Freyad-Dryden's avatar

Freyad-Dryden

Lost in thought , send a search
144 Watchers378 Deviations
67.2K
Pageviews

I'm Not Okay

7 min read
I think should not have gone quite so detailed as I did about certain things in my last journal.  Normally after I write a journal entry, I spend an hour or so looking over it, removing things that shouldn't be there that slip in while writing in the moment.  But that flowed out so fast and so hard it put me in a bad emotional state and before I could collect myself, my dad showed up (coming in without knocking, naturally; parents . . .).  Hit submit and closed the browser before I had time to think about it.  And then I was so busy putting on a happy face for my dad, I didn't have time to think about what I'd written.
Next day, spent all day moving in the last pieces of furniture into my apartment (it was only a couple of things), replacing a broken light fixture, and, incidentally, my mother showed up and was there for six hours - at first putting in shelf-lining (something I easily could have done myself) and then feng-shui-ing my apartment to her liking.  I had to feng-shui it a bit to get it back to my liking afteward.  Dealing with her was exhausting and I just went to bed.
So, it really wasn't until this morning that it really sunk in what I'd put out there.

For anyone who read it and might be worried, I want to clear something up.  I'm not in any danger of suicide, or doing anything else distressingly permanent.  If I've managed four years under the intense stress of . . . well, everything, without shooting myself, it's highly unlikely to happen now that I'm away from the most direct and upsetting stressors.

But to answer what is probably the follow-up question: No.  No, I am not okay.  I'm in a very deep, very painful emotional malaise and could probably qualify as being chronically depressed, given that it's been going on for four years.  As is normal for depression, it's not all the time.  I have good days.  But the bad periods go on for weeks at a time.  Crushing, soul-eating weeks where nothing feels like it's worth anything.

And I've avoided confronting the cause of this depression by burying it with rage.  I raged at my mother for her psychological manipulation, raged to the point that the simple act of her calling my name illicited ferocious, whispered curses at her very existence.  I raged at her hoarding habits that ended up confining me to my bedroom and roughly four square feet of free space to move and work in, with everything else in the house being piles of clutter literally (as in the dictionary definition of literally) from floor to ceiling.  I raged at her always taking in my sister's increadibly unruly and poorly behaved kids all the time (because she thought she could be a better mother than my sister could; she is and always has been about controling everything).  I raged at her constant recriminations aimed at everyone else, blaming others for what she herself did to all of us.  And I raged at my dad for not having the courage to even attempt to put a stop to it, even though we could all see it was ruining her health and sanity - to say nothing of everyone else's.

Rage.  Constant rage.  Such constant fury is not good.  Not emotionally, not physically.  Biologists have proven that stress and anger can negatively impact your health and, boy, can I feel it now.  My mom's hoarding probably played into it as well - afterall, we haven't been able to properly clean anything because of all the junk; dust everywhere.  But I think my decline in health over the last couple of years is probably more linked to my unrelenting anger at my whole situation.

Misplaced anger, in fact.  Because the only purpose it served was to keep me from confronting my own self-loathing.  I don't have many friends.  I'm an introvert by nature, and as a child, I quickly became the target of bullying and abuse in school just because I was weird.  I never made many friends as a result, but over time I developed a deep pride in believing that even if I had few friends, I was a good friend to those I did have.  It became a huge part of my personal sense of self and how learned to accept the fact of being socially ostracized.

And then suddenly I wasn't a good friend anymore.  And because of it, I had no friends.  And my ability to trust my family was shattered.  I am alone, with no one I can talk to.  Because I wasn't the person I thought I was.  I wasn't a strong, trustworthy friend, I was a pathetic child desperately pleading for mother's aproval.

Four years of rage allowed me to hide from that.  I could shift blame onto someone else, and it was all the easier to do because she was always giving me constant reminders of why I was so angry.  So many things I could be angry at.  But I'm away from that now.  I've only been away a week, but already, just being away from those stresses, being away from the uncleanliness, away from the constant interruption of sleep from screaming babies, away from conversations that start with back-handed accusations 80% of the time . . . just being away from all of that has got me thinking more clearly.

I haven't logged into DA in months.  I wanted to focus on getting myself moved out, I thought.  But in truth, I hadn't logged in because I have nothing of value to share.  I haven't written any stories in years.  I've written a few pieces that I guess you could call role-playing aids, or maybe brainstorms, and I've written some weak, fragmented, self-indulgent shit not fit to be shared publiclly.  But stories?  Actual narratives that have some personal meaning to me?  No.  Nothing.

