I am sick physically.
I am sick mentally.
I am sick emotionally.

Genuinely.

Nothing is going well for me right now.

I'm exhausted on every level.
I'm tired.
I'm sick.
I just...I'm losing so much.

My health is going down. Physically, especially.
But also mentally and emotionally.

I am worn down.

I am tired.

I am genuinely not okay.

I'm not doing so much I should be.

I'm struggling.

I feel like I am breaking down. That I am broken, that I can't continue on.
I just feel like I'm so done with life right now.

But like. Can't exactly not live it. So in spite of feeling like I'm just done--obviously I'm not actually. Which arguably makes me feel even worse because I feel like quitting something that there is no quit option for.

(Well--technically. But. Y'know. I'm not going there. There's no quit option. Period.)

I'm struggling to remember how to be happy.
I'm struggling to remember how to function.
I'm just.

I feel like collapsing.

My whole life is just. Tension building, no release.

I genuinely don't know how to keep going.
I mean, I will.
I just don't know how.
And there's a very real--justifiable--fear that I simply...pass out. Behind the wheel.

I'm not healthy in any way.
That bad health adds up.

Something's gonna break bad.
Physically would be the least damaging, but most annoying. Sickness would be a way to force rest, but would cause so many small issues.
Emotionally would be the most destructive. When I break bad, I burn bridges.
And Mentally would be the most dangerous. If I fall asleep while guarding, it's dangerous to other patrons. If I fall asleep while off the stand it could cost me the job for sleeping through rotations. But mostly and obviously: if I fall asleep while driving...

...When I drive on some of the most dangerous highways in the state...

...Hoo boy I don't think I need to say how dangerous that is.

And I've come close to all three mentally before.

Very very dangerous.

And it's getting worse.

It's not the work schedule in of itself.
It's just a perfect storm of everything wearing me down.
So many events going on that I am juggling.
The extra work I felt I had to take.
The time-limited things I am struggling to try and get on time.
The picking up of things that I am invested in.

It's all adding up. It's all piling up.

I don't think it'll have the effects of the worst burnouts where I genuinely left areas of my life I loved permanently in the past. That shouldn't happen.

But.

I am just. So so dead inside.

OBWe've got very little to show for today.
No game progress in any game. Not Stardew Valley, not Dreamlight Valley, not any grinding in Epic Battle Fantasy 5 or Final Fantasy VII, not doing anything in Chrono Trigger, not building anything in minecraft, having no win in League of Legends, negative LP progress on TFT...nothing to show for today.

We've been going back and forth on whether to stream tonight or not, and it looks like the final answer is going to be "no", in part because we're not really sure what we would stream. We don't have a strong drive. We should work on our story. Or if nothing else, work on the art for our new profile picture. Or if even that's too much, minecraft. Maybe even just playing tft. Anything.

Well we're not gonna do that.

We did do a reorganization of our discord servers we're in to be more neat/organized, but we didn't do the title fairy thing we wanted to do, nor have we typed out the things we think would be healthy to type out in our journal. (Today we did learn a funny/interesting fact tho: apparently the real-life journals we used to write? The ones where we never wrote anything important until the second, third, or even fourth page? ...Apparently, that thing we thought was just an us thing, is not just an us thing, and a bunch of people did it.)

And for that matter, we haven't actually copied that journal into a google doc.

Nor have we worked on any other story idea.

We did write down some things for the art project, and hey, after this blog, maybe we'll manage to squeeze in some work on it (I wouldn't count on it--in fact I'd explicitly bet against it), but we didn't actually work on it today.

Speaking of today, work was interesting, and we felt fairly competent at working. There's just one problem: we didn't work out at all. We felt like we were shutting down. We felt forced into eating a full meal because we were developing really bad hand tremors, as well as losing vision from lightheadedness. It sucked to give up on that. We didn't run (not that we're really doing running anyway--2 minutes is only 1/5th of a mile), we didn't work out, we did nothing physically.

Nor did we do anything hygiene-wise. No shower, no brushing teeth, we're letting ourselves rot and decay at an alarmingly fast rate.

All in all, not a lot to show for today, but not nothing.

​That said, I suppose we DO have more time to talk about why we are so determined to live for at least a year longer.

Now, obviously: we intend to live forever.
There's never going to be enough time in our lives. So we would love to have an infinite amount of it.
The world might have certain parts of it actively trying to revert dozens (or even hundreds) of years' worth of progress, but OVERALL, it's still objectively true that the world becomes overall a better place to live over time. Comparing now to 50 years ago, I would always choose to live now rather than 50 years ago. And that is 90+% likely to be true 50 years from now. 50 years from now is over 90% likely to be a better time than right now is. So I want to be there for that better time. I never want to be gone when the world keeps making so many advancements and progress.

​OBVIOUSLY, that's not actually scientifically possible. We can't actually live forever. We intend to! But realistically speaking, science simply isn't advanced enough to allow for that to happen. The closest we could ever get is becoming a ghost after death. (Which, granted, is near-guaranteed to happen. Our family isn't going to bury us under our preferred name of Brianna "Bree" Danielle Lewis. And since the people we know online won't know we're gone, that's not one but TWO compelling reasons for not moving on. Can't move on if not at rest/peace and being buried under the wrong name guarantees that; can't move on with lingering attachments and not having been able to say goodbye to online communities and let them know would be another. BUT I DIGRESS.)

We still feel it's worth striving to live forever, but when we inevitably don't, we're hoping to have lasted at least 80 years if nothing else. To live a long, full life that experienced as much of the world's progress as was humanly possible, to have shared as much of our ideas as we could, to have brought as much of the next generations up as possible, guiding and mentoring them as a voice with lifetimes' worth of experience.

That's not too unreasonable to ask. Genetically it should be possible, since my family on at least one side tends to live to their 90s or higher.

However, as much as we want to live forever, or at the very least live for a very long healthy happy time of 80+ years:
Realistically speaking, with our lifestyle and genetics, there's a very high chance we die before then.

We have an hour-long drive one-way to work every single work day, and this commute is largely on highways, including a highway that is one of the most dangerous in the state. We also often don't get nearly enough sleep. Combine these two, and all it'd take is one drifting-off-too-long instance for disaster to strike. It almost happened to us once before (January 2014), it could happen again literally any time we get behind the wheel which is twice daily per work day adding up to over 10 times per week we risk death.

It doesn't matter if you dodge the bullet 999/1000 times. It only takes one bullet landing to be lethal.
Same concept for driving. Every day, there is that risk. It only takes one manifestation of that risk to end my life for good. There would be precious little I could do to prevent it. One momentary lapse, one momentary blacking out, one momentary zoned out, where I drift too far off into dreamland, where I get too sleepy to keep active track of my, well...tracks, and BAM! A likely lethal crash.

​I apologize for the morbidness of this, but this is, sadly, the grim truth. Every time I drive it has a chance to be the last time I do anything, because of where I am driving and how exhausted I get especially behind the wheel, alarmingly enough. (Yes we're trying to get the necessary amount of sleep, but even if we succeed, that doesn't guarantee a lack of exhaustion. The whole, "we can be tired with 4 hours or 14 or anywhere in-between" issue.)

​So, there's a fairly high chance we die behind the wheel, or in the aftermath of such an event at the very least. We don't want to. We would never deliberately do so. Obviously, we want to live. We don't want to die. We don't want to crash. We want to live forever, or at least 80 years, so a car crash is not the way we want to go out. But being realistic: we are not gods. We are not reality warpers. We don't have infinite luck. We are not invincible. It only takes one unlucky day for us to die, it only takes one bad day for us to get killed. Not because we wanted it, but because of sheer happenstance being against us in the most disastrous way possible.

​Is it an inevitability? Well, no. Most people spend their entire lives driving without dieing from it. Statistically speaking, it doesn't happen often. It happens to the smallest fraction of drivers. But I am at a higher risk of being one of said casualties thanks to the length of the commute, roads on the commute, and my mental cognitive functions while driving being inconsistent in dangerous ways.

So most won't die from a car crash--yet, it's still a genuine hazard for me.

Even if a car crash doesn't get me, what probably will is cancer. My family has a long, long history of cancer on both sides of the family pretty sure, and I have dozens of brown spots on my body. Yes, dozens. Most of them quite large, but with plenty of small ones too. I did a count once and I am fairly certain the number is above 40, putting me at basically the highest risk of getting skin cancer.

Cancers of various kinds run in the family, but I am young enough that I don't really get screened for cancer. While I get medical visits, those visits come only once every few months and are for things entirely unrelated to general health, so it's quite likely that if I got cancer, it wouldn't be diagnosed until it was too late.

