Chapters of Social Life & Modes of Therapy
I need to pick up the pace with writing. I'm looking through my notepad for ideas on what to write about today to find there's way more pages of notes then I realized. I'm writing notes 2-3 times faster then I am getting around to writing about them. When that happens, I inevitably just never write about those things as I emotionally disconnect from them.
I'm about halfway into a sleep cycle right now, so that means I'm up all night when it's quiet and no one around to talk to. That isn't a bad thing, it doesn't feel lonely or depressing. whether or not I feel that way is always a reflection of how happy I am at the time. My moods have been pretty good, so there's nothing to fear. But it also means my routines get all thrown off and unhealthy behavoirs reign. I'm pushing myself to write now because I'm running a bit behind getting to this entry and it'll be too easy for me to put this off again and again. I've been feeling that slippery slope the past few nights.
Last week my therapist asked me what I wanted his role to be. It's not the first time he's asked, this came up about a year and a half ago when I was in a really bad place after the failures from Hitmouse. At the time I was not looking to the future or how to get better, but how to survive. We didn't revisit the question, but has been in the back of my mind since the frustrations he's voiced. I'm trying not to write them too explicitly as I find I rarely get an exact bead on his focus.
The question has been on my mind though the past few days and I'm still pretty clueless about how to answer it. Mostly that feels like I don't even know what the possible answers are. So I paused in writing this to google the role of a therapist but that really prompted me to differentiate between cognitive and behavioral therapy. I've a very clear bias for cognitive therapy, though I think my therapist would like to see me have more of a balance with behavioral. My experiences have led me to a strong conviction that the only long standing changes I ever make come when it's something I want to do or an old behavior is no longer appealing.
I stopped looking through some links pretty quickly because I was starting to feel overwhelmed with a bunch of new terminology, but also a bunch of stuff waiting in the wings I was trying to shut out. I've had this feeling that there's a right and wrong answer to this question...loaded terms, otherwise stated I think there's answers my therapist will not be ok with and prefer to see our time come to an end. I've been considering that possibility the last 18 months, but in this case I want to be sure of my answer before I deal with the consequences. Since I don't even understand what my options are and what commitment they require from me, I'm nervous of being forced to make a decision. At the same time, I respect my therapist's frustrations and wanting to handle things a certain way and it wouldn't be the end of the world if things didn't work out. Lately I've found myself wondering if I'd learned enough to help myself the rest of the way, but anytime I've found myself pondering not needing therapy anymore it was always very premature thinking, so I've grown to distrust such optimism.
I've tried to be better about writing again because I felt that was the responsible thing to do again for therapy. Once I felt up to it, I felt I owed my therapist that work ethic, and certainly I recognized I needed it to continue to make any noticeable progress. I've been wondering if maybe I've learned the techniques I need already and there isn't more he can give me. But that loops back around to the question of what do I want from my therapist, what're my expectations? How do I see this working?
When the topic first came up 18 months ago I did not have a good answer. As I recall, my main rationale at the time was that I looked to therapy as an obligation to keep me doing the work I needed to be doing, the extra push I needed because I wasn't able to do it on my own. I liked the idea of it as a safe place where I could talk about whatever I needed to, a therapist makes for a neutral observer but also he has at times been the main person I could talk to or share things with. On a deeper level, since I favor a cognitive approach, my writings and things I talk about have always had an underlying premise of explaining not just what I think or feel, but why, and trying to trace it back or connect it to as many events I could think to. The idea has always been to create a thorough map of my thinking for my therapist to pose changes.
My therapist dislikes my affinity for argumentation, and yet that's core to how I think. Most people don't care for it, and persuasion gets grouped into that. And yet I think that's what I've been waiting for, a convincing argument...not an answer, but a reason to accept an answer. Being told the problem doesn't really help, for the most part I've already mapped those all out. It's looking for reasons not to make the same mistakes again - being told not to make them, even when I know they're mistakes, isn't helpful.
I was looking at an old journal entry from 5 years ago and it was about existential crisis, and the first time I really labeled them as such. I'm quite comfortable with the randomness of the world, the lack of purpose supplied by religion. I long ago decided I needed to find my own reasons to care, to decide what was important to me. And looking back at that writing from 5 years ago, knowing that that was not the start of that struggle, I can see I've made almost no progress. That's added another question to juggle...do I even know how to do this? Do I have a plan to get me to where I want to go? When I tried to factor this into the whole approach to therapy question, I was left with even more doubt. If I know where I want to go and after years of trying and failing to get there, should i really be putting so much faith in my judgment?
