Tag: mental health

Ears Are Burning

Ears Are Burning is now on
https://briecs.itch.io/ears-are-burning

a dark blue box with the text "Ears Are Burning by Brie Beau Sheldon, a game of superstition & the public eye"

Ears Are Burning is a single-player game using timed observation and body control (low-impact meditation) to explore our connection to the constant flow of input from others, and our own output in desperation to match it, and the way it impacts us physically. It’s a simple experience, but everyone knows that when it comes to discourse, it’s always possible to lose the game.

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Ears Are Burning is super simple but it is expressing an experience I’m struggling with as I work through running a Kickstarter. It’s not easy – in fact, it’s super challenging – to let your ears cool down. I hope I can find more time to do it soon. Won’t you join me?

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Identity Mechanics in Turn

I just wanted to do a brief post about Turn and identity, on this, our turning point to the second half of the Kickstarter. You can check out Turn’s Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/briecs/turn-a-tabletop-roleplaying-game. Content warning for discussion of mental health, depression, and mentions of binge drinking/alcoholism and suicidal ideation.

I want to talk about what it means to be two (or more) things in one person. I come at this from a couple of different axes, and some people have more. Mine are really tied to people’s perception for some of these, but others are truly just inherently who I am.

Let me try to separate them a little.

As far as perception, to many people, I’m a cis woman. In reality, I’m not. So I live with perceived-me as cis woman, and actual-me as not. As well, I’m not perceived as disabled, but in reality, I am. So I live as perceived-me and able, and actual-me as disabled. I also appear straight – I’m even in a perceived-straight relationship. But I’m not! I’m queer as hell. So, perceived-me and actual-me again at odds.

It goes deeper, I say, in a Morpheus voice.

Morpheus from the Matrix
I am actually both nonbinary and masculine. Simultaneously, most of the time, though in different amounts. This is big, and important. One of the biggest ones, though, is that I have bipolar disorder. Even when I am at the height of mania, my depression looms and can tug at me in moments when I’m sensitive, and vice versa. My mania (including hypomania) and depression, they’re a part of me, even when I’m incredibly well-medicated.

Around 2012, I entered into a mixed episode. (A slow slide.) This is when you’re kind of manic and depressed all at once! It is, shall we say, a bad time. It lasted years. Many of my readers knew me during this time period, through what I call The Dark Years, because I lost a lot of memories due to blackouts both from mania and from alcohol abuse. Not great. 
However, I started working on Turn in 2013. This isn’t a coincidence. I don’t talk about this part of Turn very much because it’s still incredibly hard for me. I’ve been asked in a few interviews, and only went into it in detail relating to this specific subject on one, about why shapeshifters are great to tell stories about. There are tons of reasons – they’re fun, they can be used as a metaphor, they’re powerful and interesting. But shapeshifters – multiple identities in one body? I understand that, I live that.
Vin Diesel saying "I live for this shit"
From 2012 until a ways into 2015, I was what some people consider “crazy.” I was fighting with my mental illness, making tons of bad choices, but also continuing to grow my business, attending university, and so on. I was struggling between the intense, high, selfish, egotistical mania and the soul-sucking, exhausting, lonely, self-loathing depression. During all of this, I got to see that neither side – in me personally – existed without the other, that they fed into each other, interacted with each other, and that there were things I could do where both would work together, or where I could find a harmony. That eventual harmony did actually lead me to getting help, going on lithium, quitting binge drinking, and ending harmful relationships.
And there, you can see a burning light of hope. 
I have always identified with shapeshifters, having a hidden identity of some kind with everyone most of my life. They are part of Turn, and are good to make stories about, because of what I said – they’re interesting, fun, powerful, and great metaphors for people to place upon themselves. But I would be lying if I didn’t say that the actual design of Turn wasn’t heavily influenced by my own conflicting identity.
I’ve had reason to think about it a lot over the Kickstarter, and while I personally struggle to find mental health support on Medicaid. The fear of falling back into those dark days is real, let me tell you. But, in thinking, I wanted to share that the design of shapeshifters in Turn, to have these different parts of their identity that they struggle between, that they must find balance within? That’s bred out of true hope.
A bird with the text "I've been through hell and come out singing."
Many people have different sides to them, and it’s hard to deal with it sometimes. When I think of when I was first conceiving the Struggles in Turn, the mechanics for how you resolve conflicts between your beast and human identities and their wants and needs when you take action, I thought of how every day when I was struggling with my mental health, I had to choose my consequences. Sometimes it meant I’d sacrifice face, sometimes I’d deal with physical fallout, and sometimes I’d have other worse consequences for whatever ridiculous shit I got up to that day. I couldn’t always predict them and sometimes I’d just end up with the whole mess (hello, 6-). 
And it was also always about the drawbacks that my one part of me had pulling against the other. When I was more manic and just trying to slam down a conversation at a convention, my depressive side would push for me to say things that were self-deprecating. When I was a miserable mess and struggling from the edge of suicide, the mania would suggest self-destructive methods. It was kind of rough, honestly. 
When I put these into Turn, though, I didn’t want all that bad shit coming with it. For me, I wanted shapeshifters to be something beautiful! I was okay with them having hard stuff they dealt with, but it wasn’t about either side of them being dark, or self-destructive, or harmful. They’re just both parts of the being with needs and wants that the shifters have to struggle to satisfy or meet, even if it’s hard, and the biggest aspect is that they’re just trying to show up the way everyone wants them to show up. That’s why exposure is a mechanic, because the real hard part of all of this is the world, not their identity. Shifters are good!
Sam Winchester hugging someone saying "Too precious for this world."
I want to talk more about shapeshifters being beautiful and good so I will soon, but this is getting a little long. 
Basically, shapeshifters are whatever you want them to be in what they stand for or are a metaphor for. You can play them in a bunch of different ways! But the reason why their mechanics work the way they do is because I discovered through struggles with my bipolar disorder that these complex multi-faceted identities aren’t actually binary structures! Even my mania has some sadness, even my depression has some egotism. It’s not exactly a fun way to figure out how to design a game, but it’s a real one.
So the shapeshifters in Turn are complex. They are not all beast when they’re a beast, and they’re not all human when they’re a human. They’re a little bit of each, regardless of their form, in different amounts. And I thought about this intensely during throes of mania and depths of depression! So I can tell you with all honesty that there are no perfect metaphors. But I’ll tell you this: shapeshifters don’t have a special tweenie form like many shapeshifter versions do because I will never have a happy medium, and I had to find a way into the light without one. I think the story is stronger that way, and it’s a story I know how to tell.
If you liked reading about Turn and want to support it, the Kickstarter runs until November 30, so please consider backing it. If this resonated with you, please feel free to share your experiences with having a multi-faceted identity – you can even use the #turnrpg and #myturnID hashtags if you’d like. I know I’m not alone in being a person with many sides, and I appreciate the power of sharing our stories. 
Until next time:
An oppossum with the words "Do no harm, take no shit, beg no man pardon."

