2049: Dear Diary

There are times when I wonder whether this blog is the best way to handle getting thoughts out of my head in some form or another.

I used to keep a diary when I was younger. I’m not really sure why; I think it was partly due to the fact that I very much enjoyed the Adrian Mole books and fancied myself as being a similar sort of person to him in some ways. (I later realised that Adrian was a bit of a twat — or at least became a bit of a twat in the later books — and rescinded my earlier appraisal.) Mostly, though, it was about the fact that I enjoyed writing and found it cathartic, particularly if there were things bothering me.

I remember my first diary. It was a really nice leather-bound book with lovely paper, and it said “Journal” on the side of it. It was a souvenir from somewhere or other; I forget exactly where, but my first entry recounted a trip with my parents to the thrilling-sounding National Stone Centre, and subsequent entries had a touch of the “scrapbook” about them, with bits and pieces stuck in and all manner of things.

Then one day I decided to change things up a bit. I decided to use my diary as something a little more personal. Rather than effectively doing what I would do in a school English class — “today we went to [x] and did [y], it was [z]” — I decided that I would use the diary as a means of expressing the thoughts, feelings and emotions that I felt unable or hesitant to talk about with anyone, be it my friends or relatives.

My mental state throughout my school years was a little turbulent, to say the least. I suffered dreadful bullying at primary school, and this continued in secondary school until I punched my main tormentor in the face just as the school principal was coming around the corner. (I largely got away with it, because frankly he had it coming.) Although the instances of outright bullying calmed down somewhat after this watershed moment, my social awkwardness and inability to understand the concept of being in any way fashionable — a trait I maintain to this day, though it matters a bit less now — meant that I was occasionally still the butt of jokes, even from people who were my friends most of the time. If the cool kids were around and there was the opportunity to make a joke at my expense, people normally took it, and this didn’t do much for my self-confidence.

I learned quite early on in my life that I was the sort of person who was prone to falling for people pretty quickly. My crippling self-doubt meant that I was ecstatic anyone would even give me the time of day, and even more so if said person was a girl. Having little to no understanding of relationships, though, I didn’t really know how to approach girls and try to take things anywhere beyond friendship; this was about the time Friends was airing on TV, so I found myself relating very much to David Schwimmer’s Ross character, and would watch the episode where he and Rachel got together over and over again while fantasising about one day being in that situation myself.

Anyway. The upshot of all this is that I found it difficult to express my feelings about people that I found myself liking. I was embarrassed if anyone found out who I “fancied”, and my friends would often take advantage of my squirming by hijacking the middle pages of my exercise books, scrawling my beloved’s name in huge letters and decorating the page overly flamboyantly. I’d protest, but secretly I actually quite appreciated the fact that they were acknowledging my feelings, and in their own strange, mocking way, I think they were trying to make me feel better, because it almost certainly became clear to them over time that regardless of my feelings towards any of these girls that I fell for during my time at school, I would never, ever do anything about it.

It’s not that I didn’t want to, though, and that’s where the new part of my diary came in. I would use the diary to express myself and try to figure out my feelings about the people that I liked. I’d even — and I realise that this is probably depicting me as a weird sort of creepy psycho — plan out how an “ideal” encounter with my beloved at the time would go. I’d script a conversation — like a play — as if everything was going exactly the way I would want it to, and on one memorable occasion I even drew diagrams of how I’d get my friends to occupy my beloved’s friends so I could get her by herself and talk to her alone. (I actually followed through on this on one occasion of uncharacteristic courage; it didn’t work, though I did get a hug and a “let’s be friends” out of it.)

None of the romances I dreamed of in my diary came to fruition — I had precisely two girlfriends in secondary school, one of whom I became involved with when I was actually trying to get it on with someone else, who cheated on me at the school prom (and is now, so far as I know, married to the dude she cheated on me with, so, err, good job, I guess?) and another with whom I got together during a recording of the BBC’s Songs of Praise at the local animal shelter, kissed precisely once, didn’t see for three days and then got dumped by proxy because she “wanted things to go back to the way they were before”. And, at times, this lack of “action” got to me a bit, particularly as I saw some of my friends getting started with what would turn out to be pretty long-term relationships. But the diary helped. In some ways, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t muster up the courage to go and talk to these people that I was attracted to, because my diary provided me with a means to express myself without having to put myself on the line, without risking humiliation, and without threatening my real-life friendship with the objects of my affections; my greatest fear was telling someone that I liked them, and them promptly never speaking to me ever again after that. In retrospect, this was a silly fear, but it was a big deal to teenage me.

