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Counselling Class - Week 4

7 months ago3,052 words

Another diary entry of sorts about my stumbling steps into the real world. I wish I'd been employed in my teens and twenties, so I wasn't such a poisonous pest of an alien now.

I ended last week's post on a hopeful-ish note - that the worst of the readjustment to the real world after years in a bubble of isolation was behind me - but... bleh.

I spent much of the past week feeling miserable and depressed. The worst part was the anhedonia, which robs everything of joy and makes everything cause pain. You can't even distract yourself with fun stuff because it all feels numb at best and hurts at worst.

I wanted to write a post on the weekend about games dev stuff, and to reply to comments, but couldn't do either because of the anhedonia.

Probably the main reason for that was because these evening classes have been disrupting my sleeping. I normally sleep around 9pm (to wake around 5 or 6), but they end at 9, so I'm asleep around 11 and have a rough night anyway due to the fresh new batch of faux pas to cringe about. These days, even relatively minor sleep disruptions seem to affect me a lot. Or I suppose the disruption exacerbates the negative effects I'd already be experiencing from mental illness.

I had an hour-long nap today, which seems to have helped for now, though I hope it doesn't disrupt my sleep tonight.



As for the actual class, though, I spent the whole day in anxious anticipation about it again. I experienced that before every lecture at university, though, so I don't think it's going to be going away any time soon.

A big part of it is related to what's apparently called 'time anxiety', which I did some reading about, though the main thing I got out of what I read is that many different things can cause it.

In my case, I think a couple of painful memories are to blame:

- As a teenager I arrived for a class late once and the teacher berated me in front of the other students, who all laughed at me;

- And one time when my ex flew from Canada to come and see me, my step-dad took me to the airport to pick her up, but he dilly-dallied for ages which caused us to get there when she'd already been waiting a while.

Things like that - though vague, half-memories at this point - seem to have made 'being late' this horrendous thing in my neurotic mind, to be avoided at all costs, so then I don't experience or cause harm again.

I did a video call with one of my two remaining uni friends a couple of days ago, and we talked about this. She talked about how her ADHD leads to time blindness, and so she tends to be late for things; the opposite of me. BUT I also saw a meme on Reddit in an ADHD community about the time anxiety I experience (something like "I have one appointment today so I can't concentrate on anything else all day"). So which is it?

Probably "it's related to factors other than ADHD".

I wonder what that's like, though, to be late for things. To not see appointment times as this life-or-death thing you absolutely must stick to or else. So alien to me. Just as my irrational fears are likely incomprehensible to those who don't have them.



Anyway, as for the actual class, though, the receptionist wasn't there again. Maybe she quit or got fired, or changed to different shifts, and I'll never see her again. Oh well.

Though I'd set off and arrived early, to my surprise a couple of other people had shown up before me! That meant I wasn't alone in the classroom with the instructor, and didn't get a chance to talk to him.

Those two things seemed to deny me a chance for psychological relief, instead giving my demons an opportunity to fester. He spent an hour or two lecturing us, and I just simmered silently in increasingly negative thoughts, contributing nothing (unlike previous classes where I'd been unusually talkative).

A lot of the negative thoughts I have are about how I'm poisonous, a burden, a pest, and I'd be doing people a kindness by not inflicting myself upon them. I believe I make them uncomfortable, and have enough evidence to support this as more than a delusion.

(This isn't 'low self-esteem'; I feel that I have value. I just hold the belief that other people will see me in a way they find repulsive.)

I sat in the same place as last week, but the person I interacted with last week sat in another row, which my demons interpreted - perhaps not incorrectly - as deliberately avoiding me. Not a huge loss since I wouldn't say we clicked or anything, but I suppose it reinforced how I was already feeling.

Some other people came in and sat to my right (with an empty chair between us, and nobody on my left as I was at the end of the row), though at this point - just five or ten minutes in, as people were still arriving and before the class had actually begun - I was in such a poor mood that I just kept my head down and didn't even look at them to see who it was.

When the tutor started lecturing, I could barely concentrate, my mind kept wandering. He was going on about jargon and contracts and professionalism and conduct that all seem so self evident to me ("don't cause your client harm", "don't tell them what to do", "treat them with empathy"); it's concerning to me if people would train to become a counsellor but this wasn't second nature to them!

