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Me — I Will Become… Pt. 2

Kasey-Rayn 1 Comment

Nearly three and a half years ago, I started The Daily Dose of Derailment. I did it for a lot of reasons, but first and foremost on that list was the fact that I was depressed. This was partially because I considered myself a writer, but didn’t write, and so the blog was one of many aspects about myself that I changed in those weeks. It helped a tremendous amount, and I’m still happy I took that first step. I never would have imagined the traction it would have gotten in that amount of time (though that is not and has never been the point of it), and I love that I can very easily see how much I—and this blog—have grown.

If you’re interested, here is the fist blog post I ever wrote. I don’t know about you, but I can’t keep myself from cringing a bit as I read it. That’s good though, it proves growth. (The fact that I’ve since changed websites and the formatting has been screwed up does me no favors here, either.)

Having noticed that 6 out of 10 of my most recent posts have been indirectly (or directly) related to my recent depression, I feel that it’s time to revamp. Just like I did over three years ago. I need to re-calibrate, and hopefully some good will come of it.

The last two months I have not had the willpower to make myself happy. I’ve just been allowing myself to be emotionally unstable because it has been so much easier than the alternative.

That ends today.

As soon as I finish writing this, I’m going to put together a list of some things I need to do—all of the things that will bother me during the week if I waste my Saturday and Sunday knowing I had time to work on them. In a sense, I’m throwing away the weekend by not allowing myself to relax. But I need to lay the foundation for a better tomorrow if I want every day to stop sucking. (As I’ve said before, every action I’ve been taking has been with the mindset of mitigating depression rather than maximizing enjoyment.)

This means no more late blog posts—especially when there’s no reason for them to be late—and no more procrastination. If I can’t be serious about pulling myself together, I’m in big trouble, so I have to be serious.

If you actually read any of the past few weeks of posts, allow me to apologize! I can’t imagine there was anything worthwhile in any of those, but I’m certainly not going back to check.

For those interested, one of the action items on my list is to make a list of quotes that I will start using to keep me going. I already have the list, I just need to print it out and put it on a frame on my desk so that I stay on track. I think that list of quotes is a great thing to send you off with (with no attributions as I’ve reworded many of them to be simpler than they were). And, as I hope mine will be, may your tomorrow be better than today was.

“Follow your path.”

“If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.”

“It doesn’t get easier. You get better.”

“What easy thing can be done now to free up time later?”

“Don’t break your back for somebody who won’t see your pain.”

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”

Me — Playing Life on Damage Control

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At risk of taking an even more intimate look at my psyche as I have been writing on my blog lately, I need to vent a bit. Again. So read at your own risk.

At the onset of even more bad news, I’ve been starting to seriously look at how I could possibly make the changes I need. I feel like at a certain point, the depression becomes my identity, and when it gets as bad as it is right now, nothing makes me feel better, I can only do things that don’t make me feel worse. Life becomes a game of damage control and mitigation in the hopes that each day is as not-terrible as it could possibly be.

Every conversation I have ends up being about staving off the sadness, and every thing I decide to do is carefully chosen with the intent of distraction and suppression. I start to seriously consider whether or not I would really care if I got hit by a car or if that headache suddenly turned out to be cancer, (being bedridden for months would remove a lot of options and choice, and the self-loathing that comes with them) and when I decide I would care, it’s because I couldn’t even begin to afford the hospital bills that would cost.

Now, my thoughts haven’t strayed towards action, and I don’t expect they ever will, but it can be hard to gauge just how bad of an emotional state I’m in because for all I know, this is just what life is and everyone else is just more well-equipped for it. I’m inclined to think that this isn’t the case, but you never know.

