2269: Video Games (Might Have) Saved My Life

I thought about writing about this yesterday, but didn’t; I was feeling rather emotional about it and thus figured it probably wasn’t the best idea to spew out an ill-considered rant on such a sensitive subject. It’s still a delicate subject, of course, but I feel a bit more mentally prepared to tackle it and attempt to do it justice today.

This will doubtless be difficult to write, so bear with me while I inevitably ramble around the point. It will probably also be quite difficult to read, particularly if you know me quite well… but, again, bear with me — hopefully you’ll come away with a better understanding of some of the things I feel.

All right, preamble over: let’s begin.

Yesterday, when I first thought about writing this piece, I was angry. I got suddenly very angry about something I’ve been angry about before, and have been doing my best to not be as bothered by: the ongoing “culture war” that has all but destroyed rational, reasonable discussion of popular media — particularly gaming — through public social channels such as Twitter, as well as all but destroying any credibility, inclusiveness and, in many cases, entertainment value the mainstream video games press had.

It wasn’t really a specific event that made me feel angry; it was more a buildup of tension that just needed to be released. Recent controversies over the new Baldur’s Gate expansion, the press and “social justice” types outright lying about why people didn’t like it, needless outrage over Tracer’s butt in Blizzard’s Overwatch, the ever-present undercurrent of the morally superior looking down on people who are into video games and branding them misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, cis white heterosexual male scum… all of it was getting on top of me, even though a lot of it didn’t even directly concern me and the games I’m into. But the controversies still resonated with me, since I’ve also seen very similar nonsense aimed at the games I am into.

When I get angry about something, after the fact I often like to take a moment to reflect on exactly why I got so angry — why is that thing in particular so important to me that it had such a powerful emotional effect on me? Video games are dumb timewasters, aren’t they? Why should I care so much what some people I’d never want to hang out with at parties (not that I want to hang out with anyone at parties save for people who want to join me in another room and play computer games all night) think of the things I enjoy? Why do I feel compelled to continually defend my hobby and this medium from people who desire nothing more than to tear it down and remake it in the way they think it should be — because make no mistake, the loudest critics like this aren’t after true “diversity” or “inclusion” since they, in many cases, simply cannot accept the existence of material they deem “problematic”, nor can they understand that some people enjoy said “problematic” material and don’t want to be called sex pests/paedophiles/misogynists/assholes simply for the things they happen to be into. Why?

Well, “video games are important to me” is the simple answer. And I could leave it at that. But I’m not going to: I’m going to explain exactly why video games are important to me.

Growing up, I was a bit of an outcast. I was shy, I lacked confidence, I didn’t know how to talk to people. I remember on my first day at secondary school I turned to Matthew, one of my few friends from primary school and, with genuine fear in my eyes, whispered to him that I “couldn’t remember how to make friends”, which was putting me at something of a conversational impasse with Murray, the boy I had been sat next to in our tutor room. (Murray turned out to be a massive bullying twat, whom I finally punched in the face just as the headmaster was walking around the corner one memorable lunchtime; I escaped truly serious punishment on the grounds that he most certainly had had it coming for a very long time indeed.)

Growing up, I wasn’t into sports. I was into stuff that other people weren’t into. I played the piano. I played computer games. I wrote stories. (All of these are things I still do.) These were things that I learned I enjoyed at a very young age, so I have clung onto them with all my might for my whole life — and I’ve always known when someone would turn out to be a true friend, because they’d be into at least one of those things, and preferably more than one of them. Indeed, when I did eventually successfully remember how to make friends at secondary school, the group of friends I surrounded myself with were all a little like me to varying degrees — I was by far the most awkward and nerdy of them, but we all had our shared interest in video games which we felt like other people didn’t really get the appeal of.

When the time came for me to go to university, I was terrified at the prospect of having to deal with new people and even live with them. Fortunately, I found myself living with a flat full of thoroughly decent people who tended to be remarkably understanding of my quirks. There were still occasions when what I now recognise as social anxiety would get the better of me, and I’d want nothing more than to lock myself away and escape into the wonderful worlds and stories gaming let me explore and be a part of.

I continued my love of video games throughout my adult life. They always served as something comforting to me: after a challenging day at university, games were there to help me relax. After a difficult day working in teaching, games were there to help me vent my stress. After a day of chaotic retail, games were there to help me chill out and forget about the previous eight hours. And after a day where everything felt like it had gone wrong, games were there to save me.