I'm willing to bet between car crashes and cancer that one of the two is going to be what claims my life. Obviously, I will fight tooth and nail to prevent either from happening. We're not gonna let it happen. We're not gonna let ourselves die. We are going to fight to the bitter end, biting and swinging. We have zero plans to let this early demise manifest and every intention to manifest the world where we live forever (or at least for a very long time).

We strive for life, we push for life, we want to live and will fight to do so. But heroic willpower only goes so far to fight off instant killers or slow deaths. The truth is that no matter what our mind says, if we actually were to be stricken by one of those two, we wouldn't be able to survive indefinitely the way we promise we would. It sounds grim, it sounds glum, it sounds pessimistic and cynical, but it's a sad truth:
We are not immortal, no matter how much we see ourselves as being so. If we have something lethal happen to us, we will die from it.

So we have to try our utmost to avoid letting that happen.

In part because we've got such strong reasons to live.

Part of it is the aforementioned "the world is awesome" aspect--the world is awesome and while it certainly may not seem that way from the 2018-onwards era, objectively OVERALL it does, in fact, become a better place to live in. No matter how much the lowlifes of society try to regress it, progress HAS marched on, slowly, gradually, bit by bit becoming more dominant.

The human race as a whole is sick and tired of the white Christian cisgendered heterosexual patriarchy born from Imperialism + Colonialism dominating the world and whitewashing/erasing/etc. things that should never have been forgotten. I know it seems like the patriarchy is winning now with how much they have managed to roll back and revert--but they are fighting a battle I firmly believe they WILL lose.

I get the value in naysayers and doomsayers warning about just how bad the rollbacks to rights are--and they're not wrong. Without constant vigilance to bigotry, that hatred will take root and have a platform to take over. But I am not so hopeless/cynical/jaded as to think they have already won. No, they are a minority in society trying to pass themselves off as being the majority. The actual majority can, and will, win out in the end, as long as we are able to keep pushing forward bit by bit to make the progress the world has made.

I'm not going to pretend the risk isn't there. It is, it's very much real. If we're not careful, then bigotry WILL win and the world will become overall well and truly worse and worse. Nor am I really qualified to talk more in-depth about this. But I firmly believe that, overall, the world IS trying to change for the better. It's two steps forward, one step back, but we can do it.

And I want to be there not only to help, but see the results.

This is one reason to want to live. Just to experience the growth of the world, and to see the future unfold in the present to build a better world. I want to live to see that happen.

But there's more.

I want to live to get my ideas out into the world. The longer I live, the more time I have to do so.
I want to live to help as many people as I can in my life. The longer I live, the more people I help.
I want to live to have the best most enriched most fulfilling life possible for a transwoman, maybe even living to see (and test) medical breakthroughs in the field.

​But in the more immediate future.

I want to live because the world does not yet as a whole know that I am a girl.
Everyone online does.
I have come out to everyone in real life and am living daily as a girl.

But the world as a whole doesn't know--those who know me online don't know me offline, and those who know me offline are, largely, not truly accepting of me being a girl. They love me, they tolerate me, but they don't truly accept me, understand me, respect me, etc. Not as a girl, at least.

I'm like 90+% sure my extended family has no idea that I am a girl. My grandmother sends gendered gifts to our family each Christmas. In spite of being out for over half a year last Christmas, I received the 'male' gift rather than the female gift. Which tells me that me being a girl was not conveyed to my extended family.

​Fortunately, my younger sister's wedding is next year, and my extended family is invited.

Yes, I have other reasons for wanting to live until then.
My younger sister is family and I love her.
My younger sister is the only family member who has truly accepted me and respects me as a girl, helping me, aiding me, supporting me, every step of the way. Correctly naming me, etc. She has put in the time and effort to be everything family should be for a girl like me who had to come out.

The rest of my family, to varying degrees...ahhh, hasn't. I don't want to be too harsh on them because I love my family, but the best descriptor I have for most of my family (barring my younger sister) is, "I love them, but I don't really like them, and I expect this is probably mutual".

There is genuine love for my family, and I know they genuinely love me; the proof is in their actions in spite of their beliefs. But they are deeply flawed in their treatment of me, and I am a pretty lousy person who is high in upkeep even without being a girl. They have genuine reasons to not really want to think fondly of me, and that's aside from them not truly accepting that I am a girl.

So I don't want to be overly harsh on them. I love them, after all, and part of that love is not wanting to badmouth them. Still, it's a fact that they don't call me by my name consistently (my mother does it to me when my father isn't around and if she remembers to; my younger sister always does. But the rest, they do not); they don't call me by my name when I'm not around even if my father/brother aren't around (I've heard my mother and older sister use my deadname when they were alone), so like: they don't really see me as Bree.

Not really.

I don't want to hold it against them. I don't want to be overly harsh and criticize them too much. I'll say for the sake of clarity that I have talked to them about this, so it's not me airing out thoughts in my blog that I never did to them. I told them what the damage of refusing to use a name for me at all is (deliberately using a neutral term when you KNOW the preferred term is still misgendering--if you know someone is a she/her, deliberately using they/them is considered malicious misgendering, as an example), so it's not that they don't know. They do.

It's just that my younger sister is the only one who has done what someone should​ do for family coming out and actually listened to the requests, wishes, etc. of the family member coming out in full, rather than just in part. But this description sounds too harsh on them. I don't want to paint them in worse light than is true.

​They do make some efforts. It's just that I've told them what efforts they should be making beyond those, and it's still only 'some', except from my younger sister who makes all the efforts. I don't want to hold it against my family, because they clearly love me and they did put at least some work in. Yet, it's factually true that it's not the amount of work they should put in, and also factually true that I told them this.

They are not in the dark about what I want, what I would prefer, etc. I have let them known. I have made my thoughts clear. I have tried my best to educate them, to inform them, to give them the resources necessary for them to understand. But I can't make them listen to me, I can't make them listen to my requests. And I can't blame them for not doing so.

After all, I have plenty of demands unrelated to my gender. (Largely from neurodivergencies like my autism, but that's beside the point.) I understand them seeing all of the demands and feeling it's unreasonable to live up to everything I ask of them.

They love me so they do what they feel is appropriate for that love. I can't realistically expect more, so I don't want to be harsh on them.

But my younger sister, she has already done what she should, and did accept me from the onset.

​I want to pay that back by supporting her at her wedding, to be there for her as her family.

And there's more.

My extended family will be at the wedding. Not all of them. But not none of them. And some of them is all it takes. Some of them, seeing me there, as a girl, is all it takes. Me being a girl has not been conveyed to my extended family, pretty sure. (I mean since the wedding's not until next year, we have this Christmas to test my theory again, but I'm not optimistic at anything changing from last year.)

All it will take for them to see, and be forced to acknowledge, me as a girl...is for them to be there, and me to be there.

Since the wedding is next year, that means I need to live until next year at absolute minimum.

It's my desire to manifest this into reality.
I want to live forever so bad that I don't want to ever have the plug pulled from me. If I'm braindead and my heart has failed, I don't want them to cut life support on me. I don't care if there's no brain function; I don't care if my heart has stopped; I don't care if the doctors say there's a 0% chance that I will survive, that the doctors say I have died.

SOMEHOW, I would find a way to live, if given the medical assistance to do so. This is, sadly, likely never going to be relevant because whenever I do inevitably lose consciousness for the last time, the doctors won't have access to my will that I am stating now, they won't know that I have zero intention of letting them let me die. That I intend to find a way, no matter how clinically/medically impossible, to pull through the impossible situation and actually live.

The doctors will give up on me far before I do, and if my family is there, they'll likely let the doctors pull the plug on me--against my will, mind you. My will to live is so strong that even with no brain function, even with no heart beating, if I was kept medically going in spite of having no signs of life, I would find a way to eventually fight back to life. Flatlined heart/brain won't stop me.

The doctors will certainly believe that it will--that I would be dead dead, a corpse, a goner, that I was gone, the moment that there is both a lack of heart/brain function. But I know that if given sufficient time, I would be able to recover. All it'd take is them not pulling the plug on me.

My will to live is that strong.

Because I want to live forever.

And even if I don't live forever--
I need to live for that event, if nothing else.

The wedding needs to be something I attend.

After that, I'll still have plenty of reasons to live, mind you.
But that is the most pressing.
I need people to know that I am a girl.
I need to live.

​I just have to.