I have little doubt that my depression is worse than it was in January, and if I have any hope of being okay now rather than later, I need to make some drastic life decisions. As I’ve talked about before, I intend to move out of California, and my current plan has been to start that process next January/February. The reason that I’m not looking now is because I have one more semester of school left, I want to help get my passion project off the ground (which, admittedly, wouldn’t be much harder if I moved), I’m sort of waiting for a suitable replacement at work (though I’m not wouldn’t hold out for that—plus the idea of looking for new work breaks me a little bit), and I want to find a good conclusion to the D&D campaign I’m running. That last one is kind of important to me, and though my brothers and I could play over voice chat, I feel it would take a lot of the fun out of the game, because we’ve only ever played D&D on a table with character sheets and miniatures. Plus, I really hate it when campaigns don’t get closure, as is often the case.

But what if none of that really matters? What if I started packing my things right now and moved next month? Would I start healing right now? Would that be the right choice in the long run? I’m very aware that given the grand scheme of things, none of the things I’m holding out for really matter all that much, but I like to have a game plan, and throwing out the next few months of plans worries me.

Still, spontaneously going on a three hour walk because you can’t get out of your own head and almost crying in public while you’re listening to All You Need is Love also worries me. To me, that is a very clear indication that Kasey’s normal mental functions are failing.

I’ve found a quote about a week ago that really struck a chord with me.

“It doesn’t get easier. You get better.”

Strange how words can have the power to soothe and terrify at the same time. They say it gets worse before it gets better, so maybe my best course of action here is simply to assume that life isn’t done yet.

Me — Making Excuses or Biding Time?

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A lot of people have this ideology that their life will get better If and When. “If I just got that job I wanted, I would have the money I need to buy that new car”, or “When my kids finally graduate high school and go to college, I’ll finally find the time to work on my hobbies”. They take the unhappiness they’re currently feeling and deflect the responsibility by saying they can’t fix it because of whatever situation they are currently in. That situation, of course, is always temporally locked, so the future is always brighter.

I’ve done a post about how happiness is a choice, and I still think that is 100% true. It’s just a mindset you have to flex, and virtually anyone can be happy in almost every situation they find themselves in. (I’m excluding the extremes here for obvious reasons.)

But even though I’m very aware of this argument, I still have a hard time feeling that my situation is like these things. For example, I desperately want to move to Oregon/Washington for a multitude of reasons, but first and foremost is the lack of privacy I have. I don’t really feel like I have my own space to work in, because I even share a bedroom (and have all my life). I can’t move out this second because I’m still going to school, but as soon as I’m done, the current Kollin has no intention of staying for a second, though some opportunities might encourage me otherwise.

This isn’t to say that I’m unhappy in my current living situation, as my unhappiness is an unrelated issue, but this significant and constant blow to my psyche of not having anywhere I can run to does put quite a damper on my mood. Even if I’m sitting at my desk playing video games, I have to be selective about the games that I’m playing if I don’t want to be visible to friends I may or may not want to interact with.

I’m doing everything in my power to make my space my own, though. Right now, I’m in damage control: I’m trying to be productive as mindlessly as possible so that I can maximize happiness while dumping out as much free time as possible (because free time spent not being productive stresses me out quite a bit).

No, I’m not under the delusion that changing my living space will solve all my problems. But I know for a fact that it would help, as I like clean, efficient uses of space, and as of today, the amount of people living/sleeping in my home went from 6 to 11. When your living room has to be converted into a mass sleeping mat, you’ve got spatial issues.

So while I’m waiting for this temporal problem to sort itself out, I’m working on the unrelated things. I’m trying out a new hobby that feels both productive and takes up a lot of time, and on that principle alone, it works well. More on that later, as I don’t want to talk about something after having only spent a few hours doing it.

Godspeed with your own endeavors and tribulations.

Me — Rebuilding Stability

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Last week was rough. Without question, it was the hardest set of days to get through in several months, and it rivaled the month-long rut I got caught in in January. I had spent most of this year building myself and being okay with who I am and the position in life I’m in (while acknowledging the steps forward I’m taking), and I was doing great.