Those who have been reading this blog for a while will know that I’ve been through a few difficult periods over the last six years in particular. The most notable of these was in 2010, when my first wife and I parted ways and I was left unemployed, with no money and facing the prospect of having to move back home — something which I found mortifyingly embarrassing for a man of my age who had qualifications (and a failed/abandoned career based on those qualifications).

As time passed, I sank deeper and deeper into a very dark depression indeed. There were days when I was completely unable to function normally. I had a long period where I didn’t — couldn’t — get up until about 5 in the afternoon, which would always make me feel terrible when I’d stagger, unkempt, to the shop across the road from my flat and the guy with the smelly armpits behind the counter would ask “how my day had been”.

Everything felt like it had gone wrong; I felt like I had completely failed at life. I felt like I had made all the wrong choices, and that there was no way out of the situation in which I found myself. And so my thoughts turned, as do those of many people in a similar situation, I’m sure, to whether or not this world really needed me in it any more.

Once that initial floodgate bursts and you start wondering such things, all manner of unwelcome thoughts start coming to the fore. Would it hurt? What’s it like to die? If I did die, who would find me? Would anyone find me? Should I tell someone I’m feeling this way? Should I tell someone I’m going to kill myself? If I do, do I actually want them to stop me?

More often than not, these strings of thoughts would cause my brain to get into a bit of a feedback loop and I’d end up eventually just passing out from exhaustion, often after having had a spectacularly undignified cry and/or rage about the whole thing. But so long as the situation remained, the thoughts wouldn’t go away entirely. I’d picture different ways of how I might do it, and what would happen once the deed had been done and someone found me — or what would happen if no-one found me.

To cut a long story short, I pushed through all that — more on how in a moment — and, for a while, things started to look up, and I started to think that I might have finally gotten myself into a situation where I could be happy and content, looking forward to the future rather than dreading it.

That didn’t happen. The unceremonious loss of my job at USgamer for vague (and, frankly, probably spurious) reasons, followed by the horrendous way in which subsequent employer energy company SSE (or, more specifically, my immediate managers) treated me while I worked for them — yes, I am naming and shaming here, because it fucked me right up, and I am still bitter about it to such a degree that I often have flashbacks to my particularly horrible last day — caused me to once more sink into an awful pit of depression, and it wasn’t any easier this time around, either.

Those thoughts of not being sure if I wanted to be part of this world any more started to come back. Familiar images of me holding a gun to my head came around; questions over what would happen if I followed through on these thoughts started to rise up once more.

And yet, even though I wouldn’t describe myself as being out of the worst of it even now, I never once harmed myself, let alone made an attempt on my own life. Even in my darkest moments, I was always pulled back from the edge of that particular precipice.

Why? Two reasons, the first of which is the one I imagine most people in a similar situation quote: awareness of the few people in the world who do care about you, and what it would do to them if you were to do something as drastic as killing yourself.

The second is video games.

I’m not joking. A big part of why I am still on this planet is because of video games. And it’s hard to explain exactly why, because there are a myriad of reasons I feel this way, but it is absolutely true, as ridiculous as it might sound.

Games have always been important to me. But over the last few years in particular — since about 2010 or so — I feel like I’ve really found the niche of games that interest and excite me, along with a group of publishers and developers who consistently and regularly put out things that keep me enthralled for hours on end. These games engage my emotions and draw me in with their stories and characterisation; these games make me feel like I can be someone that I’m not; these games put me in a situation where, while there might be problems and strife, there’s always a way to deal with it, however challenging.

As I became more and more conscious of how I felt about these games, I started “stockpiling” — picking up games that I had no real intention of playing immediately, but which I wanted to add to my collection while they were still reasonably readily available. I also started re-acquiring games that I had previously owned that had made me feel the same way. And, one by one, I’d work my way through them, constantly finding new and enjoyable experiences to discover — even where, in many cases, said experiences weren’t received particularly well by critics.

