It was a wasted trip.

I had a fever this morning.
I am sure that unless I am magically on the road to recovery (which I don't feel like I am), I will have a fever later today and tonight.
But at the only time I could visit the doctor.
I didn't have the main symptom I've been suffering from for almost four weeks now.

They took my temperature, and it was normal. They listened to me describe what I've had, and summed it up more or less as, "So, you haven't taken your temperature, and have just felt it?"

It was in that moment I realized they didn't believe me at all. And were only not saying as much because of a sense of professionalism in being obliged to humor me. Because I don't have any other symptoms. I don't cough frequently enough to be considered a cough; I've had a brief sore throat for part of the day, once or twice per week so like about 3-5 times total but it went away in less than a day so I don't have that, either.

And no real diarrhea, beyond what is normal for me anyway. In that sure not everything coming out all the time comes out in neat stools, but that happens to everyone every once and a while and it's not consistent; on average, I simply haven't had diarrhea so no symptom there, either.

And while I've had times where I felt like I couldn't eat more unless I'd place myself at risk of vomiting. I haven't felt like I would vomit, specifically because I've taken steps to avoid feeling that way, so I don't have that symptom. No cough. No sore throat. No diarrhea. No vomiting.

Just the fever, which I have no readings for, and which wasn't there at the actual time of the appointment in spite of just how debilitating it has been when it has shown up. And the exhaustion associated with sapped stamina from sickness.

They took bloodwork, which will take a couple days to get results back from.
They told me it wasn't bacterial, which I already knew.
But since there was no proof of it at the time I went in.
And I could offer them no proof of it.

Even if they didn't say it to my face.
They just didn't believe I had it altogether.

So, wasted trip. In spite of it having been almost four weeks. Advice was just give it more time, that if it's actually real it should clear up on its own.

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.

I actually do have a headache, but that's most likely because my mom drank the cup of coffee which was meant to be mine so I'm going through withdrawal. (At least I think? I mean, I had coke last night, but no coffee today and I am a person who can drink potentially up to six cups of coffee in a day, and I believe headaches are a symptom of withdrawal, so. It's my working hypothesis.)

But even if it has more mundane explanations, my explanation for it is that I partied hard last night with my girlfriend. I basically stayed up all night, but this is not without consequences. I woke up at 2:30 pm. I left for dance at 6:15 pm, getting home at around 10:20 pm. It's 12:10 am now and I'm going straight to bed because I have an absolute HELL shift (it's a SEVEN HOUR SHIFT, of TWO EXTREMELY BUSY EVENTS), so when you factor in prep time and eating time, that's about a five-hour day total of free time, broken up into three before, two after.

And that makes a difference, because when you have an imminent deadline, which you know is there, that limits what you can do. The things I need to get done, I knew I couldn't get done in those times, so I didn't do them today. So today in terms of most stuff is a washout.

But, tomorrow will be better. I'll see if I can get my online life together.

...Was totally worth it though.

For a beautiful story idea.

I don't have the time to post it today! (Work, so sleep. Also, health.)

​I'll get to it tomorrow, though.

And tomorrow's going to be...well, quite the load I can tell you that.

I'll be getting six hours of sleep tonight--normally, fine, but with a flu, not so fine.
I'll be going from there to work. Dropped off, and picked up, so not done on my own terms.
Driven home.
Basically go straight from there to dance.
And I work on Friday, too. (Albeit, at a later hour and only for a few hours.) Meaning reduced sleep not to mention basically no free time.

​This'll be fuuuuuuuuuuuun.

And while I had the time to make a blog entry, I've been spending the last two hours or so looking up signs/symptoms/etc. of secondary infections. That being, I know that viral infections turning bacterial (in layman's terms at least) is a thing which happens; I was more or less looking up to see what the odds were that my sickness had turned from the flu into a bacterial infection.

This stemmed from a few factors. My cough feeling like it had changed. The fact that I felt like I was getting much, much better, and yet now feel sick again. The fact that I've been feeling like I've been burning up. (Though, apparently, that doesn't mean anything because according to the thermometer, my temperature is approximately 98.96--a little high, but I'm fairly certain that's not only within the margin of error but also practically expected of my family because if I'm not mistaken our temperatures always run just a little bit above the norm.)

Conclusion: uncertain. It remains a possibility, but not a probability, if that makes sense. It's something to be on guard for, certainly, but at this point I wouldn't be too worried about it. I don't have most of the symptoms that would be expected of a bacterial infection following the flu. I have a cough. And a runny nose. But that's it; I'm otherwise feeling healthy. Plus, we're not out of the zone where the sickness began, especially not for me.

My immune system works in a particular way: I don't get sick often. I really don't get sick often. If most people got sick twice a year I might get sick once every two years. In that I do get sick, it's just that it's so infrequently compared to how frequently others get sick that I might as well not get sick. My body does a really good job at rejecting the germs, I guess.