I have a daily happiness tracker that I’ve been keeping since March, and on a scale of 1-10, I’m happy to say I’ve had a bell curve peaking at 7. To me, that’s pretty solid. A passing grade, could be better, could be worse. (70% is average because of the American education system, think of that what you will.)

But a combination of things happened last week, and that score plummeted. My weekly average went from 7.07 to 5.82. My mental health has obviously taken a huge hit, and I’m afraid it’s going to take me quite a few months to build it back up to where it was.

It’s a shame, because I was doing so well. I was writing consistently, doing weekly prep for my D&D campaign, working full time, etc. I was even making efforts to be more social and getting up at 5am just to get even more work done.

Now I’m back to the rut of going to bed at midnight, struggling to get up for work, and then not having the willpower to do anything when I get home at 5-6. That’s primarily why the blog has been struggling the past few weeks. Sometimes I’ll forget to write a post entirely, but other times I’ll just put it off indefinitely (like last Saturday).

I know what I need, and I’m taking steps towards it. Different steps I’ve never taken to fix my problems, which I feel is a good sign. The problem is to muster the willpower to take those steps when every free moment I have makes me want to just play games mindlessly the rest of the night. But I know this will only perpetuate the problem.

What I don’t want to do is turn the blog into a mindless vomit of words of me complaining about my problems. That’s part of the reason why I’m being vague here. The primary purpose of this blog is and has always been simply to force myself to write more about my thoughts and experiences. That way I can be more comfortable with words while also allowing me to easily look at my past and reflect on who I once was, and I can’t do that if I never include anything personal here.

I know that my life will never be 10/10 every day, but I’m working towards increasing my weekly averages. Right now the goal is to get back up to 7, which I imagine will take a while, and then after that maybe try pushing it to 7.5 or even 8?

I want to live life to the fullest. The current me is not capable of really enjoying it, but he’s doing what he can to allow future me to do so.

Rambling — The Lack of Long-term Goals

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I was talking to a friend the other day (a game developer who’s been working closely in the industry for a few years), and I told him that if I had had my way, my ideal career would be writing up the storylines to video games. My thought was that I could be the lead writer for an indie company, because that avenue has been growing more and more prevalent over the past decade. It wasn’t his intention, but he said something that was really disheartening, which was the fact that the project that he’s currently working on has over forty developers and zero of them are just “writers”.

Now, the thing is, I’m not sure how well his situation translates to my ambitions, because the project that he is on is unannounced, and therefore he can’t tell me about it. It sounds to me like the thing that he’s working on is very mechanic-driven, with little to no narrative. (I’m struggling to avoid using the term ‘game’ here, even if that is almost assuredly what he is doing). You don’t need a narrative for a game like Chess, after all, and for all I know he’s just making Super Chess.

I don’t like facing the fact that he’s probably right—there’s very few careers for a writer in the video game industry, meaning they will be hard to get and more than likely, none of them would be exclusively writing. (I love brainstorming, but there’s no way in hell anyone would pay me to sit in an office 40 hours a week to brainstorm with people and string story threads together.) But the problem with that is that I have no other marketable skills for that industry.

The vast majority of the time I do a pretty good job at not worrying about the future and just live in the present. Building towards and preparing for my life in two years is all well and good, but looking much further than that doesn’t tend to yield very accurate results.

What concerns me here is that I have no real passions. I’m sure that’s not uncommon with a lot of people my age, and so I should count myself lucky that I tend to be competent at most everything I pick up, but what I don’t want to do is be sitting in the same spot 10 years from now wondering when I can start calling myself an adult.

It’s stupid, I know. I’m already an adult and my life started decades ago. Some people live their whole life waiting for it to start, but if nothing motivates me into kicking myself into gear, what is there to do?

I used to think I’d be a published author by now, well into the first few novels of a fantasy series, but as it turns out I get bored with long-form writing and burn myself out. I have this irrational (if commonplace) fear that every aspiration I turn to will yield the same results.