P.S. – If you’re a Patreon backer, let me know if you think I should charge for this post!

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What is the future?

Turn is currently doing wonderfully, just short of funding and 21 days to go! We just announced international shipping, and I’m very excited for what is yet to come in stretch goals and work I do after the game is live!

But I need to talk about the future, because mine is uncertain.

Brie in a leather jacket, looking out the window.

As many people know, in November of 2018 I had a car accident. I fell asleep while driving my car in a parking garage and hit my head and wrenched my shoulder. When I went to the hospital, they said I had a mild concussion and shoulder sprain, and advised me to follow up with a doctor if I had any significant symptoms.

I was in grad school, so most of the symptoms of bad concussion issues were able to be dismissed as burnout, for me. I didn’t mean to do it, but I was cramming hard and desperate to get through school, while struggling with one challenging job and another job that really challenged my now-addled brain. By the time I was nearing finals in the next semester, I had been struggling with concussion symptoms – genuine brain injury symptoms – for months.

I found tons of typos in work I was reviewing – my own work, where typos were normally rare at worst. I was getting carsick while driving, and had gotten dizzy after seeing Black Panther, slipped and bumped my head in two places on my car door. The dizziness, nausea, and unfocused confusion were too much, so I went to the concussion clinic. They confirmed my fears, that it was worse than expected, and also that my delaying it had made recovery longer – and possibly less likely.

I did physical therapy from May to September, before I ran out of car insurance funds. I still do the exercises at home. I thought I was improving, and I have at least somewhat. But…

When preparing the Kickstarter for Turn, I let John take a look at the draft, and he pointed out many errors. The kind of thing that shouldn’t really be an issue for a functioning brain that’s working well, you know, like swapped words, nonsense sentence structure, and so on. Some of it seemed like gibberish. I didn’t even notice! He had to review it for me.

Reflecting on it, I reviewed a variety of my work. I read my recent submission to Return to the Stars, and how many confusing edits there had been, because I didn’t even recall the disorganized things I had written.  I read my work on thatlittleitch, which is unedited, and how my sentence structure is even more confusing and inelegant than before the accident. Many things I have written, I have forgotten, or don’t recall clearly, and if they aren’t edited, they’re often confusing, especially if they are longer.

Brie covering their face with their hands, in a maroon shirt.

I had an appointment coming up with my concussion clinic doctor, who expressed that like we had known, my delayed treatment combined with comorbidity of a variety of my illnesses (fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, PTSD, bipolar) will make recovery harder. But, if I’m still having issues with confusion and language, it could be a greater concern. So, I was assigned speech therapy (alongside physical therapy for my shoulder, which hasn’t healed). I can’t have that appointment until December, because they don’t have space for me.

My doctor basically explained that this could continue to be a grueling process. They don’t know if I will ever be back to what I was before. They want to ensure I can continue working, but if speech therapy isn’t effective, we will run out of options pretty quickly. And even if it works, it’s a long process, with unreliable results.

What does this mean?

Turn may be my last large project. I can still fulfill the work, absolutely, but we baked in extra time for what is to be done. I have a freelance project to fulfill for Orun, which I’m going to be advising them may involve a little more editing than planned (but I hope not). But going forward, I may max out at 1000 words for a given project, or just take a lot more time, and I can only ask editors to do so much work.

Pretty much everything I’ve been working on is going to be more limited, require more oversight. It’s exhausting to imagine, and I feel broken. This is part of why Turn has felt so desperate to me – what if I never make something amazing again? What if this it? And while I do my best to ensure I have good editing, the process will be harder. I don’t know if I can put myself through a super hard process every time I want to make something. And I don’t know if I’ll ever get better.

So, this is basically just a post to explain the situation. It’s me trying to find a way to say “hey, my brain is damaged, and I may never be the same again, so I hope you don’t desert me, and I hope you understand that I am doing the best I can.”

I’m trying. But, after this Kickstarter, things may be different. Er, well, they will be different – I just don’t know how. I hope you’ll stick with me.

Love to you all <3

A pigeon hopping across pavement.

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Five or So Questions on Thousand Year Old Vampire

Hello all, today I have an interview with Tim Hutchings on Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV), a single-player game coming up on Kickstarter! (Check out the Facebook event here!) The game sounds pretty interesting, exploring the life of a vampire in intimate and deep ways. You can see a playtest version here. Check out what Tim had to say!

Content Warning for discussion of memory loss, especially near the end of the interview.

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A vintage-appearing image of a vampire attacking a man

Tell me a little about Thousand Year Old Vampire. What excites you about it?

Well, first let me say that I don’t often get excited about things I make. I get nervous, nauseous, pent up. I used to joke about the “sweat test”; if I wasn’t sweating when I showed something to someone I wasn’t sufficiently invested in the project or the showing. This came out of the time when I was showing art in galleries, and it has something to do with the way I made and thought about art at the time. It still applies to a lot of games I make, but in a different way–the games I make are personal, or visceral, or difficult in ways that my art never was. Now I sweat because I’m making a machine that people play with, and if the manual for that machine is unclear people will break it or maybe even get hurt. There’s not a lot of room for excitement in any of this.

But I’m excited about Thousand Year Old Vampire in a way that leaves me quietly alarmed at myself.  I’ve worked on this game differently than other games, with the biggest difference being that a reaching back to my old studio process. When I made a thing in the studio it was a quick, fraught process during which I could ingest or enjoy or experience the thing I was making it as it was made; the actual “artwork” was a shell left behind after this work was done. Game making is different in that you need people or systems to test things; there’s a space of time between the making and the experiencing of it. Because TYOV is a solo game it’s making was a self-contained process, I wrote and played and wrote and played in a closed system. It was fast and amazing and it’s how I want to be.

And it produced a game I am excited for and proud of. I’ve played this game so many times, and the prompts consistently produce a different experience with every go. And at least once during each game something happens that makes my innards churn, something unexpected and awful and it’s like I’m not controlling a character but being betrayed by one. I’m not a “let me tell you about my character” kind of person, but TYOV has gotten me excited enough to write game summaries on the Facebooks.

A journal with leather binding and an abstract pattern, and stickers in various languages on it.
This is the journal in the PDF, which is gorgeous.
What is the motivation for a single-player game like this? As someone who loves lonely games and making them, I must ask: why is this game good alone?
I love your phrasing of “lonely games”! It’s perfect. For me, there were a couple of reasons to make a solo game. Maybe more than a couple.