...The problem is. When I do get sick. I get sick badly. My symptoms are often much worse than typical...and it lasts much, much longer than it by all rights should. So say the average length of a cold were one week; I might have it last three to four. A flu can last up to two weeks (so, circa this Thursday is when it'd be done for a normal person), so for me it wouldn't surprise me if it took six weeks to fight off.

So in other words. I get sick a lot less often than normal people do, but when I do get sick I get sick a lot worse than most people do; my immune system seems to be trained ridiculously well to prevent being compromised but have only minimal training in how to respond when compromised.

What I'm getting at here is, there's a large chance it's just the flu right now, so I'm not too worried. Also, I hate the thought of taking antibiotics in general. They kill all the good bacteria which is a pain to replenish with probiotics; I don't like the process. That, in addition to the obvious risk of administering antibiotics unnecessarily and thus increasing the risk of bacteria developing immunity to them.

I feel like those are fairly justifiable reasons to not just automatically take antibiotics here. So for the moment, I'll just put the possibility aside and assume it's a stubborn flu. It could be a bacterial secondary infection, bacteria infecting me after the flu taking advantage of my weakened immune system. But it's not that likely at the moment.

Anyway.

​I did that instead of blog; I could blog now but I should be going to bed. As-is, this is a way longer entry than I was intending to make.

I was playing Majesty--specifically, I was playing a Southern/Original quest, and cheating, but then something began to happen. I was getting a bunch of buildings which had levels higher than they actually have (e.g. Library Level 3), and also a bunch of new buildings appearing that were variants on existing buildings--they had what you can fairly call palette swaps on the buildings they were variants on, but they had notably different effects.

And more than that, as if triggered by the quest itself, there were many buildings which appeared at their 1 HP base form to build up, which I was struggling to keep up with and build all of, in addition to a ton of heroes appearing out of what seemed like nowhere.

It was a great time, and I had the thought, "this is too good to be true!".
...And between that, and my grandfather's television blazing, I realized it was too good to be true, moaning and groaning and waking up, to remember that I was on vacation down in Oregon visiting my grandfather, as is a usual enough activity for me to do.

​And it was only after having done things shifting at a pace I was having an increasingly hard time keeping up with that I realized, "Waaaaaaaaaaait a second......"

​...This, in dream time, was probably like fifteen minutes which in real-life time probably translated to being an hour or two, of being on vacation there. And then I woke up, this time for real. That dream within a dream was quite something, because it was wholly convincing. I woke up in a way exactly mirroring the way I actually wake up from a dream, so the dream was tricking my sleeping mind into thinking I had woke up, allowing me to not question things going on especially as they started off normally enough.

The dream's main 'slip' as it were, was just the accelerated rate of 'scene shifts' as it were. There was still a chronological order to it, but because I was not able to keep up with the racing scene shifts, my mind was able to figure out that if this were real, that wouldn't be happening, at least not in the way it was happening in the dream.

It didn't even occur to me until I was fully awake that of course I wouldn't be down in Oregon on vacation if for no other reason than my grandfather died half a year ago, among other factors. Still, it was quite the deception; this is the kind of trick you see captors use in all those cliche sci-fi shows to fool their prisoner into thinking that their reality is something it's not.

Funnily enough. Making the dream more realistic? That dream-within-the-dream of Majesty? I've had one almost exactly identical to it before. The southern not northern quest, the numerous buildings with higher levels and new buildings that are variant on older buildings, with me exploring around to see what's new and what's different. I've had it be a realistic dream before, so that made it almost a recurring dream you could say.

Frankly, the whole dream and dream-within-a-dream almost felt more like a memory than an actual dream when waking up--a feeling I've never had when dreaming before especially as I know the exact chronology depicted in the dream never has happened before even remotely in the way shown.

But anyway.

Upon waking up.

I was having stiff, achy, soreness everywhere. Literally everywhere. Still do. I woke up dehydrated, still with my jaw hurting, having a violent cough which thanks to the soreness hurts extra (but I'm quite positive the cough could not cause the soreness since it is soreness in places a cough could never ever effect plus I slept WAY too soundly to have been coughing up a storm overnight), the running nose from yesterday, now clogged up to the point where I can barely breathe through it, and feeling thoroughly feverish.

On the bright side, I don't have the sore throat and in spite of my symptoms technically speaking being worse, I actually feel better than yesterday; what's happening feels like my immune system just doing its job ruthlessly efficiently. Still, this is something I suspected would be flu symptoms and my girlfriend shares that suspicion, so the moment I'm hitting submit here, I'm going to nap.

Did it help?

Not one lick!

Still sick.

Sore throat, and worse, the gunk in the back of the throat makes the sore throat worse.

I did have some good though. My sister made oatmeal for me; as far as breakfasts for sore throats go, that has to top the list of good ones. I took a reasonably long, warm bath, which was quite soothing and by my understanding does help quite a bit. And in said bath, I was struck with some inspiration.