They say not to make your hobby your day job, but my only hobby is D&D, and I already consider it a load of work. Ho-hum. Rambling over.

Me — Time Budgeting

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Lately I’ve been having a really hard time with… well, time. There’s been so much that I need to get done at work and at home, and I feel as though the amount of time I have to do it is getting smaller and smaller while the list of things is getting bigger. Part of the problem is that since I don’t have time to do weekly stuff, it keeps piling up, and another part of the problem is that I’m the only person filling in my position at work as of today. And not only that, the person that left was full time, and because of my school semester I still work part time. So what 1.5 full time employees were already struggling to carry is now being handled by 0.5 employees, which is me.

I do not know how I managed to wake up consistently at 5am last semester and get work done then. That was a magical time—a time I desperately need to emulate and am failing miserably at by struggling to get up at 7 every morning. (Which, back then, was my ‘sleep in’ day.)

What I have noticed is that it is nearly impossible to get real work done at my desk. I mean, why would I do anything when video games are right there and there’s no consequence to doing that instead of writing? (Beyond the mental consequence, that is.) That said, today I went straight to Starbucks after work, even though I was super tired from a long day, and pulled out my laptop to write. I will say, though I only stayed 2 hours and didn’t get nearly as much done as I’d have liked, I did get stuff done, so for that I am happy. I’ll try to do this more in the future.

I also think that since I have such a big backlog of work that needs to be done, there’s always a psychological strain on getting work done, so stress is a constant in my life right now. I imagine it would be a lot easier to get stuff done if I wasn’t so intimidated by the sheer amount of things that need to be done.

The thing that probably frustrates me most about situations like this is that while I know the answer is simple, it isn’t very clear. Do I need to schedule a day where I just kick down the whole to-do list? Would I even use that day properly or would I waste it and feel terrible as a result? Do I go to bed at 9pm and set up alarms that force me to get out of bed in the hopes that I can resume my once-great schedule? Do I just need to permanently trim my to-do list and forgive myself for doing so? Would the lessened burden fix things?

Part of me is thinking “just hold out for the summer, you’ll have more free time!” but I know that isn’t true. In fact, I’ll probably have less, because I’ll be working full time once school is out of the way, and I’ve half-committed to finishing the full-length play I started a few months ago, so the side projects I’m doing now will end up being even lower of a priority if I can’t find a way to up my creativity regarding personal projects.

Here’s hoping that regularly going to Starbucks will be worth my time (and the money my self-imposed patronage would cost).

Anyway’s that’s it for today’s useless ramble. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Life — Making Your Own Happiness

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In my experience, there’s a certain type of depression/sadness that a lot of people have. It’s a very common affliction I like to call (as of right now) apathetic depression. It is the primary symptom of a state of life that is suboptimal for reasons that don’t appear to be your own. Your life sucks because you hate your job, you hate your family, you have no idea where your life is headed, etc. None of these things are your fault, so you just live day in and day out moping over how you drew the short stick when you were born.

I think there are people out there who drew the short stick, but you aren’t one of them.

The trap that a lot of people fall in is being comfortable in their contempt. It’s easy. Why blame yourself for the professional career you hate when you can just write it off by saying you have no other options? (It’s like in video games: nobody wants to blame themselves for their team losing; they will always point to somebody else first.)

Being happy sucks.

I say that because it’s not what people think it is. It’s not a magical state of mind that suddenly transpires when you get a raise or when you enter a committed relationship. Good events are easily overshadowed by that wall of the uncontrollable misfourtunes of life, because while it seems that good events are rare, misfortunes are constant and ever present.