And here’s how games saved me: the knowledge that in every DVD case on my bookshelf there is a new experience to be had; a new world to explore; new characters to fall in love with — that’s the one thing that, every time, pulls me back from the brink of doing something drastic, however dark the situation in which I find myself might be, and however persistent those horrible thoughts in my head might be. I have literally had the thought “I can’t die until I’ve played all the Neptunia games”. I have literally had the thought “I’m not going anywhere until I’ve played all the Ateliers“. And so on and so on; so much do I value these experiences — and the ability to talk and enthuse about them with those people I know who do respect my interests, even if they don’t share them — that I can’t bring myself to even hurt myself, let alone make an attempt on my own life.

You may think this is a dumb reason to keep living. You may think that this is unhealthy. You may think that there are more deep-seated problems here (and you’d be right). But trust me when I say: when even a tiny part of your brain starts considering whether or not you’re really needed in this plane of existence any more, the part of you that is still concerned with self-preservation will cling on to any thing — however dumb it might be — that will help you survive.

For me, that thing is video games, and to my reckoning they’ve saved me from three particularly bad periods in my life: the nervous breakdown that convinced me once and for all that no, classroom teaching was not the career for me; my first wife and I parting ways; and my recent employment woes.

Hopefully it is now clear to you, dear reader, how important video games are to me. And, bearing in mind how important they are to me, can you perhaps understand how frustrating and upsetting it is to me when a needless, pointless cultural war comes stomping all over them — with the games that resonate with me the most inevitably being the ones that come under the heaviest fire from some of the most obnoxious people on the Internet?

Video games — as they are today, regardless of how “problematic” or whatever other bullshit adjectives you want to apply to them — saved my life. So you damn well better believe I will fight back with all my might against anyone who wants to change them and the culture surrounding them for the worse.

Video games saved my life. Thank you, video games — and everyone who makes them.

(Here’s the source for the awesome image the header pic is based on, if you were curious.)

2255: Things I Feel Irrationally Weird About Saying Out Loud

Number 9,752 in my List of Things That I Don’t Quite Understand About Myself is the fact that there are some things I feel irrationally weird about saying out loud.

Normal things, to be clear; the sort of things that regular people probably happily say out loud without a second though. And yet I always feel peculiar whenever I’m put in a situation where I might have to say one of them, and will often do everything I can to avoid saying the thing in question.

Here is a non-exhaustive list.

My own name. I’ve felt awkward about saying my name — particularly my full, non-abbreviated name — ever since I was little. I find it hard to pin down exactly why this is or what set me off thinking this way in the first place, but I have a feeling it has something to do with how much I disliked my speaking voice when I was growing up; I used to absolutely hate hearing recordings of myself, both before and after my voice broke, because I really didn’t like my accent and the way I pronounced things. I actually have reasonably good diction for the most part; when I was little — and to an extent even now — I worried that I sounded “too posh”, and the name “Peter” is a name that it is very difficult to make sound cool when you sound even the slightest bit posh. As such, I have gravitated towards “Pete” ever since, but still avoid saying it out loud whenever possible.
Other people’s names. I know lots of people on first-name terms. I hate calling any of them by name. Unlike my hang-ups about my own name, this is nothing to do with not liking their names — it’s a peculiar reaction I have where I feel that someone’s name has significant power and meaning to a person, and that using it in a carefree manner to attract their attention or address something to them is somehow insulting. This is, of course, complete nonsense, since we rely on our names to identify ourselves to one another. I feel this one may be something to do with my own reaction to my own name: perhaps I’m subconsciously worrying that other people don’t like hearing or saying their own name too.
Tummy/belly. Stomach. Always stomach. My stomach hurts. I have a stomachache. Never, ever, ever I have a tummyache or a bellyache. Why? My reaction to these words is that they are somehow “childish” and not something an adult should be saying. Once again, this is nonsense, of course, but I still just can’t bring myself to say them.
Variations on “goodbye”. I hate saying goodbye. Not in the romantic “I hate goodbyes!” sense, but in the fact that I simply hate saying goodbye, bye-bye, see you later, see you round, ta-ta for now, bye. I honestly don’t know where this one has come from because saying “goodbye” is a fundamental part of human interaction: it’s a means of demonstrating that your time with someone else has now ended, and that you are going to go elsewhere and/or speak to someone else. Perhaps I think it’s “rude” somehow — that I always think the other person I’m speaking to should be the one to terminate the interaction? I don’t know, but what I do know is that it’s ruder to leave without saying goodbye, which I have been known to do on numerous occasions simply to avoid this hideous awkwardness.
Excuse me. “Excuse me” tends to go hand-in-hand with speaking to strangers, and I do not like speaking to strangers, particularly those I perceive to have more “power” than me in a particular situation. Which is, to be honest, most people most of the time. This one I kind of understand, but it’s still fairly irrational.
Toilet. I cringe every time I use the Americanism “bathroom” to mean “toilet”, but I still use it anyway, particularly when in an unfamiliar place or with unfamiliar people. “Do you have a bathroom I can use?” Of course you do, what sort of house would it be if you didn’t? Somehow I see framing the question in this manner as more polite than “Can I use your toilet?” — evidently my mind subconsciously converts “can I use your toilet?” to “can I get my penis out and spray urine into something in your house?” which results in feelings of shame.