Solo games are a weird design space. I have a print out of A Real Game by Aura Belle that I’ve been sitting on for a year, I’m so excited about it I can’t bear to play it. Every game I make is about communication and bodies in space; a framework for people pushing at each other to find play. Other players change the game space for each other with a constant barrage of gentle tugs which keep each other engaged and off-center—this is awesome and good but what if we didn’t do that?

A non-social game is tricksy and strange. How can you operate in the “story game” space and not have it be a choose your own adventure book? The game prompts in Thousand Year Old Vampire make you look inward for responses, you are building something between you and the machine of the game without any other conscious actors in the room. There’s no “yes and” here, oh mortal. And without other people in the room watching I can do things that I might not do otherwise when I ask questions and give horrific answers.

And the solo play echoes the subject of the game itself. You play a vampire who sees everything they love turn to dust. Your character is alone, you are alone, the two states echo each other. One play option is to keep a diary as you play. Journaling is a usually a thing you do alone. One of my objectives as a designer is to have the system and the setting inextricably bound together, so solo play works.

That said, I don’t see any reason that a person can’t play it with others. Why not share a pool of Characters and let the prompt reactions affect the world that the players occupy? The system is simple enough that players can do this if they want, and I’m sure some will—there’s been a remarkable amount of pushback over the idea of a solo game being a thing at all.

And practically speaking: I’m a lonely guy. Making a game I can play and iterate on my own is helpful. It echoes the prevalence of solo rules in wargame design—I’m the kind of person that can’t get people together to play things, so I’ll make the sort of things I can enjoy on my own.

Finally: I had a conversation with Jackson Tegu, who has a solo experience called I Was Once Like You, that helped me think about the solo play-ness of TYOV. In the friendly discussion-like thing we were doing I came up with “Petit Guignol” as a term that I thought fit TYOV. It literally means “tiny puppet” in French and has a direct connection to the “Grand Guignol” which was a style of bloody, horrifying, naturalist theater developed in the 1890s. As I play TYOV I sometimes play with scale in my mind, imagining the scenes happen in the space between my arms as I update the character sheet on a keyboard. It’s a play space I don’t think I can imagine with other people in the room, it’s tiny and close and personal. Anyways, there’s that.

A vintage style illustration person with an octopus arm for a head getting attacked by someone with a sword.
Tell me about the design process. The way you handle moving through the prompts is simple but clever, and you have these memories and experiences that are created. How did you develop these aspects of the game? 
My design process is a sham. I stare into space until my unconscious gets bored and gives me something that I can think about, and then maybe that becomes a game, or a joke, or an artwork. My games are not the product of rigorous engagement with discourse, they are random stuff that vaguely imitates a category of thing which I understand exists in the world. These are the “Sunday painter” equivalent of game design, if that Sunday painter just really liked wearing smocks and berets but never bothered to go to a museum.

I don’t design these games so much as find them laying around my brain-house. I pick them up and wipe the muck off, maybe paint them a different color to assuage a conscience that demands at least a semblance of effort, then I scribble my name on them and puff up with self-satisfaction.

But a serious aside: I don’t read a lot of games, and I do this on purpose. I’m more likely to solve a problem in a useful way if I’m not clouded up with other people’s solutions for similar issues. This is a good methodology unless you’re building bridges or stuff where people can die. This builds on my greatest strength, which is that I’m pretty dumb.

Occasionally these magical brain-gift games might need some rough corners polished up. With TYOV I had to figure out a way to progress through the prompt sequence so as to maximize replayability. (You, dear reader, haven’t played this game, so super quick summary: You roll some dice and slowly advance along a list of prompts which you answer about how your vampire continues its existence. If you land on the same prompt number more than once, there are second and third tier prompts you encounter. The game ends when you reach the end of the list.) By using a d6 subtracted from a d10, it created the possibility of skipping entries, of going backwards, and of landing on the same entry number more than once. This meant that rare and super rare results could easily be baked into the chart structure—you have the same chance of landing on any given number as you progress through the prompts, but there are diminished chances of landing on a number twice and getting the second-tier prompt. Landing on a number a third time usually happens once per game, and those rare third-tier prompts can be world-changing.

The tiered prompt system naturally evolved into a mini-story arc system. I can make the player introduce a self-contained Character or situation with a first-tier prompt, and in the second-tier prompt them interact with what they created in a new way. It’s perfectly fine if they never hit that second tier prompt, they won’t for most entries, but if they do it will naturally make a little story. It’s so satisfying and it’s all part of the same system, no additional rules are needed to support it.

One aspect of TYOV I’ve been thinking hard about is player safety. What are appropriate safety tools for solo play? What tools allow us to think terrible, soul souring thoughts but then put them behind us? I’m a fan of X-card-like thinking, and was around Portland while Jay Sylvano and Tayler Stokes were working on their own support signals systems. Stokes later developed the affirmative consent-based support flower, and is giving me guidance on my solo safety thinking.

One of my imperatives as a designer is getting rid of non-vital things. This is practical because additional complexity usually makes a game less fluid and harder to learn. If I can get by with three rules that’s great, but if I’m going to have eight then I might as well have a hundred. Not that there’s much wrong with games that have a hundred rules, I like those too. I’ve recently been converted to Combat Commander, of all things.

Something I threw out of TYOV are rules about tracking time. At one point I had a system in place for tracking the date. I mean, if the game is called Thousand Year Old Vampire then you want to know when a thousand years go by, right? But there was no benefit to tracking the actual year, it was easier to allow the player to just let the passage of time be loosely tracked in their answers to the prompts. Maybe an arc of prompts happens over a year in your head, maybe a whole generation goes by—the game works regardless. The only rule about time is “every once in a while strike out mortal Characters who have probably died of old age.”

Finally, I should acknowledge the importance of Burning Wheel and Freemarket to Thousand Year Old Vampire. Writing good Beliefs in Burning Wheel is a skill, and the idea of tying character goals mechanically to the game was mind-blowing. Freemarket has Belief-like-ish Memories, which are something that have game mechanical effects AND can be manipulated as part of play. Both of these mechanics had outsized influence on the way I thought about Memories in TYOV.

Memories in TYOV are everything that your vampire is. You have a limited number of Memories, and every Memory is made up of a limited number of Experiences. Every Prompt you encounter generates a new Experience which is tagged onto the end of a new Memory. Eventually you run out of space for Memories, so you older Memories to a Diary. You can and will lose our Diary, along with all the Memories in it, and it’s awful. But the Diary is just a stopgap anyways, as you are forced to forget things to make room for new Experiences.