But anyone can be happy, despite any misfortune and any life circumstance. I won’t pretend it’s easy. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. But it is simple. In fact, you’ll probably nod to yourself and think “Wow, that was really deep, Kollin” as soon as I tell you the trick. (Or maybe you’ll just think I’m an idiot pretending to be philosophical, which wouldn’t be far from the truth.) The key to happiness is something you’ve already heard many times in many different ways from different inspirational quotes. But the inspirational quotes are just flowery ways of mystifying the truth right in front of our eyes. Ready?

Being happy is just a matter of putting in the effort to be happy. It means getting up in the morning finding ways to get excited for work instead of hitting the ‘Snooze’ button as many times as you can get away with. It means preparing for your future (near or far) instead of rewarding yourself for things you already had to do. It means taking steps to forgive and love yourself rather than dwelling on things you can’t change.

Most inspirational quotes are just an indirect way of saying that being happy is like going to the gym. It’s not easy. It’s a ton of work. Very few people want to go to the gym, they just want the results. It’s the same thing with happiness. It’s so much easier to dwell in misery because misery requires no action on your part. It’s also like the gym in that the more you do it, the easier it gets and the more you can lift.

Treating yourself to Starbucks before or after work isn’t going to make you happier. That’s a mental lie you tell yourself that will actually just perpetuate the problem. Caffeine addicts aside, you don’t (really) need anything but to commit to a personal promise that you’ll think about things with more positivity, and take action to ensure your days are better.

It’s hard, and you might need the help from friends and family to make that effort, but it is worth it.

Me — Writer’s Block

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I’m always excited about having extra time to work on personal projects, but I feel like every time that day arrives, I get nothing done and it just makes me upset.

I can’t articulate why, but my writer’s block has gotten so bad that putting any words on the page has become nearly impossible when it’s a personal project. Homework assignments being the exception, I’ve written one short story since July, and the shorts of that point and a few months prior were all meaningless little trifles.

It’s become a constant source of frustration. I have 5 things on my to-do list for this weekend, and the short story is my top priority, but instead of getting that done I’m taking infinite breaks and just being sad. I can’t relax and play games because I have stuff to do but I can’t just get that stuff done, so the days where I have no school or work end up being cycles of self-loathing.

I wrote the Act One to a full length play for homework in basically a month, and that was because I was told what to write and given very strict rules on what to do (write a scene where X and Y happens in one hour, GO.) I won’t say it was easy, but I ended up with 50 pages of content (that was actually not bad, all things considered!) that never would have existed otherwise.

The thing that sucks is that I obviously can’t impose those rules on myself, because there’s no consequence to me failing. If I take a break and go on Facebook or Instagram, nobody will be breathing down my neck, because the only thing I’m losing is my time (and my sanity, but who needs that?)

I did manage to get nearly 500 words of a short story done for the passion project I’m working on, but I hate it. Looking back on it I’m realizing it’s because none of my characters have established reasons for doing anything, and the story is just uninteresting overall. Which, unfortunately for me, means I need to scrap it and start from scratch.

People in my writer’s group often talk about how much they loved writing a scene or a character, and it never ceases to amaze me that people can just sit down and enjoy the process, because every time I look at the screen I just sigh and internally beg to be doing anything else. Luckily (or unluckily, as the case may be), I’m on a computer where all of my favorite time sinks are.

If anything, I think this is the proof that I’m never going to make a career out of writing books. (I almost said why I’m never going to be a published author, but given the fact that I already am, that would be dumb to say.) I can talk about worldbuilding and story structure all day, but sitting down and actually writing scenes and dialogue attributions and character motivations is just a nightmare.

How do you people do it?!

Me — Tempering Life Expectations

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I’ve been working my way out of a depression the last few months because of a few things, but central to it was an increasing feeling that I’m never going to have my life where I want it to be. (Don’t worry, I’m okay now, for reasons I’m about to get into.) I still have a bad night every week or so, but a few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine, and he commented that life is just always bad and people have to make their own happiness amidst the bad. We all have stuff to go through. It’s a conversation I’m sure we’ve all had in the past, but I guess it was the right time for me, because it sparked some thoughts.

