The hunt proceeded about the way I'd expect it to--every year, we say we need to make it easier (especially on me and my brother). Every year, in spite of insisting that has been done, it proves to not be the case. This year, my older sister swore she made it easy, yet almost every single hiding spot was of a difficulty rating I'd associate with being a hiding spot for my younger sister--the one who she's allowed to be mean to with hiding.

At least three of my eggs were duck taped to surfaces.
At least twice, I ran into the problem of having correctly identified where the egg was, searched for it, and not having found it, and thus making the obvious conclusion; I searched it, it wasn't there, so it wasn't hidden there--except it was.

Suffice to say.
Once. again.

I finished last.

I didn't find a single egg on my own.

Not. one.

Not a single egg, I could locate without a hint.

Normally?

Normally, people can find 2-4 eggs on their own.

Not. one. Could I find without basically being told the answer.
Because the answers were absolute bs hiding spots--hard enough that my younger sister would have trouble with a fair number of them.

My younger sister, the one who my older sister will pull evil stunts like hiding an egg inside of the refrigerator light (okay so that was my younger sister hiding my older sister's egg, butstill), who hid an egg inside of an empty orange juice container, who's hidden eggs inside of salt shakers, from light fixtures, inside the garbage can (with protection), the list goes on and on.

Evil spots like that.

She gave to me.

Suffice to say.

I was not amused.

I have specifically told her.
Time and time again.
Easier.
Easier.
Make it easier.

So I don't always finish dead last.

Yet each year.

Instead of easier.

It's getting harder.

In spite of her saying she made it easier.

She's not telling a deliberate lie, but she's absolutely lying to herself if she thinks that the spots she gave me this year were in any way easy.

The easiest thing to find was my basket, and that's mostly because baskets come in only two hiding varieties: nigh-impossible, or ridiculously easy; last year (or was it two years ago?), she learned that the nigh-impossible way simply wasn't something I'd handle well.

Yes, I am incredibly bitter, why do you ask?
It's not the dead last bit, honestly. It's that there's the sheer level of dissonance between what she said and what she gave me. She said it was easier; what she gave me was something which, egg after egg. I kept saying. "This isn't an egg for my difficulty level!" It was hard enough last year, but this year was ten times harder. 

If you keep on.
Time and time again.
Finishing last.
And time and time again.
You say.
"It needs to be easier."
And you are told.
It is.
Only to find it harder.

You'd be pretty miffed, too!

That I have, so consistently, finished last is a testament to how unskilled I am--yet she consistently is treating me like I should be getting better, rather than worse, and I am getting exactly that. This egg hunt, I wasn't functioning brain-wise for the first half of it. That wasn't what made it hard, though. I knew that even functioning at 100%, I'd never have found those eggs on my own, because they are simply not eggs that are my level; they are things way too hard for me to find in the best of conditions.

Me NOT in the best of conditions, though, made the impossible task just...laughable. Like. Pathetic. I am just entirely frustrated by the whole thing, because the hunt is meant to be equal parts fun and challenging--yet with each. and every. single. passing. failure. There's no fun. There's no thrill. There's no reward.

There's no exhilaration in being hand-fed the answers--which was what every single egg was.
There's no exhilaration from finishing last every single year.
There's no reward in. consistently. failing. Because in spite of saying it needs to be easier. It never actually getting easier.

My younger sister, hiding for my brother? She knows how to succeed at making it easier. My brother found some eggs on his own, without help, and none of the eggs he had were at sister-level difficulty. I saw all of them and went, "yep. For us two, that's an appropriate level difficulty for an egg".

She nailed it.

She did what needed to be done for him.

My sisters hiding each others' eggs are deliberately as evil as humanly possible--that's fine for them, because knowing each other as they do, they can usually find most of their eggs without hints because they simply are that good.

But when my sister hides my eggs at that difficulty level.
Instead of the difficulty level appropriate for me.
Instead of the difficulty level which my brother's eggs were at.

It's not fun.
It's a joke.
A bad one.

It's just...

...How could she just.
Be that blind.
To what I am actually able to do?

I literally can't do it at that level.
How could she think what she gave me was at the level my brother's eggs were at.
When the level my brother's eggs were at--the level which my eggs should have been at--was leagues easier than what I actually got?

It turns what should be a fun even into just a pile of pure frustration.
Losing when I feel I legitimately deserved to lose is one thing. If my eggs were hidden in places akin to the places my brother's eggs were hidden, I'd deserve to have lost and there'd be no bitter feelings. Disappointment, sure, yeah, but not bitterness because I'd know that I lost because of stupidity.

Losing because I could never have ever possibly won?
Because the difficulty level was not something appropriate for me?

It's just...why. It's not like I didn't stress it enough. Easier; I said to make it easier. I emphasized that I had lost last time, I emphasized that it took me longest to find mine last time, I said that I needed it to be particularly easy in comparison. Quite explicitly. Clear as could be. E a s i e r.

...Instead? I got eggs that were hidden in fairly creative spots, most never-before-used, never-before-checked; the times they had been used/checked, it wasn't meant for me and I wasn't acutely aware of most of them. And the two eggs which I believe were repeats of mine in previous years? As mentioned, I searched the spots, and when I didn't find an egg after searching them wrote them off because of course when you search thoroughly a spot and find nothing you're going to assume the spot wasn't used.

It's one thing to just casually search through an area and not find it--we miss eggs doing that all the time, par for the course. It's another thing to literally be running your fingers through where the egg is and not feel it and not see it and with the texture feeling like there's no egg there and the visualization feeling like there's no egg there, concluding that there is no egg there...except there was.

I am just...not impressed. There's a difference between making it challenging, and making it impossible-without-handholding-help. Challenging for me is still simple stuff. Challenging for me is still cliched stuff which has been done before. In casual searches I am prone to missing things. It doesn't take much to fool me, but I can usually realize, "oh I didn't look here well", go back, and if there's an egg there, find it. Because I knew I hadn't searched it as well as I should, and going back, give it the proper attention it needs to find it.

Simple stuff--but still enough to give it a hunt.

When I miss an egg because I did look there well, when I did look thoroughly, or when I miss an egg because I've just given up on it on the sheer inability of me to have so much as a clue as to where it could possibly be because there's just nowhere left I could so much as fathom.

That's not difficult.
That's not challenging.

That's just sheer cruelty. And as I said--my sisters can be evil to each other as much as they want to be, but they're not supposed to be that way to the other two, me and my brother, when hiding ours.

...Yet that is exactly what I got put through.

After having had a thoroughly miserable time last year, for much the same reason.
And maybe the year before that, too.

She's not learning the lesson, and the only lesson I'm learning is that I'm a worthless piece of junk.

This is just.

The polar opposite of what our egg hunt is supposed to instill.

It's supposed to be entertainment.
It's supposed to be uplifting.
But every year.
I am just...increasingly more and more dejected.
Because all I am getting.
​Is how trash I am.

Well, many things, but the particular aspect I'm talking about today is the divorce between what ideas I get in my head and my ability to actually bring life to them.

I swear to you, in less than ten minutes--it was on the latter half of my drive home--I came up with an idea. On a twenty minute drive I was over half done with, I came up with an idea.

Not just part of an idea.

Start to finish worldbuilding on the idea.

It lacks characters, it lacks plot. It was just an idea for a world, but start to finish, I came up with it.

The idea was more or less, "how do I make a realistic world featuring multiple species of anthropomorphic winged sapients?"
One with feathered "bird" wings.
One with 'leathery' "bat" wings.
One with "butterfly" wings.
One with "bee" wings.
One with "dragonfly" wings.

And two without wings, one off of an ant and another off of a spider.

For the world I came up with, every one of them would need at least six limbs--in that world, the norm being at least six, rather than in our world where it's the norm to have four. (Bats don't have wings, arms, and legs; they have wings and legs; same for birds. But here I wanted them to have both.)

They would need a common ancestor or two, one where their anthropomorphic features came from prior to diverging into their more insect/bird/mammal forms, because that is probably more likely a scenario than them having started from insect/bird/mammal forms and all, separately from one another, developing said anthropomorphic forms.

Specifically, an ancestor that'd require bipedal movement and an opposable thumb, sized about our size but with at least a second set of "arms".

They would also require a great degree of long-term separation, and, a climate where all but the non-fliers were in a position where the mutation allowing flight gave a strong survival advantage. My thought on the world was then one with many sudden sharp increases and decreases in altitude, uneven surfaces in most locations, small islands which're mostly mountainous, probably covered in trees.

Where walking is sometimes necessary, but where flying is usually much easier to cross vast distances. Leading to a world with two large continents and five groupings of islands. Seven total "continents" if you will, even if five of said continents aren't one single landmass. (At least, not one landmass above water.)

To favor flight over traversing waters, currents in the air would need to be fairly easy to travel, whereas inversely, currents on the water would need to be much, much more hazardous than in our world, deterring evolution of an amphibious lifestyle. 

The separation between these continents would need to be strong enough to keep contact from overlapping for a long time, but not quite make it so that it's impossible for them to have traveled there in the first place and millions of years down the line to reconnect.

The obvious answer I came up with is paralleling our world, with an ice age. The beginning and/or end of an ice age would either allow for contact or cut contact off; similarly, the change in climate would spur a necessary change in the needed mutations to survive.

I didn't quite come up with whether it was the ice age starting or ending which caused the isolation, even though the world is distinctly different depending on which of the two it is. If the ice age starting caused the isolation, the sapient life forms evolved in cooler conditions with their adaptions, and it can be hypothesized that the end of the ice age helped spur them into spreading out.

If the ice age ending caused the isolation, the sapient forms evolved in warmer conditions with their adaptions, and it can be hypothesized that there was some other factor other than ice blocking them from spreading out--a factor they could only overcome with technology rather than biology.

In the former, a potential cause of the isolation is an inability to maintain a long enough distance of flight to travel the distance.
In the latter, a potential cause of the isolation is isolated weather conditions, where it's easier to get into the islands than it is to get out. 

These ideas aren't well fleshed out, but they are what I came up with in the ten minutes. They aren't well-researched, because if they were then a lot of what I said would sound more plausible and be more grounded in fact rather than just my shaky guess at how things could potentially work, with my incredibly limited knowledge of biology and geology and the like. (I know almost nothing, and thus, my lack of knowledge hurts the chances of making the idea I came up with seem realistic.)

What I really hate isn't the lack of ability to flesh that part out, though.
So much as it is.
My lack of ability to flesh out each of the species I described.