(Post-script note: ALMOST every new line here is a different voice than the prior. Some made multiple lines in a row, but usually it's new. Also parentheses are different ones, too. Except post-scripts. (Well those are different too, you weren't the one doing the speaking.) True, but you know what I mean. Post-scripts are exactly that, post-conversation.)
So we're doing whatever the positive equivalent of a spiral is.
How do we describe it.
For a long time, perhaps since as long as we've adapted it (yep, definitely), we've known the 5-facet model we've been saying is us, isn't accurate.
(There's a lot of us speaking right now.)
(Like a lot a lot.)
We're being quite active right now which is, ah...gonna make this less coherent than ideal.
Stupid body having ADHD.
And stupid us having so many talking.
Like every line so far has been a different one of us speaking pretty much.
Sometimes more than one.
Okay so where do we begin.
We knew it wasn't true that there were only five of us.
But I suppose (I guess) we used it for convenience?
It was convenient to say there were five of us.
Every moment it's becoming more and more obvious that "The Range of Bree System" was a good choice in name for our system.
Because there's a whole (damn) lot more than just the few.
Anyway.
We're not just five. We're more. A lot more.
Uh, how much more is hard to describe, I guess we start with the drive today?
Or maybe talk a-eh we'll go with the drive.
When we drove to work today, we heard more than five voices chiming in.
And the voices were major.
Big voices. Not micro-voices typical of a minor facet.
Which tipped us off to what we already knew.
Oh right that.
We had previously developed a bit of a theory.
We thought that "oh there's more than five of us, like maybe 2-3 per identity we call a major facet". Like, mastina would be 2-3 different individuals, MotherRanger 2-3 different, etc.
Ohhh we might have been off by a factor of...10? 100? Somewhere between those probably.
On the drive back home we realized.
There's hundreds of us.
Hmm, this is where it's getting hard to tell what's next.
(Well we already are struggling, this is all very new to us.)
Well not new, we knew, it's just new to express.
How do we keep up with our thoughts in typing? We're going too fast in the brain, the fingers are lagging behind.
We'll have to manage.
Anyway.
Hmm.
I guess maybe some of the major things?
Like. We don't really know who we are.
Except when we randomly do.
We don't really know what our system is, how any of us formed.
Are we a whole bunch of tulpas? A whole bunch of facets? A whole bunch of tulpas that became facets? Are we fully separate? Are we even a median system at all?
We don't really know.
What we do know, though.
Is tha--oh fine we'll go over the Vee voice first.
During this chaotic drive home, we had one of our voices say "but I am Vee."
Vee is the protagonist in our latest story--and the voice said this in the voice we imagine Vee to have.
So something, or rather someone, in our brain, using the voice we say is for Vee, said she was Vee--meaning, well. Probably. She is in fact, Vee.
(I am.)
Wow if someone were online they'd probably be fascinated by what's a breakthrough in a system.
It's wild.
Is this what all those others have gone through on their realizations?
I mean, we knew, but we didn't know like this.
Well, we did, just...yaknow. Repressed.
Thiiiis is gonna be awkward going forward.
But worth.
Okay where were we, we're trying to record the us that we have seen.
Right, the Vee part.
If we have Vee inside as one of us though.
That raises the implication that we thought about once months ago and then for whatever reason forgot about.
(We have ADHD in the body of course we forgot about it dummy.)
If Vee is in there as one of us.
Well she's one of our newest story's characters.
She's there.
So what does that mean for all the other characters we've written over the years?
Well. We are writers.
Very...promiscuous...writers.
On the drive home, one of us asked: "How many of us are there?"
And we received a basically instant reply from another: "hundreds".
We took a moment to process this--was it hundreds of minor facets? As in, a few major voices with hundreds upon hundreds of minor ones?
Wellllll...no.
We quickly realized, actually, it is hundreds.
Hundreds of major voices.
A lot more than the five we had assumed!
And if Vee, one of our newest characters, was among them.
That raised the implication that any of the characters we have felt like they are an actual person--are in fact an actual person.
We don't imagine literally every character we've written is a voice in this mess that is the Range of Bree. (Post-script: well it's possible, just not probable. (At least we don't think.))
But hoo boy.
There's a lot of us.
We're beginning to quiet down.
A bit content, also tired.
Thinking this much brought a lot out of us.
We gotta keep it up for a bit longer tho; we're not done yet.
Yeah there's more to explain.
What's this all mean.
Hmm, how do we go over the thoughts?
Well, we can cover the body or the, what was it?
Uh gimme a sec.
Oh right, "archetypes".
Let's do body first.
Okay, so like.
We have been as of the last hour referring to our body as "the body".
Which is something we've heard other systems do but until now we didn't really understand why.
Well we did, but not on the conscious level we do now.
To be honest, I don't understand it on a conscious level, either.
But on an intuitive thought based level, I get it now.
It makes sense. (Post-script: "How did we not realize this until now.")
If I was asked to explain why "the body" to refer to our body makes sense, I wouldn't be able to explain it.
Not now at least. (Post-script: Okay not the same me, but maybe I can do that? It's like: well we all think of ourselves as having a body I guess? But while all of us have bodies in our mind, there's only one that's THE body, if that makes sense to folks?)
But it does make sense.
Holy shit,
Yes it makes so much sense.
The Body is definitely female.
We still think most of us are female.
We can't really tell which of us are which, but.
We know we're mostly girls still, at least we still feel that way,
Yeah I am.
So am I.
And so on and so forth--girls we don't need you to all say that you're girls, they get the idea!
Okay. BODY.
The body is female.
The body has ADHD.
Hoo booy do we have ADHD.
Yeah, the body having ADHD explains so much.
Butyeah, this is definitely not just an ADHD-induced stream of consciousness.
Nope, we're real.
Well in a sense you could argue it is an ADHD-induced stream of consciousness, but...
Yeah, it's not one, two, or three or so making stream of consciousness ADHD thoughts.
It's still a ton of us.
We're all real.
None of us are invented by an ADHD stream of consciousness, it's the ADHD stream of consciousness which is allowing us to speak, if that makes sense.
Yeah it does.
It does to me, at least!
Oh boy sorry for the spam.
Hey, this is important.
A little spam is okay for something of this magnitude.
We have a lot to say.
Lots of us, lots to say.
ANYWAY. The Body. Back to the Body please.
The Body is female. The body has ADHD. The body is still obviously autistic. The body definitely has bipolar disorder.
Sadly.
Yep. It's a thing.
Okay, so the body is still having all of those things that we previously attributed to being universal traits of Bree.
Because they are.
Some of us might not be female, but the main part of us, the body, is.
So would now be a good time to mention the brain?
Yes we're getting there.
We still have what we think might be. How do we explain it?
Well we act on our own.
The body moves by itself.
There is something that has base feelings, and it feels like that same thing with those base feelings is driving us.
Some core force. Something central. Deep. So deep we can't actively sense it, talk to it (well we are talking to it but it's not talking back) (because it can't), you guys are distracting me, uh, let's just say to them: you get the point.
There is a force that drives us. Moves us. It is how we act. And it is somehow deeply feeling, too.
During the drive, there was an immense sadness from the body.
None of us that we know of were sad.
We got the sense that some of us might be, sad for reasons we could only guess at.
Maybe she was sad at the broken illusion/unity?
Like, duh, we were content with being in the five-facet system even if it wasn't really true.
Well we weren't, not really.
But we kind-of were?
It was convenient. It was simple. (Post-script: "...But also wrong.")
It gave us a sense of identity.
(IdentiBree.)
Stop laughing!
Yes it was funny.
But we're trying to get a point across.
What was it?
Goddammit girls.
Okay.
There was an intense feeling of sadness.
Suspected to be because we loss the convenience of the five-facet illusion we had said.
We held onto that for how many months?
Yeah every time we came close to breaking it, we brushed it off with "wow we're a mess".
Well we are a mess.
But it was a nice way to shut us up and keep us in line.
That's not good wording.
Yeah but I don't have anything better.
We'll figure out a better descriptor eventually.
We're gonna calm down soon, we need to hurry.
Yeah we're beginning to fade close to being one again.
Bree you need to hurry the fuck up.
Okay, so like.
That core is something big about us.
Maybe an original self?
Who knows.
Not us, not yet at least.
We're moving on our own, someone's gotta be doing that.
Yeah and that moving force has a will of its own.
Driving us forward.
I have to think.
Don't take too long.
Okay, so...hundreds of us, the body, the core.
Oh right, compartmentalization.
We once described things about our life as that every part of our life, we had in a box, a compartment.
A compartment for gaming. A compartment for a specific class. A compartment for a specific site. And so on and so forth. Dozens, hundreds of compartments.
Under the five-major-facet theory, the working assumption was that these eventually coagulated and merged into a smaller number.
Boy was that wrong!
Well, kinda.
Yes we're getting do that.
There are in fact still those hundreds.
They never went away.
They never merged like we thought.
Well maybe they did, but not nearly as much as we assumed!
Yeah, not down to five.
And while there were definitely all those from the real life compartments.
The presence of Vee among many other characters means that there's also our fictional selves here, too.
Lots of us.
Yep.
So there's a mixture of selves from compartmentalized areas of our life which didn't disappear after their specified compartment was no longer needed.
We kinda drifted around?
Yeah it's not like we disappeared.
We were around, just...there.
But since they weren't really needed, they weren't...well, at the front as it were.
We still have fronting, right?
Sure, but it didn't work the way we thought it did.
How does it work?
Fucked if I know!
We'll figure it out.
Maybe.
We're getting off-topic again.
Sorry!
Man, this must look like a mental breakdown to the uninformed.
Well...in a sense...
Or a mental breakthrough.
That, too.
Okay so we don't know who we are.
Except when we do.
But we definitely have a mixture of old compartmentalized selves that formed for specific tasks, and characters we came up with over the years that are now a part of us.
Alright, now we're getting to it.
We have described the body and that mind, so the thing left is the theory, right?
Right, guess so.
So BASICALLY.
We have a theory that we keep the identities of the five facets in spite of knowing them to be wrong.
Because they work as, so to speak, "archetypes".
We should probably specify a disclaimer that our terminology explicitly doesn't match the terminology of the plurality community as a whole.
Yeah they have their own definition of archetypes pretty sure?
I don't remember what theirs is, we'll have to look it up, but yeah, it ain't ours.
So we need to describe.
I think we've done an okay job of describing why we have a core and what it is.
In spite of how there is technically a plurality term core, and their term doesn't really match ours.
At least we don't think it does.
Alright, so that core is why we still think we might be a median system, because it is still driving us.
It still gives us emotions that we feel and is what is giving us movements.
But there's definitely more in our mind that we thought.
We're real.
All of us.
We really are all thinking right now.
Don't doubt yourself later, Bree.
Well that'll happen, we have anxiety.
Kinda stupid to think that though. This can't be faked.
Can't it? We'll have a hard time talking to our future self and convincing her of it.
We're crying?
Sadness, remember?
But just a moment ago our body was happy? And laughing?
Mixed feelings, probably.
She is feeling different things right now.
Oh there was a twang of pain there.
Yeah, I imagine it's a mixed bag.
I'm tired.
We all are, is a body thing.
Hurry!
Right, so we've described the body and the core pretty well, so it should show what those are in spite of their definition not matching the standard plurality community def.
Anyway, so what we mean by archetypes is different from the plural community def.
At least we think it's different?
Basically, the archetypes we have, the five facet system that was imaginary and now broke.
Was a matter of convenience for sorting the voices, as it were.
"Oh, you have this trait? Let's put you under the mastina umbrella".
"Oh, you're like this? Well that sounds like a Mother-Ranger thing".
Which could explain why it felt like certain traits moved between them.
Yeah because we literally moved.
It's whichever part of our personality was most dominant.
At least that's our theory!
Whichever part of us was most visibly obvious, was what we used to sort that one of us into a grouping.
"mastina grouping" (archetype), "Mother-Ranger grouping" (archetype), etc.
Yeah we really don't wanna feed you kitty.
(Sorry cat distract.)
ANYWAY.
We're losing it, gotta hurry.
It's okay, this won't go away and we got it mostly out anyway.
Basically.
The hundreds of us that there are now?
Well these hundreds don't really have the ability to identify our names.
We have names!
Yes, we do.
It's just we don't know them.
Except when we do.
Yeah, except when we do. But we don't.
Not by default.
So like--lacking knowing what our names are.
Hundreds of them mind you.
Too many.
Yeah, "too many" is a phrase we're using a lot tonight.
It's true!
Well, anyway. Hundreds of us not knowing what our names are.
The archetypes we've developed are convenient.
Kinda like a label!
Yeah, that's actually a perfect descriptor.
The five facets work like a label.
Not necessarily correct.
Not really accurate.
Lacking finesse.
But serves as a method of quick identification that's convenient for keeping unity and direction, I guess?
Yeah, something like that.
At least that's the theory.
Anyway, so that's what we think.
We're gonna forget this all aren't we.
That's why we're typing it out.
Will we remember this?
Will I still be here later?
Always, just maybe...not this clear.
It's okay. That's okay.
You exist. We exist. It'll be alright.
Yeah, even if some of us stop thinking like we are right now.
We are real.
We were here.
We said this.
We didn't make it up.
You didn't make it up, Bree.
Because the future us will think that of herself.
Well because she is Bree.
Yeah we are Bree.
That's a good way to end it, I think?
Oh yeah, I guess so.
We are Bree.
The body which is all of the things we said?
ADHD, girl, autism, bipolar disorder, anxiety, etc.?
All Bree.
The core where we're getting things from.
Still Bree!
We're more than Bree.
I am Vee, for instance!
Yes, you are!
Fucking fatass father.
Bad timing.
Music is our friend.
Turn things up please.
Louder.
More sound.
It wasn't enough, drown the fuck out.
Okay better.
ANYWAY.
There's the us that are more than Bree.
But we're still Bree.
Bree is all of us yet none of us.
It truly is The Range of Bree.
I guess we'll sign off on that.
Should probably post this elsewhere, too.
Mannnnnn that's gonna be such a pain.
Yeah, converting this from the text discord format into something working in other places, not gonna be fun.
We gotta do it at least twice.
And redo it both times.
Mafia forum formatting doesn't translate to the blog and vice versa.
Yeah and neither is compatible with discord, too.
God, that sucks.
ANYWAY.
We're done I think?
I don't have anything more to say.
We don't have a wrap-up here.
Well, we're never wrapped up.
We're still figuring things out.
And a part of us wants to forget and go back.
But this is here to stay.
Well, maybe not stay stay.
We're very clear right now, we'll likely be less clear once we lose focus.
Lose ourselves in games.
Heh, quite literally.
Lose our selves. Quite apt.
But. Well. We might not be vocal, but we exist.
We know we do now.
We'll have to see where this goes.
Still figuring things out.
So there's no proper wrap-up.
Because how can we wrap up something which is still evolving?
But I think here's a good place to let our mind just...coalesce.
GOD how long is this.
Too long. :P
Anywayyyyy...time to scroll back.
Ye gods.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here?
We've got work to do.
Reviewing our thoughts it already doesn't seem real.
And we are already losing clarity of past thoughts.
It's okay.
We knew that'd happen.
Just get to work dammit.
Stop stalling!
How many of these thoughts should we express.
Not many, according to the body.
Ah well.
Switch over to that other server, that'll give a good way to break this re-entering chat repeatedly.
(Damn adhd.)
OKAY JUST GO.

