I feel the need to make a big rant. If you're looking for something simple and short to read, steer clear.
Huun Huur Tu & Angelite - Fly, Fly My Sadness
Recently I've been thinking a lot about the question the OP puts forth. Life - where you at? Where do you stand?
I see life as a conflict. A battle for a need to exist. People generally exist for nothing. They work, they consume resources, then they die. I don't see how someone who works all day, all week could be enjoying himself. Maybe he enjoys his work. But most people don't. They work because they need money to consume resources and stay alive.
I am a very practical, logical, sensible person. I live by instinct. Which is to say, to quote the Beastmaster, I act on instinct as well. I live by very primal laws and morals. This isn't my schizophrenia talking. This is me.
It's how I grew up. I learned to rely only on myself, trust only myself, expect hostility and confrontation at every turn. To think in a way to always best my peers. To always be one step ahead. To think how they think, to plan their thoughts and actions. I am like a predator stalking his prey. In a way, that is how I have become. I think lowly of the average person. I think less of people who try to eek out a "normal life". Even if I can see through their eyes, I cannot comprehend how they can stand such a life.
But who am I to judge? Looking back, I made decisions I would make again if given the chance. I turned away from society. I ignored the bleats of the human sheep. But I am worse than they are. I will never work, I will never love, I will never become a part of the human machine. As a result, I now live in the shadows waiting for death to come by and hit me with something pointy.
But what if things were different. What if I could go back, and change the outcome of the future, knowing what awaited me along this path?
In 10 years, I'll be 32. If I live that long, I'll be well past my prime. The stakes of breaking into any of the billion things I wish I could do grow shorter and shorter with every passing day. Only when your young can you really bring out the energy of change. Because as the mind gets older, more cynical and deeply entrenched into its foundations, it becomes harder and harder to change. It becomes harder and harder to change the flow of your life. Perhaps this is not the way for some people, but it is the way most things flow. This is the motion of life's progression.
If I could change something, anything, and alter this future of mine, I would change this.
I would never mod. I would never write. I would cast away any desires for custom content creation and never look back. Because of my connection to my desires to create things, I have suffered greatly. I cannot pursue these dreams no matter what I do. It is because I am weak, it is because I have succumbed to my diseases.
Let's look at TOA. It is the accumilation of my life's work. I have spent close to fourteen years building the universe this novel takes place in. But TOA will never be finished. All of the time, all of the endless nights and days and free mental space devoted to creating this world is all for nothing. A colossal waste of time. While teenagers are sleeping with cheap blondes and getting drunk, I was envisioning massive starships and characters taking place in events of a scale so massive and so far beyond the average science fiction that it created a deep barrier I would need to penetrate to describe it. The more I delved into this world, the more I devoted to its creation, the more it consumed me. The single greatest action I have ever taken in my entire life is the action of building this world. It is a constant that has totally devoured me physically and mentally.
I cannot express how grand this world is. How much time I have devoted to it. I cannot recall how many mods, all failures, I have attempted in an effort to bring this world to life. What if I was "normal". What if all of this effort had been put into something else. Pursuing relationships with girls, seeking a job, or whatever. But then I would lose my individuality. No, I would never choose that route.
This was my destiny. My fate. I was destined to travel this terrible path and suffer all of the innumerable hatreds and anger that comes with it.
If I had the choice, I would throw away everything. I would enter a life of complete and total solace and never speak to anyone, quietly awaiting death to approach much like I do now.
But what if something else had happened. My most productive years were the early years. If I had dropped out of school sooner, I could have begun the process of learning much faster. I would probably be a 3d modeler right now, capable of making anything I wanted. But because I was too weak, because I hesitated, I lost valuable years to the mindless, pointless hostility that was school. It is no secret that humans reject those who are even remotely different than them. It is because they are afraid, and fear always leads to hatred. It is a lesson that would be echoed.
Because I am afraid of failure, I have come to totally despise failure. When one fails at every turn like I do, one becomes very hateful. This is the cycle of hatred that has been burned into me. I cannot stand being unable to move forward. I cannot stand being unable to create my dreams. Is it not so simple as saying, "Let's do this." I have to overcome the fear, the paranoia, the utterly decimated realm of emotional control to even begin. And once I have begun, if I make it that far, I cannot hold on. It is as though I am gripping onto an impossible slippery slope, and as soon as I try to move, I start falling instead. This has killed all of my mods, all of my writing, and anything I have ever attempted - even simply playing games.
This is the challenge I face. It's a pit I have slowly worked myself into through a variety of roads. If I had the choice, I would never have started down those roads. It is because I am not normal. It is because I am not your average person. I don't function like them. From my instincts to my morals to my beliefs, I am totally different from my kin. I have, to put in a way, become inhuman.
