To have any experience with the internet is to know that there has been no greater lie told (mostly by accident) than “the internet is forever” (or it’s popular variant, “if you put that on the internet, it is there forever”). That was always what I was told when I was young. It’s what many of my friends were told. “Be careful with what you put on the internet! There’s no such thing as completely taking it down!” Nowadays, we know better. For things to exist on the internet, they have to be stored somewhere and digital storage is not as eternal as we were led to believe. Servers go down, backups get deleted, “AI” agents delete entire environments and then back that nothing up over the backups, and sometimes Amazon just deletes your account and all it’s digital licenses for no reason with no chance of recovery. Digital ownership is ephemeral and while nothing truly lasts forever, the half-life of things on the internet might be much shorter than everyone was led to believe. And sure, just because you can’t find it doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. There’s so much data tucked away in advertising companies, various archival efforts, and forgotten, dusty hard drives in some abandonded warehouse or server rack, so it’s difficult to tell when something is truly gone forever (like a video game I played via SNES emulator that I cannot find any mention or record of anywhere that I keep thinking is Secrets Of Mana but learn it isn’t when I go play SoM). I’m sure this game from my late childhood/early double-digit-years exists somewhere and I’m sure the version I remember is some modified ROM or a translated version of a game and that it is sitting tucked away on someone’s computer somewhere, forever out of my reach other than the few hazy memories of it I hold onto.
Continue readingMemory
Reopening Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Twenty Years Later
Content Warning for discussion of childhood trauma in the context of a retrospective about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. There’s also spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in there, too, but not super specific ones.
Continue readingLasting Lessons And The Impermanence Of Memory
One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).
Continue readingUnpacking The Past
Recently, my younger sibling (the middlest of us middle siblings) brought me the last of my things from my parents’ house. A lot of it was model train stuff that used to belong to my dad and that now belongs to me for reasons I don’t remember (I probably said I’d take it when he mentioned planning to throw it out sometime a decade or so ago), but this delivery also included a bunch of the seasonal decorations that had been given to me in my childhood and all of my “baby books” as my family called them (pretty much anything for kindergardeners and younger). I had a pretty impressive collection (all of us did), but I think I might have held onto mine the best. I was always the kid most interested in building my book collection. I reread things the most. I enjoyed having them since, with one exception, books were never forbidden to me in a household where every other piece of media I ever acquired had to be vetted by my parents to make sure it was appropriate for me. Which is funny, since books wound up being some of the most subversive stuff I ecountered as a kid in a lot of ways, some of which weren’t always terribly constructive or thought-provoking. I mean, I remember tearing pages out of my Dragon Ball manga because some of the art showed a woman’s breasts and I knew I’d lose all access to manga (which had somehow fallen under the blanket approval of books in my parents’ minds) just as well as I remember how Fullmetal Alchemist taught me to be more critical of authority. Or how Tuck Everlasting taught me that maybe endless anything wasn’t actually something I should desire (which laid the groundwork for me questioning the faith I was raised to accept without thought) and how Hatchett taught me how to start fires without matches.
Continue readingDigital Object Impermanence Ruined Streaming For Me
I don’t watch a lot of movies. Or TV shows, for that matter. I live alone and don’t really have a lot of people who show up in my day-to-day life and share my interests in a way that would motivate us to watch the same shows across a distance (one exclusion being my younger sister, whom I’ve convinced to watch Steven Universe with me), so most of my leisure time is spent on video games, books, and the occasional TV show. It’s not that I don’t enjoy TV shows or movies, I just don’t think of them. Most new media exists only as a digital icon I can interface with through a streaming service, so I honestly just forget most of it exists. I have the same problem with e-books and audio books. I just forget they exist. I think the only reason I don’t have that problem with podcasts is because I keep my podcast app open on my phone all the time and listen to more podcasts than music these days.
Continue readingRecorded and Reposted: False Summer
It takes only a moment,
The space between whispers of wind
On a scorching September day
As the sun roasts pavement
Two feet from where shadow shelters
A wilting garden unaware
Of how little time it has left,
And the past mixes with the present.
Fingers tracing rows and lines,
Too large now to intertwine
With the holes left in the table
Made of rubber-coated steel,
But still looking for something to hold.
I Don’t Usually Remember My Dreams And Today I’m Glad I Don’t.