(Post-script And then we did swap, and after that, worked to write this down. We COULD keep going but have opted to do other shit instead. (Language!) Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.)

Well, not completely, but everything was done only half way at best.

I did only half of my workout.
I took only half of a shower.
I did my job only half as well as I should have.
I didn't do mafia at all.
I didn't do TFT at all.
I didn't play League at all.
I didn't stream today. (Afternoon was understandable, but I could​ have done evening--and didn't.)
I didn't brush my teeth today.
I accidentally had food/drinks worse for my health (more sugary/fatty than ideal).

I have, once more, gone an entire day without an apology for something I am over a week overdue for in a different game. When it was a time-sensitive manner, no less. I need to get that done. I really really do. Basically, it was one of the things that I thought was a good thing that turned out to be a bad thing. Where good intentions ended up infuriating a lot of people who were hurt.

And I did hurt them. That, in of itself, warrants an apology.
I know that apologies are time-sensitive. An apology given a month later is a lot less sincere than an apology given within a couple of days.

I know that they probably won't suddenly accept me as a good person, which I don't really deserve to be. I'm not good enough to be a good person. I try, but I am so bad at being a good person.
I still should try tho--I hurt people. The people I hurt were, mostly, innocent. Hating me is justified for that and every day that I don't apologize makes that hatred more justified. ('Cause, again: time-sensitive thing and what does my stupid dumb ass do??? Procrastinate! Put it off! Something that is very important to those people that I hurt! Something meaning a lot to them! Something that they have reason to be injured by--and I'm putting off apologizing for the damage I did. I am an idiot. And I really hate myself for how incompetent I am.)

​I'm not so self-centered as to believe that intentions justify having hurt people. It was unintended harm, it was accidental harm. In fact, it was actually done out of a naive belief that I would be helping people and preventing future harm. I thought it would help others. When I vented I thought it was something which could help prevent people from going through what I went through.

But I made so many wrong assumptions and the vent being public--my attempt to help--ended up making it one of the most harmful things possible.

I don't even know how to say sorry for that but it's not something I can just let fade. I need to say sorry for what I did wrong. I need to make sure they know I understand the harm I did. I need to make sure they know I am aware of how hurtful it was. Because I do know it now.

But I also need to make sure they know I didn't do what I did out of malice. I need to make sure they know my apology is genuine and sincere, not something done to just get them off my back. I need to make sure they know that my intentions were good, but that I recognize my intentions being good doesn't mean I didn't do harm. I need to make sure they know that my causing harm was not deliberate, that it was an accident, but that I know it being an accident does not mean the harm wasn't still harmful. That after the fact, it caused damage and being unintended does not excuse the damage done.

