The Post-War Dream
I got my first 'big' idea in 2009, when a game called Champions Online came out. It never became huge on the MMO scene, but it boasted one of the most comprehensive character creation systems to that point, and that's one of the primary reasons I fell in love with it. I made so many damned superheroes with so many damned outfits - I would spend hours at a time tweaking bits here and there, trying out different costume combinations, and so on.
This was deep into my Role-Play As Therapy stage, so naturally I also played the shit out of these characters. I got nice and edgy with them, too, and I was fortunate enough to fall in with a decent RP guild called The Blades, and this is where I first conceived the characters that would become part of the Galena story.
I probably haven't talked much about that story here, and I'm not gonna talk too much about it now, but I'm certain you'll hear a lot about it eventually and might even get to read it some day.
Not that I haven't tried to get it made. I think it was 2011 or 2012 that I first tried to make a comic book adaptation of the story. I met with an artist in town who was willing to work with me on it, a friend of a friend, but they ended up moving away. I've tried a couple of times to find an artist online who's willing to work for a full share of the profits, but that's a hard sell for an unproven work by a person you don't personally know.
Long story short, I'm going to have to write it as a novel first, and then maybe adapt it from there, but that's not the point of this post.
So, I've been sitting on this idea for about 9 years. It's gotten huge since the beginning, making my difficulties in getting it produced somewhat of a blessing. It's just been stewing in my head, and with each breakthrough I have, with each new understanding of the various mechanisms in my head and systems that drive the world around me, the story gets deeper and more refined and takes on more meaning than the super-edgy melodrama it started out as.
So, too, have my ambitions.
I frequently fantasize about my stories being successful. In my 'vision,' they connect with a large number of people, and they're unique and bold, and they get a lot of mainstream attention and they become movies whose trailers I get to surprise people with at Comic Con with a bitchin' soundtrack and brilliant acting and on and on and on.
I love that dream. Not only would that be cool, but it also says something about my progress that I'm willing to let myself have that dream at all. It says something about my ability to appreciate my talents, an ability that at one time would've seemed wholly impossible, and it's one of the few things in my life that has ever made me feel good about myself.
Over the last few years, this dream has given my life meaning. It gives me purpose. It drives me, and encourages me not to give up. It gives me a reason for being.
But...
Somewhere along the way, the dream became a requirement. It wasn't just that it would be cool, but that it was the only way my life would have any value. It was the only way I could justify not killing myself. I told myself that if I don't achieve that dream, then all my perseverance and struggle would be for naught, and I will have fully wasted my time suffering when I could have just offed myself in my teens and been done with it.
The dream became a cudgel. It became this oppressive, all-consuming need, and in many ways became a tool used by the parts of my mind dedicated to keeping me from trying, in some warped attempt to protect me from the learned dangers of self-expression.
Every time I look around the apartment and get reminded about the little shit I could be doing to keep things clean, I think about the dream and I tell myself how far away from it I am. How can I achieve these things when I can't even take care of my living space? How am I gonna have the willpower and rabid pursuit necessary to make my stories successful if I can't even push myself to clean a fucking baking tray?
You're worthless. You're hopeless. You'll never accomplish this dream, and your suffering will never be worthwhile, so why not just fucking end it now?
The story of how you got to the point where you could realize this is epic in its own right. How many people in your position, in your circumstances, ever achieve the self-awareness to see this deeply into the machinations of their own head?
I have known this truth for at least a little while, now: the possibility of failing to achieve this dream needs to be okay. I can't make my life dependent on it. Even if I were the most naturally gifted writer to ever live (which I'm not), the odds are that I wouldn't be successful. I know better than to think that talent alone will determine success. Much of it is luck, and much of it is effort towards the less-glamorous aspects of writing, such as self-promotion, that I find utterly daunting.
Hopefully, the folly of making any happiness or sense of fulfillment dependent on such an unlikely thing is plain. In reality, it's just a way for the parts of my brain intent on my destruction to frame it as an inevitability.
At the same time, nobody who has met with that success has ever done so without the dream, and that's what makes me so reluctant to let go of it. While yet another part of me says to just get it over with, give up on it, and live the rest of my life on disability with zero hope, the reality is that I don't have to do that, either.
Here's the thing: I have needed that dream. Back up there when I mentioned how good it felt to be able to acknowledge that there's something I'm decent at? I needed that. I needed to be able to have this hope, this fire in my heart to beat back the shadows that threatened to pull me under. I needed to be able to envision a me that is happy, and healthy, and successful, who is outgoing and warm and brilliant and can actually help large numbers of people with the lessons I've learned dealing with my shit.
I needed to know that version of me was in here somewhere, and now I know.
Hi there.
I have that fire, now. I have that part of me I need. What I don't need is the pressure that ruminating on the dream creates. I don't need this looming deadline on my psyche's resilience, this ultimatum for my will to live. What I need is to be able to focus on doing the little things that will make life easier to bear. I need to get my apartment cleaned. I need to start making my own meals so I can start losing weight. I need to get out of the apartment more so my muscles don't atrophy.
I need life to be worth living as it is.
To put it in needlessly poetic terms: I need to let go of the dream so that it might one day come true.
That's the trick, right? All that effort it requires, all the non-romantic stuff that I never fantasize about, that's necessary to be successful? This is how I learn to do it. This is how I develop this skill - not by dreaming, but by doing and making the present as good as I can.
So, I'm putting the dream away for now. I'm carefully packing it in a nice box with artfully scrawled lettering saying something clever, and I'm placing it in the pinnacle of the Gilded Colossus for safekeeping until I'm ready to chase it again, and for the nonce, I turn my gaze to the upholstery and interior decorating, or some other equally cheesy metaphor that will let me go ahead and end this post.