I’m not sure when it happened, but one day I looked back over my diary and I suddenly felt ashamed of myself. It was a fantasy world, I knew; these conversations I’d script, these scenarios I’d describe, these fancies I’d indulge — none of them would ever be real, and that got to me. I also became absolutely terrified at the prospect of my diary ever being found by someone I really didn’t want to read it, so one day while I was alone in the house, I took one last look through that lovely leather-bound journal’s pages, stared at it for a few moments, then took it outside to the dustbin and buried it beneath a number of stinky, empty cans of cat food. I can only assume it ended up on a rubbish dump or landfill site somewhere, but occasionally I wondered if anyone would ever actually find it and read it — and what they would think of the clearly troubled mind that scrawled in its pages on an almost daily basis.

To my knowledge, though, no-one ever did read it. And for that I’m sort of grateful, because it would have been mortifying; but at the same time, I wonder if I might not have been able to make myself a little more understood if people had read it. And I guess that’s partly what this blog is about; it’s not quite the same as my diary and I’m certainly not going to start scripting fantasy conversations between me and people I fancy (largely because I’m married to the person that I love and thus have no need to), but it lets me get the weights off my mind at times, and, since it’s public — the journal left lying open on my desk, as it were — I hope it makes me at least a little more understood to others.

And if not, well, you can have a good old giggle at how messed up I am, huh. Either way, thanks for reading.

1051: Take This, Right in the Feels

Page_1 (With apologies to Jeff Green for the gratuitous use of “Feels”.)

I was going to write something positive and happy today as a counterpoint to 1) yesterday’s post and 2) the amount of anger that has been circulating on the Internet yet again today, this time as a result of an ill-conceived PR stunt by Square Enix. I’m not going to get into that now, because everyone yelling about it is already getting very tiresome. But I decided there was something else I wanted to discuss instead.

Instead I wanted to talk a bit about something which started up during the course of the last month — the Take This project, an attempt by a bunch of games industry professionals (including my good self) to do something positive about the stigma surrounding depression, anxiety and other mental health issues. Over at the site, numerous people are sharing their stories of their experiences with these issues in an attempt to encourage others to do the same, and to help people realise that they’re not alone with the feelings they might be experiencing. Here’s my contribution — more will probably follow in the near future.

I may well post something along these lines over on Take This at some point in the near future, but for now I thought I’d share it here.

I wanted to talk a bit about crying.

If you see someone else crying, chances are you’ll start feeling pretty shitty too. It’s not a nice thing to watch, particularly if you don’t know what caused it. There’s that air of immense awkwardness around the situation, particularly if a stranger’s involved, where you’re not quite sure if you’re “allowed” to talk to the person and see if you can help with what they’re upset about, and generally the whole thing is something most people like to avoid whenever possible. There’s also an element of gender stereotyping that comes into play, too, where it’s somehow “more okay” for women to cry than men. (I don’t agree with this at all, but “big boys don’t cry” is still a real stigma that stops many men from effectively expressing their emotions.)

But consider how that person who is in tears is feeling. It’s sometimes difficult to judge from outside, because only the person who is crying knows exactly what they’re feeling. Crying isn’t always an unpleasant thing, either — sometimes it is a sweet release from pent-up emotion that has been bubbling away inside that person’s head. Of course, sometimes it is outright hysteria, too — a complete inability to deal with a particular situation and a desire to simply let rip with some absolutely raw emotion. Only the person who is crying knows, and they’re often not really in a position to talk about it while it’s happening.

Oddly, though — and this is where I might lose a few of you — sometimes it’s desirable or even enjoyable to cry. The feeling of being affected so profoundly by something that you actually want to weep is oddly intoxicating at times, and it can, at times, be outright pleasant.

It’s not as strange as it initially sounds, though. How else can you explain the fact that most forms of media boast a “tearjerker” genre or equivalent?