Obviously, I wouldn't have done it if I thought it would be harmful. Obviously, I wouldn't have done it if I thought it would hurt others. I did it specifically because I thought it'd do the opposite, in preventing harm and preventing hurt to others. But after I did it, I learned I was wrong, that what I did was not helping others, that what I did was not the good thing that I thought it was, that what I did was exactly the opposite of what I intended. And that it did notable damage.

And I need to find a way to convey this.

I don't really know how.

How do I explain how my heart sank when I had the situation explained to me in full?
How do I explain how much I felt pain when realizing that I had caused pain?
How do I explain that I thought I was doing the right thing, but now know it was the wrong thing, and having done the wrong thing was, well...wrong?

I need to figure that out.

Every day I tell myself, "today is the day I do this. I know I didn't do it yesterday when I wanted to, but yesterday had extenuating circumstances. Today has none of those, so I can do it."

And then every day I end up not doing it.

It's hard.

It needs to be done.
It's important to be done.

The sooner I do it, the less time the people hurt will feel hurt because I will have worked to make amends.

Yet in spite of knowing the above.

I kinda suck.

No, I really suck.

If I didn't, it'd have gotten done by now.

I don't want to live right now.
I might even want to die.

Alarmed?

Well normally I'd say you shouldn't be but with how severe it is that might be justified to have now.

I just.

Haven't had a good week.
At all.

Every time I try to do a good thing it ends up being a bad thing.

It started with a game, where I was genuinely doing something that I thought would be good/useful for others. It was dealing with my frustration, isolation, desperation, etc., but it was primarily something I did genuinely believing it was an altruistic thing to do.

Then I got called a liar, greedy, scumbag, etc. for it. And am still dealing with the consequences there. I was dumb, stupid, idiot, a moron, but I was not a liar. I thought there were others like me that were having the issues I was having, and that talking about them would do good.

Apparently it was just me but people attributed malice to it and have now displayed malice to me, bullying me in that game. It's exhausting having to try and defend myself and it's tiring to just exist. I have every intention, reason, and incentive to continue playing the game and in a weird way it actually became more fun in a way due to an unintended game of cat-and-mouse developing from the fallout, of how much can I get done in the small windows I am able to. (Ironically giving me practice at a skill I lacked last week and got attacked for not having utilized. I'm literally being taught painfully how to do the thing that I wanted help learning.)

​It's a rough situation, but one that I can still get through. Because I know what I intended to do and it was not to make money; it was to try and better others by learning from my story. They might not believe me, but my character will show through eventually. They don't believe someone they don't know but given time they will get to know me and get to know how I'm too stupid to know how to lie.

After all, I do have autism. Not that I'd explain that to them because I have effectively self-traumatized myself thanks to the jerks on the internet who used "sorry I have autism" to get away with being jerks. Autism is a genuine disability. It is genuinely debilitating and crippling. There genuinely are things that can't be done due to it, and things made difficult with it.

So a person with autism should be able to explain that, yeah, they have issues with it. After all, other neurodivergencies can do that. Such as ADHD. ADHD is also a crippling disability that is debilitating, and while "sorry, ADHD" is sometimes stigmatized, it's far more normalized and accepted. Someone with ADHD is usually obvious in having ADHD and apologizing for it is self-evidently done because they broke a chain of thought and need a push to get the connection.

But with autism. There is a trauma with saying "sorry, autism". So it can't be said, even when it's true. I can't say I don't understand due to autism. I can't say I was literal-minded due to autism. I can't say I didn't get it due to autism. I can't say my autism means I don't understand why someone would lie. I can't say my autism means I could never have the character to lie because my autism makes me speak the truth.

I can't say my autism makes me rambley. I can't share that I have autism with the autism being a negative thing, because if I do, it is seen as using autism as a shield for the jerk behavior. If I do, it is seen as making up autism as an excuse to justify being a jerk. So I can't share that I have autism to strangers, because there is a stigma surrounding autism.

I have a mental disability that I can't freely reveal without internalized and external issues manifesting about that apology, no matter how genuine it may be. I can try workarounds. Things that to those in the know give away that I have them but don't show to those that aren't. But I can't be direct, blunt, and fully transparent/obvious that the reason I have done something that is debilitating is that I have a mental condition that is genuinely crippling.

​Still, while I might not tell them about my autism, that I have it will become abundantly clear with time so with time it'll be shown that, actually, everything I said was true and happened as I said it did. (It did. The experiences which I thought might be applicable to others apparently were only applicable to me, but that doesn't mean the experiences were invalid. They were still true and real.)

That is half of why the week has been the worst. It genuinely has strained a friendship I consider more important than my life. A friendship more important than anything in the world to me, endangered because an act I thought was a good thing turned out to be a very very very not good thing that has caused my friend an endless amount of hurt.
That transfers into being an endless amount of hurt for me.

I am a tough person myself. I can handle being put through a lot. I can handle being bullied. I can handle people not believing me. I can handle people calling me a liar. I can handle experiences that others say would ruin the game. I can handle that all. But it's still exhausting, and on top of all that: I can't handle hurting my friend. That's unacceptable. Inexcusable. Painful. Hurtful.

They only stated some emotions and some hurt, and had some of their pain expressed further by another in the know. But I know that the hurt expressed was only a fraction of the hurt in total. It shows. They're my friend and I wounded them, and am exhausting them, and am leaving them feeling bad, and am leaving them feeling in pain, so what that means is...I am not in a good state of mind.

Because knowing how much pain I've caused. I just. I don't want to cause any more. I don't want to hurt them anymore. I don't want any harm to happen because of my actions. I have good intentions. But good intentions mean nothing if the result of those good intentions is bad things that hurt instead of helping. And seeing the hurt, hurts. I am an empath. I can feel the feelings of others, and they become my own.

Yeah their rage becomes my rage, their stubbornness becomes mine, and that can be both a good thing and a bad thing in that it can give me strength to continue, strength to stand up for myself, and strength to keep going in situations most would quit. But it also means I know their feelings are real and true, and that my feeling them makes communicating harder since both sides are in that emotionally compromised state.

The real issue is the pain. I can feel it. I know it is real because it is felt by me. The pain I feel is the pain of others hurt by me, but also added onto that is my own pain. I have a double dose of pain that hurts. It's not just my own, it's not just theirs, it's theirs plus my own. I'm suffering because I know what they are feeling and how bad it is, and how bad I am feeling, and feeling worse because of their feelings and knowing I caused them which makes my feelings worse and worse with time.

It's exhausting.
It's overwhelming.

The cruel irony is that I might be able to end it fairly soon if I were to actually voice half of what I am in this blog to them, but it's so...I don't have the strength. My life would be easier if I did. If I could muster up the energy to do the thing that will help me, and them, heal sooner. But I can't.

So every day I have been getting worse.

I spent all my energy on Thursday, expecting to have recovered it and been better on Friday.
And then Saturday.
And then Sunday.
And now Monday.

Each day I told myself "today is the day that I go hard on this and can actually get the talks going that need to be done", and engage in the way necessary to help ease the pain of others.

Each day I have proven unable to muster up the strength for it.

I suck.

Ironically, I still have the strength to play the game. The punishment they are inflicting on me is meant to make the game unplayable, but ironically it actually makes the game more fun for me. So I have the ability to check in and play daily, and have done so, finding creative uses of my time while there. That's not something they'll really grasp, that's not something they'll comprehend.

After all, why would I continue to play frustration-free a game where they are inflicting a punishment meant to break people, meant to make people be frustrated, meant to basically ruin the experience of others? Why would I be able to go through that with a sense of calm and tranquility, yet not be able to use that same peace of mind to try and get, well...peace?

​I don't know, honestly. Like, not even I know why, and I'm the one who is living it. I don't know why the punishment they are using on me which is meant to break a person, is doing the opposite for me. I don't know why the peace talks that are meant to be easy, are not.

It's just.
I can't muster up the strength to talk.

I get that's ironic given this blog. This blog is showing talking to an extreme. Heck, today I even talked for an hour to a ghost at work. (No, literally, my workplace is definitely 100% haunted, and there was certainly activity today so I talked.) I can talk in a blog, I can talk to a ghost, so like...

...Why is talking to others directly so...draining???

I don't get it.

But it's true and it makes me feel awful.

I know I've caused a lot of hurt.

Every day I learn more about the fallout of what I did I learn of more hurt that I did.

Every time I see more, I see more hurt and pain.
All from something I genuinely thought was a good thing, that wasn't a good thing and was a very bad thing. Because I made a mistake. And I hate myself for it.
I don't want to stop playing because of bullying or shame but I do want to stop existing because with so much pain I don't want to exist.