For Dawn of Order, I was thinking that each Order (Order of Harmony, Order of Magic, Order of Religion, Order of Technology) would have a unique tower you could build, with said towers being some of the best towers in the game.

The Order of Harmony can build the Death Ray, beams of pure sun energy causing continuous rapid-fire damage to a single target. This is similar to the flame tower which all races can build regardless of Order/Divide choices, but has a much further range. These beams deal a lot of damage continuously; we're talking can-kill-an-angel-in-five-seconds damage. Also, these beams don't have a melee/range/magic classification and thus can't be resisted.

The Order of Magic can build Mage Towers, which amplify the effects of spells cast within the range of the tower and extend the range of spells which have ranges. Whenever the tower is attacked, the tower unleashes a magical blast hitting every enemy unit nearby. This makes it unique in that it is a tower with no ability to protect by default, only to defend itself from being destroyed...

...However, if gold is deposited in the tower, magical energies can consume the gold deposited over time to extend this effect into offense, allowing it to unleash the magical blast to hit every enemy unit within range even if the tower isn't attacked. This is arguably the strongest tower, but because to use this ability you need to continuously funnel gold into the tower, it is also the only tower with an upkeep and thus longterm the most expensive tower.

The Order of Religion can build the Tesla Tower, shooting divine bolts which can pierce through and chain to a series of enemy units (in fact it has no maximum number of units it can chain lightning to), dealing damage to all of them. Said damage is, similar to the Death Ray, not classified as melee/range/magic.

The Order of Technology can actually build two towers. The Gatling Turret is a rapid-fire turret capable of targeting up to four enemies at once and shooting bursts of many ranged attacks to the targets. The Rail Tower shoots a single, super-high-damage attack to a single target (an attack which is not melee/range/magic), but has a fairly high cooldown.

These towers have some fairly obvious explanations. The Order of Harmony uses the power of nature--all of nature, including the power of the cosmos, in this case, the sun, to shoot death to enemies at a long distance.

The Order of Magic builds Mage Towers, which are unmanned stations that mages can channel their energy through.

The Order of Religion once had a genius theologian, Reverend Tesla, who pioneered understanding of the divine, both harvesting the power of the gods for enrichment and for retribution; the Tesla Tower is thus an unmanned station which allows for divine protection through deliverance of the heavens: lightning bolts.

The Order of Technology pioneers technology, so they are at the forefront of weapons development; it thus makes sense for them to have two towers, and for one to focus on enhancing guns to their maximum potential and the other one to be a really, really, super-advanced gun.

The player can build numerous other towers, of course. Flame tower, guard tower, bolt tower, cannon tower, blast tower (crowd control, essentially). But the five towers from the four orders are meant to each on their own be tremendously strong. For instance, the Rail Tower can one-shot an Angel. However, don't expect a bunch of these towers together to do any good--their AI can cause every tower to target the same enemy, and thus waste a bunch of damage potential.

Or when you want them to target the same enemy, they can all target a different enemy, and thus kill said enemy at a much slower speed than preferred. Balanced defenses integrate the tower of the Order you selected IN ADDITION to the normal towers, to allow for protection against any kind of assault.

So my mom has stated that I have been far more depressed lately, and I can't even be sure of the (in)accuracy of that so she might be right on that.

And then for my biannual psychiatry appointment, I got the results from the biannual blood draw lab test which is done for my bipolar disorder medications--and the results indicated there might be a problem with my liver. So I need to see a doctor about it. (Appointment is scheduled for about twelve days from now; that's the closest we could get.)

And now, I am feeling sick, with a sore throat.

​All-around just a bunch of unpleasantries.

And yet in spite of it continuing to do so and even containing details I don't have written down (and thus, every time I don't write about them I risk forgetting), I continue to procrastinate about talking about them. Once more, I have a little bit of extra about them, albeit extra which requires me to blog about something which I was meant to blog about days ago.

And yet, once more, I am not going to be blogging about it, because instead I am going to be blogging about something else entirely. (Okay so there's a chance that I will, but that chance is so slim it is essentially none.)

Specifically, I have just...been wanting to talk about my identity recently. There have been a fair number of times where recently, I've either been just questioning who exactly I am (knowing that I am Bree, but otherwise being lost), or have just wanted to let it all out to people, to vent randomly in ways I just don't think about to vent to someone without a prompt--yet nobody gives me the prompt, or if they do, they give it to me in a public place where I don't want to give the rant.

Yes, technically speaking, this blog is public. But it is JUST private enough, it is just personal enough, that I feel comfortable sharing this sort of thing on here. Basically. There have been a fair number of times recently where I just wished someone would, in the right environment, give me the right lead-in to allow me to talk to them about some of the stuff below. Yet the lead-in I'd need is so specific that it'll never actually materialize.