I created a mental picture of each and every single one of them.
I created a basic idea of how their lifestyle would work. Their biology, their culture(s), and how the other species view them (including slur words used to describe them).
But while the ideas are formed in my head, loosely.

I can't extrapolate them in reality.
I can't bring them out into reality, because to bring them out into reality I would actually need to make them, with skills that I lack.

I'd need to draw them.
I'd need to, from that drawing, create "profiles". You know the like. In almost every webcomic featuring races (heck doesn't need to be nonhuman, many webcomics simply with fictional cultures do much the same), you see this sort of thing.

Where you get an image or two showing the typical image meant to portray them, and then a list of the relevant information about them.

I'd need to create that.

And after doing that.

Weave them together to form the details.

And the worldbuilding for each of them is rough, at best.

Yet the worldbuilding as a whole is even worse, because it takes the roughness of all of those, then is meant to weave them together, to create the modern world of whatever story this would be for.

What technologies would such societies with these described biologies have? These would be influenced by their culture as well--diet, beliefs, interactions, etc. How they finally made contact, and how they didn't manage to wipe each other out, and how they managed to understand each other, and what ideas between their separate cultures were exchanged and so on and so forth.

What nations would exist, how intermingled would the races be? (The world I'm aiming for would be "enough where it's not uncommon to have all featured in a single location for the story", but not "so much where there's no separation outside of isolated pockets". Where there's dominant races in different areas, but enough variety to not be uniform in most areas.)

What technologies would they develop we never would, what technologies we have would they never develop? All of this is possible to create from what I have, but it'd need that first step--of bringing what I made in my head, out into the real world.

And beyond what I've done here.
Mostly generics, mostly stuff about the world itself.
I can't do that.

Which is the frustrating thing I hate.

A brilliant, fantastic idea in my head--a full world, built in ten minutes. Ten minutes, to do all of what I described and then some. In a lifetime I'd never be able to bring it out. The full world's loosely functional; rough around the edges and in desperate need of concrete details, but it's there​...and it'll remain there, nowhere else, because this is as much as I can do with it.

I could formulate words, and did so, but I was basically, start to finish, in every aspect of my life, unable to really formulate thoughts. This morning at work, for instance, I thought I might actually have a day of being fully nonverbal. (That may sound ridiculous...but if you could have seen how I was, then you'd understand why I had that thought.) I did eventually talk to family, but mostly just automatic stuff.

Even in written words, I didn't think much. I mean, I did a little, and the further into the day it went (especially once I got to talk to my girlfriend), the better it was, but all said and done, altogether, today is a not-very-active-brain day. It's not that I've been vegging out.

I know the feeling of vegging out; if this were vegging out, I'd describe it as vegging out. It's just flat-out not being able to truly think on a deeper level, for far more than I should.

I've not been blogging about it, but I've had some pretty revolutionary insights into things lately, and I mean that in absolute sincerity; if I were actually able to properly unpack the thoughts I had, they would be pretty darn insightful and actually make you pause and think. And if nothing else, give good insight into my mind.

Now I ultimately decided. I didn't want to spend the time/effort making those blogs. I had other things I wanted to blog about which were unrelated, took less time to talk about, and so on and so forth. Things which I could unpack quickly, easily, flawlessly.

So on Wednesday, I didn't give an expansion on my reflections about fear.

Yesterday, I didn't give a narration about the nature of time (and by extent, reality--short version, time in the narration given both exists and doesn't exist, everywhere and nowhere, is an objective constant that can be measured yet subjective illusion subject to the whims of the subconscious, without this being paradoxical because there's a logic to how it works; there's more to it than that and that's a poor explanation of the thoughts but like I said I didn't want to bother with the full version and still don't).

But today, I had a thought about failure, and this one I did want to share.

Failure is fun.
Now, I realize the Dwarf Fortress meme of "Losing is Fun!" exists, along the lines of "There's no winning, only losing, so make the loss as spectacular as is possible", more or less.

That's not what I mean.

What I mean by that is.

Failure is seen as a bad thing, but in it, there comes a blessing.
When you succeed, it is seen as a good thing, but with success comes a curse.
Failure helps you learn, whereas success can cause bad habits to form, but even this is not what I am referring to.

I'm more referring to what the effects of failure and success are, long-term.

Continuously failing can be a test of character, causing someone to either break and give up or push themselves with a drive until they succeed, but this is not what I am talking about, either.

What I more mean. Is that with failure, comes an expectation--or rather. A lack thereof. With failure, there is freedom. Failure gives you the luxury of choice, at every step. Do I continue, do I give up, as a start, but. I'm more talking about. When you fail.

You are under no obligations.

The results are right there, failure, in front of you. So if you've failed at everything. Then there's no obligation to do anything. What you do with that failure is up to you, allowing you the opportunity to do what you want--even if what you want to do is continue to fail.

That might seem like something nobody would want. Who'd deliberately want to continue to fail at a task which it's possible to succeed in? But therein lies the realization. Sometimes, continuing the task and failing it is the fun part, because it is the task itself which is fun--and succeeding at the task would make it no longer be the same level of fun.

This is one reason why I think so many people are perfectionists. They find flaws in what was done, to give themselves an excuse to call it a failure--so that they can do it again, but better.

Because the flip side of failure is success.
With success comes obligations.

If you succeed once, you are continuously haunted by that success: "I did it before, so why can't I do it again?" plagues all too many people. More than that, by having succeeded, it is expected that you will succeed again. People hold you to the level of quality you have shown you can do. If you do good, then you are under pressure to always do that good.

Once you have succeeded.
Once you have made your name.
Suddenly, everything is viewed in the lens of that success, compared to it.
"This is better than that".
"This is worse than that".

But when you have nothing but failures, there's a level of equality to it. A failure is still a failure, and while some failures are more spectacular (and I mean that in both senses it can be used in, in that they are massive failures or look-better-but-still-are-failures) than others, they still have more or less the same treatment.

A failure is a failure.

But when you succeed.
Suddenly, everything must be a success, viewed in terms of "less successful than previous" or "more successful than previous". And while some of these metrics are objective, plenty are subjective. Artists, creators, writers, and so on and so forth in particular are what I am getting at here; when they have gained renown for their work, their future projects are compared to these past projects, and inevitably, some will shower praise while others, criticism.

And it was this that made me understand why.

Why I am okay with living my life as a failure--and even seek failure out.

​There's a trope for this: Victory Is Boring. But it's a trope for good reason; it's true to life. There is less excitement in success, because with success comes obligation, comes expectation, comes pressure, comes the chains of the weight of the world bearing down on you. When you succeed, you are burdened by it.

But with failure, when you fail. You can forever continue to fail. You never need to succeed as a failure, because you can continue to fail over and over again and nothing changes. Nobody expects differently. There's no pressure to succeed, because you have failed. There's only the minimal burdens of the world coming from the bare necessities of survival. (You need to eat, you need to hydrate, you need to have shelter, and these things in the modern world come from some form of success in some endeavor for the most part.)

And I realized that this is why I am acting the way I do.

I have, for the longest time, lacked the drive to succeed.
I have, for the longest time, been dreaming up ideas and then not following through with making them reality.
I've been figuring this as being my bipolar disorder for as long as I've had that diagnosis: manic episodes for creativity, depression for how the idea dies out.

But there's a constant throughout this, and it's not just in my creative works. In mafia games, in all aspects of my life.

I have proven, time and time again, that when I put my mind to it and really try, there is almost no challenge I can't overcome. (I am human so I have limitations, but these are much fewer than most, especially myself, would assume.)

I have proven, time and time again, that I can do this, I can do that.

I have proven it as a proof of concept. Yes, it's viable. Yes, I can do it.

So why don't I do it more often?

Why do I lack the investment to try?

Why do I not make the effort?

Because if I made the effort, I might actually succeed--and that's something I don't actually want.

Well. Obviously. There are some things that I'd rather succeed on. (Namely, transitioning; living with my girlfriend.) But by and large. "It's the journey which matters, not the destination" is a saying for good reason, and it is specifically this that I am getting at.

The destination of success isn't actually worth anything to me (except on the few things it is; see above).
The journey is what I have fun with.
But the only way to ensure I keep on the journey.
Is if I don't reach success--and thus, fail.

So as I said.

Failure is fun.

And that's why I will forever be one.
I'll probably, realistically speaking, never succeed. Not even on the projects I most want to, like Phyrra and Cyrus. And because I'll keep inventing new ideas and never put in the time/effort to find out solutions for the technical difficulties in my modding, I'll never succeed in perfecting my mod.

But I'm at peace with that, because I am okay with living my life that way.
It comes with its own hardships. It comes with its own trials. It comes with the difficulties, the pains of knowing that my vision will never reach others. It comes with financial difficulty and making the few things I still want to actively pursue succeeding at, harder to get. (It's easier to succeed in transitioning and living with your girlfriend if you have succeeded at getting a steady, well-paying income, for instance, so it's harder on me that I can't get that easily.)

But it is not without its perks.

And honestly I actually think this is a contributing factor to why most people don't "succeed" in life.
Not everyone is famous.
Nobody achieves most of their dreams.
Everyone has a little creativity in them, and the vast majority of the human population has an overabundance of it; almost every single person in existence has some sort of creative thing they'd love to make. Music. Songs. Poems. Stories. Games. And so on and so forth. Yet only some of them so much as start, and of those that start, only the smallest of fractions of them succeed.

Most people are unknowns.
Most people are failures.
Most people never make it.

But I think the reason why.
Is because even if they never consciously make this connection.
On some subconscious level.
They know it, and are happy with who they end up being, even if it's a nobody.

For most of my life I've always struggled with the dilemma of feeling like I am half-nobody, half-extraordinary. That I am stuck in the middle of being ordinary and being special, that I am not normal enough to really fit in with more normal individuals and yet not special enough to make it big as a star, not talented enough to become the famous person I've always dreamed about being.

Yet I think that with this realization, I can be more at peace with myself.

I still won't ever fully "normalize", because with my brain wiring that's not possible.
I still won't ever succeed.

But now I feel a sense of serenity about it, that this is not a bad thing. That this is an alright place to be in.

You might think that this would mean, thanks to this realization, I'd give up on some things.
Oh no.
Furthest thing from it.
I'm doubling down on doing them.
Even knowing that I'm going to fail, I'm going to do them--specifically because I know I'm going to fail!
(The mythbusters quote about "Failure is always an option"? More like 'failure is always the ultimate option'.)

