PERSONAL

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3,150

Incapable

5 years ago2,648 words

I had my first radiotherapy session today. I've not produced anything yet though! Seems likely that my future will be determined by my Avoidant Personality Disorder...

There wasn't a whole lot to the radiotherapy session, really. The whole thing was only about five or ten minutes; the actual laser penetration was less than two, I'd say. Still, I had to lie on my back with this 'mask' - a sort of net thing, solidly moulded to the contours of my face - keeping my head from moving even a millimetre. And I felt like I had to swallow, several times, but doing so moved my head slightly and it all just felt very uncomfortable. I also noticed that I had a surge of anxiety when the machine started; I think it's because I felt trapped, and my mind went to worries about what might happen if I felt the escape reflex. I just tried to control it with breathing exercises, and the whole ordeal was over before long. Only 29 of those left now!! I imagine I'll feel less... well, anything about it as time goes on and it becomes mundane, though.

I've got no symptoms yet, but it's only been one session. The fatigue and hair loss will kick in later... I can't wait. Also, I've been told that the tumour will take years to disappear, if it ever does. The radiotherapy doesn't destroy the tumour, it just 'freezes' it so then it won't grow. Hmm.

Also also, I'm used to towering over the little nurses who swarm around me, and I did before the session today, but this radiotherapy machine was controlled by three men (surprising), all of whom were taller than me. I think? Two of them slightly, maybe, but it's hard to tell actually. One definitely because I had to look up. Two of them looked like 'soyboys', and the other had a square, Chadly jaw and shaved head so he looked like a criminal or something. I couldn't help but think about incels' obsession with looks, height, and that archetype when I saw them! I didn't judge them based on it or anything; I just found it curious, amusing. I wondered what their love lives were like.

Annoyingly though, this is all I really have to say at the moment (I say, then write an essay)... I've been really wanting to write a post about the game idea I'm currently sitting on, but actually getting to that point has been more difficult than I'd like.

I want to draw the characters, you see. I already know who they are, and I want to share what I've got because I like it, but... well, I haven't drawn properly since the surgery, and my skills seem to be rusty. I don't seem to have drawn much at all this year or the last, actually; I keep a folder of my 'digital sketchbook' for each year, and the number of pages in it has been decreasing over time. 2012's hard to quantify because I didn't have this system then, but 2013 has 298 pages, all of them packed with drawings, ideas, experiments... 2014 has 223 pages, also with a load of exploration. 2015 has 179, 2016 has 164, 2017 has 81, and this year has 91 (so it's actually gone up a bit). Most of the later pages are simplistic and repetitive compared to the earlier burst of interest, though. Back in 2012, though I'd been drawing since I was little, it felt like I'd finally started to draw properly, and I poured myself into trying to learn anatomy, colour theory, studying the work of other artists, watching a ton of tutorials and other artists drawing, etc, etc. Now, it feels more like a chore I can barely be bothered with, and the style and quality of my work has either not changed or got worse over the past few years because I rarely pick up my tablet pen. I've been doing more 3D modelling than drawing this year.

I feel really satisfied when I do draw something though! I look at it on my phone before I sleep, pleased to have made something. It's just getting over that initial hump that's the difficult bit.

Drawing wouldn't actually be used much during the actual game I'm aiming to make, as that'd use 3D and pixel graphics; I'll need to use what I've learned from drawing, but I won't need to actually draw, really. Still, I do want to draw the characters, to use the drawings as references for the 3D models if nothing else, and, well... I haven't yet. I've started, sort of! But I've yet to stick with it for long enough to produce what I'd like to. I can picture the characters clearly, but they've yet to manifest on digital paper.

