'Tis the Season

You'd think yes, but actually no....

This could quite easily double up as my end-of-year roundup, but we'll see.  Basically, we're at my Mum's for Christmas, with everything that entails, and I need to write something.

Because that's how things work now.  I write.  I've had my little tablet since just after my birthday, and if I'm honest, it's been pretty revolutionary.  I needed something that I could use in the evening while my phone was playing audiobooks to get the Chap to sleep, and something that wasn't the computer.  Computers are too easy.  They make my habits easy.  But my tablet is crap enough to make my habits really hard to do, leaving just typing stuff as the only realistic option.

And it's brilliant.  I've found an outlet for my stories that doesn't involve late nights and dangerous behaviours.  Wattpad is great.  I've found a friend.  I've got two long books about half-done, and the feedback I'm getting on each chapter is really positive.  I think that might be one of the things I need in order to keep going.  I need feedback and support, which is why my Flickr behaviours are so addictive.  I get sucked in by favourites and comments.  It's dangerous.  But not with writing.  I still get nice comments, but I can somehow manage to get to bed before midnight.

And just this month, when it looked like none of my stories would be ready for publishing, I took a short story and put it through Smashwords.  It's over there on the right, just under my profile stuff, available to buy, for something like 75p in our money.  Smashwords is also great, and I liked it so much, I wrote another short story and made it available for free.  I'm developing unhealthy behaviours with the stats page, hoping that I might crack 100 downloads before Christmas, but at any rate, I'm having a very positive experience.  The plan is to get the HGS thing in shape in the New Year and upload a chapter book for a coupla quid.

Like we're about to form some kind of
 Power Rangers Voltron Mega Zord kinda thing,
which me and my siblings could probably
actually do if it came to it

And so it is in a good place that I find myself at the end of this year.  There's a blog post to be written about what's come out of therapy recently and how it relates to my Cinderella thing, but I'll save that for another time.  Spoiler alert:  I had a horrible childhood with enough privilege to paper over the cracks.  It'll take some working through, but in the meantime I've come to spend the festive season with the very people who caused it all, and I don't feel bad at all.  These people, aside from one obvious exception, are the people who will ultimately see me through.

LMW

My head is not right (Old Blog)

All this will become clear

I haven't actually died, but I continue to get weirder and weirder.  My inner life is a very interesting place to be right now.

Quick roundup of news before we get down to business:

Work is little better, but progress is being made, slowly but surely, and it looks like the whole place is going down the toilet anyway, so my concerns of having a bright career future at such a fine organisation are dwindling.  My new manager is a cowbag.  My old manager is properly wonderful.  My emails are evil.

A friend who goes by the name of Joanna came to visit.  Good chats, potable beers and general positivity all round.

Christmas looms.  I mostly have all the presents.  It should be a good one.

Now, down to business.  This is a long one, and it ends up in a very troubling place.  It was quite hard to write all this, but it's even harder trying to live with it.  Bear with me if you can, but this post carries a severe Weirdness Warning.  Credit should go to my therapist, who is really fucking good, but the results of his inquiries are pretty much as follows:

My head is not right...

Actual crisis (Old Blog)

A google search for 'femdom motorbike', apparently
Because the solution to all mid-life crises is a 22-year-old
girlfriend and motorbike... 

Yep, I reckon this is it.  This is the big one.  The mid-life crisis.

It's been a rough four weeks, and I'm feeling at a very low ebb, and last night I had a chat with Furiosa.

And it was good.

I aten't dead (Old Blog)

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...

ȹ

Hiatus (Old Blog)

So anyways, I've been signed off work for the next couple of weeks.  Very very complicated issues involving work life, home life and family life, all three of which have had the bottom fall out in the past month or so.

It's all here on the blog, it's what the blog was supposed to be dealing with.  The blog wasn't dealing with it.

This will need some time away to sort out.  Patience is a card game.  It's at this point that the blog could take a dog-leg into something much more interesting, or it could stop altogether.  It's hard to say at the minute, but this minute is where I need to be right now.

Who knows.

ȹ

Normal service (Old Blog)

It looks like I've disappeared.  Work is back in full swing, and there are issues going on.  The labels for this post should allow you to triangulate (septangulate?) what's going on. I'll post more about it when I have the time, but for the moment I need to focus my attentions away from self-absorption and cross-addiction and onto things that actually matter.

Normal service might resume.

ȹ

And things are going... well... (Old Blog)

OMG, that's, like, so relatable...
Sigh...

Don't look now, but I've had a really good week at work.

Monday was wading through emails and getting little done.  Tuesday was mostly panic and hyperventilation (that's a coping strategy, right?).  Wednesday I had a massive headache and today was finally productive.  I hit my stride at 3pm this afternoon and contacted 25 prospective students in about 2 hours about the courses they might want to do.

And I think I've sussed the trick.  More details after the break.

Domestic Goddess (Old Blog)

Yep, that's actually me.  I need an apron.

It's been an interesting week.

I've been at home mostly, having taken the week off work in order to make sure that my son was okay at his new school.  See my post here for full details.  He was completely fine.  Not a single shit was given that day.

Furiosa less so, but that's a story for another time.

As for me, I had 3 hours alone in the house every morning and a hankering for taking responsibility for as much household management as I could...  manage...  That's some pretty rubbish writing right there.

Interested in what I got up to for three hours each morning?  Then read on!

Rooty-tooty-toot! (Old Blog)

Nope, genuinely no idea

It is time to blow my own trumpet.

Today saw the culmination of several years of hard work and preparation.  My son started primary school and he was completely and totally fine.

This may not seem like such a big thing, but there's a backstory, some issues to explore and ultimately it becomes an example of the kind of marriage I'm hoping to achieve with Furiosa.

Bits of this have only really crystallised over the past couple of weeks, but I'll be taking you all the way back to my son's birth to get a good run-up on this morning's resounding success.

Are you sitting comfortably..?

Fingers crossed (Old Blog)

This is my greatest fear

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, and now is as good a time as any to take a voyage around my father.

TL;DR:  My father is one of my triggers, and one of the main reasons that I'm so panicked by my own addictive behaviours.  He's also the reason Furiosa and I are so intimately familiar with our own psychologies (and each other's), and also why we're both so literate in self-reflection and therapeutic verbalisation.

My father's addiction is alcohol, and for the past 30 years I've watched him slowly slide from functional human being into almost complete obsolescence.  I have no idea how he's even alive, and this week it looks like he's beginning to gear up for one of his trademark stunts.

He's been such a dick about not having his bank card that the decision has been taken to let him have it back, knowing full well that he'll be drunk for several weeks, possibly months, with worsening health problems, trips and falls which will have him in and out of the Sad Old Man ward at the hospital.  I have my fingers crossed that this time round it will be different, so that's where the post title comes from.  I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the whole thing, but be warned:  you might be more than a little surprised by the time I'm done.

So, let's take some time to explore how I'm currently feeling about my alcoholic father, shall we?

Inferiority complex (Old Blog)

I think it's fairly easy to spot my inferiority complex.  It's all over this blog and all over my psychology.  It's worth bringing up at this point because I've been dancing round a crucial factor in my fantasy creations, and exploring this factor could be a very useful tool in keeping my fantasies from interfering with my reality.

My inferiority complex probably comes from a range of different places, and serves mostly to frustrate me and those around me.  It's a big thing in my life, and it's part and parcel of my addictive behaviours and the cycles and spirals that I get myself into.  Let's have a look, shall we?