The schizophrenia, autism, aspergers, bipolar or whatever other names people brand psychosis as, works like lubricant upon that slope. For an individual who has an impossibly difficult time mustering personal control and motivation, it acts like a barrier. Even if I am motivated to do something, I hit a physical barrier and find it impossible to move forward. It's not that I don't have resources - the internet is everything someone who wants to learn something could ever want - the problem lays in myself.
When I dropped out of school, I opened up to the internet. I learned everything I know about English from reading books and the internet. School was totally useless in teaching me anything, so I used my own personal resources and instincts to guide me through. Even though I was in my mid teens by then, I was emotionally still just a child. The onset of mental problems which back then remained totally unidentified and unknown, cast a dark shadow across a canyon of personality problems. They mixed together to become the demented trainwreck that speaks to you today. Identifying a problem is unfortunately a very tiny step on the road to correcting it. I know what's wrong, even if I can't describe it very well. But I can't fix it. For someone who values mental control so much, I have so little.
So I opted to take drugs. Que a half-year wait period between asking for an appointment and actually getting one. Everyone thinks Canada's healthcare is so great because it's free, but you only get what you pay for - which is utter garbage. It took nearly another half-year to actually get on some drugs - Olanzapine, aka Zyprexa. But it doesn't do anything. It just makes me sleepy and hungry. So they doubled the dose. Still, nothing happens but the worsening of the aforementioned after effects.
It is as I predicted - I cannot resort to drugs to solve my problems. The problems are too deeply rooted.
Coming back on track, I find myself asking myself the following questions.
Where is my life now?
What will have happened in a few years?
I am totally powerless in changing the events of the future. I am, to say, on a train bound for armageddon with no seat belts and no bubble gum. That is what it feels like. There are many people out there who face difficulties. But that knowledge doesn't make my own challenges any easier.
I said that I feel the future is going to be better than what times have been like in current days. That is because I am dropping modding and writing completely. I have come to realize that these are two impossibilities that only serve to hurt me. I dropped all ties to other people's projects and effectively closed myself off from virtually every community I was a part of, except for this one. This is an important step to completing my ultimate goal...
A total rebirth.
Ninja Gaiden II OST Precipitation
I don't mean a simple change of mindset, I mean becoming a totally different person. The change I aim for is on the scale of when I dropped out of school and turned from a totally passive, totally closed shell into an extremely angry, depressed individual with nothing to show for his ten years of modding and writing. I am aiming to become a totally carefree, totally boundless spirit who hopes to spend his last days in a state of ignorance and bliss.
It is impossible for me to mod or write anymore. I cannot learn new skills and I cannot improve my existing ones. The best choice is to abandon these roads altogether and never look back. It is not possible for me to correct my mistakes. I can only turn away from them and hope they never happen again. I am a weak person, this is my only logical option.
You might be thinking, "Oh it can't be that bad", or "His life isn't that simple". But you'd be wrong on both accounts.
It is this bad because of how simple it is. It derives all from the basic roots of my existence - primal instincts. My life may be a complicated, interwoven web of personality flaws and mental fuckups, but it can all be summarized in basic forms and my goals and values are all very basic. I, like all creatures, simply desire happiness. But I can never have happiness, because I always fail in my efforts to bring my worlds to life. I am bound to the art of creation like the spine of a great beast. It has become such an integral part of my being that I have sacrificed virtually everything in the physical world to attain power.
I don't "live" in the physical world as you do. When you close your eyes, you enter an imaginary world. For me, it's when I open my eyes that I enter that imaginary world. It is difficult to describe how close I am to my work. I cannot conceive of modding or writing as a mere, unimportant hobby.
But I have to cast them aside. I cannot pursue these dreams any longer. I am powerless to bring them to life, and that consistent failure is what's killing me. I have to accept that I have simply become too old, too weak to pursue these dreams. It is the first step to healing the broken spirit and to become reborn. I believe that I am close to that now, because I haven't touched modding since AO.
Sc2 won't change anything. It could be the greatest game in the world and I would be no closer to being able to mod it. I have to let it go.
Battlestar Galactica Season 4 OST: Diaspora Oratorio
In order to become a better, stronger person, I have to let it all go. I can't cling on to things that I cannot do. They are dead weight holding me back from living my final moments in peace.
Ultimately that means that my presence here will dwindle away until it remains no longer. As I will never mod again, I have no place here. Anyone that genuinely cares has put together my life's story from the countless posts like this one. In that respect, this will be the last time I ever talk about these matters.
To a new future, no matter how short or how long.