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Breaking My Chains

9 years ago1,596 words

Firstly, I'd like to say that I've been really impressed by the comments here so far! Well, with a couple of deliberately malicious exceptions, but I'm trying not to think about those. There's a lot of thought, depth, insight and compassion in them, and I'm glad to have attracted the attention of people such as yourselves. I'd like to talk about a tangled mess of things in this post, though I'll try to use subheadings this time!

Derren Brown - Miracle

I'd just like to make a brief mention of a stage show I went to yesterday, by a performer I've admired for many years now, called Derren Brown. He's a household name here in the UK, though I don't think his reputation has spread beyond the seas. His act is hard to explain; he's essentially a magician, but his tricks are more psychological (at least superficially; my psychology lecturers seem incredulous and insist it's nothing more than deception). 'Mind reading', in a way.

There are a bunch of videos of his TV shows and live performances on YouTube. ∞ Here's one where he makes a poor young woman kill a kitten! ∞ (It's not what it sounds like.)

I like him because his personality resonates with my own; I've read his autobiography, and we sound similar mentally, except of course his particular experiences have led to a much more fulfilling use of his mind than mine have.

This was the third time I've seen him perform live. While I could go on about how impressive and amazing his show was, the most interesting part about it for me was that it began with something bizarrely relevant to things that have been significant in my life recently. He explicitly described the idea that the past and future are mere fantasies; that the present is the only thing that ever truly is, and that we should live in the now to alleviate mental suffering and enjoy happiness.

I think I'd heard the gist of that idea for years, but I properly discovered it and came to embrace it most fully through the path of spirituality, specifically a book called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, which I'd describe as paradigm-shifting, life changing. I then learned about the almost-identical practice of mindfulness, which works on the same concept.

Seeing Derren Brown incorporate it heavily into his latest show surprised me because a big part of his personality has been his outspoken atheism and rejection and debunking of apparent supernatural, spiritual and religious ideas. He uses his 'magic' to show that those who claim to have genuine magic or divine powers are nothing more than charlatans by reproducing their effects with what he openly says are deceptive tricks.

I suppose the fact that three quite different sources - airy-fairy spirituality, cold scientific psychology, and the probing inquisition of a sharp-minded sceptical performer - all converge on the same idea lends to support to its value.

The past and future really are just ideas in our head, and seeing them as such robs them of a lot of their pain.

Wallowing

Except for that outing, I've spent the last several days lying in bed in my pyjamas, trying to work through a lot of difficult thoughts and feelings... With mixed results.

There have been two reasons for this. One - the biggest one - is the loss of hope from a sort of romantic rejection that I described at the end of my previous post, and the other is the fact that I'm currently back at my parents' house.

I'm only here for a few days to look after the house and dogs while my parents are away on holiday, but even so, the feeling of repeating a cycle again and again gets me down a lot. No matter how far I seem to stray from home, I always seem to end up back here.

I left my childhood home when I moved to Australia with my mother and step-dad at age 13, and we moved many times in the years since then. So it's not like I'm returning to the place I spent my earliest years or anything.

Still, the first time I had a taste of moving out was when I flew to Canada alone to see my then-girlfriend, and we lived in a rented place alone together for a month. It was wonderful... but over far too quickly, and then it was back home again. I had to wait six months for the next time, and again it was a wonderful escape, a jump forward, when it did come. This pattern repeated for six trips without us ever really going anywhere with our lives, just going around in circles, but it ended when she did move on, and I sunk into a pit of despair.

I tried going to university to study video games art, but dropped out after a year because I didn't make any friends... and ended up at home again for a year. I went to uni again a few months ago, and it's gone so much better, given me so much hope, made me feel like I'm finally going through rites of passage I should have gone through a decade ago... but then the feeling of just losing all that and going backwards as I came home just for these few days really got to me. I feel like a slow-blooming flower that's been forced back under the soil.

Breaking My Chains

The pain of all this has left me feeling numb and alone, but those feelings have been pushing me to venture out of my bubble more than I have in the past. I feel like I've learned a great deal over the last few days, about the world I've been missing out on, and I feel like I'm growing quickly as a result.

I've been using multiple apps and websites in a desperate attempt to connect with others who are in the same position, who are suffering. I've always been deaf to the 'thoughtstream' of the world; the outpour of minds that most people are exposed to by daily conversations, Facebook feeds, news and the like. It shapes the way that most people think and behave, but my isolation led to development that was bizarre by comparison. I wanted in many ways to explore Facebook to remedy this... but the fear of alienation always held me back; I knew that if I were made aware of the wonderful lives that people were living, and the ways in which people were so well-connected compared to me, I'd only feel worse and I wanted to avoid that suffering.

The apps I've been using are about reporting moods, diary-style, and they allow you to see posts from all other people in the world. The numbness and desperation have encouraged me to actually look at what's on the mind of the collective. I do feel alienated, largely because most users are teenagers and the way they speak and think is unlike the way my own mind works, but I also feel like those feelings will subside once I gain enough experience to adapt, or at least to understand.

Mostly I find it fascinating seeing so clearly that everyone is suffering... That so many of my issues are shared by others. I 'knew' this before, but actually seeing it so clearly makes it all so much more vivid. I feel less unlike others than I did before... though I do feel embarrassed that I can probably relate more to the naive infatuations and social awkwardness of teenagers than to issues experienced by people closer to my own age, just because I spent so many years cut off from everything and failed to go through the steps of development that I should have done.

I feel that by exploring the world in this way, by reaching out to others and trying to help them, I'm overcoming a lot of the aversions and pickiness that constrained me in the past. I still have a lot of chains to tear off, but I feel like I'm finally climbing out of the hole I was in (mixed metaphors!). Which is good.

It's also making me feel artistically inspired, and the comments here and on Alora Fane have helped in that regard too. A lot of people on the mood-reporting apps feel irrelevant, unappreciated, like their life lacks meaning and like they've failed to make an impact in the world, and I feel that way too... But then I remember that people do fondly remember MARDEK, that people have praised Taming Dreams, and that there are people who are impressed by me as a person and an artist and believe I have the potential to do something great.

I think I'm going to play Taming Dreams again tonight or tomorrow, for the first time in a long time, to get myself back into the state of mind I might use to continue working on either it or a similar game. These last few months of creative drought have been frustrating, but I feel they've allowed me to grow, and to better understand what I must do, and how I should do it.



I've been pouring out my thoughts in posts on those apps and websites, to be seen only by strangers who don't even appreciate them, but perhaps I should update this more frequently with shorter posts!