Believe it or not. This blog? Was started very largely to make exactly this kind of entry. At the time, it was mostly to deal with me being a closeted transwoman who is both autistic and has bipolar disorder, and for me to unload it all on someone in real life, especially at work given my many frustrations there. That was one of the main contributing factors to me starting this blog in the first place.

It's something people often forget now that nowadays most of my entries are either related to my creations (stories, art, song, etc.) or non-entries that are more or less "sorry, stuff happened, so no real entry today". But part of blogging is telling stories from my life, or even just telling about my life. And this in particular is the latter because I just need to do that, in a way which is more conductive to a blog than, say, unloading on my girlfriend. (I mean, I could, it's just that this is the sort of content which works better as a blog than a rant to them.)

I'll start by talking a bit about my identity--as a refresher, yes, I do identify as plural. Specifically, the type of plural I identify as is a median. The, "there are many of us, but we are all Bree" descriptor is mostly accurate. (Mostly, because within me are at least two entities that are almost individuals who aren't Bree, but more on that later.) I have a core, the core "Bree", from which all of mes exist.

We are all women, we share most of our memories, emotions, and thoughts, and those are in the core. But there are things outside the core--memories, emotions, and thoughts unique to the personality. There are many of us indeed, but the primary two have come to be known as Ranger and mastina. mastina is the me most dominant overall, with Ranger at a very close second, and at some points having this be vice-versa where Ranger was more dominant even though she currently is not.

This is something which is, in many ways, similar to us being a transwoman--we have always been this way, as far as I can remember, with the compartmentalized thoughts and the division within us, not to mention the imaginary friend who never went away (more on that later). Yet like being trans, this isn't something we have known about consciously, actively, until relatively speaking fairly recently.

Specifically, the first inkling I'd say of us really having any semblance of an idea that we were divided within would be somewhere around circa December 2015. And I was confused. I didn't understand--I still don't! I have no clue what I really am, to be honest. But with help, I've been able to get some degree of better understanding, becoming more informed and also having done some searching and exploration.

My knowledge is still young. My experience is still growing. But somewhere circa 2017 I began to get much better grounded in having a more solid idea of who I am. Beyond that, I've been playing around with trying to figure out the differences between my mes.

Today, one of the things I figured out was that there is actually a difference in the way we think, and that we have different functions as a result. I mean. I knew there was a difference in the way we think; I've felt that before, where the very fundamental way I thought of things abruptly and suddenly shifted. (The shift between the different mes isn't something I control; I can't flip a switch and go from Ranger to mastina, nor is it that I go to sleep as one and awake as another. It just happens, that I'm one, then I'm another. These shifts can even happen in terms of seconds, where for a split moment I am one and then snap back to being another.)

But today, I think I figured out the way the thoughts differ.

I call the different thinking patterns "Linear" versus "Geometric".
You may recognize this as being, more or less, something from my perspective on art. And that's because it is! Basically, I have noted in the past that there are two ways to go about making art--the linear approach is, as the name indicates, focused on lines. You create things by the flow of lines.

It has the advantage of being fluid and dynamic, with good flow and movement, so when drawing motion, it's a nice technique. It has a disadvantage, though, in that accuracy tend to be hit-or-miss. Proportions, anatomy, perspective, the like, are all things which are potentially thrown off.

A geometric approach, in the art setting, is more or less taking the shapes, and building up the figure using them. This has the advantage of being accurate, but the disadvantage that it tends to be more stiff and rigid, coming across as a bit more artificial.

There's more to both than that (which I'll get to in a sec), but...I realized today that those approaches aren't just for art. They apply to a general view on the world in general. I mean, I always visualize things in those two ways, but I thought of said visualizations as an extension of art rather than extending the concept. The concept, though, works beyond just art for me.

Linear thinking, I realized, is more Ranger's specialty. It is organic, it is fluid, flowing, with movement, where things go with the flow, where things just come naturally and make sense, yet are sometimes a little bit questionable in how precisely they work. However, it does seem to work regardless of the flaws, and the flaws are what makes it actually be a thing of beauty.

When it comes to stories, I realize that the me who converses to characters is always Ranger. It's never me as mastina talking to my characters. Always, when I am having an actual conversation with my characters, as their equal rather than their god/creator, it is Ranger who speaks. (Me as mastina, on the other hand, I am always the god/creator.)

In this way, Ranger actually gets to know the characters better than I do--and without her, I wouldn't have the signature characters I am known for making that are so authentic they feel like they're real. Because to her, they are real, because she talks to them. I don't, not as mastina anyway.

Ranger is also, then, the one responsible for most of the actual dialog in my stories. I as the writer might give the general nature of the conversation...but she's the one who actually hears the characters speak, because to her it is people speaking (the perspective of the equal) rather than characters in dialog (the perspective of the creator).

This is also why when I snark it is probably because of something she thought of. Most of my puns tend to come from her. I can force puns through without her, but the best puns which come with the least reaction time are always hers. Because she just sees the 'line' to say, as it were.