I rarely remember my dreams. I’m not sure why, though I’d bet it has to do with my various sleep issues and how rarely I feel properly rested, but this has been my experience for my entire life. I can’t remember a time in my life that I recall waking up with the details of a dream in my mind more than once in a long while. Most of the time, the dreams I do recall are bad ones, full of negative emotions and unpleasant images perhaps only still present in my mind because the experience of these dreams was so awful that I shook myself awake from them. The rest are a general smattering of the sort of odd, disconnected ideas and sequences that seem to form most dreams and are utterly unremarkable in any way other than their rarity.
Continue readingThe Secret To My Success As A Game Master
In one of my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, I recently leveled up my players and gave them access to some a few magic items each since the next adventure hook they chose was to explore an incredibly dangerous area that can cause magic to go haywire. In the time since that session, I’ve been working with some of them to select the items they want and ensure that they understand their new abilities or powers. It is fairly typical for this group, but it’s something I provide to any player who needs it because I have a fairly broad knowledge of the content and I know enough to find anything if I can’t remember it. It’s a useful skill to have as both a DM and player, and I feel like I’ve managed to present myself as a resource to other players and DMs alike without being overbearing.
Continue readingMy Place Beneath An Infinite Sky
I am a child. The world has become huge, but pieces of it still feel small and like they can belong to me in a way they can’t belong to anyone else. I am past all the illusions of youth, but I’ve learned to lie well enough to fool even myself when the need arises. Tonight, a night when everyone else is busy settling in to the cabin my parents have rented, I am left to my own devices. My parents are so busy with my youngest sibling that they don’t even notice me leave. Their usual hail of admonitions is absent as they talk about the next two weeks and the schedule we are all to stick to. Tonight, though, I have no schedule, excellent fire-making skills, an enormous pile of wood beside the bonfire pit, and a cloudless evening sky that I’ve been told will soon be filled with more stars than I have ever seen in my life.
Continue readingLearning to Rest & Recover
In the past year, amongst all the other hard truths and difficult steps of my growth, I came face-to-face with the fact that I never learned how to recover since I spent almost my entire life coping. Specifically, due to the situation I grew up in and the life I was choosing for myself in my college years, I never learned to recover from things because I never had the time or opportunity to do more than cope.
I’m quite good at coping. Throw me into any difficult situation, any amount of stress, any environment, and I’ll make it work. I’ll get things done, achieve my goals, and manage to keep my sanity. Like a lot of people who grew up with stress and trauma as an everyday part of my life, I got so used to it that I feel uncomfortable without a constant high-level of stress so I tend to thrive when things get difficult. In the years since I graduated college, leaving behind the orderly environments and clear, outlined goals, I’ve discovered that there is an upper limit to how much I can handle. I don’t thrive under highly stressful situations so much as I never learned how to live comfortably in any other kind of situation.
What made it click this past year was talking with my roommate about how to organize his studying and classwork time. He’s a student now and he regularly struggles with staying focus on his work because he’s an extrovert and can be easily distracted by anyone even walking into the room he’s working in. He remarked that he gets frustrated because he wants to go do stuff with me and our other roommate, and I agreed that it is harder for him as a late-20s adult going to college when most of his friends have already graduated. He can’t connect and enjoy studying with his classmates because some of them are a decade younger than him, and he doesn’t have a group of friends to study with since we’re all playing video games or going out (I’ve offered to sit and write with him if he wants company while he works, but he has yet to take me up on it).
While we were talking about strategies to help him focus, I told him some anecdotes from my years in college and the lessons I learned. During my junior and senior years, when I figured out what I wanted to do and buckled down to work, I did homework or worked six nights of the week. Between classes, studying, and working full time, I got one night off a week, so I took Thursday nights off to play video games with my friends. Other than that, I ignored everyone or told them they could join me as I studied in the library or in the English Department lounge. I picked studying and work over everything else and counted on my friends to understand. Some of them did, some of them didn’t, but what mattered most to me was making the right choice for myself.
All that stuff tumbled around my head for a while before it finally connected with the final piece to the puzzle. One of the most important things I ever learned from a professor in college was a saying he liked (and still likes) to repeat to all of his classes. “I know some of you will say that you write your best papers at the last minute, as the deadline approaches. That isn’t true. What is true is that you only write your papers at the last minute.” It was a lesson I took to heart then and something that connected what I learned by choosing myself in college with what I’ve been learning from the books I’m reading about trauma (they’ll show up in a review sometime).