My younger life was defined by obedience, I did what my parents told me to because there was pain and punishment if I didn't. I didn't develop much of a sense of what I wanted. I flitted my free time away with meaningless leisure. The only identifiable desire in there was connection with others. When I was 12 I remember praying for love, while specifically a romantic one, my ideas of romantic probably have too much overlap with the sort of emotional benefits that should come from a parent to a young child. When I was 15, I had my first real set of friends...I'm not even sure what I mean by real, i suppose, people I chose not whoever was around. That was the sci-fi club in school, and my takeaway from that whole experience made me quite cynical about humanity. Watching the social outcasts band together only to repeat as a microcosm what had happened to us in the macro, the group needed to create its own social outcasts. Alongside this was an active online life in chatrooms that really shape me...and I've made the time to tell those stories.
I'll try to tell those stories in brief, god knows my memory of them is too blurry of the two and a half years to be overly detailed anyway. But they were important to me and did shape me, and I really should've made time to tell them sooner.
It was my first introduction to roleplaying. I was 14 when I started and it was a normal chatroom, but a few roleplayers did visit it and I found myself getting pulled into the whole thing as people described actions. That usually meant people getting into combat as a way to settle arguments, force someone out of the room, harassment etc. The rules for such things were loose and usually came down to who could sway others. After getting pushed out by someone I changed my screenname and looked for revenge, but he didn't show up for months and by the time he didn't even remember me or care.
I migrated down to a different set of fantasy themed rooms, away from the sci-fi ones, the fantasy ones were exclusively roleplaying based. Quickly made an enemy of someone else who got his whole guild to come after me. Made a new screenname and came back. Started to make some friends, that was how I met Nicole. Got pulled into a tiny guild, the guild leader got his character killed off, I think he wanted to quit the whole thing, and asked for someone to take over the guild...everyone else stepped back and I got left holding the bag.
I was probably 15 at the time, and most people around were ages 18-35. The beauty of the internet, no one sees who you are. By the way I talked, I guess a mix of education level and serious personality, people figured me for at least 20 years old. I mention that because if people realized how young I was, I don't think any of the rest of this would've really turned out as it did. The GM gave me a lost of old members and told me to track them down to rebuild his guild. I tracked down several people and looked to hand off leadership to someone who knew what they were doing, I certainly didn't. He handed things off to someone else before disappearing, who then did the same.
At this point it was me and Bev acting as lieutenants, but given I had the stronger force of personality by far, I ended up running things. Over the next few months I recruited about 2 dozen people into the guild...we were probably the largest guild in the realm, the community wasn't all that big, maybe 150 people in total. Beverly convinced me to become the official leader and others supported the idea, seeing as I was running things anyway. What does a GM do in a rp chatrooms? You're really the social head of things. I created an organization structure for the guild and made ranks...though my first foray into such leadership was a dismal failure as no one really knew what to do with those ranks, so there was no one to delegate to or entrust. The guild was heavily infused with my black and white morality, and our main function was blocking evil characters from killing or harassing other players, interveneing when petty fights broke out and calming things down. I held weekly meetings, which was mostly giving long passionate speeches about our mission, justice and morality...I don't know how anyone ever sat through any of it, but I thought the world of what I was saying. I think I as evening intending for those things to be motivational...I don't think it even worked a little.
My character at the time was named Embermage, because he was a fire wizard, it's a screenname I still use to this day but no one knows where it comes from. It was my first real rp character...if you can call it rp, it was really just me being me in a fantasy setting. But that character still represents aspects of my personality. And that character and their experiences were very influential on me in the next decade.
I went on vacation for a week and came back to find some players had formed an evil guild and started harassing everyone and killing off characters, early internet trolls as they were doing this for fun. This was exactly the sort of thing my guild was designed to thwart. While I was gone petty squabbles ensued as members couldn't unite or agree on things...really just power struggles. Once I got back people got in line and I rallied the realm. It wasn't a glorious victory, more of a whimper then a bang. But we did exert some pressure and they eventually backed down, probably just got bored of the whole thing.
My mother had a free account with Prodigy, back before AoL was a thing, she'd worked for the company briefly years earlier and they never took away the free account. They eventually did and there was a month downtime before me and my sister's new unlimited service account was setup...back when you had to pay hourly for online services. I had just arranged a merger with another guild..more absorbing them really. It wasn't a popular move but I was trying to grow my guild's influence. The members that I recruited were usually very weak combatively and really what could be described as social players, but this guild had a mission...so I always needed to recruit more people hoping to acquire the combatants I wanted. In that few week window, the existing members socially spurned the new people and the whole merger fell apart. The person I left in charge did a dismal job and even helped make things worse. By the end of the month when I got back the guild had basically disbanded.
