Character Customization

Wouldn’t it be nice to just have a stat sheet?

My days are strange and chaotic and emotionally draining. There seem to be a lot of storms at varying levels of metaphoria. I don’t want to complain, I just want to convey the idea that it’s hard to maintain perspective from a surface that doesn’t stay level.

Frame of reference is everything.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve been playing Super Hexagon that things seem to be spinning a lot.

But it ain’t bad, it ain’t bad. When everything else is shifting around me I feel somehow a bit better able to perceive the boundaries of myself, since for once those are relatively constant. When I get upset, I perceive a bit better who I am, and the things that I am afraid of, and sometimes if I am lucky I get a peek at why.

I’m scared of being ignored. I want to be heard. Which makes choosing to write my thoughts a natural choice, but also a terrifying one. One cannot be ignored if one chooses not to speak, and I have given a lot of my life to a coward’s path of only speaking as quietly as possible, usually with only myself and those closest to me as an audience. I’ve justified this to myself as some sort of training, but those justifications were in large part cowardly and self-serving.

Also, I have been in the habit of trying to pick out the talent I admire in others, and to try to conceive of taking it for my own. To consume their abilities, integrate them into myself, to conquer them. This external focus is, I think, symptomatic of my self-disdain– yes, I have taught myself to disdain anything that comes easily to me, which often includes speaking in a genuine voice. Certainly, there is much to be learned in emulating others, but we can only approach their abilities from the stronghold of our own experience and talent if we hope to measure up in any way. And, in the end, if all you can offer is a copy, you can’t offer anything.

So I will try to do better.

I want to make more things. I just wish I knew there were a life waiting for the me that makes all those things. It is terrifyingly easy to go unheard, and the more time I spend creating something the more it hurts me if it never finds an audience. That, alone, I can handle, but the way it ties into the financial uncertainty of an artist’s lifestyle makes it even more difficult.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just have a stat sheet?