Don't worry. It'll be ready when you are.
This was deep into my Role-Play As Therapy stage, so naturally I also played the shit out of these characters. I got nice and edgy with them, too, and I was fortunate enough to fall in with a decent RP guild called The Blades, and this is where I first conceived the characters that would become part of the Galena story.
I probably haven't talked much about that story here, and I'm not gonna talk too much about it now, but I'm certain you'll hear a lot about it eventually and might even get to read it some day.
Not that I haven't tried to get it made. I think it was 2011 or 2012 that I first tried to make a comic book adaptation of the story. I met with an artist in town who was willing to work with me on it, a friend of a friend, but they ended up moving away. I've tried a couple of times to find an artist online who's willing to work for a full share of the profits, but that's a hard sell for an unproven work by a person you don't personally know.
Long story short, I'm going to have to write it as a novel first, and then maybe adapt it from there, but that's not the point of this post.
So, I've been sitting on this idea for about 9 years. It's gotten huge since the beginning, making my difficulties in getting it produced somewhat of a blessing. It's just been stewing in my head, and with each breakthrough I have, with each new understanding of the various mechanisms in my head and systems that drive the world around me, the story gets deeper and more refined and takes on more meaning than the super-edgy melodrama it started out as.
So, too, have my ambitions.
I frequently fantasize about my stories being successful. In my 'vision,' they connect with a large number of people, and they're unique and bold, and they get a lot of mainstream attention and they become movies whose trailers I get to surprise people with at Comic Con with a bitchin' soundtrack and brilliant acting and on and on and on.
I love that dream. Not only would that be cool, but it also says something about my progress that I'm willing to let myself have that dream at all. It says something about my ability to appreciate my talents, an ability that at one time would've seemed wholly impossible, and it's one of the few things in my life that has ever made me feel good about myself.
Over the last few years, this dream has given my life meaning. It gives me purpose. It drives me, and encourages me not to give up. It gives me a reason for being.
But...
Somewhere along the way, the dream became a requirement. It wasn't just that it would be cool, but that it was the only way my life would have any value. It was the only way I could justify not killing myself. I told myself that if I don't achieve that dream, then all my perseverance and struggle would be for naught, and I will have fully wasted my time suffering when I could have just offed myself in my teens and been done with it.
The dream became a cudgel. It became this oppressive, all-consuming need, and in many ways became a tool used by the parts of my mind dedicated to keeping me from trying, in some warped attempt to protect me from the learned dangers of self-expression.
Every time I look around the apartment and get reminded about the little shit I could be doing to keep things clean, I think about the dream and I tell myself how far away from it I am. How can I achieve these things when I can't even take care of my living space? How am I gonna have the willpower and rabid pursuit necessary to make my stories successful if I can't even push myself to clean a fucking baking tray?
You're worthless. You're hopeless. You'll never accomplish this dream, and your suffering will never be worthwhile, so why not just fucking end it now?
The story of how you got to the point where you could realize this is epic in its own right. How many people in your position, in your circumstances, ever achieve the self-awareness to see this deeply into the machinations of their own head?
I have known this truth for at least a little while, now: the possibility of failing to achieve this dream needs to be okay. I can't make my life dependent on it. Even if I were the most naturally gifted writer to ever live (which I'm not), the odds are that I wouldn't be successful. I know better than to think that talent alone will determine success. Much of it is luck, and much of it is effort towards the less-glamorous aspects of writing, such as self-promotion, that I find utterly daunting.
Hopefully, the folly of making any happiness or sense of fulfillment dependent on such an unlikely thing is plain. In reality, it's just a way for the parts of my brain intent on my destruction to frame it as an inevitability.
At the same time, nobody who has met with that success has ever done so without the dream, and that's what makes me so reluctant to let go of it. While yet another part of me says to just get it over with, give up on it, and live the rest of my life on disability with zero hope, the reality is that I don't have to do that, either.
Here's the thing: I have needed that dream. Back up there when I mentioned how good it felt to be able to acknowledge that there's something I'm decent at? I needed that. I needed to be able to have this hope, this fire in my heart to beat back the shadows that threatened to pull me under. I needed to be able to envision a me that is happy, and healthy, and successful, who is outgoing and warm and brilliant and can actually help large numbers of people with the lessons I've learned dealing with my shit.
I needed to know that version of me was in here somewhere, and now I know.
Hi there.
I have that fire, now. I have that part of me I need. What I don't need is the pressure that ruminating on the dream creates. I don't need this looming deadline on my psyche's resilience, this ultimatum for my will to live. What I need is to be able to focus on doing the little things that will make life easier to bear. I need to get my apartment cleaned. I need to start making my own meals so I can start losing weight. I need to get out of the apartment more so my muscles don't atrophy.
I need life to be worth living as it is.
To put it in needlessly poetic terms: I need to let go of the dream so that it might one day come true.
That's the trick, right? All that effort it requires, all the non-romantic stuff that I never fantasize about, that's necessary to be successful? This is how I learn to do it. This is how I develop this skill - not by dreaming, but by doing and making the present as good as I can.
So, I'm putting the dream away for now. I'm carefully packing it in a nice box with artfully scrawled lettering saying something clever, and I'm placing it in the pinnacle of the Gilded Colossus for safekeeping until I'm ready to chase it again, and for the nonce, I turn my gaze to the upholstery and interior decorating, or some other equally cheesy metaphor that will let me go ahead and end this post.
Don't worry. It'll be ready when you are.
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