I was really upset and torn up about the whole thing. This had become a surrogate family to me...I was too young to know that at the time, and I think it was Bev who observed it. Once she said it, I knew she was right. My character went on more of a private arc from there on out. I tried to rebuild the guild at one point but it never got far. Instead my character focused more on personal relationships. I got to rp out a relationship, the closest thing I had to one for probably a decade. It was an interesting experience, being friends with someone nearly twice my age, but roleplaying as a couple. There was an intimacy to our friendship but nothing romantic between us directly and we kept out the sexual stuff for the most part. I stayed friends with her through college, but we lost touch after that. For the longest time, I'd say she understood me emotionally better then anyone I knew.
I felt robbed when the guild fell apart, cheated by people I trusted. When it fell apart a second time I felt like a failure. But the whole experience validated this belief I'd held since I was a child that I was a born leader. It was also when I first began to understand cult of personality...it was my personality that gathered all those people and held things together, and it always went to shit when i wasn't there. That also meant it couldn't survive without me...and I wanted it to. Yeah, there's some parallels there with my warcraft guild 20 years later. The guild was an ego boost for me...the idea that so many people were willing to follow me, and most looked up to me.
There was so much drama through it all, not limited the guild. Just in general, the whole online chatroom experience. It felt like being on an emotional rollercoaster most of the time. Chunks of that drama came from me as that was my emotional outlet at the time and I had a lot of rage in those days. As draining as it all was, there were people who stuck by me through thick and thin, and those relationships form the backbone of my belief in people being good and reliable.
The whole online experience really messed with my sleep. I'd regularly stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning on school nights. My mother would often catch me awake and I'd lie and say I was going to sleep in a few minutes. The lack of sleep meant I napped on the train instead of reading for pleasure..a trend that never reversed itself. I began to sleep through some of my classes, but only the ones I knew I could get away with it and where my grades wouldn't slip for it. There was an odd dichotomy to my life with my social life at school and my evening social life.
Returning to the original point...my life when I was young was about obedience to my parents. Social connection is probably the only thing I ever really cared about...and it's the thing I find most elusive. I mentioned my high school friends and my chatroom days because those were my first real attempts at connection. Both were troubled. The next social group came at the end of high school and was dominated by Joey, my childhood friends who now wanted to subjugate me and demean me for his own exaltation, and god the drama from that circle is just absurd. What followed was an iterating group of friends through college with me in charge that was stable and peaceful, punctuated by the occasional schism. After that, you're in the larp days. The larp days didn't last long, but evolved into a smaller social circle with me in charge that was pretty stable which ended with the relationship with Andrea and the Mage larp. After that you're in the Hitmouse and warcraft days. These are the chapters of my social life, and it's all defined by failed relationships.
But the core point is this...I never really wanted anything in my life besides human connections. College was the first time I wanted something, and not initially. In high school I avoided the topic of college. I knew I was going to go because my parents didn't even give me a choice, but the idea of choosing a college...based on what criteria? If I have no desire to go, how could I even begin to make such a decision. And when I did go it was because I got bored of a deadend job, and then choose a school to follow Jessie. After she left I saw no reason to leave, but my mind opened to learning and I pushed myself because I wanted to. After that, Hitmouse is the most ambition or desire I have displayed.
I lack a reason to do things in life. Odds are most of what motivates me these days is to not be in pain. Any of the things I really desire, I've been driven away from after so many painful experiences. And yet it's also core to my personality to seek to challenge myself...but how I do so seems to be unimportant to me.
I feel like I'm beating around the bush, getting lost in my own thoughts and trying to say 5 different things. More towards an earlier point...what do I want from my therapist, what is his role...I'm also asking myself, what do I want to accomplish in therapy? And right now it's occuring to me there's a break in logic, like there's two different tracks of thinking. I went into therapy because I felt I'd trapped myself and couldn't get out, but the driving force was I was in pain and didn't know how not to be. But right now I'm talking about a reason for life, something to care about. And if I ask myself what do I want to do with my life, what do I want to accomplish, I don't see therapy as part of that process. I'm seeing therapy as an internal process and my life as an external process, like one doesn't help with the other. And if I sit with that a moment I can feel a return to an older me, the one my parents instilled, the one who suppresses emotions because they get in the way of getting things done.
