I'm still here, but it's complicated... Here's a quick roundup of what's new with me:
I have beta-blockers. They're not magic, but they help my body to stop giving a shit about all the adrenaline it seems to produce. Trouble is, while they remove the physical symptoms of my anxiety, I'm still left with what's in my head, and also a complete lack of motivation to do very much at all. If I was going to get all bad teenage poetry about it, it's like there's a space in me for my aspirations, hopes, dreams and desire, but I fill it with anxiety, and when the anxiety is taken away, the void remains. Which brings me to my next thing:
I don't know what I want to do. That's not a function of having too many conflicting choices, it's simply that I am really very bad at knowing what I would like to have and what I would like to do.
And that's pretty chilling. When I'm anxious I can get a few things done around the house. When I'm at work, if I can hit the sweet spot between fired up and burnt out, I stand a chance of getting something done. Take my anxiety away, and I'm not sure I'm really a person any more. It's weird.
I have a therapist. He's a man. I chose a man on purpose, not because I don't like talking to women. I love women. See
here. Trouble is, I find it quite difficult not to fancy them, and very difficult not to include them in some kind of fantasy. If I'm spending regular time with them alone and they're wearing shoes, it's highly likely that something will develop. If I'm talking about my Cinderella thing and my sissy maid thing, it's almost inevitable. I chose a man for my therapist so this would never happen.
He's also very good. During the first session he poked a couple of things that were pretty raw, leading me to the following conclusion:
I'm trying to defeat my father by channeling my mother, and neither of these things is good. In subsequent sessions he's raised the idea that my mother might be partly responsible for the state that I'm in, which is an idea that I am highly resistant to. The height of my resistance is probably very telling. I see him every Monday. He's very good.
Not being at work for 3 weeks was good, but again, it wasn't magic. I had surmised that without the work stress to deal with, I wouldn't turn to my fantasy creations for solace and soothing. Alas, I had time on my hands, so I ended up making an interactive Powerpoint thing. It has a Cinderella theme:
You get a picture of some ladies in nice dresses (nicked shamelessly from some Russian bloke on Flickr) and you click through a little scene involving domination, humiliation and cruelty that casts the viewpoint character as Cinderella, serving at the Royal Ball rather than attending as a guest. Half the slides have a random element, and the other half feature a Fairy Godmother character to whom you can appeal for help. Naturally, the help that is given is often counterproductive, and she actually joins in most of the time with the barbed remarks and the enjoyment of Cinderella's suffering. The first picture is what it looks like to play, and this is the bit where we're being offered a choice of magical help. You click one of the buttons on the right and you head off down that path. The second picture is what it look like behind the scenes, with the script in the slide notes. Behind that is some VBA that reads the script, displays the right text, shows the right buttons and moves you on to a random next slide when you're done. Towards the bottom of the second picture you can see what happens when you kiss or don't kiss the ring. TL;DR: If you kiss it, you become sexually aroused whenever you're within 20 feet of the ladies in the picture (but stray too far and you get period pains (my head is weird)). If you don't kiss it, there's some nipple twisting to be suffered.
It took a couple of late nights to get the slide templates and the VBA done, and then a couple of days to get the pictures and the scripts written. Suffice to say that I can make Powerpoint do pretty much anything. It's weird. It's enjoyable. It eats my time and robs me of sleep, but, like this blog post, I can't seem to go to be until it's finished. My behaviours, here they are.
But yes, even without the need to self-soothe after a day at work, I found myself making the Cinderella-themed interactive Powerpoint. So it's not just self-soothing. It could be more of a hobby, and that's a worrying thing. I'd like to have a normal hobby, something that I can admit to doing. Something that doesn't have to wait until my family members have gone to bed, and something that I can be enthusiastic about with other people.
But that's the thing. I don't know what that hobby could be, because
I don't know what I want to do. And then my therapist suggests that I could find some way to do this sort of thing for a living. I was talking about the whole thing with captions, about which
I've posted before, and it's pretty obvious that my output is very well-received in the various communities to which I've posted it. My therapist was interested in my enthusiasm for it, and also how I manage to express power and dominance with only a few words of text, how I give various different voices to the women in the pictures that I use, ranging from soft and teasing to full-on totalitarian bitch-queen. I can do things with words, and I appear to be able to write reasonably well. Could I, perhaps, be able to put something together, get published under a pseudonym and actually make money out of my fevered imagination?
It sounds very tempting, but also highly risky, and not something I could give the day job up for. I need to keep the job that I can explain to my mother. Also, I've never finished anything long. I rarely finish a Powerpoint thing, as I always find more pictures to add, more choices to script, &c. &c. The only thing I appear to be able to finish is a run of 6 captioned images, and even then it takes up more of my time than I'd like. Perfectionism is a curse.
Also, there's the issue of how I'd monetise something that's as inherently personal and idiosyncratic as a Cinderella-themed interactive Powerpoint fantasy. Captions are infinitely-more-than-ten-a-penny, there are hundreds of free webteases on Milovana, the community around SexScripts is very much open and free, and more often than not I'm stealing pictures from Flickr to use in my projects, so I'd be in serious trouble if I tried to charge any money for them. There's ways to get supported by Patreon and donations, but there's no way I can generate enough output to get more than £2.50 every decade by that method.
Can you tell I'm trying to talk myself out of it?
It's November, of course, so there's NaNoWriMo going on, which could have been my way into the wonderful world of dodgy paperbacks, but something else has got in the way:
I've gone back to work. I went back yesterday for meetings and got back in the classroom today. Everyone's being very supportive, and it feels good to be out of the house and doing things again, but my anxiety levels are through the roof, even with my medication. I can't imagine what I'd be like without the beta-blockers. It's exhausting, but I'm doing it. It'll get better once I've sorted out everything from the 4 weeks that I've missed. If anything, I've demonstrated to my employers just how much stuff I've been doing for them for free, and just how time-consuming and frustrating it all is to do it without proper support.
And the small boy is being weird, because both his parents have gone weird, and he's been disrupted by half-term, and the clocks went back, and his sleep patterns went weird, and he's got some sort of chesty cough / cold thing that knocked him out for a couple of days, which is not what either of his parents need when we have our own stuff to deal with, and Furiosa appears to be more or less falling apart, which is affecting me and affecting the small boy, who is acting up and ruining everyone's sleep patterns and causing everyone to fall apart. And now I've gone back to work. And now it's approaching midnight on a school-night and this was supposed to be a quick round-up, but I got sidetracked by my Powerpoint...
I think I've created a properly messed-up tesseract of life-work-fantasy-addiction-computing-habits-blogging-family. Thank the Lord I have a therapist...
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