I’m pretty sure there are more, but making this list is depressing me about my own lack of social skills. (Not really, but, well, that’s probably enough to be getting on with for now.) So let’s leave it there for now. I may well return to this topic if I think of some more!

1759: Mingler

Are you planning some sort of event that will bring together a number of disparate groups from your life? (Say, friendship groups from different eras of your existence, departmental colleagues from different parts of your business or family members from various far-flung corners of your family tree.)

Are you planning said event to involve a certain degree of social interaction?

Then do me a favour: stop subscribing to the popular wisdom that “mixing people up” is “a good way for people to get to know each other”. Because it’s not.

The theory is sound: make people step out of their comfort zone and meet new people and there’s the chance of developing new relationships, be they personal, professional or even intimate.

But here’s the thing: jumbling people up randomly (or even semi-randomly) is not a good way to go about this, for a number of reasons.

First is that in many cases, people will just bugger your plans and seek out their original groups anyway after a while, making the exercise largely pointless in most cases.

Secondly, and more seriously, by doing this you put anyone who has even the slightest degree of social anxiety in an extremely awkward position, where they’re caught between the terrifying prospect of having to engage unfamiliar strangers in conversation without the support of their peers, and them coming across as that sullen loner who doesn’t talk to anyone.

I haven’t found a good way of dealing with this yet, and sometimes it’s unavoidable. Invite someone to, say, a wedding as the only representative of a a particular group (as happened with my friend Cat’s wedding a while back, where I was the sole representative of her Southampton years, albeit not quite alone as I had Andie with me) and I can forgive the situation as there is literally no alternative.

But if you deliberately and wilfully split up friendship groups — groups that have often formed on the basis of mutual trust — then I’m less understanding and, more to the point, less understanding. And considerably more prone to bouts of crippling anxiety.

I may well be in the minority on feeling this way. Social anxiety is a disorder, after all; a deviance from the norms of society. But I don’t think it really hurts to at least provide the option for people who feel this way to remain with the people they know, like and trust.

Or, you know, just stop doing this altogether. I get the intention and it’s somewhat admirable in theory. But it just doesn’t really work, and in the meantime, there’s a reasonable chance it will be putting at least a few people in the room in a situation of considerable discomfort. So just stop it, please.

Thank you.

1255: A Realm Reborn, Redux

I really, really like Final Fantasy XIV.

There, I said it.

It may not be fashionable to like a new (well, rebooted) MMORPG that steadfastly follows the old-school subscription model, but given the alternative is the inherent restrictions and inconveniences of the free-to-play model or the regular badgering to check out the “cash shop” in pay-once-play-forever games, I’ll take a few quid a month on the promise of gradually-evolving content.

I’m not going to rabbit on about the game itself here — I’ve already written two articles over at USgamer on that very subject — but I do want to talk about one thing I’m quite looking forward to: the game’s social aspect.

A touch of context here: I have a pretty wide circle of friends, but unfortunately the vast majority of them are scattered across the globe, from California to Japan and everywhere (well, not everywhere) in between. I get to see the friends I have in the local vicinity every so often and we have a good time, but 1) I don’t necessarily get to hang out with them as often as I’d like — none of us are in our twenties any more — and 2) not all of them are into the same things as me.

One thing I’m looking forward to with Final Fantasy XIV is the opportunity to make new friends. But I have some personal struggles to overcome in order to make that happen.

As longtime followers will know, I suffer from a degree of social anxiety, particularly when confronted with strangers. I worry a lot about what people will think of me, and my low self-esteem and low opinion of my physical appearance causes me to immediately believe people will think the worst of me.