And at this point I think I've talked myself in circles where I have no clue what I'm even talking about anymore. Don't think I've ever managed that before.
I'm about halfway into a sleep cycle right now, so that means I'm up all night when it's quiet and no one around to talk to. That isn't a bad thing, it doesn't feel lonely or depressing. whether or not I feel that way is always a reflection of how happy I am at the time. My moods have been pretty good, so there's nothing to fear. But it also means my routines get all thrown off and unhealthy behavoirs reign. I'm pushing myself to write now because I'm running a bit behind getting to this entry and it'll be too easy for me to put this off again and again. I've been feeling that slippery slope the past few nights.
Last week my therapist asked me what I wanted his role to be. It's not the first time he's asked, this came up about a year and a half ago when I was in a really bad place after the failures from Hitmouse. At the time I was not looking to the future or how to get better, but how to survive. We didn't revisit the question, but has been in the back of my mind since the frustrations he's voiced. I'm trying not to write them too explicitly as I find I rarely get an exact bead on his focus.
The question has been on my mind though the past few days and I'm still pretty clueless about how to answer it. Mostly that feels like I don't even know what the possible answers are. So I paused in writing this to google the role of a therapist but that really prompted me to differentiate between cognitive and behavioral therapy. I've a very clear bias for cognitive therapy, though I think my therapist would like to see me have more of a balance with behavioral. My experiences have led me to a strong conviction that the only long standing changes I ever make come when it's something I want to do or an old behavior is no longer appealing.
I stopped looking through some links pretty quickly because I was starting to feel overwhelmed with a bunch of new terminology, but also a bunch of stuff waiting in the wings I was trying to shut out. I've had this feeling that there's a right and wrong answer to this question...loaded terms, otherwise stated I think there's answers my therapist will not be ok with and prefer to see our time come to an end. I've been considering that possibility the last 18 months, but in this case I want to be sure of my answer before I deal with the consequences. Since I don't even understand what my options are and what commitment they require from me, I'm nervous of being forced to make a decision. At the same time, I respect my therapist's frustrations and wanting to handle things a certain way and it wouldn't be the end of the world if things didn't work out. Lately I've found myself wondering if I'd learned enough to help myself the rest of the way, but anytime I've found myself pondering not needing therapy anymore it was always very premature thinking, so I've grown to distrust such optimism.
I've tried to be better about writing again because I felt that was the responsible thing to do again for therapy. Once I felt up to it, I felt I owed my therapist that work ethic, and certainly I recognized I needed it to continue to make any noticeable progress. I've been wondering if maybe I've learned the techniques I need already and there isn't more he can give me. But that loops back around to the question of what do I want from my therapist, what're my expectations? How do I see this working?
When the topic first came up 18 months ago I did not have a good answer. As I recall, my main rationale at the time was that I looked to therapy as an obligation to keep me doing the work I needed to be doing, the extra push I needed because I wasn't able to do it on my own. I liked the idea of it as a safe place where I could talk about whatever I needed to, a therapist makes for a neutral observer but also he has at times been the main person I could talk to or share things with. On a deeper level, since I favor a cognitive approach, my writings and things I talk about have always had an underlying premise of explaining not just what I think or feel, but why, and trying to trace it back or connect it to as many events I could think to. The idea has always been to create a thorough map of my thinking for my therapist to pose changes.
My therapist dislikes my affinity for argumentation, and yet that's core to how I think. Most people don't care for it, and persuasion gets grouped into that. And yet I think that's what I've been waiting for, a convincing argument...not an answer, but a reason to accept an answer. Being told the problem doesn't really help, for the most part I've already mapped those all out. It's looking for reasons not to make the same mistakes again - being told not to make them, even when I know they're mistakes, isn't helpful.
I was looking at an old journal entry from 5 years ago and it was about existential crisis, and the first time I really labeled them as such. I'm quite comfortable with the randomness of the world, the lack of purpose supplied by religion. I long ago decided I needed to find my own reasons to care, to decide what was important to me. And looking back at that writing from 5 years ago, knowing that that was not the start of that struggle, I can see I've made almost no progress. That's added another question to juggle...do I even know how to do this? Do I have a plan to get me to where I want to go? When I tried to factor this into the whole approach to therapy question, I was left with even more doubt. If I know where I want to go and after years of trying and failing to get there, should i really be putting so much faith in my judgment?
