June 3
I’m Alive
Hey, I just wanted to check in with everyone. I had a few hectic weeks and I’ve been all over the place mentally– and a little physically. I ended up in North Carolina for a few days, which was actually really nice. Except for the airport and the racism; that just sucked. I’m pretty fucking disgusted with how acceptable racism is the further south I travel. It’s so common culturally, I don’t think people even realize they’re indoctrinated in it. :/
I’m working on the PATB Serial to get the first episode ready for publishing. My goal is to post some scenes from different short stories as I work on that, just to give you all something new to read, but without my brain needing to jump from past to future in the PATB series. Less confusion, less redundancy, less boredom.
I’m musing about a lot of shit lately. I might be slipping into (or squatted right down in the middle of) a midlife crisis of sorts. My birthday is on the 12th. I’m facing how I’m ‘healthy’ yet have lost a lot of passion and joy and drive in my life be it from the Parkinson’s or something else, maybe stagnation after being ill for so long? I’m not sure– maybe it’s everything. Maybe I’m just not good at sitting still, and I’m fighting a lot of guilt around that because I don’t know how to balance my life between work and living. Work has been my creative endeavors, always, and that is my passion. I’m not feeling the spark. I haven’t for months now.
It might be time to look into hiring help, writers who are willing to flesh out my outlines–outlining being where I feel most like the creative soul I am. But money has been difficult because my productivity has been down (fucking common sense there,) and it’s just a frustrating cycle right now. Because I don’t know if it’s the answer, and finding out if it’s the answer feels like this big leap of faith. I am very good in conflict, a grand procrastinator who writes term papers in an evening and gets A’s on that shit. And I worry that’s what I’m doing to myself now. Just looking for any old cliff I may fall off of, and waiting until it feels inevitable that I’m going to tumble until I finally act.
I don’t want to be that kind of person in life, especially when it comes to my work. But it’s honest to who I have been up to this point with mold toxicity and death seeming to loom just ahead as I wrote to keep from falling into that pit. I don’t know. It’s been long years only knowing how to live one way, that way full of anxiety and fight and flight at every turn. I am as I am, yet struggle in knowing how to be this way without trauma or illness. I took all this time just waiting to see if my chemistry/my love of life would kick in already and point me where I really want to go. It’s not happening. No sparks.
It might be a midlife/newbirth crisis. >_> It might be my surroundings. I am very isolated lately with little ability to go out into the world. My car needs repairs (finally have it in the shop now) and being ill has been very effective at cutting people out of my life. I miss being around different people and borrowing a bit of their energy to spark my creativity. I miss sharing art and being good at shit and not having to feel guilty–do you know how many times I apologize for being good at stuff because I know it’s not normal for others to just jump into a field and flourish? Ugh. Self awareness is the worst. Maybe I’ll avoid creativity all together. I don’t think I’m even seeking intellectual curiosity at this point but the basic chemical reactions that are part of being a social animal. I might be happy just to hear about other people’s lives and then go home and write a crazy story… I miss conversation. I wish people could fucking understand me and talk about more than the weather or the mundane, but fuck it, I’ll take what I can get.
There is so much shit I want to do that I don’t have the money for. That could be what’s crushing me a bit. Like, I seriously want to find a software where I can create 3D renders of my characters that look 2D (because I’m not a huge fan of hyper-realism for anime style art and I want to work with outlines) and then use that shit to make elaborate interactive novels. Sculpt, pose and repeat. I mean, legit, that would be fucking fun. But I totally bet that kind of software isn’t cheap — might not even be available unless I have some crazy computer set up. Maybe this is my brain fail lately. I definitely still have creative sparks, but the projects I want to do and the way to execute them feel beyond my means. I don’t want to waste time lining the same characters and coloring them, etc, etc, when my brain already sees such an obvious shortcut of ‘just get the right software so you can do other shit at the same time.’ It’s not a lack of passion, so much as, I see that the wrong path will waste the little energy and time I have, so if I’m going to do this shit, I want to take the most efficient path.
I have about 5 different interactive novels/mini video games in my head that I can’t fucking touch because I feel held back by a lack of knowledge, and more importantly, resources. What an ugly feeling frustration is– no wonder I’ve been ignoring it. If indie creators can create elaborate handheld minigames, the software has to be out there, right? I’ve found software for turning graphics and text into an actual game, but not how to render 3D characters–not quickly or efficiently while also cheap, at least. But it’s totally out there, just closer to the video game aspect instead of the interactive novel aspect. I bet I could find info when searching there instead…
This is a big, fucking spiel of whatever. Why do I feel so defeated when I haven’t even started? This just isn’t like me. Where did my beautiful, manic self go who didn’t believe anything could slow me down?
I don’t think I talked a lot about this here, but I’ve been researching into how gut biome affects mood/behavior/personality, and I wonder if this is a symptom of my new gut biome. I might have lost something essential without realizing it. We are in reality manifestations of our biology, psyche, and environment. In the same way we react to stressors in our environment, we act in ways programed by our biology and set by our psyche. PTSD might seem like a disorder of the psyche, but the psyche has only adapted to previous memories and the biological forces that are pushing it. It rationalizes but doesn’t necessarily define. So, what if in targeting the Candida that was producing neurotoxins that were destroying my dopamine transmitter genes, I wiped out something in the gut biome that allowed me to act on impulse, that allowed creativity to flow without giving self doubt time to flood in? It was easy to discover the bacteria that created dopamine and use that to cure my Parkinson’s, but what element leads to inspiration/creativity/impulse? Where did my inner daredevil go and is that as easily programmed back in?
I’m rambling, but eh. This is the part of me I miss. I want to find my fun mania again. It was never ‘out of control’ for me the way people would describe their creative genius. It was just a way to live without all the mundane shit overwhelming in and trying to pretend it had value. Who the fuck wants to be bored in life, really? What lie is that that being stable and in control means a lack of lust for life? Why wouldn’t you want every moment to be fun, a challenge, a new thing to learn and overcome? This weird apathy (which I fear is long term damage from the Parkinson’s) strips all the joy away until life is about going through the motions, mechanical and dull. That’s not real living; it’s fucking sociopathy when we take away our chemical reactions to stimuli. :/
How frustrating to see this as a far more difficult problem to overcome than the PTSD and mold induced Parkinson’s. Because when my lust for life dulls, my passion to problem solve fades as well, and it is so much harder to act… I guess I’ll look at the chemical byproducts of Candida. Maybe the answer is in the microbiome I cleared out.
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