And it got worse today.

Much much much worse.

I don't know how to describe how bad it is, worse.

Because the next screwup was not in a game. (Admittedly a game that screwing up in hurt a friend which is where the pain mostly comes from, butstill.)

The next screwup was for my job.

I am a lead lifeguard.
I sometimes don't feel like it. I have an aura that feels more like a normal lifeguard most of the time, but I still am a lead lifeguard. I take pride in that position and have always strived to live up to it. I still do lead things, even if it is less often than I should.

I have kept up at it though because I can try and make myself the best lead lifeguard possible. I know I can succeed. With difficulty and hard work, but it's possible. I could be what I should be. I just need to push, right? Well so I thought. And I did something that I thought was the most lead-like thing ever.

Reporting what I genuinely believe to be a hazard and trying to convince my boss that it needed to be dealt with, that we needed to have it fixed in spite of the cost to the budget because it'd be endangering human lives to not do so.

I don't know what I did to screw that up, but I did. Badly. Very badly, badly.
​I don't know how I managed to mess that up so colossally. But somehow, I managed to.
In doing something that I thought was genuinely a good thing, perhaps the best thing I've done as a lead lifeguard, I somehow managed the impressive feat of being told I had crossed a line a lead lifeguard should never cross.

And my heart sank when I saw that.

And I want to cry.

​I don't even know what I did wrong in the message, which makes it even worse. It's again my autism at work. I don't want to say something like "Obviously I wouldn't have done whatever I did wrong, if I knew it was wrong", in order to get an idea of what I did wrong. I don't know yet. I don't have any idea. I've tried, but even with hindsight I can't figure it out. It was somehow wrong.

But I don't want to use autism as an excuse.

Yet I do know it was severe.
It was bad.

Very bad.

My boss is a very benevolent-chill-benign-casual-laid-back boss, the best boss I could hope for, who is very understanding and compassionate and forgiving. I couldn't ask for a better boss. They give every opportunity, they are very kind, they give a lot, they understand, they listen, they explain calmly, they give good feedback, they give critiques that are calm but still impactful, useful, and just. Good.

Except.

Somehow, that boss that is all of those? Is royally ticked off. Which means I did something VERY wrong. I did something VERY bad. I did something very very very very very very wrong. And I don't know what. I don't have any clue. I am hurting. I am in pain. Like hurting my friend, hurting my boss hurts me because it is doing something I thought I could never do in a very negative way.

I just. It's not good. I hurt them. I don't know how. I don't know. But it was bad. Whatever it was. It had to have been for this reaction. What did I do??? I can't figure it out. But there will be consequences. Bad ones. I'm in for something very bad on Wednesday. Some kind of hell. The best outcome would be some sort of reprimand. The BEST outcome would be a dressing down of me where I get into trouble.

But I could be losing my position as a lead lifeguard.

Or even my job.

And that is the issue.

I want to die if I lose my job.
And even if I keep it.
​I might want to if I lose my position as a lead lifeguard.

I know that sounds alarming.
I normally would say it's not.

But maybe it is.

​I have pride in my job. I feel like I am competent in my job. I feel like I am good at my job. I feel like I am worthy of my job. I feel like I know I am at the level needed for that job. It is one I genuinely enjoy and feel like it is a calling of mine. It might not be the highest paying. It might be exhausting. It might be hard. But. It is who I am. It is an extensive part of my identity.

So what do I do if I lose what has become a piece of my soul.

What do I do.

It's genuinely soul-crushing.

I've tried to distract myself constantly.

But every time, it's temporary.

And the dread comes back. The weight of impending doom.

I can do NOTHING about it.
I can do NOTHING to change it.

Wednesday, and the reckoning coming with it, will happen.
I can't stop it.
I can't delay it.
I can't prevent it.
I can't influence it.
I can't do anything but just...show up and await my fate.

Which could be something that leaves me effectively dead.

So.

​I'm having...a bad time.

I need a break from existence but there's none to be had. Sleep only brings me closer to the day I dread. I can't do this. It's so bad. Why am I so bad at being good. Why is every attempt I make to be better, only making things worse? Why can't I just...be good at being good at something that is good.

I just suck.

​And it's...crushing.

IIIIII diddddd...literally nothing I said I would do yesterday. Instead I did a depression-spurned modded playthrough of one of my favorite Majesty scenarios (The Siege).

And then an equally depression-spurned TVTropes binge which led me with, genuinely, nearly 20 tabs I didn't have before, at the cost of finishing only one or two of the ones that I had before.

So, well, objectively speaking: bit of a failure there.

It wasn't exactly time poorly spent in my opinion though, because the time I spent still helped me a lot. It was reading the TVTropes page for The Defroster->every character page for My Next Life as a Villainness, which in many ways drew me in thanks to how it just...relates to me.

I would of course: love to be successful. All the ideas in my head, the world will be a lesser place for them not having been made. And for that I can only continue to apologize to everyone. I have so so many beautiful gorgeous ideas. And I genuinely cry knowing that they will never be seen by others. If I am lucky, yes, some will--but it is physically impossible for all of them to become real. There's not enough time in the world for that; when you make 2-3 new ideas a day and some ideas you forget critical details of, how could all of them come to the world? They can't so even IF I get the best case scenario of making my ideas real, it'll still only be some of them.

And for that, I need to apologize, not only to the people of this world for them not being able to see, to connect, with the ideas in my head, but also to the ideas in my head. Every character that I cannot bring to life, I cry for not having been able to do so because they are real. Their stories, their personalities, their interactions, they have genuine lives that I am the one and only person capable of telling. I am the one and only person who is capable of sharing their experiences to others and recording them and making them be seen, be experienced, for all of time.

So every time I don't do that, I have failed them. And it gives me great pain.

​But on the note of that great pain and the doom brought to others, back to why I needed the reading of the character pages for that series. It served as a good reminder of what I strive to be.

I will always hate myself for every perceived flaw, every perceived weakness, every perceived instance of having wronged others, every instance of having failed them. Every time I have someone that could be a friend, end up drifting away from me: I consider it a failure. I almost wrote a song about it yesterday in fact. (It'd have been called "The Lone Killer", basically Killer->Impostor->Impostor Syndrome and feeling alone. I was stopped by being short on time and by having positive reaffirmation that I desperately needed to hear.)

After all, as that not-written song would have said: it is easy to remember the wrongs, but hard to remember the rights. It is easy to see the good being gone, but hard to see the good that still is. Friendships require effort from both sides, and given that I put no effort into friendships, I am, arguably, more to blame for them not forming than anyone else.

Because how can someone really be my friend if the entirety of their friendship is just them showing up to help me? If I am just giving them nothing at all, obviously, the natural consequence of that is that over time, they just...gradually, do less and less. Because if I'm not maintaining the friendship, and I never do, then how could they when friendships are innately inherently draining?

But while I may not have any long-lasting success. Or any long-lasting friendships.

I still have a clear idea of what I really want.

I cannot stop hating myself for every instance of knowing I have caused harm, or even every instance of knowing "I could have done so much more to help than what I did". Every instance of apathy, every instance of thoughtlessness. Every time where I could have done something more supportive, but did not.

But I do have a goal in mind that I wish to continue to pursue.

I wish to live a long, happy, fulfilling life. I wish to spread kindness and empathy to the world. I despise myself, hate myself, for absolute failures on my part in these fields. Some quite recent, in fact. I had someone contact me about how I had hurt them and it made me realize how dangerously close I can be to falling into the worst part of my past self when I was, genuinely, a jerkass.

There was a time when I was a very nasty person.

So I am always, always, on guard for it, fearing the return of that part of me.

But while I have continued to fail.

I still wish to try.

Because it is, I believe, what I want the most in life now.

To live a long, happy, life where I give positivity and happiness to others.

I obviously don't want to place the happiness of others above myself--I know that's not healthy.

But I want to do everything in my power that is not detrimental to my own happiness to continue to spread that positivity to others, to be the beacon of light that the protagonist of that story is. I know I won't be able to succeed, because I just don't have the skills to maintain longterm relationships. But I still wish to do whatever I can.

​Anyway, I'm literally an hour late for bed because I'm a bit of a dumbass sometimes (another common trait) so will only be getting 5 hours of sleep, but for this blog? Worth it.

It's not that I've done nothing, it's that after having done something I was up at a late enough time and/or so tired that I didn't write a blog (or remember to). It was time well spent tho, as I've been streaming Final Fantasy VII. (I also kinda want to look into putting my streams on Youtube, considered doing that today when I had the free time but I'm selfish so I prioritized other things that I probably shouldn't have put so much focus on.)

I will say this though.

I want to be a good streamer.