So strong is this issue — and yes, I know I should do something about it; that’s not really the issue here — that I’ve been surprised to discover myself having the same feelings of anxiety when playing online games. I’m actively afraid of voice chat with strangers, for example — a hangover from when I was young and really, really hated the sound of my own voice — and I even find myself hesitant to do what I feel would be “butting in” to online conversations in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. I haven’t hung out in Second Life for a very long time, but on more than one occasion I behaved in that virtual world’s virtual clubs exactly the same way as I did in real clubs; I’d sit or stand at the side of the room, watching everyone, and wondering what it would be like to talk to that person over there, who I found quite attractive, or that person over there, who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a design based on something I found interesting.

Well, I feel like I need to take control of this somewhat. While my issues with interpersonal interactions with strangers in “reality” are a more deep-seated issue that probably requires a degree of professional help (or at least a lot of self-discipline), I can do more about the online thing. I chat with people with no problem on Twitter, for example, and pretty much every means of online communication has some form of “safety net” where you can either “escape” from an uncomfortable situation or “mute” people who are bothering you. Chances are I won’t need to use either of those things, but the knowledge that they’re there is comforting.

So where does Final Fantasy XIV fit into all this, then? Well, once the current phase of the beta test ends and the characters everyone starts playing as become “permanent,” I intend on actually making some new friends. I want to play with other people; I want to enjoy the game together with people who like it as much as I do.

I’ve been hesitant to join “guilds” or equivalents in MMOs in the past because I fear not being able to commit to the regular play schedules that they often require. But the more I think about it, the more I think it might be something worth pursuing. After all, at present, I have no regular “social” event in my weekly calendar; my board gaming nights with my best “real-life” friends are sporadic and irregular, and hanging out with everyone else tends to be a more “spur of the moment” thing. Why shouldn’t playing Final Fantasy XIV be some sort of regular, albeit electronic, social event, in which I can get to know people and hopefully make some good friends? Stranger things have happened.

The reason I’m picking Final Fantasy XIV for this purpose? Because Final Fantasy XI is, out of all the MMOs I’ve tried over the years — and that’s quite a lot — the one in which I found people whom I most enjoyed hanging out with virtually. I have no idea where the delightfully entertaining “Bendix” and “Nefertari” are now, but I do quite often find myself missing them. Obviously having some friends a long time ago in a completely different game is no guarantee that the same thing will happen in Final Fantasy XIV, but it’s as good a starting point as any, I figure. I’ve long since abandoned all hope of getting existing friends to play with me in an MMO, because it’s impossible to coordinate.

It remains to be seen whether this plan is successful once the game enters open beta and rolls ever-onward towards its August launch. But I feel strangely optimistic about this coming opportunity to meet some new virtual people; I can represent myself however I want in the game, with no-one pre-judging anything about me besides my character’s name and their appearance. And since everyone in Final Fantasy land is impossibly attractive in that distinctively “Japanese video game” sort of way, I don’t even really have to worry about that, unless I accidentally call myself Pooface McScruntyflange. Which I probably won’t.

Anyway, in the meantime, rest assured that Final Fantasy XIV is shaping up to be something actually quite special, and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into the game as a whole for realsies. Enthusiastic blog posts will undoubtedly follow once my “real” character is born.

#oneaday Day 899: I’ll Be There For You

I have social anxiety. I may have mentioned this before once or twice.

What that means is that sometimes I get tongue-tied and don’t know what to say. Sometimes I let conversations run inside my head but worry about what the possible outcome of them will be, and end up saying nothing. Sometimes I quite literally have nothing to say whatsoever. And sometimes I do say something and don’t get the reaction I expected and consequently feel weird.

As you might expect, this makes the prospect of “making friends” a fairly terrifying one. Obviously I have made friends over the years, otherwise I wouldn’t have any right now, but I can never quite remember how it happened. In some cases, it was a simple matter of being thrown together in some context — living together, studying together, working together — but in others, it’s not quite so clear.