My younger life was defined by obedience, I did what my parents told me to because there was pain and punishment if I didn't. I didn't develop much of a sense of what I wanted. I flitted my free time away with meaningless leisure. The only identifiable desire in there was connection with others. When I was 12 I remember praying for love, while specifically a romantic one, my ideas of romantic probably have too much overlap with the sort of emotional benefits that should come from a parent to a young child. When I was 15, I had my first real set of friends...I'm not even sure what I mean by real, i suppose, people I chose not whoever was around. That was the sci-fi club in school, and my takeaway from that whole experience made me quite cynical about humanity. Watching the social outcasts band together only to repeat as a microcosm what had happened to us in the macro, the group needed to create its own social outcasts. Alongside this was an active online life in chatrooms that really shape me...and I've made the time to tell those stories.
I'll try to tell those stories in brief, god knows my memory of them is too blurry of the two and a half years to be overly detailed anyway. But they were important to me and did shape me, and I really should've made time to tell them sooner.
It was my first introduction to roleplaying. I was 14 when I started and it was a normal chatroom, but a few roleplayers did visit it and I found myself getting pulled into the whole thing as people described actions. That usually meant people getting into combat as a way to settle arguments, force someone out of the room, harassment etc. The rules for such things were loose and usually came down to who could sway others. After getting pushed out by someone I changed my screenname and looked for revenge, but he didn't show up for months and by the time he didn't even remember me or care.
I migrated down to a different set of fantasy themed rooms, away from the sci-fi ones, the fantasy ones were exclusively roleplaying based. Quickly made an enemy of someone else who got his whole guild to come after me. Made a new screenname and came back. Started to make some friends, that was how I met Nicole. Got pulled into a tiny guild, the guild leader got his character killed off, I think he wanted to quit the whole thing, and asked for someone to take over the guild...everyone else stepped back and I got left holding the bag.
I was probably 15 at the time, and most people around were ages 18-35. The beauty of the internet, no one sees who you are. By the way I talked, I guess a mix of education level and serious personality, people figured me for at least 20 years old. I mention that because if people realized how young I was, I don't think any of the rest of this would've really turned out as it did. The GM gave me a lost of old members and told me to track them down to rebuild his guild. I tracked down several people and looked to hand off leadership to someone who knew what they were doing, I certainly didn't. He handed things off to someone else before disappearing, who then did the same.
At this point it was me and Bev acting as lieutenants, but given I had the stronger force of personality by far, I ended up running things. Over the next few months I recruited about 2 dozen people into the guild...we were probably the largest guild in the realm, the community wasn't all that big, maybe 150 people in total. Beverly convinced me to become the official leader and others supported the idea, seeing as I was running things anyway. What does a GM do in a rp chatrooms? You're really the social head of things. I created an organization structure for the guild and made ranks...though my first foray into such leadership was a dismal failure as no one really knew what to do with those ranks, so there was no one to delegate to or entrust. The guild was heavily infused with my black and white morality, and our main function was blocking evil characters from killing or harassing other players, interveneing when petty fights broke out and calming things down. I held weekly meetings, which was mostly giving long passionate speeches about our mission, justice and morality...I don't know how anyone ever sat through any of it, but I thought the world of what I was saying. I think I as evening intending for those things to be motivational...I don't think it even worked a little.
My character at the time was named Embermage, because he was a fire wizard, it's a screenname I still use to this day but no one knows where it comes from. It was my first real rp character...if you can call it rp, it was really just me being me in a fantasy setting. But that character still represents aspects of my personality. And that character and their experiences were very influential on me in the next decade.
I went on vacation for a week and came back to find some players had formed an evil guild and started harassing everyone and killing off characters, early internet trolls as they were doing this for fun. This was exactly the sort of thing my guild was designed to thwart. While I was gone petty squabbles ensued as members couldn't unite or agree on things...really just power struggles. Once I got back people got in line and I rallied the realm. It wasn't a glorious victory, more of a whimper then a bang. But we did exert some pressure and they eventually backed down, probably just got bored of the whole thing.
My mother had a free account with Prodigy, back before AoL was a thing, she'd worked for the company briefly years earlier and they never took away the free account. They eventually did and there was a month downtime before me and my sister's new unlimited service account was setup...back when you had to pay hourly for online services. I had just arranged a merger with another guild..more absorbing them really. It wasn't a popular move but I was trying to grow my guild's influence. The members that I recruited were usually very weak combatively and really what could be described as social players, but this guild had a mission...so I always needed to recruit more people hoping to acquire the combatants I wanted. In that few week window, the existing members socially spurned the new people and the whole merger fell apart. The person I left in charge did a dismal job and even helped make things worse. By the end of the month when I got back the guild had basically disbanded.