All of this made it clear that nothing had changed from college. I hadn’t become deficient in someway. I hadn’t lost anything. I just got worn out because I assumed that I thrived when under a great deal of stress instead of questioning if I had ever tried to live without that much stress. I’d gradually worn myself down because I could just keep coping until I was physically incapable of continuing. Even after I knew I wasn’t really fine, when I’d seen the cracks in the world I was building for myself and did my best to patch them, I still thought I could keep doing what I was doing and the changes I’d made to my world would eventually fix things. Turns out what I needed to change was me.
I still think I made the right choice back then to change jobs. I think that, overall, my world is much better than it was three years ago even as I’m currently breaking it all apart and building most of it back up again. I also think that what I really needed was to learn how to rest. How to recover. They sound so easy, right? The idea of resting is super easy until you try to explain it to someone, isn’t it? You grab for metaphor and simile, confident that the person you’re talking to understands it and you just have to find the right bridge to connect your understand and theirs. I didn’t really understand it. I thought I did. If you’d asked me even three months ago, I’d have explained that resting is like gasping for air after a sprint, taking the minute you have to get as much air into your lungs before you’re up and sprinting again. Recovery is the break you take during a marathon to stretch a cramped muscle, drink a sports drink/energy slurry, and use the bathroom before you carry on running.
I’m sure you can see the flaw in my understanding. Those are breaks. Reprieves. Moments of peace in a storm. Real rest and recovery are something else entirely. To be entirely fair to myself, it’s difficult to understand that you misunderstood something most people can’t explain and that most people take for granted. For instance, did you know that most old memories are typically viewed in third person, almost like a story you’ve told yourself (or that someone else has told you)? You don’t really see most old memories through your own eyes, you see yourself participating in them.
Until very recently, I thought that it was normal for all memories to be first person. Memories weren’t stories so much as resubmerging myself in a moment long past. In most people, the only first-person memories are the recent ones and the traumatic ones. For me, my trauma changed the way my brain stored information so thoroughly only a handful, if that, of my memories were in third-person. I don’t think those count as real memories though since I know the photographs of those moments and I’m pretty sure I just built a story around those moments that I’ve labeled a memory. They’re all from before I was 2 and I don’t think my memory is that good.
You can see how I might have a bit of a warped understanding of some things, yeah? It’s hard to really grasp how different my understanding of the world is from yours when all we can do is use metaphors to approximate our own experiences and ideas in the hopes of evoking someone else’s.
After a month and a half of rest, three weeks of which got eaten up as coping time since I talked to my parents one week before I had two solid weeks of all-day meetings, I think I’ve kind of gotten it figured out. Enough so, anyway, that I can do it every day. I’ve literally got it built into my daily schedule every day but Monday (I kinda go all day Monday, without stop, from 6am until 10pm). While that might seem a bit absurd, to schedule rest and recovery, it’s kind of who I am? I like order and having a time marked out and a box to check for every day makes it a bit easier to take the time to actually rest and recover.
I’m still pretty burnt out. Nothing is going to fix that in any short amount of time, but the rest I’ve taken has provided me with enough energy and strength to go back to writing every day, to working on my projects, and to figure out how to choose me right now. I’ve never been good at advocating for myself, but nobody else expects as much from me as I do. Any and all of my D&D players are happy to play D&D modules instead of custom campaigns. My friends understand if I don’t go for a hike with them because I need to do laundry and make D&D battle maps for the one remaining custom campaign I’m running. And if they don’t… Well, their loss.
I’m choosing myself again and I’m comfortable with the knowledge that this won’t be easy. I may stop talking to some people I’m close to if they won’t respect my needs and boundaries. I may need to get a new job if nothing changes and the same problems repeat without end. I may have to cut back on all of the D&D I’m doing so I have energy for other projects and the players who lose out might not like it. I may have to skip everything I’d planned for an evening because I really need to rest more and I’ll have to learn how to be more adaptable. There are no hard-and-fast rules here, other than I need to be aware of how I’m doing at any given moment so I can make the calls I need.
This may not seem difficult, but I almost chickened out of telling my at-work D&D group that I needed us to switch to running modules because creating the entire campaign might take the same number of hours as preparing a module, but running a module takes a lot less energy. And that’s the easiest of all the things I might need to do. They only get harder from here.
Wish me luck.