Eventually you have an ancient, creaky vampire who doesn’t remember that he was once a Roman emperor, or that they used to live on a glacier, or that he fell in love two hundred years ago. But they at least know how to use a computer and are wrestling with the fact that the hook-up site they used to find victims was just shut down and how will they eat now? This design goal was crystallized when I read “The Vampire” by Ben Passmore in Now 3 put out by Fantagraphic Books. It’s a heartbreaking, sad story in which you see the vampire as a deprotagonized system of habits. It’s great.

A vintage illustration of a man in period clothing with a white curled wig, standing under an eclipse and a hillside with Egyptian-appearing monuments, while corpses lie on the ground.
What has the development of this game been like, from original inspiration to the speed of production?
This game flowed out quickly and mostly easily. My pal Jessie Rainbow I were playtesting and iterating the game over weeks instead of months. The game is built from a story games mindset and there aren’t any ridiculously novel mechanics that need to be explained; I hand the rules over to a playtester and they understand them immediately and the game works.

The game works and a year of refinement to get it five percent better isn’t worth it. It’s done, and like an artwork it might be slightly flawed but that’s part of the thing itself. I don’t necessarily want an extruded, sanitized perfect thing; instead I have, like an artwork, a piece that becomes a record of it’s own making. If I work on this game another year it won’t get better, it’ll just get different—2019 Tim will have different priorities than I do right now and all that’s going to happen is that TYOV will torque around to reflect that. I might as well let 2018 Tim have his moment and give 2019 Tim new things to worry over.

In regards to the themes of mortality and memory, as well as with aspects of queerness in some of the prompts, how do you relate to TYOV? How is it meaningful to you?

This is hard to talk about. I think I need to break this question down into three very separate categories: My understanding of evil, personas shifting over time, and a vampire-shaped momento mori.
The game is twined up in my own ideas of person-scaled evil which is based on my experience of social predators, thoughtlessly selfish idiots, and rich people exerting power over others. This evil is written into the “Why did you do that awful thing you did?” type prompts, which assign an evil deed which must be justified. There’s an important subtext in the game which I never say out loud: As the vampire is writing in their diary are they telling the truth? But the evil is about the wickedness that people do to each other, and this is my chance to pick out a version of it that I seldom see represented.

Completely unrelated to the themes around evil are the ideas of shifting identities. Over the centuries the vampire will be reinventing themselves so they can fit in with the societies shifting around them. As a cishet white guy I’m outside of the dialogues that happen around LGBTQA+ folks, but I see folks change over time and it’s exciting. A related prompt might draw attention to ingrained societal mores that can now be abandoned because the culture of your mortal years is centuries dead. I can gently make a space for this even if I don’t have that experience, with the understanding that my understanding isn’t necessarily another’s understanding of the space that needs to be made. Like I said before, this becomes a portrait of 2018 Tim thinking through difficult issues using creative work—this isn’t Truth with a capital T.

The shifting personas of the vampire are probably the most personally resonant aspect of the game for me. I have some pretty distinct phases in my life where I was having to be markedly different people. In NYC I used to exhibit art with a gallery owned by the son of billionaires. I’d get taken to a dinner that might cost more than I made in a week then go back to my home which had holes in the floor which I could see my neighbors through. I remember hanging drywall in the morning and meeting a Rockefeller descendant later that night; he got noticeably upset that I had a scratch on the back of my hand then shut me out when I said it happened “at work.” I learned that I had to keep these worlds very, very separate. And it went both ways, I found myself being reminded of the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas telling a story about how no one in his Brooklyn neighborhood believed him when he told them he was teaching at NYU.

Now I’m a guy with a kid living in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. I’m not the same person that I was five years ago in New York. I can’t be the same person, that guy couldn’t live this life.

Which leads me to my final bit: I did things that sound wonderful and which I can’t remember, I apparently did things that are terrible which I am glad I forgot. These moments are lost until someone else remembers them for me or I happen upon some chance evidence. My memory is going, and it’s awful—there’s a much more exciting version of me which is being forgotten. I can see my brain failing in other ways; sometimes I leave out a word when I’m writing now. I bet I did it within the text of this interview.

This loss of skill, of memory, of personality are reflected in the way the game has you lose or edit memories. Eventually I’ll die and be forgotten in turn, but at least I’ll have this self-reflection on mortality outlive me for a bit.

A vintage style illustration of a man tied down onto a wooden structure of some kind, bound.
—

Thanks so much, Tim, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Thousand Year Old Vampire on Kickstarter when it’s live! In the meantime, you can RSVP on the Facebook event here.

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A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes, or, What to Do When You’re Living the Dream…But?

Today, I am 30 years old, I work in my dream job teaching leadership using games, and I make $0.85/hour.*

Leading with Class, in case you don’t know (most people don’t!), is my YouTube show where I teach about leadership using roleplaying games. It’s the dream job I made real for myself through a lot of hard work and the support of my loving, and incredibly talented, partner John. It also still doesn’t feel much like a dream come true, because it comes with some overwhelming “but”‘s.

I get to teach leadership…but it’s not in a respected role.
I get to teach using games…but it’s not seen as “fun.”
I get to work from home…but I can’t pay my bills.
I get to work with my partner…but he doesn’t get paid any better than I do.
I get to share my vision with the world…but almost no one watches my channel.

In 2014, I made the decision to continue my pursuit of an education and get my degree in organizational leadership. From there, I continued on to graduate school and got a degree in leadership – and over that two year period, experienced continued health and career setbacks that left me unemployed at graduation. My job became Thoughty – and Thoughty is still my actual primary income. All $300-ish a month, maybe. I have ten years of career experience that the lessons learned can apply to my work in leadership, but no one wants someone who was mostly an admin in a position of leadership, and my health disallows a full time job.

So, whatever, fine, I said. I’ll make my job. With John’s encouragement (and from my other partner, Dillon), I started working on scripts for Leading with Class. Even now, it feels endlessly selfish, and working on Leading with Class instead of trying to dig through thousands of jobs to find at least one that pays $15/hr. and only requires 25 hours a week felt irresponsible. But I did it while still doing freelance work (as I am now) and Thoughty, and it was so wonderful to make something that meant so much to me!

What was less wonderful was the lack of feedback and viewership. I am incredibly grateful for the Leading with Class patrons on Patreon – honestly, it means the world to me that anyone would support this work. But it’s still extremely quiet. On all of our videos combined – all of them – we have fewer than 350 views. I’ve shared on LinkedIn, Facebook, G+, Twitter, Mastadon, and Instagram, and of course, they’re on YouTube. I’ve done streams on Twitch to garner interest, answering questions and writing the script live to engage viewers.

We have three comments on all of our YouTube videos combined.