Logging in leaves me feeling ashamed.  I'm producing nothing of value to anyone, so why should I even bother to update anyone.  What do vague suggestions that I might, maybe, be able to get back into things do for anyone other than allow me to persist in deluding myself further?  I'm not writing.  And I don't know if I will be writing again at any time in the forseeable future.

Because I no longer have any confidence in what I write.  Because I have no more sense of self-worth.  Because I am alone.

But maybe . . .

I'm not okay.  But that little outburst, that harsh, straight-faced acceptance of what I refused to acknowledge . . .  For the first time in years, I fell asleep easily, and my sleep was unfitful.  I don't feel better, but I feel . . . calm.  I'm not hiding from myself now.

I'm not okay.

But maybe I can be in the future.

--------

I'm gonna stay on break from DA still.  I may briefly check in now and then, but I'm not going to be posting anything.  I may privately reply to any concerned inquiries if I get any.  But logging in regularly serves no point.  I don't have anything to share, and logging in just reminds me that I don't have anything to share.  I may need to start up therapy again, because I don't know if I can pull myself out of this on my own anymore.

I'll update again, if I feel I have something worth updating you all with.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Updates

4 min read
So, graduated recently.  That's a significant chunk of time expenditure removed from my life.  Now there's just my work taking up time.  I'm going to try and get back into writing, but it's been such a long time that it's proving a challenge to clean the rust off.  Skills and techniques previously learned are all coming slowly due to such a long period of disuse.  It's very frustrating.  The stories are still there, the ideas still come, but art isn't found in the idea.  Art is in the expression, and my ability to express creaks on its hinges now.  Gotta oil things up again.

On that note, I want to try and get back into my Dream Gate Cycles novel (this is nothing new, I've been wanting to go back to it for years).  I recently bought Pink Floyd's "The Wall" (music album, not the movie), and listening to it has helped me identify one of the main problems with the original draft.  Mainly, it has no climax.  Oh, it's got a final battle with the main villain (or at least, the main villain according to the narrator's internal perspective), but that's not a climax, that's just an event.  A climax is a turning point; the point of the story in which the main character either decides to get his shit together and solve the problem, or where he breaks down completely and sets in motion the events leading to the final tragedy.  The interesting thing about this particular novel is that, because of the conflict between the narrator's internal delusion and external reality, the climax is potentially both at once.  Within the internal delusion, there's a moment when he decides to take action and fix the mess, but outside of that delusion, it also represents the moment where the emotional shock is so great that it causes him to divorce himself from reality, which sets him up for his final fall at the end (what's kept me wanting to come back to this one is how the plot tells two completely different stories at the same time).

There's a moment where that sort of happens in the original draft, and it's timing is perfect.  It comes right after what is essentially one of the happiest moments of his life, but that same event also directly contradicts the internal narrative he's had to construct to make life tolerable, so he has to do all kinds of mental gymnastics to twist this event in such a way that it doesn't challenge his comforting delusion.  Given that, he's already in a state of emotional vulnerability and what happens very shortly after that is a shock that goes 100% in the opposite direction (from happiest moment of his life, to most horrifying).  But the way the original draft is written just kinda glosses over that moment and skips right to the penultimate conflict.

I was listening to The Wall, and it was the emotional transition that happens in Waiting For The Worms->Stop!->The Trial that made me realize how I'd overlooked what was supposed to be a highly emotionally charged moment.  The whole story is about a character who suffers an event so traumatic that it causes him to have a break from reality, but the event that causes it is written almost as an aside.  It seems so obvious now that I wonder how I missed it to begin with.

It's also made clear another flaw in the first draft, in that too much of it is written in an emotionally detached manner.  If I were writing this from the perspective of the villain, who is a sociopath (a psychosis marked by severely impaired empathy), that might be appropriate, but from the perspective of a character who's break with reality is caused by emotional instability, the narrative style needs to emphasize his emotions way more than it does.

Forgive me if so much of this is super unclear.  Only a handful of people have read the original draft, so all of this will probably not make a lot of sense to most people.  But I wanted to write my thoughts down to help me crystalize them.