Most recently, I’ve been playing a visual novel called Kana Little Sister, which I talk about in greater detail over on Games Are Evil here. Kana is described as an “utsuge” — a “depression game”, or a title that is specifically designed to elicit “negative” (for want of a better word) emotions in its audience, in this case sadness. (Other examples include Silent Hill 2, which evokes reactions ranging from slumping back in one’s chair and sighing to crying bitter, bitter tears.) I have played through Kana five times now, and even though you know from the very outset that the titular little sister character is going to die at the end (spoiler: except in one ending), it still gets me every time, and the tears fall without fail.

This doesn’t make me feel bad, though. It’s a perversely enjoyable experience. I like responding to something in this way. I like the feeling of being overtaken by emotion and being physically affected by a work. It’s an impressive mark of how much something has engaged me fully if it can make me cry — or if, for that matter, it can make my pulse race, or generate that hard-to-define feeling of “butterflies in the stomach” that a good, epic final confrontation in something like an RPG can sometimes manage.

Even now, though, as open as I generally am about this sort of thing, there’s still a slight feeling of embarrassment when it happens. It’s perhaps because when you cry, you’re making yourself quite vulnerable. You’re “letting go”, turning off the safety switches that let you behave “normally” in polite society without breaking down into tears every five seconds. If you do it around someone else, you’re showing a great deal of trust in them — trust that they won’t laugh at you for having emotions in the first place, and trust that they won’t think any less of you in the future because of your reaction.

Basically, I think what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t be afraid to cry — regardless of whether you need to or just want to. So, you know, let it out.

#oneaday Day 551: Feel What You Feel

It’s been a couple of days of bad news, what with the horrible attacks in Norway and today’s sad but unsurprising news that Amy Winehouse’s somewhat tentative grip on life has finally given out.

Online and broadcast discussion of these matters has been interesting to observe. The media has been all over both of them, as you might expect. The reporting of Winehouse’s death was a bit obnoxious, to be honest, with a constant live stream of the view of her street, presumably hoping to see something — anything — newsworthy. In the time I watched, there was nothing newsworthy besides the fact that she had died. The BBC strung this out with a series of quotes from a bizarre selection of people, including the ex-prime minster Gordon Brown’s wife.

A lot of Twitter got all indignant earlier on at people expressing sadness over Winehouse’s death while considerably more people had died in Norway. Then people got indignant about people’s indignance, saying that it’s OK to feel things about both pieces of news. Then people got indignant about this, saying that there are people starving in the world, etc. etc. It could have continued indefinitely — I haven’t really looked since earlier, but there was severe risk of an infinite loop of indignance going on.

I kind of agree with the second group. As the version of Stalin in Command & Conquer: Red Alert said, “when one man dies, it is a tragedy; when one million die, it is a statistic” (Aside: according to Wikiquotes, this is commonly misattributed to Stalin. I did not know that. TIL.). That may be a harsh way of putting it, but there’s a sort of logic to it; when we hear about the death toll in Norway, it’s horrifying, but difficult to picture all the individual faces if you didn’t know anyone affected personally. Contrast that with Amy Winehouse, whose face everyone knows, and it’s easy to see why some people might take that a bit more “personally” despite not knowing her themselves — it’s more relatable and, in some ways, easier to deal with.

However, that doesn’t mean that it’s a case of all or nothing, one or the other. You can feel bad about both things. You can feel bad about those things and the starving children in the world, too, if you like. Or, if you’re going through a difficult time in your own life, you can feel free to say “fuck it” to all that and be selfish, too. There’s no shame in your own individual feelings, particularly in this media- and Internet-saturated world where it often feels like the things we’re supposed to feel about a “tragedy” are prescribed to us, and anyone who doesn’t conform is not being appropriately sympathetic or empathetic.

I say feel whatever you want to feel. If you knew someone in Norway who was killed in the attacks, mourn them. If you knew Amy Winehouse, mourn her. If you didn’t know anyone involved directly, feel bad for the people who were affected if you want to, but don’t feel guilty if the things that are happening to you feel like they’re taking priority. The relative severity of incidents gets proportionally amplified the closer they are to you — so something relatively “minor” in the grand scheme of things may seem like the most important thing in the world to you, even with all these other things going on. And that’s OK.

The reason I say this is because of the way I spent a lot of last year feeling. Grief is a terrible thing and sometimes it feels like it will never end, but the worst thing I feel you can do while you’re grief-stricken is feel guilty about it.

So feel what you feel without guilt. It’s your business, and no-one else’s.