Now, we’re lucky enough to have followers and subscribers on our various media accounts! There’s just really low engagement. I know we’re kind of a niche interest, but I’ve only ever seen (personally) fewer than 5 total shares of Leading with Class content outside of my own personal shares, John’s shares, and the dedicated shares of some of my close friends on G+. Most shares aren’t accompanied by any positive recommendation, either.

And you know, yes, this does sound like whining. But as a creator, as a person who struggles with impostor syndrome and serious anxiety and depression, and as a person, I think it’s essential that my viewers and readers know me as a real person, and that they know the truth. The truth is, creating the thing that means the world to me, living the “dream” like I am, is heavily dented by struggling to make it through financially every day and hearing basically silence when it comes to my work.

I am used to silence when it comes to my work. People don’t link and share my site(s) or my work very often, and this has been notoriously challenging for me. I struggle with professional envy, seeing others get praised while I can barely get a retweet at times. But I thought, with Leading with Class it will be different! Even if it makes no money, even if it gets no press, I’ll be making something meaningful. I’ll be using my degree to do what I wanted the most!

But if a YouTuber makes an amazing video and no one watches it, does it functionally exist at all?

When one of my key purposes with Leading with Class is to educate, and there are no new viewers, who is really learning? If one of the necessary aspects of so-called “edutainment” is that it is spread broadly and enjoyed by an audience, have I created anything really at all? Did I get hit on the head by a backdrop while recovering from a brain injury and struggle to put words together to make episodes and even my best friends, people I respect and admire, haven’t watched a single episode?

This is the episode where we stopped using the backdrop because it fell on my head. Such a headache!

And I suppose it does often just burn me that John puts in so much work to make these episodes look beautiful, to make me look and sound competent, even through brain injury problems, and yet as of this writing, only 22 people saw our latest video? The lovely work he did? That makes me so sad! I feel I’m wasting his time. This thing that is meaningful to both of us feels injured by the quiet, by the feeling that we are working so hard, this is so good, it means so much, it should go far and silence.

I do try to bolster with every like our videos and posts get, and absolutely I could be posting more often. But the hype machine only does so much when no one else turns the gears.

And I don’t want people to think I hate making the videos or I don’t think they matter. I do think they matter, and I love them, and love creating them! I had to take a hiatus in July because my recovery from my brain injury (sustained last November) was taking a long time and writing and filming while trying to also do freelance work and get through recovery was just not working. I struggled so much, and I cried so hard about taking a hiatus! It would doom the show, I knew it, and what if we could never start back to it?

But we did, even though I’m still in recovery. Even though the cats insist on interrupting our shoots.

And I’m spurred, truly, to keep working on the project. I want to take it further – I mapped out a second series, and a mini-episode series. I’m even getting the chance to do my first workshop at Big Bad Con – one huge part of Leading with Class that hasn’t progressed far yet, but would mean the world to me to make bigger and broader. This is my dream.

I am a game designer, and love designing games – I want to keep doing that. And Thoughty is still important to me! But Leading with Class is a dream that I feel could make a difference! If it could just… grow. I know I need to work harder, I always do, but I have always worked best with the enthusiasm of others encouraging my progress, and John cannot carry all of that weight. He isn’t my audience.

I suppose, what I’m trying to say is, it is very hard to do the thing you love and feel unfulfilled by it. The perils of relying on others! But we are, as they say, a community, so I think a lot of people could understand what I’m feeling here, so I felt like I needed to finally speak these words clearly, so you don’t feel alone and so you don’t feel like your work is meaningless. Leading with Class isn’t meaningless, and your work that feels like it’s floundering has meaning, too.

So what the heck am I gonna do about this?

First, I’m going to keep writing scripts, filming, hopefully streaming, and doing workshops. I’m going to finish the first season of the show with the full twelve episodes, no matter what.

Second, I’m going to try to do better about promoting the show and increase my social media presence, as hard as that can be.

Third, I’m going to continue to be honest in how I approach this work and my purposes with Leading with Class. I’m never going to bullshit you about the work I’m doing, and I will continue to be transparent.

And fourth, finally, I’m going to be grateful for those of you who are here, who do support me and Leading with Class, and try to keep that in mind when the gremlins come to fight in my mind. I can’t let them win. I’m the winner here!

Thank you for reading, for watching, and for every moment of your being. The world is a better place because of you, even when you think it’s not. And hey. Come join me — in Leading with Class. <3

*For those curious about the time John and I spend on a given episode, here’s a breakdown.

Brie’s time investment per episode
~10 hours research
~5 hours script writing
~1 hours rehearsal
~3 hours filming
= ~19 hours

John’s time investment per episode
~1 hour research support
~1 hour script review
~1 hour rehearsal
~3 hour filming
~5 hour editing
~3 hour graphics and animation
= ~14

Total investment = ~33 hours per episode.

The Patreon currently sits at $28/episode.

We aren’t stopping, though. 🙂

—

Check out Leading with Class on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. For questions about the show, email leadingwithclass@gmail.com.

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Turn, Bigness, Mental Health, and “Different”

First off, I’m going to make a damn #TurnRPG hashtag, then we’re gonna talk about this precious gift of a game I have been working on since December 2013. And have I got some WORDS for you this evening, my friends, about Turn, and about large design projects, mental health, & “different.”

a yellow bird on a branch with its beak open with a bunch of As in the background like yelling

Turn is a slice-of-life supernatural roleplaying game about shapeshifters in small, rural towns who must find balance in their shifter identity and community with their fellows. I’m planning to Kickstart it at the end of October. tinyurl.com/turn-rpg-beta-2018

I’ve been really digging into it and I’m in the expand and explain part – I think the mechanics are solid, but trying to ensure people understand the mechanics is hard. I’ve been struggling through recovering from a brain injury, & until recently, sometimes my work was nonsense.

So a lot of this is revisiting old text, making sure it makes sense, revising it, and adding as much as I can to make it approachable to people who aren’t me. John helps with this – he’s my dev editor – but he can only do so much when I’m struggling personally with the work.

Turn is the biggest thing I’ve made and a large part of me *needs* it to succeed, to be appreciated. So I want everything to be perfect! Like, everything has to be exactly how it’s supposed to be written in my head. And that’s a pain in the ass, and doesn’t guarantee perfection.

A picture of Diana as a child in Wonder Woman with a tumblr post posted over it that says "me, logically: it's never gonna happen. the tiny hopeful goblin in my brain: but what if it did"

So like today I’ve been asking for help figuring out a new title for the facilitator role because facilitator sounds boring and what I was using, Storyteller, is too associated with White Wolf (not why I was using it, but no one cares) and also doesn’t describe the role well.