While I am more than happy with the friends I do have, I do sometimes wish I could have more. That may sound greedy, but the fact is that I don’t get to actually see the friends I have all that often. The vast majority of them live in the States (thank you, Internet) and the others live just far enough away for it to be A Big Effort to go and see them. And, you know, sometimes I just want people to play board games with. I bought a copy of Legend of Drizzt, one of the cooperative Dungeons & Dragons adventure games, this week and I’m hoping I get the chance to play it more than once or twice. If I had more friends (who liked board gaming) then I’d be able to play it more often — at the moment, however, it’s determined largely by mutual availability and whether at least one of us can be bothered to drive about 50 miles. I’m more than happy to for the prospect of board game fun, but it’s the former bit that can be tricky sometimes. Hopefully if and when Andie and I manage to move a bit closer to Southampton it’ll be a bit easier to be more spontaneous — as it stands, however, it’s a relatively rare treat to see people.

This is all rather self-pitying I know, but I direct you back to the first line of this post. Social anxiety makes the act of making new friends — even the prospect of just talking to strangers — a terrifying and difficult prospect. Even in an environment that should be “friendly” — I know there’s a local board game shop in Bristol that does games evenings, for example, but I don’t even feel especially confident about that. My mind gets caught in a cycle of “what ifs” and I just end up deciding not to go.

Perhaps one day I’ll get over this social anxiety and be more confident about making new friends and considering that people might actually want to spend time with me if they don’t have to. That day is not today, however, which means that I’m all the more grateful for the friends I do have and the time I do get to spend with them.

Anyone fancy a game of Legend of Drizzt?

#oneaday Day 877: Far Away

It’s not been a great week to be in my mind. You can’t control how or when or for what reason depression will hit you, but it’s been getting me down somewhat recently for a variety of reasons. The events I outlined yesterday are one contributing factor, but as I said there, they aren’t directly affecting me and thus I have to think that the exaggerated feelings of disappointment and upset I have been feeling may be caused by, rather than be the cause of, depression. Or perhaps there’s a whole mess of contributing factors.

I don’t know. And thinking about it inevitably doesn’t help.

One thing that is getting me down a bit at the moment is how far away I am feeling from all my friends. I live in the middle of nowhere a long way away from pretty much everyone I know, and thousands of miles away from the people I talk to literally every day — friends, coworkers, confidantes. I have Andie in my life, a fact which I am incredibly thankful for every day, but that unfortunately doesn’t stop the occasional feelings of loneliness and disconnection.

It’s partly my fault in some cases, of course. When you have disparate, unconnected friendship groups scattered around the globe, it’s difficult to keep up with all of them. (Hell, it’s difficult to keep up with disparate, unconnected friendship groups in the same city sometimes.) Some necessarily fall by the wayside as a sort of natural atrophy. In many cases, this gradual contraction of your worldwide friendship network is a sign that one or all of you have evolved and changed from the people you were when you first knew each other, and you’re just going in directions too different to stay together. In others, yes, it can simply be laziness, but mental states play a role in all this, too, particularly if you struggle with social anxiety as I do — sometimes even the prospect of hanging out with a longtime friend can be terrifying if you haven’t seen them for ages. What if you have nothing to talk about?

Mostly, though, my daily life, my work and my hobbies have led me to the position I am in now, where the vast majority (though not all) of the people that I would consider my closest friends live many thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean, and in some cases even further afield than that. It’s great that I can talk to these people every day thanks to various forms of social media and other online happy funtimes, but sometimes all you want to do is get some people together in the same room, play some couch co-op (or couch competition games like the rather wonderful Hidden in Plain Sight), play some board games, eat some pizza/curry/Chinese/other takeaway goodness and simply, you know chill out together. It happens all too rarely these days.

Ah well. Not a lot I can do about it right now at 1am in the dark in Chippenham, is there? Someday I’ll buy you all a drink. Just probably not all at the same time.

#oneaday Day 868: Enforced Merriment

The Queen has been on the throne for 60 years. Yay The Queen.

In Britain, despite the fact that we spend roughly 98% of our time being completely oblivious to the continued existence of the royal family (apart from those few members who regularly appear in OK Magazine and have subsequently developed obnoxious and probably quite disrespectful nicknames), it is actually the law that anything vaguely celebration-worthy that involves said group of royals must be celebrated with a Street Party, with non-participants being taken to the Tower of London to be pecked to death by ravens.

As such, there was a Street Party today on our street. I was coming back from my evening of board game and curry depravity and I had work to do, so I really wasn’t feeling it anyway, but then my social anxiety kicked in and I was reminded of why I hate this sort of thing quite so much.