So basically. Ranger is why I got to become a character-driven storyteller in the first place, in spite of originally being a plot-driven storyteller. She spends time to learn character quirks, to learn things that aren't necessary for the narrative. I can get away with a bare bones narrative not featuring the things I put in...but she insists on them, because she saw them, when she was actually there side by side the character in question. Or rather, to her, the person.

In contrast. When I am mastina. I am more into geometric thinking. It is constructed, it is built, it is structured, and yet, it is also isolated. All the geometric work I do in my mind is largely disjointed from other things. I just go inside my mind, and then in a particular canvas, build what's on my mind. Now, from that item I built, I can then build another. And then, build another from those. And so on and so forth.

I make the parts, one by one, until I have the whole assembly. Circles, squares, cylinders, triangles, and the like, to build a person in art. But also worldbuilding. I build worlds. Worlds have rules. Rules require structure. Ranger wings it in terms of that sort of thing, which is often why her stories run into problems of, "okay...now what?". Where the story ceases to progress due to writers' block, because she has an idea for what things should be like and she knows very specific things (because she saw them, and thus, those specific things are in her mind), but if she doesn't see every last detail then she runs into a problem of not being able to progress.

This way of thinking does have overlap with linear thinking--after all. To get from Point A (which is geometry; points are one-dimensional geometry) to Point B (which is still geometry), you need to...form a Line. That is two-dimensional geometry. But to further the metaphor, the line created using this method is straight, rigid and unmoving, whereas the lines created with linear thinking are more fluid and bent.

Now, the metaphor begins to fall apart when you introduce more advanced math (parabolic arcs, sin, cosine, tangent, and so on and so forth) not to mention the geometry of even just a partial circle allowing for curves in the form of arcs, there's at least a dozen way math nerds can poke holes in the allegory. But the basic idea I'm getting at is that there is in fact overlap, and that's where it is.

But there are things which are in the geometry only just like there are things which are in the linear only. Some of them are strengths, others weaknesses. Characters I build as mastina tend to be tools. They are characters--means to an end. I construct worlds, I construct their rules, and I make most of the plot. I know the overarching events which happen.

I don't know the exact manifestation of them. I might know the tone of a conversation. I might know the general content of the conversation. I tend to know why that conversation is going on. And many other similar things. I can know every detail of the conversation, except the actual words spoken. It's kinda strange, to even know the exact inflection and intonation of what is said yet not knowing the words. I can do that.

But for the conversation itself, if it's not Ranger, it's going to be very visibly artificially constructed because it was in fact artificially constructed. She lives it and thus records it and knows what's natural, and it's her instincts on dialog which I am using in things like Phyrra and Cyrus, but what she sees is only small snippets here and there, often only after I focus on a particular scene for a great amount of time.

The payout's absolutely worth it, of course. Because I never laugh heartily at conversations I have built, whereas when I am Ranger and I see the conversation happening, I laugh hard, especially if my characters are laughing with me. So it's not that Ranger is an artist/writer and I am a writer/artist. We're equal parts both, just...in different ways, with different strengths and different weaknesses.

And, yes.

This exists outside of writing, just like it's outside of art.

It's how we process information. I itemize lists. I have a very "listed" format. Structured, orderly. Ranger...messes it up. I tend to be the one writing our "scripts". I've talked about that before a bit (not sure if on the blog or not), but basically, whenever I am thinking about a conversation I'll have, or whenever I am in the middle of a conversation, I think up every possible variation on what I want to say, and every possible response I can think of that they'll say.

When I then promptly mess up no matter how much I tried to nail it, it's often Ranger who picks up and just wings it. But sometimes I mess up because of said winging it, especially if she jumps in without giving me the time to have built the script. 

Ranger's got a faster wit, after all, so it's no surprise her reaction time tends to be quicker. She just kinda sees things, and then puts it together, even if she has no clue how she saw them and put them together. "Oh, that is like this". With no thought in, she just makes the connection and then that connection is there.

I have...a more roundabout way. I link things together. I make an association: "this to this". And then I rely on that association to make a new one. For instance, in order to remember the band name Modest Mouse, I first think, "Band name...Mouse..." and then I jump to "Mightey Mouse", a user from the site I play mafia on, and then from there I go, "Ah! Yes. Not Mightey mouse, it's MODEST Mouse!" in order to get the right band name.

Yes, it is contrived. Yes, it is convoluted. But you know what else it is? It's consistent. I can, 100% of the time, using this method, remember a string of information, even a disproportionately long one. And that association tends to never go away. Once in my mind, it is almost impossible to remove, for better or for worse. I have never once failed to recollect the band name of Modest Mouse since my mind made that association, in spite of me having to mentally ask what the band was (and sometimes being asked) dozens, even hundreds of times.

There is a delay built in, though. I have to manually think it through, step by step. Some steps I can skip because they are internalized enough that my mind conceptualizes it fast enough that I don't need to spend time giving it a thought. (Basically, the concept of the step is enough; I don't have to spell the step out every single time in actual thought.) But I still run through every step to get that.