Though I suppose concepts like "give them a space to figure out their own issues rather than giving them advice" probably only seem 'obvious' to me since I've spent years dwelling on them (since the Fig Hunter days), which other people wouldn't necessarily have done.

I kept noticing out of the corner of my eye that the person to my right was giving subtle signs of curiosity about or interest in me, though. Things like mirroring my body language, glances at me. All that did though was bring to mind what I know about women being interested in emotionally unavailable men, despite what they might claim or even believe themselves. But that's a whole thing in itself.



After a lecture that seemed to go on forever, we were given the opportunity to discuss some concept that'd just been explained in groups of three, as there were nine of us (I think there were more before, but some just didn't show up this week?).

I was at the end of my row, and felt silently apologetic to whoever was on my right for being stuck with the broken nutjob. Wondered whether they'd turn away, try to find someone better.

They didn't, but... Well, they're I think the two youngest in the class, though 'youngest' here means like mid-to-late-twenties, and they seemed to already be friends. I couldn't tell if they'd become friends from these classes or if they had a history spanning years.

Either way, they talked comfortably between one another while the one next to me (or one seat away from me) - who I'd noticed body language signs from earlier - basically had her back to me.

I talked last time about how it's mostly been external rather than internal factors that have been the biggest causes of misery for me. I literally don't have opportunities to meet people, rather than I meet them and they reject me, that kind of thing.

In this case, though, I know that my own mental health issues were the problem.

I mean, I could have greeted them in a friendly, open way, asked to join their group; they likely would have welcomed that. Instead, though, I crossed my arms, looked away, basically sulked like some beaten puppy, my body language screaming 'stay away', due to the thoughts I had about how I'd only poison them if I engaged and they'd be much better off if I didn't. Of course they awkwardly pretended I wasn't there. Who wouldn't? I was silently asking for that.

Somehow though we eventually managed to break through that, and I did contribute at least a little bit. Though the fact they both already knew one another - and clearly had at least some degree of history together because they kept referring to things and people I didn't know - made it feel like they were having a conversation with one another while I was just occasionally butting in. There was a flow between them, which I only disrupted.

I suppose that's due to a combination of my internal faults and external circumstance. Their uninclusive behaviour as much as my aloofness and social ineptitude.

We only got maybe five or ten minutes before that opportunity ended and the woman next to me - who'd moved her chair a bit to form a kind of semicircle to ostensibly include me - eagerly moved back to where she was before.



Eventually, after more lecturing then an awkward break where I silently read about anxiety and parasympathetic nervous system on my phone (apparently the right and left amygdalae do different things, I didn't know that) while the tutor talked happily with a couple of the women and the rest left the room, we finally got to practise actually doing some counselling.

The way this had been presented previously was that we'd get into groups of three, with one person as the counsellor, another as the client, and the third as an assessor/supervisor, and we'd take turns inhabiting each of the roles. What actually happened was was less formal and probably less useful in terms of skills training, but maybe more useful when it comes to what made me join the class in the first place.

We got into the same groups as before - so me with the two younger women - but the other two groups - and the tutor - all left the classroom to discuss in their own rooms, leaving just us three in the classroom alone. Meaning we were just completely unsupervised and they started threatening me and they ganged up on me and beat me up and mugged me and now I'm in hospital and the doctor's given me three months to live from the severity of the injuries.

So that was awkward.

Or, less idiotically, we sort of tried deciding on roles and going through the intended exercise (which was basically just practising reading out what's essentially a list of terms and conditions, which I don't care about in the slightest and have mentally turned off when counsellors have gone through it in the past with me), but it soon degenerated into us just generally talking.

Again they were more comfortable talking between with one another than either were with me, though I did at least learn little bits about them. Though only one had seen a counsellor in the past, the other had experience with mental health issues of her own (though I didn't learn what). Interestingly, she said she felt like an alien because of it, which is at least similar to what I'd describe my own experiences like.

Though they both have partners and mentioned multiple jobs they've done with people, so I'm objectively more of an alien than them in that regard as I've never been employed.

I also talked with my other friend on the phone earlier in the week, and she's about the same age as those women and has had several jobs in similar fields. I suspect their backgrounds have a lot in common, so knowing her - and being a part of her life as she went through those various jobs - gives me at least some insight into what these strangers' work lives a have likely been like.