Partly it's for the reasons I've mentioned - it feels like a chore - but I think it's also due to, well, everything else going on at the moment. I'm in this horrible position where I'm alone, struggling with recovering from surgery for my brain cancer (who'd have thought recovery from having your head cut open would take months?!?), starting radiotherapy, depressed, and unsure where to go with my future... SEX is on my mind a lot, but I don't have any way to truly fulfil that (trying alone just makes me feel empty). I wish I had friends I could physically spend time with, but there's no way to meet people. I wish I had a job, but I don't know whether I can ever get one with this Avoidant Personality Disorder.

I also applied for government benefits, because I'm unable to do anything with this brain stuff going on and I wanted to contribute at least some money to my parents. It pays a pittance, but it's better than nothing, and supposedly anyone with cancer counts as 'disabled' and is eligible for it.

Disabled... I have to fill in a form about how my condition affects my life, and it's mostly stuff like "can you go to the toilet by yourself?" or "can you dress yourself?" or "do you need help communicating with others?"... I suppose they need to know whether they should get some carer to look after me. My brain condition doesn't really affect these things though, so I'm ticking a lot of 'no's and it looks like I don't really have any serious impairment at all. However, there are sections for "interacting with other people" and "going out", and one of them asks what the effects of interacting with others during and after an interaction are like, which shows awareness of how severe anxiety functions.

See, what I fear isn't the actual interactions, though they are always awkward because I say strange things due to inexperience or odd mental wiring. What I fear is the 'mental scars' that each social mistake causes. I've been sitting here at my computer trying to do work every day, and these mental demons keep bringing up memories dating all the way back to my childhood. Times when I've embarrassed myself or those with me. I'm haunted by expressions of embarrassment on people's faces, mostly. Silent faces, a frozen second lingering, tormenting me with feelings of shame and self-loathing. A desire to curl in a ball and hide in a cave, away from everyone, so then I don't cause any distress ever again for being so inept.

I get that most people cringe when remembering old memories, but this feels like that, but in overdrive. It's like saying that most people feel sad, so they can understand depression. It's not like that, really. It's Avoidant Personality Disorder, I'm fairly sure, and, like other personality disorders, it affects the fundamental wiring of the mind. Perhaps it's natural to suggest I 'cure' it by 'getting out there' or whatever, but it feels as curable as conditions like Antisocial Personality Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, autism, etc. You can't really cure a narcissist or a psychopath; that's the way they fundamentally are, and they lack the capacity to become neurotypical. Attempting to rewire them might be like trying to move the blue wire from the red hole to the blue, only to find that there's neither a blue wire nor a blue hole to begin with.

It seems defeatist to see it this way, as incurable, since the standard seems to be believing that we're all entitled to happiness, that everything is all puppies and rainbows and smiles if only you try hard enough. That we're all essentially the same brand of blank slate, with entirely alterable scribblings. But I've tried that for the better part of a decade, and now find myself still in a pit, the same fundamental pit, though I do know a whole lot more now than I did then.

I think rather than attempting to be something different to what I am, to 'cure' it, I should just accept it, and try to work around it somehow. That's what I'm trying to do, but it's a process, and not an easy one. Of course the brain cancer treatment on top of it all doesn't help. Annoying that it feels like these things are piled on top of each other all at once.

Getting back to benefits, though... While my brain thing doesn't prevent me from putting my pants on by myself or anything, I do struggle immensely with social things due to these endless and constant soul-churning reminders of my various failings. Though I've not been formally acknowledged as having Avoidant Personality Disorder, I'm going to write about it on the form (I'll probably have to go and get it confirmed, but I'm fairly sure at this point that that's the issue; I've seen doctors and therapists about my anxiety, but AvPD never came up by name). What this might mean is that I could go on benefits for a longer duration than the few months I was expecting...

Which might mean that my primary form of income for the unforeseeable future could be government benefits.

I don't like that at all. Some people are quite happy to scrounge a living off the dole so then they don't have to do any work; they sit around like couch potatoes, happily contributing nothing to anyone. I don't want to be that. I want to contribute! Much of my struggle so far has been in trying to find the most meaningful thing I can do; I wouldn't want to work some 'mundane' job because I'd feel it wasn't contributing enough to the wider world beyond my immediate surroundings. I want to influence human thinking... but I know that's incredibly naive, a symptom of the 'you can change the world!' attitude apparently imbued in Millennials from an early age.

