinds of people, and every time I see some post universally mocking some loathsome 'nice guy' or even an outright predator, I worry that maybe I fell into one of those categories - or will one day - without ever meaning to or even knowing until much later.

Am I a monster? A manipulator? Should I just go and hide in a cave, or jump off a bridge, so as to never inflict my toxicity on anyone ever again??

Thoughts like that swarm around in my head all the time, and sometimes their intensity becomes too much. It'd be easier, in some ways, if I were indisputably the victim of some other person's foul behaviour, but instead I feel I was blamed for everything - including by myself - so it's not as if I can escape the monster and heal if the monster is me.

I'm especially prone to guilt and shame in general though. I see vile people every day on Reddit ranging from ∞ the openly monstrous, like this woman who was apparently happy to beat her spouse while spouting slurs during a stream ∞, to the more common anonymous posters who casually argue or tear others down as if it's nothing. It all feels so alien to me; I beat myself up for days if I say some minor thing which is awkwardly received. I wonder what it's like to not fret about your every word. The idea of hurting anyone tears me apart.



So yes... bleh. Ugh. I feel I'm such a mess of a person, so broken down by a life of terrible luck. Even when I try to get out there and connect with people, it leaves me worse than I was before I started. It's very difficult, then, to want to keep attempting that. But since I don't, the loneliness is chronic and flares up occasionally, and there are times like this when it just distracts me from doing anything to crawl out of the hole I'm in.

I should probably go and see a therapist... yet again, though I'm sceptical about how much it could even help since I already know the psychology and most of my issues are situational. Finding a therapist takes months, though. One of these friends recently mentioned that her counsellor told her something or other, so I've asked where she found that counsellor; that's a start. Better than nothing.

(She said that when she called me out of the blue after weeks of silence to vent about her own problems, and during the conversation I hinted at my own woes but was largely shrugged off, and we haven't talked since because - despite being an awkward person herself - she has so many (mostly male) people reaching out to her in her time of need that she's literally never alone. Most young women could experience that; few - if any - males could.)



Doing personal creative stuff is at least a distraction, and I feel better now than I did last weekend, at least. I'll have to hope I can get some work done next week...