Now I’m trying out Meddler, because I tried a whole bunch in text and it’s the only one I like next to Busybody but is slightly more teasing than mean like Busybody tends to be. And I listened to a bunch of people’s input, too, and felt kind of “eh yeah?” and like COME ON.

See, one thing that I need to really tell you here is that the longer your project, the more likely you are to hit a wall of mental health issues, new or old. They will fuck you UP. I love this game. I love it SO much. And I find myself poking at it all like “I should trash it.”

I’m working on this big, meaningful project and I’m getting engagement with input from people and all my big stupid brain can say is “Well I dunno, people haven’t said it’s visionary or anything, and these other people aren’t interested, so maybe it’s just awful.” This project!

Keegan Key saying "I mean, I spent the majority of it in a deep fog, in a profound depression."

And part of it is because it’s a big project, a lot of time and energy with (to date) little to no returns. Most of my projects seem futile because I don’t exactly swim in recognition, reviews, or funds as a result of them. But I still do them, and I’m still doing this. I’m especially still doing this.

If I was working on something smaller I could be done and stop torturing myself with the maybes and the whys. But it’s big. It matters. And mental illness just wants to dig in its claws and remind me that I’m not doing good enough. But I also know it’s because Turn is different.

Jaylah from Star Trek Beyond yelling in preparation of a fight.

I said it, I mean it. When I play Turn, it always feels different than other games. When I’ve been designing it, it feels different than other games. I haven’t played all games, and I’m not fucking gonna, but I do know that compared to the games I have played, Turn is different.

Maybe it’s because of the angle? Or because it’s quiet drama? Maybe it’s because I took away failure, and focused on consequences? Maybe it’s because this game isn’t designed to play like an adventure, but instead like everyday life that gets hard and troublesome but also loving?

Mad Max pointing towards one of the bikers in recognition.

And like, the biggest thing I struggle with while designing this game is that I want to maintain that “different.” Some people have looked at the mechanics without playing the game and said it was just copied from a bunch of places, but it’s not. It’s different. So it’s rough!

How do I keep my snowflake of a game from melting or getting mushed together and ruined? How do I present it to people in a way that highlights the difference? Worst of all, what if I AM wrong and my game’s actually just a boring facsimile of other games I don’t want it to be?

It’s a lot. I just want this game to be good and succeed and I want this weird experience I have when I play it to be replicable for people. I want to do a Kickstarter and not have it fail because I want people to be interested in it and excited for it. But I’m also very tired.

If it was smaller, maybe I’d care less. I didn’t have a mental illness, maybe I’d struggle less. If it felt samey, maybe it would matter less. But none of those things are so. It’s a mattering struggling caring mess. I’m mulling over every design decision like it’s life & death.

My final real point, I suppose, is that all of these things: bigness, mental health, difference, they are important to the game and the design process I’m experiencing, and I have to overcome the challenges. I love Turn so much, and I can’t let it fade away, I can’t risk that.

So if I kind of sound like a pain in the ass a lot right now, & for the foreseeable future, I want you to know that it’s only because I’m trying my best. I want to do my best. I want the game that I put out to be one you can pick up & have an amazing experience with. I’m trying.

Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta on Brooklyn 99, in workout clothes. Someone asks " Are you crying?" and he responds "No. That's eyeball sweat."

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Loving Your Work

Earlier today I tweeted about a tweet by John Harper on the subject of loving your work and how it impacts others. For ease of access, I’m going to include the thread here, and then write the rest of the post. This is… a long post.

John’s post: 

Hey, creative friends. No matter what you feel inside, go ahead and tell everyone that you love your work and you’re excited to share it. Lie if you have to. Your enthusiasm will shine though and others will pick it up. Don’t do the bs self-effacing shit. It’s kind of awful.

My responses:

I don’t think that it’s best to lie about how you feel about your work. My suggestion, to meet some of this ask, is “I’m working on something that I want to love and be proud of, but I’m struggling with that. Can you help me find good things in it?”

I’m not great at this yet!

As someone with mental health disorders, it’s really freaking hard to not speak negatively of my own work, especially when my work rarely succeeds or gets recognition and ESPECIALLY when I try to speak well of it and instead it gets trashed or I lose followers because of that. 

It is far more encouraged for men, typically cis men, to praise their own work. The rest of us can get called egotistical, or have people say we’re over promoting/praising work more than it deserves.

I want to speak well of my work but I struggle with it constantly. 

I get what John is saying here and I appreciate the intent, but I also know that lying about your feelings can hurt you so you should work on how you express them more than how to hide them, & that being positive about your work doesn’t always bring good returns and that hurts. 

John’s method can work for many people, probably. But for me, that would be painful & harmful to me,  with my past luck as example, & would not be successful as an exercise. 

Just saying: nothing bad about John’s words for many people, but it’s okay if it’s not right for you.💜

—

So, let me get the hard parts of this out of the way:

  • I’m not mad at John. I think he’s great and he’s been kind and honest with me in the few bits of time we’ve had together talking. We just don’t always agree, which he has always seemed to be cool about. I’m not arguing with him over this because I don’t see a point, it’s not like he’s bad or something.
  • I don’t personally think lying about your feelings is healthy. Some people can fake it to make it, and that’s great! But not all of us can, so I suggest if you do John’s method (which is totally fine!), be careful and respect your own needs. Performing self-love publicly sometimes needs to take a backseat to living and functioning, and I know that’s not a popular thing to say. It’s still true.
  • I know not all men benefit from the things I’m talking about here. I have many men I care a lot about who have struggled intensely with receiving recognition with their work, who struggle for people to value their work, and who have received negative responses to their promotion of their work. I know and love them, and I am not trying to belittle their experiences. Please understand that.

There we go. On to the meat of this post!

Description: Debbie Reynolds saying “Chins up! Boobs out!”
It’s okay to not love your work. 

It’s okay, even though it sucks. It’s hard to look at your hard drive at your projects, or down at your drawing tablet, or whatever your work happens to be, and feel that sinking disappointment in yourself. It can be related to success, or completely unrelated. It can be in spite of the love of your fans and friends, or it might be related to trying to meet their standards. It’s okay.

I’m going to say something that you’ve probably heard before, and I’m sorry to be repetitive. But let me try.

Your work is not what gives you value. There is no amount of work you can do that will make you valuable. You don’t deserve things based on what you’ve made, and it’s not about deserving in any case. You are valuable because you are. You are part of all of this world and your work may never be recognized but you mean something, you matter, and you are bigger in the scheme of things than your work ever could be.

Van Gogh could not have made Starry Night if he did not exist in the first place. You must be for any of your work to be, and you make your legacy, not the approval of other people.

Description: Freddie Mercury saying “Fuck everybody else!”

That being said.

