I don’t normally have a bunch of time where I’m not actively engaged in doing something. That’s an active choice I’m making, generally speaking. I’ve spent my whole life managing my anxiety and depression by keeping myself constantly busy with one thing or another so there’s no room in my mind for them to occupy. Music or podcasts while I drive, cook, and do chores. Books or TV while I eat. Video games when I’m free. Endlessly scrolling social media when I need a minute to myself at work. I’m always doing something. It’s not like I’m afraid to spend time thinking. That’s kind of what this blog post is, and my daily journaling haiku habit, but even that isn’t letting my mind be at rest. It’s an active form of thinking, a directed mode of thought. I rarely leave myself the space for my mind to wander wherever it wants since even the usual “wandering” is directed by whatever activity I’m doing. While driving, though, there’s not much else to do. Watching the road, being aware of drivers, and so on takes some of my attention, but when you’re driving a thousand miles in sixteen hours, almost all of it on one long interstate route, you have a lot of time where there’s no cars or trucks near you where you can’t afford to let your eyes wander but your mind is free to stroll about as it pleases. I rarely come out of a long drive with much in the way of clarity so much as ideas to pick at some other time, but this time I woke up the morning after my drive with a thought nestled in my head that had bubbled to the surface as a result of the time I’d spent and coversations I’d had with my friends over the days preceeding the drive.

My creativity, as expressed by my writing, my storytelling, the way I direct just about every aspect of my life, is the only spark in my life that my experiences haven’t been able to grind out. My hopes for the future are so much scattered dust. My sense of self is cracked and warped and trying to adjust to the world I find myself in and the life I’m leading as I try to make sense of my “self” in a world that has no room for me to be anything but the person my parents molded me into. Almost all of my past relationships have withered and faded, and while I’m not without friends, I am largely without a sense of connection to what is still, for a few more years yet, the majority of my past since that is something I’ve largely abanonded every time I’ve gotten a chance. I labor in the endless present for the ghost of a future that no longer has any kind of coherent shape. Yet, despite all that, I’m still writing. I’m still telling stories. I’m still sharing my joy for making thing with other people and doing what I can to be that gentle nudge that suggests, just one more time, to give it a shot. I am still, at my core, the person who took the opportunity provided by a creative writing class’s final free-form assignment to bring in all my heavily-invested cohort who cared to create a shared universe of stories without letting our professor know simply because it would be fun and we (students and professor) would all get a kick out of it. I am still the person who sees a chance to tell stories with people and will do all they can to encourage other people to participate. Every single time. Without fail. My mind will immediately lay out a plan for how to make it happen and I’ll find myself gaming out scenarios for how to get people involved before I’ve even realized that I’ve decided to do it come hell or high water.

This part of me is not undefeatable. It has been through the wringer in recent years as all my attempts to set up collaborative storytelling via tabletop games have fallen to scheduling woes, people who just want to be told a story, and the slow grind of modern existence wiping out the energy I need to make any of it happen at all. It is not an invincible thing that I can rely on to carry me through life, a bulwark against all trials and a balm for all tribulations, but it is the one thing I will always come back to given enough time. Always. Inevitably. Even against what I might sometimes argue is my better judgment. Some rest, a little bit of recovery, and the lingering sparks will always catch into something greater. Which is unfortunate because my life would be so much easier if I could give up on that and content myself with puttering my days away. Easier to live without drive, finding joy in my distractions, with nothing to whisper in the brief silences of my mind that maybe, after all has been said and done, it’s time to give it another shot. How can I live in peace when there is this part of me that is only fulfilled by the exhausting labor and often unrewarded effort of collaborative storytelling? How can I ever fully rest when the first thing to return to me when I rest at all is the thought that it would be so much fun, be such a good idea, to start up some new kind of game, to begin some new branching story, with whoever I can drum up to participate. That will look at the empty (metaphorical) table when no one responds and start suggesting all the things I could do by myself to make the vision real. That whispers ways to get people interested in this kind of storytelling so that, when I’ve had the time to cook something up, the seed I planted has blossomed into a desire to tell some stories together. Which, to be clear, is a game of numbers, not some masterful skill on my part. I will prosyletize to anyone willing to listen long enough for me to get a word in edgewise and eventually I’ll find people who share my interest long enough to get something going. That’s how pretty much all of my tabletop groups have come together, so far.

This is, however, not enough to live on. I need more than a fire that will burn every available scrap of fuel I wind up having the instant I have it. Especially when it’s basically all I’ve got left and I almost can’t bear to deny it despite knowing I should take a more measured approach. I don’t know what else I could have or do where I am these days, as locked-in to my current path as I am, chasing a future that looks less and less defined the closer I get to it (if I am getting closer to it, which I’m no longer sure I am). I need to find something. I need to find anything. I need to have more in my life than this. What’s the point of having fire and drive and something to burn if I’ve got nowhere to go? All I can do now is stay on my current path, hoping that time along will be enough to get me where I want to go while I’ve still got life to live. I can’t do anything with my scant bits of drive and passion to get there faster. I can’t even make my own life better or more comfortable with it because all the benefit I ever seem to get from telling stories and creating things is offset by the stress of trying to create in the modern environment of anti-creativity. Every single one of these blog posts is probably scraped and fed into some LLM. Anything I eventually publish, should I even manage to get through the traditional publishing route, is going to do nothing but add another daily burden and expectation to my list of self-assigned labors that is never going to be offset by any substantial amount of income because the publishing industry is deeply broken.

I have spent most of my self, most of my life, driving myself forward as much as I can. Better to go forward, regardless of where that winds up being, than to be stuck in place or endlessly pulled backwards. But it has not taken me anywhere I’ve particularly liked. It hasn’t been all bad. I’ve had good times, made good friends, become more myself than ever before, but I’ve never really gotten anywhere I wanted to go because, by the time I knew enough to be able to focus my vision of the future onto something specific, I was too burned out to make it happen. And so I dialed it back. And then the pandemic happened and I had to dial it back even more. Now I’m writing this blog, aware that all I have left is the joy of storytelling when I can bear to put effort into something, and no ability to get anywhere I’d like to go with that. It’s not a great position to be in. It’s not even a particularly useful realization to have since knowing this isn’t going to change what I’m doing from day-to-day. I don’t even know if it’ll help on a larger scale. Realizations are great and all, but they’re nothing without action and change to back them up and all that’s a bit beyond me at the moment. It’s all I can do to keep myself going from day to day with the stuff that’s currently in my life. I don’t have anything to spare for adding more, so what’s the point of all this? I wish I could tell you.