And I needed something to waste everybody's time with in a journal.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Busy Busy Busy

1 min read
Sorry, I know I've got a bunch of comments waiting to be replied to and, to use the scientific term, a metric shit-ton of deviations to look at.
This month has been insane at school.  I've had about three assignments due every day in class, which is a workload I've never had before even back in getting my first degree.  Plus I'm still working.  Bottom line, I am super exhausted and don't feel up to leaving replies these deserve . . .
I'm coming close to the end of the mod, though, and hopefully will be back on my feet soon.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
I'm moving out soon, and it's about damn time.  There are a lot of reasons I've delayed moving out of my parents' home.  Learned helplessness, fear of finding myself unable to take care of myself, laziness, my mom's mind games (don't get me started), but in the last few years, things have gotten . . . bad . . . at home.  Very bad.  I don't want to go into detail because, frankly, it's painful stuff.  It's psychologically traumatizing when some delusions get torn rudely away by the facts of life, and it's even worse when not having the sense to see through it costs you some very dear friends.
But it finally reached a point where it's just got so bad here that all the other fears have been made to seem very small indeed.  And as I may have said before, I'm not hurting for money and am unlikely to ever hurt for it again, barring economic collapse, or my evil uncle somehow getting control of the family company.  And I've got a full time job that I can build a career out of, which is something I've never had before.  All in all, the ability to take care of myself seems like a laughable thing for me to be afraid of at this point.
For the past three days I've been going through my whole room, getting rid of things I don't need anymore, boxing up things I intend to keep but don't have an immediate need or use for, and generally cleaning it out (I may not be happy with my home life, but I'm not going to leave a terrible mess like my younger brother and sister did; I'm a asshole, but I'm at least a responsible one).
My hope is that once I get out of the hell-hole that is this basement, I'll be away from some of the stressors that have been crippling me and maybe I'll be able to start focusing on my writing again.  I still want to write, but for the last little while, I've had so little focus for it and most of the time, sitting down to write has just made me feel depressed.  All I've been able to write is extremely self-indulgent shit that I wouldn't want to share with anyone.  Hopefully, I can turn that around soon.

Wish me luck.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Rewriting

3 min read
The process of developing characters sometimes forces you to rethink plans.

A book that I've talked a lot about in the past is my Dream Gate Cycles novel.  One of the main elements of it is that it features a lot of characters that reappear in later stories.  It's main villain is the Legionnaire, who has at least three other planned stories including him as a character.  It features Persephone, who is a character in Endymion's story and a very important one.  Certain entities that appear in Dream Gate Cycles are a part of my Gaea setting.  And the Elder Gods are, of course, a part of every setting for every story I write, even if they don't appear by name (or at all).
And there's a character named Reverend Dr. Eliot White who also appears.  Dr. White would later go on to be a central character in the second part of Endymion's trilogy, but the way that Dr. White developed as a character has changed so much as I developed that story that he no longer feels appropriate in his role in Dream Gate Cycles.  In DGC, Dr. White is a minor character, not directly an antagonist, but someone who proves a problem for the main character in that his association with the main character creates political problems for him.  There were hints of a tragedy to his past, but he was, overall, just another disgusting political figure in a story full of disgusting political figures.
Meanwhile, Dr. White in Endymion's story was meant to be a secondary antagonist.  But as I've been developing that story, Dr. White has evolved into a position that is way more complex.  The hints of tragedy get fully fleshed out and his position has evolved from a straight up bad guy to a sort of . . . I guess you could say a midway point between the hero and the villain.  Dr. White represents the well-intentioned path that Endymion could potentially take that would end with him being every bit as bad as the villain, which is a set-up for the completion of the trilogy's thematic arc in book three.  He's not a good-guy per say, but he no longer fits the villain category either.  He is, in fact, a blurring of the lines; the character who demonstrates how unclear the line between hero and villain is.
And that really is no longer appropriate for the role he serves in Dream Gate Cycles.

DGC already needs rewriting.  Although the actual narrative of that novel is disjointed by design, it's thematic cohesion cannot be disjointed in the same way for it to work, and so the story needs to be reworked in some areas.  Knowing that Dr. White has already evolved in a different story to be very different from his initial appearance, do I keep him in the story, or create a new character?  It's a question I need to think about and, ultimately, answer.

And I need to start working on these stories again . . .
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Featured

I'm Not Okay by Freyad-Dryden, journal

Updates by Freyad-Dryden, journal

Busy Busy Busy by Freyad-Dryden, journal

Escape. Finally. by Freyad-Dryden, journal

Rewriting by Freyad-Dryden, journal