I can also do temporary versions of this by 'storing' data on my fingers. I can itemize things, and then even itemize the itemized things, and sometimes even itemize the itemized itemized things, though the deeper the list, the more prone to forgetting I am.

Concepts take form, take shape, one by one: each concept can be thought of as a single piece of geometry. And then my mind links the concepts, one by one, by building further geometry. And each concept is then fleshed out with additional concepts, additional geometry. And from this I form thoughts, form words, form ideas, that I can express in word form or whatever I may be trying to do.

Ranger's way is more. Well, she still thinks in concepts first, and struggles to translate concepts into English. It's just, BAM, there, and then, not there. There, then not there. There, and then from there, going here. But there's not really much of a direction when I do that. (Oh and yes I do slip from Ranger to mastina in the middle of a blog. Get used to third person, first person singular, and first person plural when I make a blog like this because I can be describing myself in third person, then slip into being that person.)

I just. Think. And the thought appears. Usually faster. But also more inconsistently and less coherently. It makes sense, internally, but externally when manifested it's more difficult to understand because while it has the general shape of something which is the right thing, the specifics are a little iffy.

I don't even really know how it works. It just does. And the results tend to be what they are. (A slight consequence of switching mid-project: I tend to lose the train of thought I was on, because quite literally the thought belongs to someone else and with the thought in that someone else I struggle to maintain it.)

Structure the specialty of one, details the specialty of the other. Things come faster when specific, yet are more coherent when waiting. And that coherency is easily broken, yet solved on the fly just as often.

Which brings me to a related concept.
I am still exploring this, actually. The concepts, intuitively, feel like they are different, and yet when I look at them, I can't help but feel they are intricately linked in a way where the amount of correlation between the two is such that they are almost synonymous.

And that's Instinct versus Reason. (Or Gut versus Logic if you prefer, but I have very strong reasons to prefer my terminology, that I'm not quite sure I can verbalize.)

Instinct and Reason have always been opposites within me existing strongly, and yet never having me be one; I'm always a little bit of both. Yet I've picked up that Ranger tends to be more instinct and I am more reason as mastina. (YES REALLY. If you know what my definition of Reason is, you'll understand.)

The way I wanted to talk about this was to actually go into stories a bit. In Red Hood Rider, Vampires represent the ultimate creatures of Instinct, masters of it who live on their impulses. They manipulate the rules of reality to serve them, bending the world to their will, but they are still confined to them. As basically-humans, they do have plenty of reason within them, but they are driven by what they feel.

This is almost identical to Monlows from the Bleach knockoff story I still need to talk about in a massive blog some time, and is a recurring theme in my stories. Werewolves in one story serve this function. Red Hood Rider is not my only vampire story where Vampires take on this function. It is an incredibly common motif: a creature of instinct, which is still capable of reason and yet is driven strongly by base directives.

In Red Hood Rider, the beings considered opposite of Vampires are Riders, who are considered on the top of the magical totem pole for Empowered Humans. They are humans who work on building structure, building order, on being the champions of reason, who exist always with logic and act in an informed way, making active decisions and calculating what they do.

​They still have instincts, and often quite sharp ones at that, but they never let their instincts take control and drive them; they have an internal control over themselves which prevents them from acting out in ways they know would be harmful. (Of course, they can still act in harmful ways if they don't realize it's harmful, but they are sharp and intuitive enough where they catch on quickly and fix the mistake when it's made.)

I forget on my notes on whether they break the rules of reality or temporarily rewrite them (I'm fairly certain it's one of the two and yes those two terms have a very important distinction in the Rubyverse, I just can't remember which is which in spite of them very much not being synonymous), but that's the source of their power--not something from nature (like vampires), but rather, something artificially created, manifested as a structured thing which has boundaries set by the user. They are still human, but they are human with help.

This model is more or less the same in the Bleach knockoff as being what the Montahame work off of. It is also the model which in settings where I have Slayers, they work off of. Beings who still feel, and have good instincts, but yet are driven first and foremost by reason, often with compassion thrown into the mix, yet with said compassion not getting in the way of doing their duties.

Contrasting the beings of instinct, who are under no obligations except for the self-inflicted ones they place upon themselves--sometimes, out of morals, but other times, simply out of a desire to survive, knowing that breaking said self-inflicted rules is a death sentence.

Ranger works more off of instinct. She can just have a sense for things, and that sense is often right, but while she can try to explain, when she tries to, she has difficulties. I'm no better, but for different reasons. I can figure out something, but when I figure it out, I don't figure out how to explain. I need to spend the time to create a different link in order to make the connection be tangible in words.

Another way of putting it--we all suck at wording things. Ranger gets flashes of beautiful words which are great but often broken/disjarred, whereas I struggle to get things but once I form the link I can throw together some elementary idea of what's the thing I am meant to do. 