Honestly if I actually succeeded at this point I wouldn't know what to do with it.
But I'll still try. Over and over and over again.
My lot in life likely won't ever change, especially given my lack of drive to do so since I'm mostly content (aside from hating my dad) to live as I am.
But I'll still try.
Because the failure from trying is the most fun I can have.

And while I know there is quite a bit of risk in me extrapolating on my thoughts down this avenue (seriously you have no idea how worried I am that this blog post could get me banned from sites or like have a cop knock on my door), I feel like the reward is worth it.

Basically. My detractors may have the impression I think I'm the greatest, but. I really don't. Sure, I have delusions of grandeur, I put up a facade of confidence all the time, and even get genuinely arrogant. So I'll be the first to confess there are times when I, genuinely, fool myself into thinking I'm a good person.

But whenever I'm actually honest with myself and reflect...I know I'm not. I'll talk about things I've done, thoughts I've had, perspectives I hold, but even when I try to explain why I'm a monster, I avoid actually revealing the things which make me one, because I don't want them to be known. (And frankly I could potentially even ruin my life by revealing some of them.)

Even in this blog post, right here and now, I am doing precisely that. I'm not going into what makes me a monster. I'm barely even teasing it. My statement that I am one sounds like it's empty, because I don't back it up. And people may think I exaggerate, as is my wont. People may think that what I think is monstrous of me is something completely normal. They would be wrong, because if they actually knew, they'd agree, yeah, it's monstrous.

But because I don't tell them, they assume the like of that. Thinking I'm not possibly that bad even though if anything I'm worse than I indicate. To give the tip of the iceberg, and I hesitate to even describe it that way because this makes people severely underestimate the extent of how disturbed I am, I wanted to talk about something.

What I'm about to describe, I feel would not so much as even scratch the surface of my inner monstrosity. (I've made it quite clear in the past that all of my mes, all of the me that makes me me, is afraid of that inner monstrosity, and for good reason given what it can do and my fear knowing it can and would do that.)

The evil within me can be, on occasions, channeled into good, but the evils were evils I immersed myself in willingly, with no such altruistic goal; I had no expectation of turning the evil into good, and doing so can be thought of as simply not letting lemons go to waste and making lemonade from them. It's still evil regardless, unambiguously so.

How bad am I talking?

To reiterate: everything I am about to describe. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I am about to tell you. I don't consider monstrous. So after reading the entirety of this blog post and seeing every single thing I describe and knowing not a single one I consider to be monstrous, you should be left with a question:
"If she didn't consider any of THIS monstrous, what does she consider monstrous?"
(The answer is not some philosophical trivial BS nonsense which is completely fine with everyone else, by the way, nor is it some quirk that literally everyone has. It is actual real monstrous things, but the darkest parts of my mind I keep private from others and won't ever explain on a blog.)

Before we begin, though. This is a necessity:
TRIGGER WARNING: THE ENTIRE REST OF THIS BLOG DEALS WITH TORTURE AND MAY TOUCH ON GORE AND RAPE, AMONG OTHERS. Viewer beware!

You've been warned, so you know what you're in for here; it's...not gonna be pleasant.

​Torture is something I think about alarmingly often, and not in the more lighthearted ways. What I mean by that is, I'm not talking about BDSM here because that is in no way shape or form torture; I am also not thinking about torture in the clinical, scientific, detached, theoretical sense of it.

You know. Think about how someone can be a buff for a subject. Science buff. History buff. Gun buff. Knife nut. You get the idea. They can hold fascination over the history of the subject throughout the ages, and know details about it from various regions and points in time, and go on long, passionate rants about, saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy, the gory details of how the Aztecs would sacrifice a human being.

But they do that in a way which is self-evidently healthy and light; they're not into those things because they derive some form of recreating these things. Their interest can be thought of as trivial. They dig into the facts about those things as a side-project, as a hobby, as a passion, as a passing interest which they can be enthusiastic about, but they don't really go beyond that.

My interest in torture is not of that kind.
My torture is of the more thorough, deeper kind. I absolutely was the kind of kid that tortured all forms of life as a child. I probably left lifelong psychological damage on one of our first pets from what I did to her; I would squish ants, tried burning them with the magnifying glass trick, and would relentlessly brutalize plants in just about every way possible.

And while I eventually did swear off those ways and promised to be pacifistic, in spite of that, on some level I did shift gears from plants and animals onto humans. Where the unhealthy, darker sides of torture would be. The type of thought where it'd be, "This is how to go about it, and this is what to do to not get caught", kind of thinking.

(Disclaimer: Due to just how vividly and detailed I am in these descriptions, I feel the need to state beforehand: in case you are wondering. No. I haven't actually tortured anyone. Nor have I looked up/researched torture. But these are a collection on my thoughts on the hypotheticals behind if I did do it. I state these with a viewpoint which sounds confident and assured, that what I say is fact. That viewpoint comes from a lifetime of demented thoughts, thoughts not acted upon but which were thought up all the same. This is the darker side of having an overreactive imagination; by having the ability to envision even the most twisted of things, I am able to do...well. Just keep reading. THAT.)

People can and have called me psychopathic and/or sociopathic for my more sadistic tendencies, and frankly I don't really blame them for doing so, given my selfishness and detachment from reality and utter disregard for the rules of society and so on and so forth.

Yet to go into torture, really go into it, you have to start with a few baselines for what I actually mean by torture, here.

You can think of torture in terms of attempting to obtain pieces of information. Not only is torture proven ineffective in this regard, but also there are more reliable ways of obtaining such information. I don't really see torture as viable to this means, and this type of torture is not what I mean.

You can think of torture in terms of deriving pleasure from the inflicted suffering of others. This is closer to what I mean, where the torturer is enjoying the act of the torture more than anything else, but this isn't quite what I mean, either. There's plenty of ways to derive pleasure from the suffering of others that don't involve torture.

​What I more mean about torture is, what you can think of in terms as being "torture for the sake of torture". Torture for the sake of tormentation. Not expecting to get pleasure, not expecting to get anything out of it. The torture here is zero gain. There is nothing to be had from it. Only pain of the victim.

In other words: inflicting suffering, just to inflict the suffering. To drag others down, not to raise yourself up, but simply just to drag them down. Something transcending a sense of sadism, as it were. This is where I approach torture from, so that should give you a good idea of where I'm coming from, if you can comprehend this concept as an actual real thing. (And I'm telling you it very much is one...at least for me.)

​I've even thought about what would ultimately be one of the most excruciatingly slow, painful methods, which I call the "Hundred Permanent Paths of Pain". (Name is a bit of a misnomer, because there's not literally 100 pains involved. There's more.)

The first step in it would be to break every bone you can safely break without killing the victim. Hands, arms, legs, feet, ribs, the like; we have hundreds of bones in our body. Not all can safely be broken without risking, say, internal bleeding, but a fair number are safe to break. Keep in mind that bones can also be broken in multiple locations if big enough, and that inflicts even more suffering.

That's just the start though. From there, pull out all 20 fingernails and toenails. Rip them out of their sockets. And then, cut off the top third of each finger and toe. Then the middle third. Then the bottom third. (Each finger and each toe--even our thumbs, even our pinkies, even our big toes--has three distinct sections. These sections are harder to see in some of those extremities than others, but exist all the same.)

For all of these cut off parts, cauterization (which is extra pain) can be applied as is necessary to stop the victim from bleeding out. We're at 81 (if you count bones collectively as 1) paths of pain thusfar; the next logical step is to cut off the hands at the wrists, then the feet at the ankles. Then, cut off the arms at the elbows, and legs at the knees. And then, the arms at the shoulders, and legs at the hips. Which bumps it up to 93.

At which point, there's a bunch on the face.
Ears, 95.
Eyes, 97.
Tongue, 98.
And then you can pull out each and every single tooth they have.

The tongue and teeth come last for the purposes of hearing unmuffled screaming.

This level of agony would of course be instantly lethal if given all at once, so would be delivered over the course of days, if not weeks. And if their forcefully-blind/deaf/mute-paraplegic state isn't enough, there's always whipping their torso and hanging their neck but not enough to kill them for bonus extras (that can technically be done again and again at any time).

Step by step, the permanent paths of pain would be...well. Permanent damage. Starting out with things that can heal even if unlikely to heal correctly, and then moving on to things that won't heal but can be adapted to, and progressively on to more and more debilitating injuries, worse and worse as it goes along with the exception of the facial ones that are technically less severe, but are more psychologically scarring.

Which is a nice segue into the next section of defining torture to me.

All of the above? Absolutely nothing to me. Because while the above does hold some psychological aspects to it, it is almost entirely physically-based induced suffering. And for me, psychological pain is the true heart of where torture lies. You can inflict endless amounts of pain, but if it's physical, it's temporary. Psychological pain, on the other hand, isn't.

​This is one of the reasons, say, rape is such a special kind of evil. (I'll try to keep my talk here light and respectful, but I do consider it to be a form of torture of sorts, so I feel I need to at least mention it. And, yes, it is in fact monstrous, so ignore my "everything I say below I don't consider monstrous" line above when it comes to this section.) There is the obvious immediate physiological damage, but the psychological scarring from rape lasts a lifetime. 

Especially if after it, the victim suffers further from others: not being believed, being called names like whore, slut, and the like, victim blaming, and in a disturbingly large number of cases absolute lack of closure as the rapist walks away without any lasting consequences for whatever reason.

Even if the victim does receive a form of vindication/justice and has some amount of closure, there will always be some reminders of the incident that they can never fully remove from their minds; it will last a lifetime and never go away. They can find ways to cope, they can find ways to recover, but they'll never fully heal, because the psychological damage lasts well after the physical damage has passed.

It is perhaps one of the more extreme examples and in our every day life/the absolutely craptastic world we live in one of the most common examples of torture (sad as that may be, it's simply the facts; it happens, and pretending it doesn't won't change that it does, and is there a LOT), but I could name any number of other tortures akin to this.

For me, torture can be thought of as a performance art, subject to the whims of the audience (in this case, the audience is the victim): the key to making it be successful is to find the audience's trigger points, and figure out what works to psyche them, what gets them to react in the ways you are hoping to make them react.

Because, the real key to torture, is to never let the victim go numb. When a person is past their breaking point, they'll numb the pain. Pain will be meaningless to them. And when pain is meaningless to them, it ceases to be torturous, because it no longer has any affect on the victim.

