'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

Blindsided

This song.  Just...

Stephen Fry did a documentary about Wagner, in which he said there are times when he wonders what the hell he's doing with his life when the only thing that's worth doing is spending all one's time listening to Wagner.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the same is true with Leonard Cohen.  I'm beginning to think the same might be true of Iron and Wine.

Also, this song is about mothers and sons, so obviously it strikes a chord there (Em-C-G-D if you're doing it properly, or Am-F-C-G if you're on the ukulele and you want the noodly bits (I always want the noodly bits))

I think I'm far from killing the last snake in the creek bed, but I think I've made it up from the bruise on the floor of this prison, and the creek has certainly drunk the cradle she sang to.

So, therapy's going well, work is going better, family is good enough to be expecting another child in 6 months' time, and the writing looks like it could be a really useful thing for me to deal with my fantasies.

I now have two stories up and running on Wattpad, 13 people following me, and one very wonderful person who is happy to message me on a more or less daily basis.  I'll write a proper post about it all when I have some time, but basically, writing yay.  Check out my stories:  A Question of Faith and Stupid

LMW

Make Good Art

Does this picture really need a caption?

It's been a bad year...

Let me fess up:  I'm in a bad place, and I'm not handling it well.  2016 can officially get to fuck, for so many reasons, and while therapy is going well, it's a regular slot at the start of the week during which my anxieties are poked and prodded.  Current massive crisis detailed below.

This post is pretty much a list of what's going on at the moment for me, and how much of a mess I'm getting myself into.  Also, some vague and misapplied wisdom from Neil Gaiman.  Ready?

Me and my Shadow

My therapist is really good.  I think I've found my problem.  It's brought back a memory of an excellent short story that I read years and years ago by Jeff Noon.  It resonated with me back then, which seems to suggest that the problem that has now been identified has been my problem for a good many years:  I have a shadow.

Full disclosure:  I've had a bad week, and wrote most of this post while at work, for reasons which will become clear.

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...

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That's the thing (Old Blog)

Some more information about what's currently going on with me:

I've been signed off work sick for two weeks, with the official diagnosis of 'anxiety with depression'.  I was surprised at how easy it was, but then, that's the thing.

Having the time off is brilliant, as I'm not having to put up any fronts or seem like I'm coping with anything.  That's something I've been doing for years, and getting dressed and going to work is one way that I can 'pass' as a functioning adult.  Now that I don't have to do that, I can simply deal with how I actually feel on a daily basis, which is:  anxious, but then, that's the thing.

I've also had time and space to talk to Furiosa about what's going on with me.  She's also been signed off work for a couple of weeks, due to work stress and the stress of the Chap starting school.  This has been brewing for 6 years now (he'll be 5 in January, that's a lot of brewing).  Her symptoms were panic, anxiety, hyperventilation and The Fear that came out of nowhere to paralyse her and screw up her morning.  It was when she was telling me about it that I realised that what she was describing was reasonably normal for me, and that's the thing.

The thing is, my normal is messed up.  My baseline level of background anxiety is mild to moderate.  Just existing on this planet is enough to make me nervous, and that's before you start adding in things like money, work, hoovering, talking to other people and having sex.  Furiosa's symptoms are fairly regular occurences for me when I'm at work, and have been for several years.  I've been existing at work-stress levels that can get you signed off sick for several years, and they've become normal for me.  I've normalised anxiety with depression.

Looking back to try and find out how I got this way, when it started and how it developed, I couldn't.  I can't think of a single time in my childhood, in my teens, or as an adult when I've actually felt relaxed.  Not at home, not at school, not on any holidays.  I've always been anxious about something, and I've never found anything that can make that go away.

"But Darling, your sexual fantasies make it all go away, don't we?"

But they don't, not really.  They keep it at bay for a time, they offer me a space where my anxieties simply aren't felt any more, they throw a towel over the poison parrot's cage.  But, like an alcoholic sobering up, which is a massively barbed analogy for me to draw, my anxieties are all still there in the morning, with an added layer of guilt on top, ready to be evaded all over again.

So, plan:  time off work, good, therapy, good, pills to quell my baseline anxiety, good, staying my version of sober, good, finding another outlet for my submissiveness, very very necessary.

This blog?  Not sure yet.

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