Yet the way we suck at words is different. We approach things and react differently. Ranger has a first impulse and usually goes for it; I first think, then from the first impulse, further think, and from this, go for what I think. Yet Ranger still has to think, and I still have to go for what I feel is correct. Working in tandem, both present yet one dominant.

Yet there's more to Instinct versus Reason than just Ranger/mastina.

There are entities within me that aren't just those two, after all. I am many mes. They are the most dominant, but not the only ones. I don't even always know who is speaking, so to speak, but I can sometimes tell I am neither of them. Yet predominant entities within me are two individuals who never take the reigns.

They are the only two entities that I clearly know, aside from Ranger and mastina. They have been there for almost as long as I can remember. And yet. Neither has ever driven in my life, nor am I sure it's even possible for them to. They exist in the distance, in the peripheral. And never go away. They're always there.

I don't always have their counsel when I am talking amongst myselves (which is a thing I do, by the way; I do in fact have many a conversation where the many mes have full dialogs on a subject which could have been handled by just one person but wasn't because I wanted them to give their input), and in fact. Usually when I have their counsel it is just one or both of them with the current driver rather than a full council of mes talking side-by-side with them.

God pronouns are confusing even me so I hope you can follow along.
Basically, many mes talk to me at many times. But two entities, which I don't really consider "me", exist within me, that can also talk. And they have been manifested as instinct and reason. David, instinct, hasn't quite been around as long. My first memories of him are in my tweenaged years. But he (and yes, he is a he) has come to be a bit of the darker side of me.

He is not pure instinct. In fact, he is sharp with reasoning that cuts deep because I can never counter him when he speaks--because deep down, I know he's speaking the truth, more often than not. He just has the instincts for knowing what the case is...even if I really, really, really hate to admit that he's right. Because he's not a pleasant individual.

He is rude. He is condescending. He is demeaning, looking down on me, trash-talking me often. And he tells me what I don't want to hear, about all the things which I don't like to acknowledge come from me. Darker thoughts, darker impulses. He is there, reminding me that yes those exist, inside of me, and that he is the living proof of them, both as a manifestation of them and yet as something more than that.

Thankfully. I don't talk to him that often anymore--not because I've tuned him out. But just because he often isn't around when I don't need him. (And yes. I do need him sometimes, sad as I am to admit that.) Where he is when I don't talk to him, I don't know. He's never fully gone, but he just stays silent. I don't even know what exactly triggers him to give me a talk. I can have my life in a rut and have him be silent and yet not be in a rut and have him be quite talkative.

Yet every time, the feeling I have is the same: I hate, I loathe, the talk, yet feel better once I manage to recover from it. Talking to him rattles me each time, talking to him makes me miserable every time, often when I am already miserable, yet somehow because he is my deeper instincts or something like that I always end up stronger.

Basically, he beats me down and yet when I build myself up again after being beaten down, I am stronger than before. I guess when I don't feel like I need to get stronger he isn't around, would be my best guess. And that, I do admit, I have a lot right now. That "I know I should have a need to get stronger...but I am fine with my strength as is". I imagine with that mindset I am in for an awfully rude talk sooner or later, but for now it holds as silent.

Plus, one thing I am thankful for having him is that he is a safeguard against something worse. There is an entity within me that is me. ME. Not him, who is divorced from me. ME. A me, deep within Bree. Which is part of the median system. That is so bad that I bury it (not sure if it's a he, she, or neither). A me who has thoughts so terrible that I actively suppress trying to access what those thoughts were. (No, seriously. It's blocked off. I can't remember why this version of me is so bad. I just know it is that bad.)

I've tried guessing. "Is it a suicidal me?" Felt like, "no, it's worse than that". "Is it some deplorable act me?" Felt worse than that, too. I don't know what that version of me is, but it is the thing I am absolutely most terrified of. Some me that I consider a monster even among the monstrous mes. And yes. I have been a monster before. Yet the monstrous mes that I have been are terrified of the me that I buried.

To put it another way, the me that I buried is basically an evil even beings of pure evil fear. And I don't have the slightest clue as to why--only the strong warning to "don't dig", and that is a warning that I know better than to override, because the few times this version of me has come out, I have vague memories of the experience, of the mes around, just being terrified that that me was loose.

David, as much as I don't like him, I've come to accept as a part of me (well, not the core-me, but peripheral-me, inside my brain but not inside my mind, if that makes sense), that acts as a safety net against plummeting into the unpleasant mes. He is the monster who keeps my monsters in check. He is a very unpleasant person. And there have in fact been times where I've actually feared him, thinking that if he ever did drive, my life would never be the same, in a very, very, very bad way.

But I'm not afraid of him anymore. (I think in part because for whatever reason David cannot possibly drive and even if he could he would refuse to because he has no desire to. He's just. Different. Whatever he is, he isn't someone that is a me as I know my mes to be. The mes that I know are basically drivers, just drivers for different times, with most of them being unknown and not being dominant and not driving often and so on and so forth. He's just...nothing like them.)