So you rotate the torture. You give variety, introduce new hells one after another. And you give things which, preferably, can never be adapted to. Many psychological sufferings can eventually be coped with; a skilled torturer who really knows how to torment their victim will inflict psychological scarring that no matter how long it goes on for, will never be something they can adjust to.

The majority of my most disturbing imagery will end here, but I still wouldn't say the rest of this blog is safe to read, because I'm starting out with describing the ultimate torture someone could inflict on me. (One of the few redeeming aspects of these thoughts? I had them with me as the guinea pig in them. I didn't envision me inflicting the hundred permanent paths of pain on another; I envisioned them being done to me. But that still doesn't change how disturbing they are.)

The ultimate torture that someone could inflict on me is what I call "The Metal Box".
It is exactly that, a metal box, about three times the height (and thus, width and length, as this is a perfect cube) of the prisoner contained within. The walls absorb sound, so no sound from outside enters; no sound from inside echos. As the name indicates, the walls are also a cold metal.

You might think that the metal box would have no lighting, or dim lighting. Quite the opposite, the lighting within is equivalent to that of the sun (give or take), with light shining from all six directions. Not from a single location, either; the light is spread out across the entirety of the walls, floor, and ceiling, as if the very metal itself were the light itself.

There would be a small hole in one wall for a toilet, but not a hole large enough to climb through. So small a hole, in fact, that it can barely fit the contents you are dumping into it. It's just big enough that you won't die of disease as a result of poor sanitation, but offers no escape, no entertainment (it's not like a flushable toilet with a toilet seat that you can lift and lower for entertainment or a handle to flush for entertainment or tools you can use to escape). Pure baseline functionality.

There would be a water dispenser, designed similarly to that of those used for rodent pets like a hamster, such that you only receive the amount of water you need to survive, no more; it's impossible to drown yourself when you become more suicidal. It's also impossible to break it down into tools to orchestrate an escape.

Meals are delivered at random varying intervals, anywhere from as little as one hour apart to as much as two weeks apart. There is no pattern to these meals; there is no rhyme, no reason, to them. They come when they come, and don't come when they don't come.

Said meals are delivered with no tray, no plate, no silverware, nothing but the food itself, and are dumped in such a way that it's impossible to see anyone delivering the food. It just goes in, and that's it.

The metal box is, other than these features and the presence of the prisoner within...completely and entirely empty. Nothing inside it. Whatsoever. Except the prisoner, and the necessary means to keep the prisoner alive and functioning. With no way for the prisoner to derive entertainment from those necessities, and no escape route. Trapped in a metal box of a room, utterly empty.

The end result of this would be losing all sense of time, trapped with the worst enemy of all: my own mind. My own mind is my absolute worst enemy. I function because I have an outlet for it. I wrote down this blog at work; that's an outlet. When I post it as a blog, that's an outlet.

But what if I were, permanently rather than temporarily, deprived of all outlets...yet not having my ability to think dimmed, dulled, or numbed in any way, shape, or form? What if my overreactive imagination and relatively speaking fairly sharp senses were left to run amok, unchecked, ungated?

I fidget with objects to distract myself. I do things all the time to distract myself. But I always need something, anything, to focus on, because if I have nothing to focus on my brain explodes in activity, and when it has that type of outburst, nothing can stop me from just being in agony.

I need to move. But in such an environment, I would be unable to move. I could pace back and forth, but eventually my body would tire and I'd be forced to stay in one spot. As pacing helps me channel my energy, once I was no longer able to do so out of sheer exhaustion, I'd be at my wit's ends. Because I'd have all this energy, all this mental energy, accumulating, as if a bomb ready to explode...yet it couldn't be released.

That would be the truest, greatest of hells someone could inflict on me. Highly immoral, sure, but that's a given for torture since, y'know. Torture isn't exactly ethical, now, is it? Also highly illegal, mind you. But scarily enough, not all too far off of real world jails in some parts (for instance, isolation), which mind you is a contributing factor to why I want to always be a law-abiding citizen and never need to go to jail.

I simply couldn't survive in there, because the things I would need to survive are the very same things they would absolutely forbid me from having. Pencil and paper to write down thoughts? Way, way, way, WAY too dangerous. Laptop to type up thoughts? Probably even more dangerous! I'd no joke if a thought hit me that was that important, would write it down in blood, which I'm quite sure would make my living situation even worse.

What I'm getting at there is that I need an outlet. I absolutely need a way to vent, a way to express myself, a way to give my thoughts, to give my mind away in an external factor, even if it is something stupidly simple. And not doing so would be torture. Psychologically scarring, driving me insane.

So that's what I mean when I say I can think of no greater torture someone could inflict on me than that. But...I have a small confession to make:
In spite of what I just said. It's not quite fully accurate. While it's true that The Metal Box is the worst torture which someone could inflict on me, an aspect of it would actually give me respite from the TRUE ultimate torture...one which nobody can inflict on me.

That of the hell of my life, due to what can never change in it.

There are many, many, many things that people can change in their lives. It's not exactly true, but in general it can probably be said that the more things someone can change, the more privileged they are. An old story my dad used to tell me comes to mind.

There were two men.

One man kept making wrong choice after wrong choice.
The other, right choice after right choice.

As the man who kept making right choices went on in life, more and more choices opened up to him.
As the man who made wrong choices went on in life, fewer and fewer choices were available, until only two were available: death by (one method I don't remember), or death by (a different method I don't remember).

I'm horribly, horrendously butchering that story since it's been like 15, 18 years since I last heard it, but it's related to what I'm talking about here.

If you are in a position where you have the luxury of choice, you can change many, many things. The better off you are, the more you can change; the worse off you are, the less you can change. Now, even if you are worse off, you can still make changes, but your chance to make change and your opportunities to make the change are going to be more limited than if you were better off; that's just self-evident, that a poor situation/circumstances leads to less available chances to create good ones, whereas good situations/circumstances lead to more available chances.

Anyone can climb the latter in theory, but those who are already higher up on the latter have better shots at climbing the latter further than those who start from the bottom. That's just the world we live in. I don't feel I'm being cynical in stating that, either. It's real. Should it be that way, no. (I could probably go on endlessly on a tangent about equality, equity, and so on and so forth but I won't.) But it is that way.

And why I'm saying that is...

...I hold an incredible privilege, because I am already quite high up on the ladder. Not incredibly high, but middle class. (Not sure where on middle, if it's upper, lower, or right in the middle, but it's middle class undeniably.) We have debts; we have the need to monitor money; we have a bunch of things we have to watch out for that upper class people take for granted, but we also have things like 1.5 cars per person in a six-person family, about that same number of computers, a TV in both bedrooms as well as the living room, at least two PS1s, at least three PS2s, at least two PS3s, at least one PS4, an XBox 360, a Wii, numerous DVD/Bluray players, half a dozen gameboys and gameboy advances, plus the things which make use of these (movies, shows, games) in the hundreds.

If my parents had had only one or two kids with no pets (we've had two dogs, four cats, countless fish, two mice, and a hamster as pets off the top of my head and pets are ludicrously expensive to raise and keep in good health; saving our 14-year-old cat when he was a kitten cost at least $3,000 when he swallowed too much strong), then they would undeniably be upper class. (Especially since my brother is the only sibling of us three to really make any actual money.)

We're poorer than that because of said pets and extra kids (mind you, neither myself nor my younger sister were planned; we're both accidents so the aforementioned two-children scenario almost did happen), but what I am getting at here is...that's still incredibly well-off, all things considered.

I have a lot of things that are good in my life. I have warm shelter every day, due to having a house to live in. I have safe, reliable, consistent, quick, reasonably cheap transportation. I have a steady job (albeit minimum wage). I have a neverending supply of food, and more than that, the luxury of choice in what to eat. (I can't even begin to fathom how much of a privilege that is, in spite of knowing just full good and well exactly how much it is indeed a luxury!)

I have a constant supply of water, albeit due to no city water access not quite unlimited. (We have a well. And live in Western Washington. I need say no more than 'western Washington' for 'endless water' to come across.) As indicated above, I have multiple sources of entertainment available to me at any time.

I even have a girlfriend!

​I am in a position which, objectively speaking, is awesome to be in. People would quite literally KILL to have what I have.

Yet this creates torture.

Because while there are so many things I can change.
Because while due to having all of that, I have so many opportunities, so many chances to change.
What eats me up inside is that the things I most want to change.
Are the things which can't change.

There are plenty of things which can change, and my position affords me almost unlimited access to pretty much all of those; I have at my disposal endless numbers of decisions which can lead to countless numbers of possible paths, good or bad. I can change my life in those ways, with the potential to make it better!

But the ways I can change my life, be it for the better or for the worse, are the ways I don't care about changing.
The ways I can't change are the ones that I want to change.

And therein lies the suffering, the torturous part of it.

Because what I can change isn't what I want to change. I am shown, every day, with my privileges. "All of this is things you can do." Yet I am shown, by that, "You can make change"...except in the areas I want to make change.

There's hell to be had in my every day life because of that duality.

​No matter what I do, I can't change some things, even if I really want to. I have a female mind, born into a body that is biologically male. That can't change, no matter what. I could suffer a form of death. Pretend I'm just a guy for the rest of my life and hope, PRAY, that if I tell that lie to myself for long enough, that if I consistently sell the same story, that eventually it'll be real.

That's not changing it though. That's denying it. That's a refusal of reality. That's rejecting reality, and going down a road that nobody should go down, least of all someone like me since going down that road leads only to misery and suffering not just for me but potentially for others as well.

Technological advancements are an amazing thing; there's HRT and GRS or whatever name it goes by. But while those are good, they aren't perfect. The technology to make a body born biologically male 100% absolutely indistinguishable from a body born biologically female doesn't exist yet.

We're getting closer every day to it existing, but it doesn't exist now. That's no excuse of course not to use the existing technology, which I fully do intend to use...but even our existing technology is ludicrously expensive; to fully transition will cost me $100,000 or so, give or take.

In other words. No matter what I do. Regardless of the situation. I can't change who or what I am. I can't change that circumstance. I can get good at masking it; fully transitioning will help me cope with it. But nothing can change it, well and truly change it. At least not with our current technology. (Who knows what the future holds, in ten, twenty, fifty years it very well just might, but right now, no such luck.)

I am also autistic. This is not as obvious a tormentation as being a transwoman can be, but it is not without woes. This is also a mixed blessing/curse, in that there is some genuine good to come from my autism, from my ability to pick up on nuances, increased pattern recognition, and vastly boosted creativity, among other gifts.