I get it. I do. I look at my work sometimes and I scream inside (or sometimes outside) about its inadequacies. It’s failure. I lament loudly on Twitter that no one wants to interview me. I whine that I haven’t sold much of my work, and that no one posts about my work on social media or reviews it. I hurt. I hurt so much. I pour hours into my work and I hurt, and my work is no good. Nope. I hate it.

I bet you think that too, sometimes. And that’s okay.

The idea that you have to love your work for others to love it is probably not entirely what John was referring to, but I bet some people took it that way. Loving your work is not the only way to succeed and to make others love your work. It’s not! But there are things you should do. You know I love questions, so I’m going to give you some questions to ask yourself to make hating your work useful. (click thru for more!)

—

Sorry, this is my favorite quote and is appropriate. Description: Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta saying “Eyes closed, head first, can’t lose.” 

This is an exercise to try to find out what you can do to solve your negative feelings about your work, or at least move past them. This is something I’ve actually done, and I found it helpful, so I’m not just bullshitting you. You’ll need at least 5 minutes per piece of work, potentially more like 10.

Go to look at a few pieces of your work that right now, you feel bad about. Yeah, it’ll suck. Just go. Take something to record your thoughts. Ready? Ask these questions about each piece of work, briefly. You can go back with details later.

  • How am I feeling while I look at this work? 
    • Do I feel disgust? 
    • Do I feel sad? 
    • Do I feel angry?
  • Do other people tell me they feel this way about them?
    • How do other people feel about them?
    • If you haven’t shown them to anyone, show them to someone after the exercise.
  • Why do these pieces make me feel this way? 
    • Is it because of their structure? 
      • How should they be structured? 
      • Can I change their structure? 
      • How? 
    • Do they look bad? 
      • How do I want them to look? 
      • Can I make them look that way? 
      • How?
    • Do they not function? 
      • Can I make them work? 
      • How? 
      • What tools do I need?
    • Do they relate to something negative in my life? 
      • Can I talk to someone about that? 
      • Can I change it to ease that connection? 
      • How?
    • Has someone said something bad about them? 
      • Were their complaints valid? 
      • Can I solve any valid issues the person presented? 
      • How?
    • Are they unfinished? 
      • Can I finish this? 
      • Do I need to? 
      • Can I set it aside officially and return sometime?
    • Are they not what I planned for them to be? 
      • What did I plan for them to be? 
      • Can I make changes to make them that? 
      • How?
    • Did they not give me the success I wanted?
      • What was the success I wanted? 
      • Do I need to rely on that success? 
      • Can I ask for help to find it?
    • Have I been too busy to work on them?
      • Do I want to make time to work on them? 
      • Can I make time to work on them? 
      • How?

Look back at your “how?” responses. Which of these is 1) something you want to do, 2) something you can do (by yourself or with the help of others), and 3) something you think will make any difference in the way you feel about those pieces of work? If you have multiple things for one piece of work, put them as a bundle together.

Description: Taraji P. Hensen taking a picture with a phone camera captioned “you’re doing amazing, sweetie.”

Once you’ve figured a few out, look at your calendar and your current to-do list. Set aside a half hour in three days and then another half hour in a week to look at one of the items you think you can address, focusing on one set of questions and responses at each of these scheduled times. So maybe you think, “this drawing sketch doesn’t function the way I want, it doesn’t convey the emotion I’m looking for, but if I take it into Illustrator maybe I can strip out this section and draw in a new one.” You work on that.

Even if you just think about it for a while and write some notes, that’s okay! Keep setting aside just brief 15-30 minute appointments to address these questions, and work forward on execute the “how?” If you reach a hiccup or feel frustrated, seek support. Choose one or two people – only one or two – whose opinions on this project would be valid and you would trust. Tell them, “I’m struggling with solving this problem. Can you talk with me about it and tell me your positive and constructive thoughts?” Work from there to see if you can complete what you said you could do.

If you find that a piece of work doesn’t answer yes on any of those “something you want,” etc. questions, set it aside. Unless it is paid work, step away.

With other people’s projects, remember you’re satisfying them, not you. Contact the person you’re working with, and explain some of what you’re seeing, ask if they feel the same way. If they do, ask what options there are to address it (“someone said the draft of this NPC sounds like nonsense, can we look at it together and consider rewrites?”). If they don’t, just finish the project to what they ask. It might be hard or frustrating, but sometimes, we do paid work for no satisfaction. But, don’t hate that work – it’s over when it’s over. Archive the files, put it away, whatever you need to do: put it out of your mind. You’re done.

Description: Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple saying “Okay, I’m done.”

Here’s the thing: you might not love the work after you’ve worked on this. Make an effort to execute your “how?” and ask for help when you need it. After that, you might feel better. But, you might find out it’s not what you wanted. You can return to the questions, or with your own projects, you can set it aside until you want to jump back on that boat. Or you can toss it out. You are in control of it.

Now you know why you feel bad about it, and can try to do something about it. Just disliking your work and not knowing the reason can burn you up inside. And the best part is, sometimes, figuring out the why and whether you can fix it and how is the path to liking something, or for getting rid of something. Asking these questions and thinking about it practically puts more power in your hands to either do something or not do something, and neither decision is morally or ethically wrong.

—

You might hate that exercise more than you hate your work, so that’s something. But really, friends, think about why you make things. Creation is power. Creation is beauty. When we make something, we put something into the world that otherwise wouldn’t exist. It’s amazing! So why wouldn’t we work? Why wouldn’t we make?

And we are the biggest part of that. We control the work, as much as is realistic. We control how we market it, we control how we consume it, we control how we engage with our work. This is a choice we make.

I just wanted to use this. Description: Pink text reading “baby bok CHOICE”

Speak up when you feel dissatisfied with your work if you want, but try to do it with purpose. I felt upset with Turn because people kept on calling it Powered by the Apocalypse, so I thought it through, and I made the changes I needed to do to make myself stop being angry and disappointed with it. A few word changes and it bloomed. I felt frustrated with Shoot to Kill, but after I realized it was because I felt ethically strained about it, so I am making changes to fix it. It sucks to think about why you dislike your work, why you’re frustrated, but it makes it possible to change it and feel better about it!

People will see your enthusiasm over your work, or even your constructive discussions and growth, and want to enjoy your product with you. It will encourage them and it will benefit you. It is hard to do, but I think it is a challenge any of you are up for.

Hating your work won’t make work better, and yeah, it might not make it worse either. But couldn’t loving it make it great?

Description: Terry Crews saying “You know Terry loves love.”

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To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Death in RPGs – Let Me Live (revised 2/17/18)

Hi all!