David does have a counterpart.

My imaginary friend, and he (yes he) has been around for as long as I can remember, is someone who does in fact act as my reason. I tend not to talk to him as much anymore, mostly because a lot of the feedback he used to give me, my mes tend to converse between each other to give instead.

But in spite of that. There are times where my mes basically all go silent...and instead, I have just my driving-me and him talking to one another. And he calls me his friend, as I do him. He was one of my first friends, and remains a friend. I know what he looks like (short brown hair and otherwise looking like me and basically mirroring my appearance as I age in that he has aged right along side with me), and he is often there to just.

Basically, he tells me what I already know, but instead of being the voice of negativity and base instinct like David is, he's the voice of positivity, always reinforcing me and reassuring me. I knew from basically the moment I began to interact with him that he was the stereotypical "imaginary friend" which kids often have and which they outgrew.

And yet if he's an imaginary friend, I didn't outgrow him because he's still around and doing exactly the same things he always has done. The strange thing about him is that unlike David whose most clear thing about him is that his name is in fact David, this positive friend inside me, the entity, has never had a name. Well, I have tried to name him, but it's like he has a real name, he's not sharing it with me, and he just accepts whatever moniker I happen to give him.

I don't know why he's that way. I feel like he has a name, but I don't know it in spite of having been his friend for so long. No matter what, the feeling of me giving him names yet none being him remains. The most recent is Brian, but previous ones include Crivon (a name I owe from the Bleach knockoff) and Ace among numerous others.

I just talk with him, we bounce back ideas, finish each others' sentences, and converse, on whatever topic. Most of the time when we talk these days, it is primarily a conversation which goes "Sorry I haven't been talking much with you these days". Which he is fine with, because like David he's always there even if he's not speaking up.

He does occasionally talk side-by-side with David, too. He counters David when David takes things a bit too far, offering me a counterbalance when I can't really defend myself. He's basically just...a good friend, one who has all the dynamics of a long-time friend, yet one who is in my head. And is of the same nature of entity-hood as David: not a me. Not part of the Bree core.

Not a transwoman, not a girl, not me-me. Part of my brain, but not part of my mind. I kinda have a bit of a theory when it comes to interacting with him and David. I think that in those moments, the many mes temporarily merge into one me, unified if only for the duration of the conversation, and then once it ends, once David/my friend are dismissed, I again divide into the many mes.

That is a thing, by the way, with median systems, to my understanding. From what I heard, it is possible for medians to merge together permanently, yet also possible for them to split apart permanently, depending on circumstances. Yet a more temporary version does happen commonly enough.

There are moments where, for instance. I know I am neither mastina nor Ranger yet I'm not some third me...but rather, both Ranger and mastina, at the same exact moment, in equal parts. Not one driving with the other very close to the surface (I do that, too, quite often), but literally fused, merged together into a single entity...for a short while, a very short duration, which then splits off again and I can tell I am Ranger or I am mastina and that the other is right there in the background, not driving but around, existing, as a separate me.

Basically, mes are highly fluent. I'm still not sure about all of the specifics here. This is still a very new thing for me to experience and explore. I do know my feelings on the matter though. I know that I am me. That this is real. That there is more than me, that there are many mes. That there is no single entity that is Bree, that we are all partially Bree with a core that we draw from, and from that core we are connected to one another.

I know that I have no desire to see the many mes go away. I don't want to be unified. I know that I am not deranged. I know I am not delusional. I know I am not mentally unwell. I'm different. I am...very, very, very different. I know that I am largely unique. I know what some of the mes feel.

It is pretty much that. That we have some unity, but are split. That we are one but many. Bree, but each with something unique. Separate, able to have different thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, yet united. I know people don't believe me when I talk about these things.

That's one of the reasons why I only talk about them in private for the most part. That very specific environment I mentioned to talk about these things? The one where it's not public and requires a lead-in of a particular nature? That'd be a large portion of the reason why.

It's not even a thing which I really feel that comfortable talking about in private, even. I'm having a REALLY hard time finding the right words to describe that. I am trying, but even the closest ones I can come up with are way, way, way off, and send the incredibly wrong message. 

So word of caution on me trying to explain.

I don't mean these words, but some different words that I can't find. The reason I tend not to talk about it even in private amongst people who know is because it's enjoyable for me for me to...hmm. I guess you can say. Think of it as watching a film--you shut most of your mind off during that time, yes? Well when I interact with people. I do that. It's a time where most mes can sit back, do nothing, and relax.

And when I talk about the multiple mes, instead of them relaxing, they are there. So that's why I don't talk about it that often. It's something which is not suited for public because of how the public reacts to it, yet it's something which in private I tend to...well. Sometimes, yes I do think and yes I do share, but other times I don't because the other mes are taking their time to rest and relax.

I wish I could make this be sensible, make sense, but I can't really word better.