I was really upset and torn up about the whole thing. This had become a surrogate family to me...I was too young to know that at the time, and I think it was Bev who observed it. Once she said it, I knew she was right. My character went on more of a private arc from there on out. I tried to rebuild the guild at one point but it never got far. Instead my character focused more on personal relationships. I got to rp out a relationship, the closest thing I had to one for probably a decade. It was an interesting experience, being friends with someone nearly twice my age, but roleplaying as a couple. There was an intimacy to our friendship but nothing romantic between us directly and we kept out the sexual stuff for the most part. I stayed friends with her through college, but we lost touch after that. For the longest time, I'd say she understood me emotionally better then anyone I knew.
I felt robbed when the guild fell apart, cheated by people I trusted. When it fell apart a second time I felt like a failure. But the whole experience validated this belief I'd held since I was a child that I was a born leader. It was also when I first began to understand cult of personality...it was my personality that gathered all those people and held things together, and it always went to shit when i wasn't there. That also meant it couldn't survive without me...and I wanted it to. Yeah, there's some parallels there with my warcraft guild 20 years later. The guild was an ego boost for me...the idea that so many people were willing to follow me, and most looked up to me.
There was so much drama through it all, not limited the guild. Just in general, the whole online chatroom experience. It felt like being on an emotional rollercoaster most of the time. Chunks of that drama came from me as that was my emotional outlet at the time and I had a lot of rage in those days. As draining as it all was, there were people who stuck by me through thick and thin, and those relationships form the backbone of my belief in people being good and reliable.
The whole online experience really messed with my sleep. I'd regularly stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning on school nights. My mother would often catch me awake and I'd lie and say I was going to sleep in a few minutes. The lack of sleep meant I napped on the train instead of reading for pleasure..a trend that never reversed itself. I began to sleep through some of my classes, but only the ones I knew I could get away with it and where my grades wouldn't slip for it. There was an odd dichotomy to my life with my social life at school and my evening social life.
Returning to the original point...my life when I was young was about obedience to my parents. Social connection is probably the only thing I ever really cared about...and it's the thing I find most elusive. I mentioned my high school friends and my chatroom days because those were my first real attempts at connection. Both were troubled. The next social group came at the end of high school and was dominated by Joey, my childhood friends who now wanted to subjugate me and demean me for his own exaltation, and god the drama from that circle is just absurd. What followed was an iterating group of friends through college with me in charge that was stable and peaceful, punctuated by the occasional schism. After that, you're in the larp days. The larp days didn't last long, but evolved into a smaller social circle with me in charge that was pretty stable which ended with the relationship with Andrea and the Mage larp. After that you're in the Hitmouse and warcraft days. These are the chapters of my social life, and it's all defined by failed relationships.
But the core point is this...I never really wanted anything in my life besides human connections. College was the first time I wanted something, and not initially. In high school I avoided the topic of college. I knew I was going to go because my parents didn't even give me a choice, but the idea of choosing a college...based on what criteria? If I have no desire to go, how could I even begin to make such a decision. And when I did go it was because I got bored of a deadend job, and then choose a school to follow Jessie. After she left I saw no reason to leave, but my mind opened to learning and I pushed myself because I wanted to. After that, Hitmouse is the most ambition or desire I have displayed.
I lack a reason to do things in life. Odds are most of what motivates me these days is to not be in pain. Any of the things I really desire, I've been driven away from after so many painful experiences. And yet it's also core to my personality to seek to challenge myself...but how I do so seems to be unimportant to me.
I feel like I'm beating around the bush, getting lost in my own thoughts and trying to say 5 different things. More towards an earlier point...what do I want from my therapist, what is his role...I'm also asking myself, what do I want to accomplish in therapy? And right now it's occuring to me there's a break in logic, like there's two different tracks of thinking. I went into therapy because I felt I'd trapped myself and couldn't get out, but the driving force was I was in pain and didn't know how not to be. But right now I'm talking about a reason for life, something to care about. And if I ask myself what do I want to do with my life, what do I want to accomplish, I don't see therapy as part of that process. I'm seeing therapy as an internal process and my life as an external process, like one doesn't help with the other. And if I sit with that a moment I can feel a return to an older me, the one my parents instilled, the one who suppresses emotions because they get in the way of getting things done.
And at this point I think I've talked myself in circles where I have no clue what I'm even talking about anymore. Don't think I've ever managed that before.