But there are also some tremendous downsides to autism.

I will never be able to communicate as I want to.

I can try.

And I do try!

Every day, I try to get better at communicating.

But no matter how hard I try, I am hardwired to the very core to think in a way which is just different from other people, and that difference is difficult to live with. I can never convey my intended meaning as effectively as I want to. Even in words, it's difficult. I ramble. I make gigantic wallposts that nobody reads. In person, it's outright impossible.

​I can't change that. So it's torture. I can cope with it; I live with it every day, so I've adjusted to it. But I still don't like it. I don't like not being able to tell people what I mean and have them understand. I don't like my increased vulnerability to not understanding what others mean. I don't like people altogether skipping what I say.

I don't like those things, but no matter how much I try to change them. The best I can do is develop workarounds. I can turn weaknesses into aspects of strength, to exploit the most out of things. But I can never cure it altogether. I can never change it. I can try to make it work, but it'll always be a part of me that I wish was better than it is, because it is something I simply can't overcome because it's impossible to truly grasp.

I am bipolar. This is more obvious a tormentation in some ways, because the torture is something which people can generally at least grasp the concept of, but they might not understand just how bad it can be. Impulses are very, very, very nasty things. Most people have good control over their impulses. As I'm bipolar, I am forever vulnerable to succumbing to them.

Now this is all fine and dandy if the impulses are innocent enough, and good can come from being impulsive. I took track on an impulse. I took cross country on an impulse. I decided on swimming over wrestling (which my mom actually favored) on an impulse. I went to the same lifeguard training my sister did, on an impulse. And from those series of impulses which are a direct line (swimming came from needing a bridge between cross country and track, meaning without crosscountry, there wouldn't be swimming; with no swimming, there's no lifeguarding), you get me eventually getting a job.

But most impulses aren't innocent. Impulse buying is a go-to example, but I always live in constant fear that the darker half of my brain I suppress holds the full potential to, via impulses, enact those darker thoughts. I told you in the earlier disclaimer that I'd never tortured a person before, but no matter how unlikely it may seem to you--and believe me, it's quite unlikely because I've forced myself to set up dozens of safeguards--I am always living in fear of myself succumbing to an impulse which could lead to an event like torturing someone.

Do you know how scary it is to always be afraid of what you fear you're capable of doing? Impulses can lead to me hurting someone. In fact, they have. Not deliberately, of course. But they have hurt people before, and quite severely hurt them at that. Mostly online, mind you. And years ago when I was a kid fairly new all things considered to the internet. In the dark times, of the 2010 range for me (give or take a year).

The hurt I inflicted on them will never go away. It was accidental, yes, but it still happened, and it was because of poor impulse control more than anything else. (Autism may have played a part in me not realizing what had happened until it was too late, but that's ultimately not important what caused the hurt; what's important is that the hurt happened.)

Impulses aren't even the torturous part, though. I live in fear of impulses letting loose the monster within me, but I fear that knowing it to be an incredibly unlikely scenario. (I doubt that, short of some extreme trauma severely negatively impacting my psyche, it will ever come to reality. Still doesn't stop the fear though.)

The real bitch about the manic half of my depression is that when combined with my autism allowing me to sense things and connect random things. My brain is in constant overdrive, the overreactive imagination I mentioned earlier. How's it feel to have something within you, which makes you feel like your chest/brain is going to explode? It's maddening.

It's useful! It is incredibly useful for my creative efforts. But it is so overpowering that when I wave of mania hits me, I can do nothing but succumb to it. I can't do anything other than try to release the energy pent up within me, and this can and does lead to the aforementioned poor impulse control, too.

There's more to bipolar disorder than the manic half, though. The depression half of it, the low of it, is crippling. It can kill my drive altogether. It is, singlehandedly, the reason I haven't made anything of my life. At this point, probably having had high hundreds of thousands if not even millions of story/game/etc. ideas.

Not one has made it to reality.

Not. a. single. one.

To some extent, yes, the mania half is to blame because I can't focus on one if my mind is entirely on a new, different one.

But even if I am entirely focused on an idea.

If depression is running its course.

I can't do a thing.

I just shut down.

I do nothing.

I waste time, and make no effort.

And the worst part is, this can not only happen randomly, but also be induced by the slightest of causes. If I have reason to feel down, then I can enter depression no matter how minor the reason (it can be as little as a bad work day), and once in, I'm not leaving in a timely fashion (say a bad work day happened and I get depressed; it's not magically healed the next day).

The depression has its uses, yes, in that the time down is time which I've managed to turn into an artform, sometimes quite literally.

But I still don't take it well.

​Not even going into, counterintuitive as it may seem, how depression and mania can coexist simultaneously. Specifically, the danger there is combining depression bad enough to get suicidal with mania's poor impulse control; you can understand, then, exactly why that is an ugly, dangerous, combination to exist but it is perfectly plausible.

Again, I've put in safeguards to prevent it. Numerous ones. Failsafes for the failsafe's failsafe, levels of safeguarding. But all of this. Every single bit of the bipolar disorder countermeasures. Is just coping with it. It never changes that I have it.

I can make use of it; there is good to be had from it, as I have outlined.
But there is also a great many downsides to it, and no matter how much I want to change it so that I don't have those downsides.
I have those downsides.
They won't go away, no matter what. There is no magic pill to make my mind all better; it is permanently messed up, because I was born with these neurological conditions.

And the downsides of them stack.

Because the downsides of them stack.

Every day.

In spite of having the power to change.
I know that they won't change, because the ability to change doesn't mean that anything can change.
I can only change the things it is possible to change; the way my brain has been wired since birth is not a thing that can change.

You can slightly alter it. Coping mechanisms. Workarounds. But the fundamental nature of it remains the same.

So while I can get closer to being allowed to be the me I want to be. I'll never have everything I actually want.

And because of that.
That creates my torture.

I shouldn't be in a position to complain about a hellish life, because I have things which SHOULD lead to a happy, fulfilling life. And I do in fact, genuinely, feel happiness, each and every single day!

So maybe you can then understand the torture of HAVING THESE THINGS, KNOWING THEY ARE AWESOME, YET FEELING TORTURED IN SPITE OF POSSESSING THEM. Having them makes the torture in many ways worse, especially when I am told, "You have those things, why are you saying your life is hell?"

​When I have things others want above all else, how can I tell them I don't want those things? That what they consider a cherished gift is worthless to me? That what I have is their dream, yet I'm deliberately wasting it? That I don't care about the things I take for granted they want.

When I have no RIGHT to complain...what's it mean when I DO? Knowing I got good, yet I don't appreciate it. So luxurious, so nothing to complain about...yet I do ANYWAY. I know that my feelings on the subject hurt them...but I can't stop myself from having those feelings.

I can pretend I don't feel that way, that I appreciate the things I ought to appreciate, but it's still a lie. The simple truth of the matter is that I don't care about anything I have other than my girlfriend. (Incidentally. Caring about nothing in my life except my girlfriend is, in fact. Reason I would leave everything for them. Because I don't care about those things; I care about them, my girlfriend. Because I care for my girlfriend but not any part of my life, I would thus sacrifice any and every part of my life for the sake of my girlfriend. But I digress.)

​In other words. I know I am privileged, yet with the sole exception of my girlfriend nothing I have I really feel helps, making the torture worse. The torture is mental, psychological, in nature, continuously ongoing. It never ends. There's never a break in it. Never a chance for me to get a rest from my weaknesses.

They are always there, always a fundamental part of me, constantly reminding me of what I'll never have, what I'll never obtain, no matter how much I dream of having those things. All of that? Things which, by having, I "SHOULDN'T" be tortured, so because I know I shouldn't feel tortured, make the torture I feel all the more worse because in spite of having those things I still am tortured?

It's the worst pain I can possibly have. I don't feel I have the right to complain. I don't feel like I have the right to say I'm in pain. I don't feel like I have the right to say I'm struggling every day. I don't feel like I have the right to say my life is hell, my life is pain, my life is suffering.

I don't feel like I have the right to say those things. Yet I say them anyway. And I live this pain, every single day of my life. Because every single day, no matter how subtle, I suffer from gender dysphoria of my body not matching my mind. Every single day, no matter how little problem it presents, I struggle with my autistic idiosyncrasies clashing with society.

Every single day, I live in fear of succumbing to any number of problems originating from my bipolar disorder, and even when I don't, I am constantly bombarded by my own mind's hyperdrive. Processing a million different things and inputting them all at once, with poorly-assembled filters that could fail at any time.

Hells made worse by living them every day.
So isolation cures most of them, except the explosion of bipolar's mania, which is made oh so very much worse. 

Of course, all things considered. Miraculous as it may be, I am reasonably speaking well-adjusted. People who interact with me might just think I'm quiet, or a bit odd; they wouldn't really think of autism. (The last time I was asked, it was by a police officer, who wanted to make sure my stuttering wasn't because of either brain damage ensued from my car crash or from consuming alcohol, both things he would have obvious reason to take action on.)

That's because I have coping mechanisms in place.

I genuinely am able to live a happy, peaceful life. (Especially considering, and I can't emphasize this enough, I have a girlfriend that I love, who loves me, and that by being with I feel alive; they really are a motivator for me and an anchor point, as it were, a "rock" to rest upon.)

But said happy life is largely the result of wastefully squandering what I have, akin to a drug addict. An easy example to utilize here is the game of mafia, which I have so heavily integrated into the core of my life. A running joke is that mafia is the ultimate drug addiction.

The real piece of wisdom comes in when you realize it's not actually a joke. Mafia serves as an escape from the world. My problems still exist outside of it, and manifest even within it, but while I am playing it I don't have to consciously think about those problems. They don't go away. In fact, they only get larger. But while there, I can bury myself away, happily doing nothing.

I derive a sense of self-worth from it. It is self-destructive, it is incredibly harmful, but it makes me feel happy. It is a way to deal with the torture, but it does not cure the torture. It is a way of temporarily forgetting about my problems, my suffering, but it can't cure them no matter how hard I try and by immersing myself too heavily in it as I've done on occasions my life has taken nosedives, plummeting in a downward spiral.

Sounds like a drug to me.

I do have non-mafia coping mechanisms.
Even productive ones! That being, non-gaming coping mechanisms, since I play more games than just mafia to escape the misfortunes of the world.

But while those coping mechanisms exist. They can't cure the problem. Just mitigate the damage of it. 