I recorded this recently and had to make some updates, but now it’s a new video on a new URL: https://youtu.be/Uluvyh64_P8

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Lag

I was very hesitant to write this post but I think I should.
Things have been quite rough here, and John and I are financially strapped. I also started back to grad school and a second job for the semester. We ended up, after two significant financial hits (one of which isn’t resolved), starting a GoFundMe. 
It took all my willpower but we honestly had no choice. We have met our goal but we aren’t  sure how far it will carry us while  we deal with crises at work and home. We’re grateful for all of the support and care everyone has shown for us!
The purpose of this post, though, is to let you all know that I will be super busy over the next few months and my energy is also incredibly low, but I’m doing my damnedest to keep involved and post. It will just likely be rarer. I hate that, but I only have so much of me, and I’ve already been struggling with physical and mental health, so I have to be careful.
If there are things you think are super important that you want me to know about, feel free to tag me into them or email contactbriecs@gmail.com with anything like that. I also am happy to talk to people interested in doing guest posts (paid with the Patreon dollars). If there are smaller ways of contributing I can do, let me know.
If you’re promoting a project and would like to do a Quick Shot (three question) interview, go to the bottom of the Contact page to see how.
I hope that you will all stick around as I muddle through an incredibly challenging time of my life, and continue to support me. I love you all and I want to keep bringing good things into your lives – and I will do my best to keep doing so. I’m sharing the GoFundMe, my PayPal, and other related things below.
I know this is all very personal, but you all know I’m like that. Thank you all so much for being here!
Love,
Brie
https://www.gofundme.com/keep-the-sheldons-afloat
PayPal.me/briecs or PayPal.me/thoughty
cash.me/briecs
Patreon.com/briecs

Love, Joy, Empathy, and Why I I’m Not Giving Up

Last night I had the awesome experience of going to see Mikey Neumann’s Movies with Mikey Live, courtesy of my friend Anders as a 30th birthday gift. Mikey reviews films and is a video game writer, and he is one of my favorite people. It was amazing – I laughed, I cried, and it hit some nerves in important ways.
There are a few things Mikey said that made an impact more than all the rest, and some of them weren’t just a few words. I’m gonna go through the hard ones first then roll it back to good. This will relate to games, I swear.
—
Mikey at one point asked, “how many of you have been alone with your thoughts for two months?”
I raised my hand (I think there were two or three of us). When he said it, my mind rubberbanded – shot backwards and snapped forward. When my husband John was deployed in Iraq, I lived alone for over a year in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I shut myself inside, I tried to vent it out in journals or on places like LiveJournal that was mostly screaming into a void, but I couldn’t escape my own mind.
My mental health deteriorated rapidly, and my physical health didn’t do well – I’d lock myself in the house for days. I saw people, but it wasn’t broken until I sat on the floor of my mom’s house, completely delusional and fully in belief that the world was ending. I sobbed for hours and sat in terror of what would come and my biggest fear, the scariest thing about an apocalypse, was that I might live and be alone with myself forever.
That fear hasn’t faded. It’s still scary to me, and I worry that my being a trash fire to be around will make that a reality – my behavior and incompetence will lead to my partners and friends deserting me, because I know I would desert me.
So there was that.
Then Mikey talked about his experiences in the hospital when he had his frankly terrifying event last year. I have not been hospitalized long term, but the facts of physically deteriorating, not having diagnoses, and sudden onset symptoms are familiar – and the experience he described is one I desperately fear. Every time I have a twinge in my back, a cold, a night where waking up seems like the worst option. So it shook me up, just like listening to him talk about things close to this before. I cried a lot.
I’m struggling right now because every thing that goes wrong just wrecks me. I made one mistake at work the other day and just destroyed myself over it for hours. I’m still thinking about it. I struggled with design work and almost bailed out on a contract because I can’t look at my own work and see value. I told myself I wasn’t allowed a birthday because I don’t deserve it.
So that also happened.
Mikey also, earlier, had talked about altering perspectives, helping people see movies in different ways that might change how they feel about them. He talked about Deep Dive, and it reminded me how I wished he would do a do-over of the Jupiter Ascending episode because John said it wasn’t nice and that I would get upset. See, I love Jupiter Ascending, and it’s often hard to get people to see the good in it. But it made me think about how our first tries are often not our best ones. That gave me a little shiver of hope. Over the past few years I’ve nearly shut down this blog and quit games multiple times, after my work continued to be inadequate and the blog floundered. I don’t want to end things, but my self-loathing and lack of success has been heavy. But maybe if I keep trying?
Then he talked about the important part – love, joy, empathy.
I honestly can’t remember everything he said. I was so overwhelmed. A lot of people might know that I’ve been struggling with my mental and physical health for a long time, and one of the ways I’ve tried to do that is to try to be kinder.
I’m an angry person. I always have been, angry, ready to fight, every day. I’m bitter and fiery and it’s exhausting. But ever since the Dark Years, I’ve been trying so hard to be better.
I worked on not calling people names and swearing at them. I disengaged from relationships that allowed my anger to grow and fester. I preached to be kinder, to love people, and I asked people to stop hurting people.
But lately, I have not done this. I have been exhausted, surrounded by everyone else’s anger, boiling in hurt every day by the words of my friends, colleagues, and the people who control my life. My work makes me angry. School makes me angry. I am so angry all of the time, and it turns into this cycle of self loathing because I don’t want to be angry, but it often feels like my only alternative is sadness.
My doctors have told me that a happy medium will always be a challenge for me, and that experiencing joy will be fraught because it’ll be hard to find and the crash can often be very brutal. I’m glad they told me, but it’s something I struggle with because it’s true.
I need to change that. I may never normalize to happy, and I might not be able to be joyful without a crash. But that has to be okay. It must be. With that in mind, I’m reflecting on how I pursue games and create them, and how I engage with the community.
Love
– I will give my love freely in all ways, even if it’s just a general love of humanity.
– I will try to ensure that love is a part of my games, encouraged and recognized.
– I will remember that hate is less effective than love.
Joy
– I will have more fun! I want to find at least one fun thing a week to enjoy, in games or out.
– I will support joyful games, bring attention, and encourage more joyful games to be made.
– I will put joy out, too, by trying to post more about good in my life, including the positive work I’m doing in design.
Empathy
– I will support those in my community who struggle in the ways I can.
– I will continue to fight against injustice, and against harassment, and try to find opportunities to change our landscape to support those in need.
– I will let go of bitterness against those who have wronged me.
—
The last of those is one I have already started pursuing, with my apology weekend where I asked people to apologize to me freely, without any given reason, and I forgave everyone who did. It was revolutionary for me.
I have realized, just while thinking on this, that my recent deep struggles might not be solved by these efforts, but that it doesn’t actually matter. This isn’t about fixing me, or anyone else.
It’s about living.
<3