I don't want to eke out a living on unearned cash, but I also don't think I could handle any kind of typical job, because this mind thing really is a disorder. A disability. I hate that it is, but it probably is. I understand it and so many things surrounding it, but that doesn't make it go away, frustratingly. If I've got to this point, this age, and it's still here, it seems fairly clear that it's here to stay.

But I could never just sit around, complacent, while the money trickles in, thinking I don't have to do anything anymore. Whatever happens, I'm going to continue spending much of my time at this computer, making things as much as I can.

Ideally, I'd be able to finish and release this game I've got planned, and if I earned money from that, maybe that'd lead somewhere. I'd also hope to earn money from Patreon, maybe, once I produce something regularly. I'll never earn loads from that, but anything I'd make based on my own pursuits would be better than just draining the coffers of people who actually can work.

I feel like making a game could 'save' me from the position I'm in, but with all this weighing down on me, I'm struggling to move forward at the pace I'd like. Some people would still be in bed so 'soon' after brain surgery, and during radiotherapy! And I have actually been in bed a lot of the time. Still, I feel pressured - by myself, if nobody else - to do something just to alter the bleak uncertainty of my future. I don't want to be a dole-scrounging NEET living with my parents still in my mid-thirties. God.

...Something I obsess over constantly, in the form of those demons unwillingly reminding me of past mistakes, is the relationship I had with my female 'best friend' in the first couple of years of university. Partly it's because we were close and spent much of our time together for those years, and I've not exactly had other relationships like that, but also it's because the relationship ended horribly, with me as the 'villain', and I'm still cut up about that. She used to tell me about her sex life all the time, so I thought it'd be okay to talk about my sexual feelings too. Bad idea, especially considering the current climate. The thought that I caused her such discomfort eats away at me, and I wish I could find some resolution to that... but it's not as if there's anything I can do, really. She's likely forgotten about me, moved on. I haven't checked what she's up to because I don't really want to know. I hope she's doing okay, but also fear that she is, because I'm not.

I really hate the idea of people 'ghosting' others, because of this, but it seems to be so common. If someone's bothering you, you just decide you're 'done' with them, and cut them out so you can feel better. To hell with how they feel; it's not as if you can live in their head anyway, so it's only how you feel that matters. Right?

Sigh...

Reading about 'female nature' in the manosphere places reminds me of many things about her, that she did in accordance with her biological programming, and that eases the pain somewhat. Still, it hurts to be so cruelly rejected by someone so close. I dread to think what people who go through divorces feel like. Separations where their beloved, who they lived with and who was a crucial part of their life for years, decides they don't want that connection anymore. Must be beyond hard. I've only had one romantic relationship, and while I'm mostly past that now, it took me years before the trauma subsided enough that it didn't define my every day.

I keep wishing I could reconnect with this ex-just-a-friend, but even if I did, what then? I suppose I'd want a resolution, but I can't see her wanting that. The incels and MGTOW claim that women always blame others for problems arising, and never apologise for their own misdeeds because from their perspective, nothing was their fault. It's interesting that this person would apologise for accidentally kicking my foot while we sat together, but she's not once said sorry for anything she's put me through, though I've apologised to her many times. I suppose what I did must just have been that awful. How, then, could I feel good about myself?

That's the kind of thing that goes through my mind too often... I'm aware I should 'get over' it, and her, but I'm just ~too sensitive~, it seems. The whole thing plays right into the heart of this disorder that's already ruined so much of my life.

Anyway. What lovely things I write about... I'm trying to get stuff done, but I'm having to work through a lot at the moment. I'm hoping that once I get the ball rolling, things will start progressing at a steadier pace, but for now, thank you for your patience!!