I am always struggling between my self, and my sense of others. The desire to do good is there, but so too is the struggle to overcome my limitations, to bypass my roadblocks, my shortcomings. And I fail, time and time again. And each failure is more painful than the last, because each time I tell myself I learned, I'll do better, and that I won't make the same mistake again...so when I make it anyway, there's a sense of dread and despair, of a broken record.

And, yes, hopelessness. Always, wasting. Never who I want to be, never doing what I want to do, and when faced with this truth, using excuse after excuse. (Heck, you can find them here in this very blog!) But never changing. Half because I don't want to change things I can, half because I can't change the things I want to. So always on repeat.

Some things I most want to can't change. Yet I have the power to change plenty. An ability I knowingly and deliberately squander. Itself a form of cruelty, self-defeating, even destructive, yet I learned to revel in this debauchery as a coping mechanism.

There are good coping mechanisms, but most of mine aren't. I can change coping mechanisms, but I struggle to do so, because what I want to do isn't to change the coping mechanism, but to change myself so that there's no need to cope in the first place.

Something which I know is impossible to obtain. And the circle continues anew. A self-feeding loop.

I do, however, have a saving grace. It's a form of acceptance. Knowing that I can't ever get what I want has allowed me to come to peace to it to some extent, and I can live my every day life at least in part due to that, and I don't think that's an inherently bad thing; it's actually a quite rare gift.

I have some level of peace about who and what I am, something most people in similar situations never obtain and their response to never obtaining it is quite often disproportionately suicide; my risk of that is quite low because I know I can live this way even if I hate it.

It is also a curse though because that same tendency has a downside of feeding the negativity. It can help me, in the sense that it prevents the negativity from taking control altogether. But it can also hurt me further, because it allows the negativity to foster, to thrive.

It's actually quite possible, in fact, that this sense of acceptance is in some ways...my numbness from succumbing to the torture. It does fit a number of the symptoms; I am continuously in pain, and certainly have been pushed to breaking before. It'd make sense that if I did in fact develop acceptance as an adjustment to the pain, it'd make me more numb to it.

Granted, this being psychological pain. This being psychological torture. Acceptance as a numbing agent to the pain doesn't stop it altogether. The pain still destroys my life. It just doesn't do as much damage as it would without the acceptance.

​I don't really have a direction to take this morbid blog after this. I certainly don't have a positive spin to put on it; with more clever writing I may have managed one, but honestly I'm not sure this is a subject which would deserve a positive spin. This is a debilitating thing.

Every day, I have that torture, and every day, I know it could be oh so much worse.

I'm not even scratching the surface of my mind here.

​But I thought I'd at least give you a piece of it.

Just not what I need to be doing!
At work, I sketched out in some quick doodles a few traditional Paladin weaponry.
Now, mind you, what I mean by traditional, is exactly that; they are things which are common due to tradition, but are not in any way shape or form mandatory in that Paladins use the weaponry they forge, and the weaponry they forge is weaponry suited to their style of combat/lifestyle choices.

I didn't get all of it done, but I still knocked a few basic doodles out for a few of them. Felt good to ~art~, even if only briefly so.

What I more came to talk about is a personal blog from my childhood, to tell a completely true story of one of my earliest memories, because it's an entertaining (if a bit mortifying) story. I had to have been either three or four years old for this incident, early. (So in the 1996-1997 range.)

Basically, the short version of it is...I was a genius child. Absolutely smart as could be, in many aspects; incredibly sharp. Fairly common descriptor of autistic children in fact; we pick up on things which most people don't, but we just have an incredibly poor understanding of other things as a tradeoff, more or less.

This is not always a good thing.

When my family was out car shopping, it happened that I was left alone in a dealership car. I don't know why I was left alone, but I was left alone in the back seat of the car. Presumably, my parents were testing the car out, and got out to talk to the dealer about details of the car, inspecting it from the front, or something like that. (They may have had the hood up, even; that'd certainly explain how they didn't notice this!)

If I was in any way restrained by a buckle (I'm presuming I was, but I have no memory of it, so if so it presented me with no challenge to my goal), I managed to undo it; I know this, because I remember crawling from the back seat...into the driver's seat.

(This is a story that, for full effect, you'd need to listen to multiple family members' perspectives.)

What I remember of this is I had a single thought:
"I wanna drive like mommy and daddy do!"
I knew the steering wheel made you go left or right; I knew the brake pedal slowed you down; I knew the acceleration pedal sped you up; I also knew that in order to start the car...mommy and daddy always pushed the brake pedal down, and ended up pulling that lever on their right sides back in order to make the car go forward.

So in the driver seat.

I did exactly that.
I think I was completely down in the pedal area where the feet were, pressing down on the brake pedal...and shifting the car into gear. (Or at the very least, neutral.)

My parents were, prior to this, completely unaware anything was happening...but started panicking when the car I was in started moving forward. (Thank heavens there was no key in the car because even at that age I coulda turned the car on. Though, granted, had I managed it, I probably woulda been stopped before shifting the gears, butstill.)

The main reason for the panic, however, was not because of the implication...

...But because my brother was right in front of the car as I pulled this stunt.

So they made a mad dash to the driver side door, figuring out what had happened, in order to stop me.

In other words.
As a child.
I almost ran over my brother, by "driving" a car.

To this day, how I pulled off what I did baffles my parents, and even I'm not really sure what happened. All I remember from the incident, really, IS that thought of "I wanna drive like my mommy and daddy do!" and the car lurching forward after I fiddled around.

​Makes a good story to tell at the least.

It's very hard to keep my life together. It's just...so difficult for me to do anything right now. I'm physically okay, albeit a bit battered. I'm mentally alright, albeit a bit tired. I'm emotionally...well, a bit dulled. Almost dead emotionally as in robot with no feelings, empty shell, barely holding on to happiness, but I manage, especially with support from my girlfriend (who probably doesn't know how much I rely on them even if they think they do because however much they think I rely on them it's more than that).

While the problem could in fact be at that emotional level, it actually feels like I'm tired in a way transcending all three. Not physical, not mental, not emotional. Like, spiritually, or something. Where I just am detached from everything, and yet attached to everything, all at the same time.

My mind goes hectic, racing about everything, everywhere, but there's a disconnect between it and reality of doing anything, where I drift off into the world of "this is what I want to have done" rather than "this is what I'm doing". Because what I'm doing is a flat load of nothing.

I'm just.

Really struggling to get things done.

I'm not overwhelmed.

Well, I have a little bit of that, between working the same long shift every single day and the amount of time/effort devoted to my extracurricular activities. (Such as playing, or rather far more time-consuming, moderating, mafia games.)

But the simple fact is, when all is said and done.

I have a lot of time free.

And I waste it.

Doing.
Nothing.

And more than that.

I often lie.
Sometimes, directly to people's faces.
I say I don't have the time, when I do.
I say I haven't read, when I have.
But while those are things which should be lies, they don't feel dishonest. How could those things which aren't truths yet be spoken not be the dishonesty? Because the real dishonesty comes more in a deeper level. A level of character. Where I am lying to myself about the problems.

Where it's just so hard to do things, for no apparent reason. So I decide not to do them.
In part out of a sense of perfection; I seek it when I do things, in spite of knowing I can never have it.
In part because of the time and effort.
In part because of inertia, of momentum having halted to a crash.
In part because of a sense of detachment.

Not in that I don't want to be there, because it's the opposite; I want nothing more than to be there.
But more because of a not wanting to do the thing associated with being there, and a detachment, disparity, between what I want to be there and what would actually be there. Because what's actually there is work, effort, hard stuff for me to handle; what I want to be there is me genuinely giving my all to give the absolute best, to give something as close to perfect as possible, so that things are positive and people, other people, feel better.

A great amount of my desires are born from some sense, deep down, of altruism. I want to help others. I want to give them something. I want to show them the best I have. I want to deliver something they enjoy. I want to have everyones' lives just be better because of me.

But I also have a deep sense of selfishness. I want others to have been helped by me. I want to prove that I can give it to them, that I live up to it, that I can do what I promise. I want to have done something, and have it be done by me, and that something be positive.

I'm in a bit of a rambly mood. I don't really have a direction with this. No greater purpose. Nothing tying this all together. I'm just kinda venting my thoughts out, pouring my heart out, and more or less trying to figure out why I am continuing to be a failure.

The more and more I dream of success, the further and further away success seems to be from me.
The more and more I want to help others, the less and less I feel I actually am helping them.
The more and more the thought of doing good exists, the less and less there's a reality of any good.

And I don't know how to fix it.
It's a problem.
I don't have a solution.

So many things I want to do.
And so few things, I am actually doing.

I'm existing, but only just.

I'm trying to find a way to put a positive spin on this. I've been toying with various things. Writing a song (which I've toyed with but never doubled down on doing). Rambling about all the reasons I'd have to, say, not do my job--and then at the last second, giving the twist for why I am committed to keeping going in it in spite of the hardships. Stuff like that.

But while those thoughts keep me afloat, it's hard for me once more to actually put them down and extrapolate on them.

A perfect example of "the more the thought exists, the less the reality does", in that the more I am thinking about such things, the harder it's becoming for me to actually blog about those things.

I don't want people to worry about me right now, because I don't want to be in a state which is worth worrying about.
I want to be in a state where I am at my prime, and doing what I do best. (Which is, at least in theory, being. Well. Me. And doing the things that I do. Like, uh. Generate stories? Tie interesting concepts together in new ways unique to me, e.g. the sort of person who would tie the four fundamental forces to the four classical elements?)

I don't want to be in a position where people have to give me advice, where people have to give me support, where people have to give me positive feedback and encouragement. I shouldn't need those things. I shouldn't need to have an ego fed, I shouldn't need to be propped up, I shouldn't need to be helped.

I should be the one doing that for others. Where I'm giving them support, even love.

Which makes it all the more pathetic that I do see myself as being in that position--where I constantly need others to tell me what I should be able to tell myself. I should be able to tell myself that I'm not a failure; I should be able to tell myself I'm not pathetic.

​But right now, I certainly don't have it in me, because that's the way I'm feeling.

That is.
I don't make a second entry for a day when my previous first entry was already past midnight.

Mainly because of the risk that I'll have chronology issues on the blog that I don't know how to fix.

But I'll make an exception.

I am typing this immediately after my "all my days are the same" entry. It's 1 am, that entry was started at like 12:45 am.

But.

One of the things I wanted to talk about is how people give inquiries into my life.

Often times, they will give the fluff questions. "How are you doing?"