I loathe, despise and detest enforced merriment — the feeling that you “should” be somewhere and that you “should” be having more fun than you actually are. Enforcement could be unspoken (a simple feeling that you “should show your face”) or explicit (someone outright saying “oh come on, come and see these people!” in such a way that to say “well, no actually, the very prospect fills me with a crippling sense of outright panic” would make you look like A Right Bastard rather than someone suffering from an actual problem). The effects are the same though — a feeling of dread, the thought “I don’t want to do this” rattling around your head and, while the socialisation is actually going on, a constant and intense desire to find an excuse to leave or, in extreme cases, to simply bolt as quickly as possible.

The reason I don’t want to be in that situation is generally nothing personal to the people I’m supposed to be socialising with — our neighbours seem like a perfectly nice little family, for example — but it is simply part of the whole social phobia. I feel pressured to put myself in that situation, and then once I’m in there, there isn’t an easy escape route to get out of it, which makes me panic.

I think the main problem I have with occasions like this is the fact that they centre around small talk, which is something I can’t do very well. I tend to think about things a lot before I say them — to a fault, sometimes — and small talk just doesn’t work if you’re contemplating and considering every single thing that you say. “Should I mention the weather?” I think. “Or does that make me sound like the most clichéd twat ever? Should I crack a joke? What if it falls flat? That’s the worst feeling in the world. Everyone’s looking at me. Say something.”

Oddly enough if I’m in a professional situation where I have a reason to be interacting with strangers, I’m absolutely fine. If I’m running an event, or meeting and greeting customers, or standing up on stage and presenting to lots of people, I have no problem whatsoever in talking, making jokes, being charismatic and charming the pants off people. (Not literally. To my knowledge, anyway.) But take away that sense of context and purpose and I’m fucked. I feel panicked, and all I really want to do is run away and do something — anything — rather than talk to these people I feel I have nothing in common with. I build up resentment, and then I feel guilty about resenting these people for simply being more social than I am, and the whole vicious cycle goes around and around and around until I find some convenient excuse to extract myself and leave, never to return. (Today, I had work to do, so I was able to go and hide for a bit while I did that.)

This particular aspect of social phobia/social anxiety/shyness/whatever you want to call it is why I never really got on with the concept of “going out” for the sake of going out, or going “on the pull”, or indeed in speaking to anyone I didn’t already know somehow. I count the few occasions that I have successfully managed to initiate and carry on a non-essential or non-professional conversation with a stranger as huge personal victories — justifiably so, in some cases, as some have led to long-term friendships, such as my utterly nerve-wracking first words to my now-friend Cat while trapped in a lift (well, not “trapped” as such… we were both riding it, and it was in full working order) with her on my first day of a pre-term music course at university.

I won’t lie, this particular phobia is a real pain to deal with at times, and I really wish I could be free of it. That won’t happen without hard work over a long period, however, and I’m sometimes not sure I’m ready to confront this particular problem head on.

#oneaday Day 820: Disagreement

I hate arguing. In fact, I’d go further than that. I hate disagreeing. I have absolutely no doubt that this particular aspect of my personality is a side-effect of the social anxiety that I suffer from, but it sometimes makes discussions hard to participate in.

I’m fine with expressing my opinion and feel I can argue my viewpoint pretty convincingly in most instances — this blog is filled with numerous examples of that, as longtime readers will doubtless know. It’s in the things that happen after my opinion has been stated that things get a little trickier — namely, if someone comes along with a diametrically-opposed viewpoint and the willingness (and/or ability) to argue until they’re blue in the face about how much I’m wrong and how they’re absolutely right.

Most of the time, these disagreements don’t descend into “you’re an idiot”, but my discomfort with disagreeing makes me sometimes feel like it’s implied. I like to think that I go through life as a fairly likeable sort of chap and take great pains to try not to offend anyone (swearing and masturbating stickmen aside, obviously — I’m referring specifically to personal attacks here) so having someone disagree with me and argue their case in an impassioned manner is a frustrating, disquieting experience that often makes me wish I had kept my mouth shut in the first place.

Part of this is due to the fact that I tend to cycle negative experiences around and around inside my head involuntarily. Even a seemingly innocuous, irrelevant discussion that might have gotten a little bit heated somewhere along the way is enough to keep me awake at night sometimes — and those rare situations where someone is actually genuinely upset by something which has occurred? I can pretty much forget about remaining calm, instead preferring to stare into space, replaying the incident in my mind and wondering what could have happened if things went a little differently.