That “revelation” might seem obvious, I know. Life is always a constant battle as we try to position it on a precarious pedestal and hope the slight breeze doesn’t ruin that balance, and that’s after you find the right life and the right pedestal. I’ve started to think, probably realistically, that there will never be a moment in my life where everything is exactly how I want it to be.

Sounds sad, but tangential to this is the opposite effect. Life might never be perfect, but it can get pretty good, so its imperfections shouldn’t disallow you from appreciating the times when it actually is pretty good. And for me, that’s right now. I’m doing great, all things considered. I have two passion projects (sort of three, if you count the play I’m working on), I’m hosting a D&D campaign that is going really, really well, and my school and work lives aren’t tearing me apart, even if they are a constant source of struggle.

So just because I don’t make as much money as I’d like to be, or my living situation isn’t ideal, or my social life needs a ton of work, doesn’t mean I haven’t made any progress. This time last year I had no job, was actively struggling with friendships/relationships, and my writing block was just starting to take hold. I’ve made some good strides since then.

I think it’s time to stop putting unrealistic expectations on myself. I’m not going to fix my financial situation or my social life by this time next year. They might improve, but the problems won’t be solved. But hey, I’m doing fine where I am now, and I can’t discredit that. Of course, we should never stop striving for more, trying to make things better where we can, but being disappointed when perfection isn’t achieved is just going to ruin things at every turn.

Also, if you’re no longer satisfied with being in a good position in life, waiting for it to get better, maybe that’s also a sign that things haven’t been bad for quite a while, and if that’s the cause, you should be thankful for that. It’s easy to forget harder times when you’re living in a period of mediocrity.

Me — My Goal in Life

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I’ve been thinking a bit lately about how often people reformulate what they want their life to amount to. The end of the road. The “I’ve made it”. I’d never really had concrete plans, as for the longest time the goal had just been “get real good at worldbuilding and then write some books”. Well, if you really know me then you’d know that I don’t have any real, serious dreams/hopes of ever writing books as a career. I’m just never as interested in the characters as I am with the scope of the world itself.

But even at that point of my life, my true goal has always simply been ‘happiness’. I mean, I’d say that’s everyone’s goal whether they realize it or not. To me, it doesn’t matter what my life ends up being as long as I get to a point where I’m not twiddling my thumbs wishing things were different. Do I expect to ever get to a point like that? Maybe not, but I’d like to get as close to that as possible.

Still, I had never thought about what that life looks like. Obviously, I can’t predict the future and I know my life will change in unimaginable ways, but I think it’s still worth exploring the ideal future the current Kollin would like, and for all the introspection I do in my day-to-day life, it’s a little surprising I had never given it more thought until now.

So here it is.

I have a stable career working on story structure and planning for some big game a la Overwatch or World of Warcraft, or perhaps I’m the main story writer for some smaller company. Maybe the story I’m working on is in a world I helped build from scratch. It’s a steady job, something that keeps me living well within my means but doesn’t allow for extravagances (I’m never going to be the person that takes yearly vacations around the world). I probably also live in Oregon or Washington, because it’s gorgeous up there and doesn’t get nearly as hot.

I’ve got a wife and maybe some kids (2 or 3 or none at all), and every week we invite my brothers and maybe one or two other friends to our awesome game room (where most of my expendable income goes) and play Dungeons & Dragons. I have appropriate monster miniatures at the ready and have been playing the game and practicing long enough to tell crazy cool stories with fun adventures, complete with interesting character voices I fully commit to. Perhaps I even play D&D twice a week so I can play with all the people I want to play with (or heck, I might even be running the fabled West Marches campaign.

I wake up just past dawn every morning feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the day, because I go to bed earlier than most people. I enjoy the privacy of every quiet morning with a hot cup of tea.

That’s it. That’s all I want. I’m not optimistic I’ll ever have half of those things all at the same time, but hey. Ideals.