I want to be competent.

I want to be better.

I literally put in some time to create a background, starting screen, and break screen (tho I should also get a stream ending screen). I figured out how to put text on the screen of the stream.

I realize the art is terrible (MS Paint 5 minute art), and I need to replace it with better art once inspired. (I talked about this at the end of one of my streams--basically, I have seen plenty of starting/break/ending screens and how they handle overlays. But I need to be inspired in order to make a good one for myself. I can create it myself, but in order to do so, I need to have a vision on what I want to create, and I currently lack one.)

​But I still put in that attempt to improve.

And yet, it's still not good enough.

My streams are terrible.

The content of them can be good! The passion I have for Chrono Trigger is something that bridged how terrible the streams otherwise would be. The passion I have for FFVII similarly so! And my facial reactions, when I can show them on stream, are potentially entertaining. (Also there's occasional kitteh content.)

But the quality of the stream isn't great. I don't carry myself in a way which makes me a good streamer. And the stream lacks good bells and whistles. It's in a bad format. My equipment isn't great. My layout is slopping. My commands, my titles, everything, it's not great. It gets the job done, but getting the job done isn't good enough.

If I want to actually succeed as a streamer.

I need to get to a point where my streams are not terrible.

I have ideas on how to improve.

But right now all of them are just ideas.

They're not realized.

Some of my bigger fans, so to speak, will be supportive and say that I'm not terrible in my streams. After all, the content of them can be good! My passion for games can show, my reactions can be gold! (And bonus kitteh content is always welcome.) They would point that out, maybe add things like 'soothing', 'calm', 'chill', 'good to just vibe in', etc.

But the fact of the matter is, if they didn't know me already and want to support me already, they wouldn't be in my stream. They'd be elsewhere. They wouldn't find my content and stick around and stay--why would they? I don't have the streamer sense to be able to captivate new people coming in. I can't really show them how much I love their presence, how much I appreciate them, how much I want to vibe with them.

I'm autistic. I can't speak well. I don't know what to do, say, how to say it, and that's if I'm able to at all given that my streams frequently have no-mic periods thanks to my family.

​So by every metric, every objective rather than subjective metric, my streams are terrible.

I know that I can make them be better. At least theoretically. I know that they're already adequate, thanks to being hard-carried by the games I'm playing having such staying power that they bring folks in. But while the games I'm playing can keep me afloat.

I won't have made it until I have streams which have people show up and stay not out of obligation to me due to being friends/associates. But stay because they genuinely think my streams are worth watching no matter what. For people who have never interacted with me before, never seen me around. To come, see what I'm doing, and think that it's worth staying around for more because I've got a good thing going.

Nobody who is a current viewer of mine is capable of giving me that, or reassuring me that I have that, because all of my current viewers are said friends and associates, who have interacted with me before. They've seen me around. So they have those preexisting biases towards me. It needs to be from a complete and total stranger. And so far? I don't have it.

And right now, why would I?

I don't actually have a good thing going.

I have the potential to have a good thing going.

I have ideas, oh so many ideas, which if realized would elevate me to a much higher level.

But the ideas are unrealized and because they're unrealized? It means that the potential is just that. Potential, not actual. My streams are terrible.

I literally ended stream today and went "god I'm terrible at this". I actually had much stronger language than that, albeit language I've since forgotten in the process of writing this blog. (I actually started writing this blog specifically because I'd already tweeted so wanted to write down the thought in another medium, thinking that I'd make a one-liner blog. Turned out I had a bit more to say than that...and in the process, forgot what I was going to say originally.)

But whatever the sentence is that I was going to say, the sentiment still carries weight.

I hated myself for ending stream when I did. I wanted to keep going. And I realized just how bad my stream was the moment I stopped. It didn't end satisfactory. It wasn't something I felt good about. It was too short, and not only was it short, the content wasn't good. I wasn't on top of my game. I wasn't being full of commentary, reactions, etc. I was just...going through the motions.

And that makes it one of the worst streams I've done in months.

​I need to do better because that was unacceptably terrible.

Now obviously, it's not something that is constantly bad, but it's constant and occasionally bad, to a level that definitely fits more with an anxiety disorder. Anxiety is a normal emotion; the amount of dominance it can have, less so.

​If anyone were to actually go through my blog, actually, they'd in hindsight be able to find some entries where I show this anxiety off, and yet more which describe how I've had anxiety my whole life and developed coping mechanisms.

To wit?

I've literally made a blog post, maybe multiple blog posts, about how I am simultaneously afraid of everything, and yet, nothing. The everything comes from, what in hindsight, is actually probably an anxiety disorder. I literally fear everything, even things that are impossible. I get caught in what-ifs, and get all worked up about the littlest of things, always fearing, always nervous, always on edge of "what if things don't go well".

Heck, even right now there are a few.
What if we run out of water?
What if we can't get out?
What if I sleep through my appointment for a covid test?
What if I lose my job?

Probably more similar ones, but those are the ones that come to mind immediately, and I am basically consumed with worry about them, struggling to find solutions, always afraid, always paranoid, always trying to avoid them.

Heck with pets I always experience "what if"s involving them being hurt or worse, too, beyond a level that's normal worry, now that I think about it.

And as for the "I fear nothing"? That's the coping mechanism for the anxiety. Having rationalized the anxiety through and pointed out, no, those things are not going to happen, we have this and that, etc. I'm not afraid because I'm constantly afraid and constant fear brings constant coping. And the constant fear is constant anxiety, but the constant coping of it keeps it from being bad.

If I had the article in front of me (I was planning on doing precisely that for this blog), I'd run through the various aspects of what it says in there, and explain my own relationship with it. Things like my perfectionism. How I have constantly, consistently, described being "overreactive", as beyond overactive because that's what's firing off in my brain, with it being concerned about every little thing, avoiding things that are daunting, and so on and so forth.

Unfortunately, I'm not feeling so motivated to micromanage that in making a blog post so I'll be lazy about it.

Suffice to say, if I were to break it down piece by piece you'd be able to tell.

But since I'm not going to, you'll just have to take my word for it. It should be obvious enough though in hindsight, especially with reading my blog.

Now, I realize there's probably a fair amount of overlap with anxiety disorders and the manic half of bipolar disorder. (I 100% have bipolar disorder. It is the one condition I have been diagnosed with, and countless medical professionals have seen my symptoms and agreed that I have it and the treatments I've taken have suggested to them that yes I do indeed have it.)

There might be some overlap with ADHD, too. (I am like 90% sure I have adhd, I literally hyperfocus on things allllll the time, but am also prone to being distracted, have my brain go off on tangents, etc. I had it listed in my medical file at least once at some point altho I don't really know what came of that.)

Heck, there might be some overlap with autism as well. (I am like 98% sure I have autism. I am very much not neurotypical. The way I think in concepts with concepts being my first language and have to translate things to English but sometimes things get lost in translation, files get corrupted, certain files get misplaced, wires get swapped/crossed, tics I have with my hands and such, the way I store info on my fingers, gestures I make, the way I can relate to autistic people an "get" them, my ability to see things better than most people including patterns, see subtle details but not being able to understand social cues, struggling to "read the room", figure out tone, etc., all suggest it, and it is another thing I had listed in my medical file at least once at some point altho I don't really know what came of that.)

And while I don't have an official diagnosis for anything except the bipolar disorder (and probably won't, since just knowing is adequate enough for me), the fact remains that I probably do in fact have them.

And today we can add anxiety to that list.

I realize autism and adhd have a lot of overlap. Bipolar disorder might overlap, too. And I know that all of them likely overlap with anxiety.

So saying that I have all of them might seem a bit dubious. How could someone, after all, have not one, not two, not three, but four different mental conditions that a neurotypical person does not have? How could someone who passes as mostly-normal (albeit highly quirky and often dragged down by debilitating crippling aspects of my mind) have so much not-normal in their mind?

But the thing is.

While I realize that the conditions have overlap.

There are some things about them that do not overlap with each other. And I have signs and symptoms of all, which includes the areas which don't overlap between them.

​I'd have to go into extensive depth and research to list all the signs and symptoms of autism, adhd, anxiety, and bipolar disorder in order to show why I believe I have all of them, which is too much effort for me to do now. But I genuinely feel like if I cared enough to show my homework, even a skeptic could be made a believer so long as they are not a literal mental-condition-denier (as in, someone who believes mental disorders don't exist).

I realize people hold criticism for self-diagnosis. Which is fair. It'd do a lot of good for me to put the skeptics to rest if I did go through the time/effort of getting official diagnoses for the conditions I have. (That said, I believe that the medication I am taking for bipolar disorder is also used for anxiety anyway​ so like...if I am correct that I have anxiety, my current medication is a three-in-one special dealing with depression, mania, and anxiety all in one.)