It can happen before time, too. If I know there’s some form of difficult conversation coming up, I’ll find myself role-playing it in my head, imagining what might happen. Inevitably my mental conversation has the worst possible outcome, usually descending into someone getting yelled at or thumped. This does at least make having the actual conversation pleasantly surprising almost without exception, since no-one ever gets thumped and hardly anyone ever gets yelled at.

I guess part of the frustration over all this is to do with power, or more specifically, a feeling of powerlessness. If you know (or at least believe) that your opinion on something is inherently sensible and others seem to think that you’re speaking gibberish, it’s disheartening — particularly if said opponents of your viewpoint are aggressive and stubborn in their dismissal of what you have to say. It’s particularly disappointing and upsetting when people whom you like and respect fall into this category, too.

Nine times out of ten, the argument just wasn’t worth having in the first place, too. So what I have taken to doing most of the time these days is just stepping back before jumping in to a debate, thinking “will this get heated? Is it worth potentially getting upset over?” and then — only then — making a decision on whether or not to proceed. In some cases, said decision leads to launching a discussion and dealing with the consequences. In others, it leads to walking away — deleting the unsent tweet, closing the comments section, biting my tongue. And in extreme cases, it leads to me feeling like the correct course of action is simply to remove myself from the situation in question and ensure it doesn’t arise again — online, that means unfriending, unfollowing and/or blocking people; offline… well, you just walk away and don’t look back.

Some people are built for arguing. I don’t think I’m one of them.

#oneaday Day 799: Um, Fluttershy

A discussion with my friend Lynette earlier today (who, it has to be said, squeed rather enthusiastically at the news that I have been watching My Little Pony) saw us pondering, as so often happens with strong, character-led pieces of work, which My Little Pony was the most “us” — or at least the one we felt most able to relate to.

My answer — Fluttershy — is apparently one of the more popular ones, for a variety of reasons that I haven’t explored as yet and am mildly terrified to, given the deep, deep rabbithole that sites such as knowyourmeme and TVTropes can be.

I imagine, given her timid nature, that there’s at least an element of crossover between Fluttershy fans and Hanako fans — a category which, if you recall, I count myself firmly in. Her endearing meekness, anxiety and loyalty are character traits I can well and truly understand, and I know I have more than a few similar traits myself.

Take the fact that she has a clear case of social anxiety, and is nervous about showing off her talents except when absolutely necessary or in a situation where no-one can judge her. When taken along on a perilous journey to use her talent for “parenting” (for want of a better word) to convince an unruly, belligerent dragon to go and sleep somewhere else, she’s (understandably, I feel) too scared to go in there and do her thing, even in front of her friends. And only partly because she’s dealing with a fucking dragon.

I know too well how all that feels — of the difficulty and anxiety which surrounds using your talents and abilities in “public”, even in front of people you love and trust. (Not the “dragon” bit.) I know, for example, that I’m a decent writer and that people enjoy reading my stuff, but I hate hate hate anyone watching me write. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever why this is — whether it’s anxiety over people “backseat editing” or judging the things I’ve written before I’ve finished is anyone’s guess. I just know that I hate it — but I like showing it off when it’s finished, namely when I can hit “publish”, light the blue touch paper and just walk away. (At this point, my fear of negative, destructive feedback comes into play, but that’s a whole other matter.)

Same thing with music, really. Practicing is a necessary part of being able to play complex pieces of music, but I hate people listening to me practice. Performing? Fine. Playing the same bit over and over and over again until I get it right? Well, that’s something to do with headphones or when no-one’s in the house. Something of a combination of perfectionism (“if anyone’s going to hear this, I want it to be right“) and worrying about the judgement of others (“they won’t want to hear those three bars repeated over and over and over! They’ll tell me to shut up, or hurry up and get it right or something”), perhaps? I don’t know.

Same with doing anything vaguely creative, in fact. I hate being watched doing something like that. Perhaps it’s because doing something creative puts you in a vulnerable position where your “soul” (or whatever) is on display, and anyone could quite easily strike it for massive damage with an unkind word or an ill-timed snigger. It’s something I could really do with Getting The Hell Over, but it’s also one of those things that has indelibly stamped itself onto my personality over the years.

Whatever the reasons for it all… Um, Fluttershy? I feel your pain, girl.