It seems strange to me though that twenty-somethings have jobs which involve caring for or teaching other people. The tutor of this course is in his twenties too. And I'm always seeing people on Reddit in their twenties talking about this long history of work experience, or how they're so old so it's tragic they've not yet done this or that... Seems so ridiculous to me in hindsight, since those years still feel like the first chapter after the prologue/tutorial.

My friend works with vulnerable or difficult people; the sorts whose demons mean they need constant surveillance because they're a danger to themselves or others. So much time, effort, and money spent on people who'll never positively contribute only to prevent them from negatively contributing. Also strange, I suppose.

Whenever she talks about it, I think about how I could never do that, or how it seems ridiculous that a twenty-something, still fresh out of school, should or could have that kind of 'power' or authority or competence or something like that.

And I suppose I think this because I spent my entire twenties without any work experience. I hate how I decided to just make games from my bedroom, and avoided all that. If I could go back and do that differently, I would.

One of the women said she was a teacher (as most of the people in the class seem to be...), who works with children, and she's interested in becoming a counsellor for children rather than adults. The other said she'd be more interested in working with teens, and said something how teenagers hadn't yet learned the masking that adults do.

Which got me thinking about recent thoughts and conversations I've had about masking, and how I don't do it. I've always seen it as something I don't do both because I'm so ~creative~ and open and comfortable - in a sense - with who I am, and because I'm socially inept and lack that important social skill, though this made me reframe it a bit as something I've just never developed due to spending my entire adult life essentially isolated.

I mean, I've suspected for ages that the main reason I'm so metaphorically naked is because I've never had to be in environments where that'd be professionally and socially detrimental, though I suppose this just solidified the nebulous notion that'd been floating around my mind for years. I've never had the opportunity to develop beyond the teenager stage.

Working as a young adult is more valuable for the social development than for the monetary earnings, most likely.



I left the class feeling... mixed, I suppose. I'm getting a better sense for how I perform in the real world as a result of the prolonged isolation, and while it's painful inflicting my flaws on others, I suppose I at least feel with each passing class that I might be becoming slightly less deranged. Or something. That's the hopeful way to see it, anyway.

There's no class next week due to half term (is that a universal thing or a Britishism?), though, so I won't get a chance to practice then. I'll be curious to know how things might go after a prolonged break and after having talked briefly with these other two people this time. Will they avoid me when we next meet, or engage with me?

I also got a call from the mental health charity I last had counselling with, informing me of an anxiety meetup group that'll be running on the morning of the same day as these classes. I'll go and give it a try, but it's in the middle of the day, so I imagine that - like the ones I tried in the past - it'll be full of retirees. Everyone else will be in work at that time.

So no high hopes there. Still, I spend all day anxiously awaiting the evening class, so having something else in the morning might relieve that. We'll see.



Because I have no class next week to distractingly fret about, hopefully I'll be able to write about games stuff over the coming days. I don't know if anyone actually cares about that, but it's something I at least want to do.

Another thing I wanted to mention is that while I listen to my music compositions pretty much every day, I listened to the MARDEK OST a few days ago, for the first time in ages. I'm not sure why I usually don't; I think it's something like awareness of how naive I was when I composed it, and a lot of people have heard that music, so my demons tell me they must all have perceived it as flawed and I should be embarrassed about that, or something.

Listening back to it, though, I'm really impressed at what past-me was able to achieve while having so little to work with. Little to no theory knowledge, basic MIDI sounds. While the pieces aren't exactly competent, I'd say they're inventive, melodically interesting, take some turns that are surprisingly pleasing to me even now. Probably more daring than I'd be these days, too.

The soundtrack's longer than many 'real' games' soundtracks, and I made it together with everything else in the game, driven by passion rather than profit.

I hear and miss the enthusiasm I had back then. Creating for the sake of it, loving every minute of it.

I still do make stuff, and I love my music in particular (when I actually finish something, that is), though loneliness and the struggle to make money poison so much of my mental activity that I never really get to get caught up in that passion like I once did... It's such a shame.

I'm proud that I've made things like that, though. I don't think my 'professional' life has been 'worse' than someone who's spent their twenties being a teacher or wiping the bums of people who throw tantrums about being told to wear pants. It's just very different, and difficult to connect due to a lack of similar experiences.

Anyway, I ramble too much. Hopefully I'll have the energy to write about the games dev work I've been doing soon.