Butstill, while you can do a lot of convincing of yourself, while you can be mistaken, while you can be ill-informed, while you can mistake one thing as being a different thing, while you can delude yourself to a certain extent, while you can always just be exaggerating the connection of the dots and once the connection is formed, force it to fit...

...At a certain point? I am still the one who knows me best. I know my mind. I know the way it works. I know the way it operates. Nobody can know it better than I do. Nobody knows me better than I do. The same way nobody can tell me that I am not trans (when I am, I am Bree, I am a girl, and nobody can tell me I am not because I know I am), nobody can tell me I'm not bipolar, not autistic, don't have adhd, and now, don't have anxiety.

​There's being cautious, there's being skeptical, but then there's just being a gatekeeper. And you shouldn't gatekeep mental health and disregard the experience of an individual who has actually spent considerable amount of time researching and reflecting and considering their findings and wondering and even doubting their conclusion while managing to still hold true to their conclusion because they know themselves better than you do.

I realize harm can come from claiming something that you actually aren't; I realize harm can come from misdiagnosis, especially self-misdiagnosis. But there's no harm in having something just click and realizing, "yeah, that makes sense in hindsight" and then using this knowledge to try and better your future by incorporating the knowledge of the probability of having That Thing, and managing to maximize the advantages of That Thing while minimizing the weaknesses of That Thing.

It did just click for me as "oh yeah, in hindsight? That makes a lot of sense that I'd have an anxiety disorder". It just fit instantly. Like, basically no doubt, I just somehow knew that it was true. I already have mechanisms for dealing with it, but these mechanisms can be improved with knowledge of having the anxiety disorder. And that knowledge does me no harm, only good.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble.

My anxiety is somewhat spiking in regards to tomorrow, so to mitigate it, I'm going to go to bed now.

...But I'm pretty darn surprisingly close.
I'm taking the day off of mafia stuff (as I normally do on Saturdays), and health stuff continues to not be the best of things, but I am mostly on top of my life right now, because I just felt inspired today. It sounds weird to say, but it honestly feels like a mixture of simultaneous mania and depression coexisting for different areas.

Maybe a touch of autism/adhd in there as well.

Basically.

I started the day working on the civ 3 mod--the most worthless of the worthless thing to do. I made very very good progress there, but I got burned out from working on it so much so I didn't want to work on it more today.

But the usual timekillers aside from it I felt apathetic about. I don't feel like playing League tonight, or TFT tonight, or Epic Battle Fantasy 5, or offline Chrono Trigger, or Stardew Valley, or offline minecraft work. That leaves precious little on the list of timekillers.

So what came to mind that was left?

Two things. Neither a waste. Both which I should be trying to do more of anyway. Not mutually exclusive, either, as one is better later at night when my family is asleep and the other can be done before then.

I basically...came up with streaming (probably building minecraft), or...working on Phyrra and Cyrus. I was thinking of things to do, and the folder with my Phyrra and Cyrus stuff just...caught my eye. I kept staring at it, going back to it, and the inspiration just...struck me. Because it called out to me.

I don't even know what I am going to do there, yet. I think it'll be script-work though because it all starts somewhere and there is a very good place to begin.

​Wish me luck.

...But it's too long for me to record on twitter and I want to preserve this thought.

A stream I was on tonight touched upon the Star Trek 'verse and the subject of the Borg came up.

What the Borg offer me is something that if it were actually delivered, I would consider it a godsend.

The Borg, in theory, share their thoughts with the entirety of the collective.

As someone who is autistic, who struggles to think of words, that sounds like a dream to me, because explaining my thoughts to others is something I struggle with and having it instantly just happen would be amazing.

A common downside to that is "there are some thoughts that I wouldn't want to share", but for me, personally, I actually wouldn't mind sharing the bad with the good, because the bad can help contextualize the good, and vice-versa. A lot of the best ideas/thoughts/feelings/etc. have spurned from some of the worst screwed up stuff in my head, where they wouldn't have existed at all if I hadn't had the negative parts.

If I shared all of my thoughts and ideas to everyone, they would get out there and be in the world, rather than trapped in my head to die with me.

And because it would communicate them to others, so long as the Collective survived, so, too, would my ideas, meaning that even after I died, part of me would live in the Collective for all of eternity.

More than that, the Borg Collective would also help to give me a purpose in life. A directive. Some people, like me, actually lack that direction and could use it. Living for others, serving others, serving the Collective and being told how you can do so effectively? Not a bad deal.

Plus, being a cyborg would presumably extend my natural lifespan.

So if the Borg actually were the Collective they boast about, it'd be neat! And several episodes of Star Trek shows beyond TNG actually show that. (Mainly Voyager I believe.) Where splinter cells of the Borg Collective without a connection to the Borg Queen actually live up to that ideal and show off all the good the system can give.

But unfortunately--the Borg aren't the collective they boast about, they are, explicitly, conquerors. They aren't interested in sharing their knowledge among the collective, they're interested in forcefully making every living lifeform one of them, and of suppressing their ideas and creativity to fit the mold of 'Borg'.

Instead of being what amounts to the ultimate form of Socialism where every individual does the most to help everyone else (what they could be), they explicitly are modeled more on an Imperialistic mindset, think USA USA USA brainwashing of "forcing everyone to be more like us".

The Borg Queen is, explicitly, out to conquer and suppress the ideas of others and to use their knowledge only when it furthers their goals of conquering others. They are out to deliberately remove everything that is not-them from the universe.

If the Borg were to actually offer, rather than demand, acceptance into their collective, there would be droves of people who would willingly become a part of their collective. Both in our universe and in the Star Trek 'verse. There's plenty of planet-of-hats that have ideals which resonate with the theory of the Borg and thus if the Borg offered rather than 'making-it-mandatory' assimilation to them, they would join willingly.

But the First Contact film tells us explicitly; the Borg Queen is not looking for an equal, for a counterpart, for people to willingly join and become an equal; the Borg Queen is explicitly looking to quash resistance and force everyone to submit by force. They don't want them to join willingly, they want to actively suppress the ideas of others.

In that regard I've always considered the Borg to be a bit stupid, and a shame for showing off a system that would be a dream if it was what they actually offered, but instead of offering it for real, they throw it away in favor of imposing their way on the world forcingly. Just some generic conquerors, whose ideals are empty and unfulfilled.

The idea of the Borg would be a better Federation than the actual Federation, where those joining would willingly work together for the betterment of all. The idea of the Borg would live in a similarly-Socialistic-ideal to that of the Federation, just with higher efficiency thanks to the direct mind link.

But while the idea of the Borg is better, the fact that they don't actually deliver means that it's a waste. The Borg are idiots for trying to forcefully assimilate everyone and make everyone their enemy; the Borg are idiots for not delivering on what they offer; the Borg had a good theory to them, but by the Borg Queen's selfishness, never deliver on it.

And the extended Star Trek 'verse shows this off. I remember quite vividly, for instance, one episode of Voyager where there was a colony on a world that was former Borg, cut off from the collective, and at the end of the episode, they reconnect to each other, recreate their own micro-Borg-collective, still cut off from the Borg Queen, still cut off from the Borg as a whole, but connecting to each other, and in that episode I vividly recall thinking, "This is what the Borg should be!!!".

In that splinter cell, that micro-Borg-collective, I seem to recall that at the end of the episode, they were all linked to each other, sharing their thoughts/knowledge/ideas/feelings/etc. with each other, and working together with unity and purpose, but critically still having some amount of individuality to them because it wasn't being forcefully suppressed by the Borg Queen.

Especially since in that episode, they did that willingly. They all had the choice; they all chose to be Borg again rather than having it forced upon them. But they were the Borg as the Borg should be, rather than the Borg that actually exists.

A Borg Collective which offered people the chance to join their collective willingly, where everyone joining did so by choice, where their thoughts, feelings, etc. were shared with everyone, and they worked as a collective in harmony with purpose? Literally could be a Federation 2.0 in being a good system that works well.

But a Borg Collective which is out to conquer everyone, which is out to make everyone be them, which is trying to force everyone to join or die, which is out to make everything theirs with no choice, suppressing those within, forcefully oppressing the masses and creating absolute unity under a stagnant system that steals in order to survive and expand and is in itself sterile without the outside opinions that it works so hard to actively destroy?

It's such a waste.

But I digress.

I am not a real Trekkie so I'm sure a true Trekkie or even someone who like me is just a casual Star Trek nerd/fan who is more educated could go, "Well, actually..." to me and point out the flaws and why the Borg system isn't as good as the Federation system or something or so forth, I'm not a true expert on the Star Trek 'verse, I'm just a casual fan who happens to be passionate and opinionated.

​I still felt like sharing my thoughts in a more permanent form tho.