I am often conditioned to respond automatically: "good", "alright", and the like.
Sometimes, when I pause to think, but am in a position where I don't or can't talk about it, I'll lie and give the response manually in spite of knowing it's not right. (I do give an honest answer when I think about it, can talk about it, and such.)

Yet there's a third type of situation, more common than both.
I pause to think, but no matter what I try to think about, I don't actually know. I don't have the details. I don't have the ability to think, "What's actually going wrong right now?"

In that.

Say someone asks me how I'm doing.
Say I give a fluff answer.
Say they prod further, or that instead of giving a fluff answer I hesitate.

Then I'm put in the position where I'll probably just answer with the fluff responses of "good", "alright", and the like...even though those aren't the truth. And the issue is dropped right there, because they don't go further. But they need to, because I require prompts.

I don't know what goes on with me. I don't know what's good, what's bad. I don't know how I'm doing. I need others to frame things for me, give me a reference point. "How's your day" isn't a good starting point, nor is "What's happened in your day" for that matter, and those are some of the more creative ones that just don't work.

I don't actually know what does work. I know a bunch of ways which don't.

But often, I find myself in a position where I would love to talk to people and talk my heart out but I don't have any coherent thoughts and I need something a lot more specific than most people can really give. In fact, it's even a little bit of a catch-22:

The only way to really learn something meaningful about me is to get me to open up and talk about the truly important things. The only learn to get me to open up and talk about the truly important things is to engage me in a meaningful way. The only way to engage me in a meaningful way is to have first learnt something meaningful about me to get the right response going in the first place, and thus the cycle continues.

My girlfriend is just about the only one who can actually consistently accomplish the feat I'd say, in spite of numerous others from close friends to coworkers (both long-time and well-positioned) to family attempting the feat. Even I can't really do it to myself; I can't really just ask myself, "how am I doing?" and come up with an honest answer.

That may sound stupid. How could I not know how I am doing when asking myself?

But it's true.

I don't actually know.

The times I do know, it was never because that's the questioned I asked; it was because I stumbled into the answer to an unasked question completely and entirely accidentally. 

All my days seem to be the same. So I'm not really feeling great. And yet in spite of that if you asked me how I was feeling I would say exactly that. Because I don't actually know what I'm feeling, if that makes sense, and you'd need to forcefully prod it out of me to get me to actually know it myself.

And it was completely accidental, too; I wasn't really trying to soul search, but when I felt it, I felt like I was onto something, particularly during one moment which felt oh so strongly, undeniably, true.

I'm not quite sure where to begin; this revelation took me a while to unpack, but.
Basically.
You know how I identify as a median, right?
How there are many mes, and all of them are Bree?
And how while there are many of us, the primary two are identified as Ranger and mastina?

Well.

I think there's actually a third, and she's more dominant than both combined, especially right now. The reason I haven't noticed, however, is that she's really good at disguising herself as either of us...and more than that. She...on her own, by herself. Doesn't really have anything to think.

She's a bit of an empty shell, an empty husk. There's nothing in her, by herself. Yet she has this amazing ability. Ranger has the capability to talk to characters and get to know them. I've always known, however, that I have another ability, and this third me I believe is the source of it: when I actually become the characters.

And...this has been happening a lot as of recently. A LOT, a lot. Far, far, far, far, far, FAR more often than normal. The most it's ever happened since I was a young child, I believe. Primarily, the two I am becoming are actually becoming Ruby and actually becoming Phyrra, but I can and do become others as well. In this mode, I can think what they do, I can feel what they do, I can almost feel their powers coursing through my veins, and everything about their world becomes a reality to me.

Yet also during those same times, I feel a little bit of a sense of emptiness--as if there is a nothingness, a void. Which I think becoming the character is an attempt to fill. That the me who becomes these characters is literally attempting to become someone else...because there's nothing in her, nothing to her, nothing about her.

I actually have a hypothesis, that this third me who I only caught the faintest glimpse of is actually the first me, the first Bree, the original me. The me who is responsible for me having a core that all Brees derive from. The me who has the fullest control, the me who connects everything together in spite of not actually thinking for herself, instead simply summoning the thoughts of others to think for her.

This sounds like normal me delusions, yes. But what made me convinced that this might have merit was a moment.
There was a moment where I was able to release thought, control, and emotion to her. It was her, alone, in her thoughts, for just a split moment.

At first, there was literally nothing. No thought. No emotion. No nothing. But immediately following that. I felt the strongest fear I have ever felt in my life. It lasted for a split second. Only that long, because immediately following it I was promptly and immediately driving again, as if she was hiding herself intentionally from facing whatever thought could create that emotion.

But that was the most intense feeling I have ever experienced. A deep, primordial fear of something, mixed with a taint of sadness. My theory more or less developed that she was me before there were many mes, but was empty, isolated, alone. She was a vivid, perfect actor of sorts, capable of playing a part to reflect the circumstances and yet being nothing on her own. These parts she played were compartmentalized and from those raised the various mes. All originally her, but extensions of her that eventually came alive, more or less.

Of course, that's just the theory.
I think it's a good one, because it more or less matches my memory of my entire life, matches with my numerous mental conditions (autism plus bipolar disorder namely), matches what feels like it makes sense, and matches my recent experiences. (I've been feeling a bit detached from reality but more than that...I've been feeling a bit detached from myself in that I've been looking at me and just...not feeling like there's anything there.)

But while almost everything I've said is just conjecture, while almost everything I've said is purely speculation. I can still access the memory of that feeling, that sensation, of that deep, fundamental fear, with the tint of sadness attached. That was real. That was something overwhelmingly strong, even painful, to feel, and I know as much as I know I am Bree that it was a real feeling, one which originated from some very deep-rooted source.

If I had to self-analyze, what I'd get from it is that my guess is that I'm afraid of being nothing. I don't mean amounting to nothing. I don't mean dieing. (As in, suddenly going from existing to not existing.) Afraid of existing, but there being nothing in that existence at all. Which seems like a fairly reasonable fear to me.

I also don't think this is something I'll be exploring too much. I think stumbling upon this discovery was very, very healthy for my wellbeing, as a more or less, "Oh, so that's what's happening", in that it can help me better understand what I'm going through so I can manage my life a little more effectively. Yet I also feel that exploring much further would be detrimental since I get a kind of sense where, "leave the system undisturbed since I am happy with it", more or less.

In short, for much the same reason that I don't particularly care if people call me crazy or delusional, I don't particularly care to look further; I'm happy with this as it is, and that's all that really matters.

One of the things which turns me from manic to depressed so often now in spite of medications meant to help with that.

Forgive the phrasing as it's something I'd normally not say unless in tongue-in-cheek because saying it seriously is a hallmark of arrogance, but I can't think of a better phrase to describe the issue:
"It's not every day you have a stroke of genius."

I don't want to call myself a genius because of how presumptuous that'd be. BUT. I think you can at least understand my sentiment here, what I'm going for.

It is not every day that you come up with a great idea.

It is not every day that you come up with an idea which is amazing.

And like.

I know I am a very creative person, who builds grand worlds. The World of Soano (The Descended's setting) is one of my favorite places. The Rubyverse is a conglomeration of my work across the years and takes the best of everything put into one place.

Heroes of Gistou takes what is perhaps the greatest achievement I've ever had as a writer and is a conglomeration of all my years of work as a writer; in the original mafia game I wrote the flavor for it was ambitious enough but as a novel which took things even further, it has literally every skill I've ever used in any of my stories ever in one place, while adding elements I've never used before including diversity in gender/sexual orientation (okay so that's touched on very lightly in one other story but only barely), racism, and hair/eye/skin color and whatnot.

It is basically my crowning achievement as a writer because the characters are humans I know (okay so to be fair, this was a bit of a cheat because when writing their characters some influence from the players who were assigned those roles leaked in), the setting is one of the most intricate ones I've built, the plot is one of my favorite stories, and the quality of the writing is the highest I've ever done; there's nothing to top it.

Though, coming close would be the other novel I was working on when my flashdrive failed and caused me to lose literally years' worth of work. (Still bitter about that, but if you're wondering, probably wouldn't work on my novel if I had the information, anyway. I'd back the information up, but my mood to work on the novel was utterly killed and having the flashdrive back and functioning wouldn't magically revitalize it.)

It is, in many ways, similar to Gistou in that it is the other story which touches on sexual orientation (albeit not gender orientation), and in some ways it actually is more of a statement. Some things which we might think are very unprogressive are shown even from the main characters...but this is more or less commented on in the book and you can tell that it is a deliberate narrative choice. (At least if I competently write that is.)

Racial divide, philosophy, the nature of war, the nature of fate/destiny, discrimination, eugenics of a sort (something I don't think I ever actually wrote down was a minor revision to dialog at one point where the protagonist notes that while there are 10,000 humans left alive, only about 4,000 of them are pureblooded humans with no genes from the other species which is closely enough related to humanity that they can have fertile hybrid children and said hybrid children's descendants account for the other 6,000 and the protagonist believes that in order to survive humanity needs that genetic diversity since humanity's gene pool is dangerously small; even his ancestors had a first cousin marriage).

It just touches on a lot of things, with some of the most powerful writing I've ever done, a full cast of characters who are actual CHARACTERS. They don't just have quirks. They have flaws. Most of my characters, well, they might have flaws but they don't get displayed in my writing. It's a bit of a weak spot in my writing; when I write characters, they don't tend to fail, they don't tend to have shortcomings, they don't tend to be in the wrong, and so on and so forth.

This story has all of that. And the question, of course, of "am I really in the right?", with ambiguous answers, rather than clear-cut ones. People. More than any other story, maybe even more than Gistou, people. Yet the world has a beautiful history to it and the plot progresses in this altogether philosophical way, where action is happening and yet you still get these little moments to know everyone.

The Perfect RPG for me is a setting I might have slightly tabled in favor of other projects, but I am still passionate about it because I really like what I made there.

I still want to make the Disneyesque Villain Song setting. I've toyed with various expansions, from extra characters (the protagonist, the seer, the love interest, the best friend of the protagonist, a cool old guy, and of course the villain among many others), how the beginning of the story unfolds, how the protagonist meets the love interest, how the story ends, and little things here and there including that the villain would be almost by-the-book following the evil overlord list (with some liberties taken here and there).

It is a wondrous, beautiful thing, envisioned as a film but also suitable for a miniseries. Probably not a full series, but could be done I suppose with tweaking.

And then there's the two most recent.

Phyrra and Cyrus.

And Dawn of Order.

I am passionate about them all.
Yet those ones really speak to me as, so to speak, "genius among the genius". Or rather. "This is the perfect balance of something which can actually be done (and is thus, pragmatic to do), and yet is something which is still grand enough to be ambitious, reach the masses, and inspire greatness", more or less.

Phyrra and Cyrus, and Dawn of Order, are both outside of my general comfort zone. I am a writer first and foremost. I am secondarily an artist. While those are used in animation and games, they are not at the forefront of them. Both have incredible ambition behind them, both have incredible ideas which make them truly unique and original, and yet because of what they are, are something which can be spread to the masses fairly easily and readily once made.

And more than that. I feel that they can actually be done. Not by me, alone, yes. But they can be DONE.
One of the reasons The Descended may never get off its feet is because it feels like a project which needs to be done entirely by me, but yet the scale of the project is such that while it's incredibly ambitious I'm probably never going to be able to complete it in my lifetime just as me alone.

Aside from how I've lost the art and scripts I've had multiple times, aside from how the site is (pardon the language) a clusterfuck and yet I have a strong desire to not nuke it and start from scratch. Aside from that. To tell the story I want to tell, I need to produce high-quality, almost professional art. Yet there's a ton of content for the story. I've forgotten a fair amount and with no usable notes that content is lost forever but even with it removed (or magically recovered).

The story isn't short. Compared to Red Hood Rider, yeah, it's short. But it's still something which if I were updating daily would take years of my life to complete and updating at a rate slower than daily would take...well. Longer than a human lifespan, honestly. 

Speaking of Red Hood Rider. What I just said about The Descended applies to it, too. Red Hood Rider, being a project which is mine. Just feels like something which should be done by me. I have also lost many notes of mine on the subject and what I have is chaotic, jumbled, scattered. Yet new content keeps being added even to this day, and content gets revised. And it's estimated to be about 80-100 episodes worth of content.

Each episode with 20-40 pages.

If that were daily updates that'd be potentially 4,000 pages. You know how many years that is? Ten. If I were releasing daily pages it would take ten years to complete Red Hood Rider. Now imagine less than daily. And knowing that the quality of art demanded for the project is even higher than that of The Descended, because Red Hood Rider is meant to be something which could be adapted into an animation (which is why chapters are called episodes).

My novels are, obviously. Personal projects. Can't outsource writing. Well, you could I suppose but heck no that's not something I'd do. So it'd have to be me doing them, by myself, alone.

All of them, I can reach out to others of course. Get a novel published, I can communicate to my readers. Start updating a webcomic, I can have dialog with my readers actively on a daily basis. But there's something in that which feels missing, actually.

And that is something not missing when I think of Phyrra and Cyrus especially, although also recently Dawn of Order.

Because on those. I would be creating my visions, but I'd be working with others, collaborating with them to bring what I envisioned to life. It would be my project, it would be personal, but it would have the touch of others on it as well and that would be a good thing. For The Descended, Red Hood Rider, and my novels, the thought of the touch of others on it feels WRONG.

But because it is literally a requirement for Phyrra and Cyrus (given voice acting) and Dawn of Order, it feels right. It feels good. The thought that I'd have it.

I'm not sure I'm presenting a very coherent thought here on what I am getting at.

What I am getting at is that many of my projects, I feel are personal projects.
Yet when it comes to a project like Phyrra and Cyrus.

What makes them strokes of genius.
Is that they are something which aren't personal projects. Yet in spite of not being personal projects. They feel like they are realistically achievable. I don't think anything I've envisioned in them is impossible, unreasonable, or really that hard to achieve if I really set my mind to it.

And I just.
Really, really like thinking about them.

And that's where the depression comes in--when I can't think of them, as it were.
Or rather. "I have thought of this great idea. Why am I not thinking of something just as good, or doing something just as good?"

By that, I mean.

Anything I do, I feel like it's less than what I could be doing.

I pretty much stopped playing Final Fantasy VII once I started envisioning the perfect RPG.
And now there's something similar for Majesty, Zeus/Poseidon, and the like.

Where I have envisioned a really cool game, Dawn of Order. Which I want to be playing, or at least designing. Rather than playing those games.

And any other game just feels...lesser than those, because those are some of my favorite games after all.

And there's something similar for Phyrra and Cyrus.

I've pretty much stopped rehashing most of my ideas (aside from the villain song one which is alive and well) since starting it. And when I think about them. I just. Want the moments I envision to be real.

I've even mapped out exactly how I could do it, too. The things I ask for, most I know explicitly can already be done because I have seen them done. And if I've seen them done, then it is possible for them to be done on my project. (For reference, this is also true of Dawn of Order. I don't think anything I describe is impossible, not even when putting it all together, because every element I describe exists in one of the games I was inspired by, and while I know code isn't exactly directly transferable, it'd be possible to more or less manage it if you were a competent coder familiar with the inspiration and knowing the intended result.)

​If I could, for instance. I'm like 97% sure that Phyrra and Cyrus could be hosted on ComicFury. Yes, it's a comic site, yes, Phyrra and Cyrus is an animation, but I am almost absolutely positive (thus the 97%) that a "comic" can be a video.

Specifically. A video which doesn't autoplay, which you hit play in order to play, and which has both animation and audio. There is a file format which allows that. Well, multiple file formats. But I am positive one of said file formats, ComicFury supports for comics, and thus, it would be potentially possible to upload an entire episode. (Might run afoul of the size limitation to uploads but I'm sure there'd be a workaround for that.)

If that were possible, then from there it'd be easy.
Each comic (except fillers in the form of character art or worldbuilding concepts) would be an episode.

The most iffy thing I'd want would be the ability to make a video fullscreen; I'm less than positive that'd be possible.

But I'd want a home page with disqus comments that'd display the latest episode and latest blog (easily done), the ability to leave disqus comments on every blog post (easily done), maybe disqus comments on some extra pages (easily done), and then for the comments on every comic...
Disqus comments displaying on top and ComicFury comments also displaying below Disqus as the default (seen it done so it can be done),
With the option to alternatively have ComicFury comments on top and Disqus comments below,
And the option to hide ComicFury comments (seen it done so it can be done),
And the option to hide Disqus comments (seen it done so it can be done),
And the option to hide both comments,
And the ability to save preference for comment display (the above options) between both pages page to page and visits  visit to visit (meaning not needing to manually click the preferred option each time; pretty sure this can be done),
And Disqus comments linked to every site I host Phyrra and Cyrus on with Disqus (seen it done so it can be done).

Optionally, with a domain purchased and used.
Premade layouts have a quick-navigation (dropdown menu) so I'd have that, and premade layouts also have the "save my place" function for saving the comic/episode location you were watching so you can "load my place" later, and optionally, I could maybe have non-intrusive advertising built into the site.

So that might seem like a fair amount. But given what I know ComicFury can already do. In that I've seen almost all of this already done. I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to do. And it'd be awesome.

This is what I mean. I mapped that out over a week ago. It's doable. Most likely, at least. 

It feels like something I can actually have made real.

It feels like something where I could have a blast.
Just interacting with viewers, with fans, with friends, and coworkers, to make a project, pouring pure love into it every step of the way. A project which is mine...but also more than mine. Something greater, built by a team, a community. Something to share with the world, and be remembered for.

Something unique, quirky, original, and ambitious. Yet not so ambitious as to be impossible. To be manageable. To be something that can be made.

That's what I want to make on a daily basis.

But it's not every day I make a Phyrra and Cyrus.
It's not every day I make a Dawn of Order.
It's not every day that I get to have those moments of genius for lack of a better term.
It's not every day where I can snatch that greatness and feel it.

But on those days where I don't have the greatness.

I still remember the feeling of it.
The sensation remains.

On days I am not making the next Phyrra and Cyrus. Or for that matter, making Phyrra and Cyrus. I am remembering the sensation of Phyrra and Cyrus. And that is where the depression comes in...because I feel empty, because it's just so real and something just so close to something I can see tangible...yet not actually existing. The ideas will die with me.

I intend to live a very long life, of course. But the ideas if I don't make them...well. Nobody else would. Nobody else could. They could make something which has all the elements my notes describe, of course. But it wouldn't be how I had tried to make it because my notes aren't nearly as extensive as they should be, and there are little things here and there that the only way I'd be able to bring up is if someone first was trying to do them wrong and I'd be able to tell them, "No, not that. This." to fix it.

And that's the frustrating feeling.

Knowing that I have these ideas. Ideas that are. No matter how much I try to be humble. No matter how much I try to avoid arrogance. No matter how much I try to be a realist, a pessimist, a cynic. Ideas which are just...good. Ideas which are genius. I have them. And they demand to be made real.

I feel them as real. I actually live with them as real. I don't just see episodes of Phyrra and Cyrus. I also see me interacting with viewers who watch the latest episode of Phyrra and Cyrus. Me commenting on their comments, engaging them in dialogs which are currently nonexistent. Talking to them, revealing miscellaneous facts, sometimes being a bit of a trolling creator, other times revealing tiny snippets which couldn't make it into the show, small Word of God things like that, you probably can get a sense of what I mean.

When I think of them. I am actively doing that. Not just laying out the episode itself. But also the reactions to the episode, which I know would exist because. Well. I am confident in myself. Not arrogance. I know that, 100%. If Phyrra and Cyrus was made into a series. There would be fans. There would be people commenting. There would be a lot of them because in order for Phyrra and Cyrus to publish so much as a single episode. It'd need to get the publicity to get off the ground in the first place.

In other words. I know that if Phyrra and Cyrus existed. There would be people talking about it. It would demand to be watched. Demand to be seen. It would be popular, spread like wildfire. I know this because I know what I can make it be. If it existed, then it would exist at a high enough quality where those things would be impossible to not have.

And the depression more or less comes from.

"...So why isn't it so?!?"

So why don't Phyrra and Cyrus already exist.
So why doesn't Dawn of Order already exist.
So why doesn't this idea. Which is magical. Have its reality.
And why can't I have something like it, right now, in front of me.
Why can't I have something like it, or it itself, in my mind if nowhere else.

And that's what cuts deep. Not having it in front of me. Not having it in my head. And not having something similar to it in my head. Living in a world where it doesn't exist tangibly. Living in our world. A world close to the one they exist in. But they don't. Because I haven't made them exist yet, in spite of being their creator.

I think that describes my depression pretty well. And people might be able to relate to it now that I've described it in those terms. But I never know. Sometimes, it might just be I'm crazy.