Fear

 My father was a violent drunk.

I remember waiting for him to come home. If he was late you knew he went to the bar. As the minutes late increased, the higher anxiety would get.

He never disappointed when he was late. One time I stood up to him. We were arguing on opposite sides of the kitchen table when he threw the table aside to come after me.

I didn't handle the situation well, actually.  I turned to alcohol myself (and pot) and let myself be taken away in a dream world of my own making.

Self hatred came out of that experience.  So much wasted potential, even now.

Yes, I hate myself.

I Don't Know What to Call This Post

 I should have punched him in the face.

It was college, my sophomore year, and I should have punched him in the face when I realized what was going on.  Never-mind that he was my favorite teacher up until that point. Never-mind I was in a state of shock. I was the metal head. I should have beat the crap out of him. I was drunk at the time when he kissed me and groped my genitals.

We went after him through the college board and administration. I never got the police involved. My one friend he also did it to broke down and asked if this is what it felt like to be raped. Only later I found out he had been doing it for YEARS from a friend who was an alumni from before.

He was an awesome teacher.  Amazing, really. He had three themes to his Western Civilization class and we applied those three themes to each lessoj. It made for a fascinating class.

I should have punched him.

In the end he was dismissed from the college and moved to be closer to his family.  We never involved the police. He was allowed to go on, and possibly continue doing it to other people.  I don't know.  Maybe he would be cowed by other people doing that but I doubt it. Once a predator always a predator.

I thought I had dealt with that but then the whole Penn State/Sandusky thing exploded.

I broke. I have my boss at the time to thank because she knew I was going through a mental thing.  She could have fired me because I couldn't function at work at all. 

Thing didn't get better until I was on my second set of head meds. (I will talk about what happened with the first ones another time.)

I alienated a few Penn State alumni with my outspokenness about how the Sandusky stuff was handled over the years. A lot of that, though, came from an internal place because I didn't truly stop HIM.

Any person he hurt after me, that's on my head, because I could have stopped him and didn't.

I am sorry but that's the way I feel about the situation. 

LARP Coming Up

 So tmorrow I will not be me.  I will be Hayward the Bastard, healer to people who fight far better than him.

Gods I need this. 

It's funny how I use my LARP character to reset my brain. Hayward was my place to go to cry for years, to the point where everyone knew Hayward was going to cry at one point or another during a game. What they do not know is that sometimes I need Hayward to cry for me. LARP is always the safe environment to deal with situations where I cannot deal with them in real life.

Nido, who was the 1920's Lovecraftian Coward, did this for me also. I had an insane exterior because I was so scared of many things, first of all my alcoholic father. Man, when I was a teenager I feared that guy. I would watch the clock when he was supposed to get home from work, because you knew if he was late then he was out drinking after work. The later he got the more fear would be built up inside, because you knew the drunker he was.

I stood up to him once, yelling across a kitchen table at him that he was a drunk and abusive and all of that.  The table between us disappeared and I briefly considered throwing myself through the window behind me to get the hell out of there.

That was many, many years ago. I don't know if I ever truly processed the situation and didn't know back then what sort of help I could have gotten.

Playing Hayward gives me strength, though, and I need that right now. Hayward is slowly transforming into what I want to become. Hayward is slowly losing the crying aspect of the character and leading more towards a heroic figure.  I need to tap into that for my own life.

I need Hayward.

We Are All Going to Die

 I have a friend who is sick.  Wait.  It's more of I have a friend who I strongly suspect is very sick and I am having insane anxiety over it. I don't know how else to put it.  He has known something is wrong for him but he is not insured so he doesn't want to incur medical expenses if he can.

He finally went to see a nurse practitioner, who set him up for some tests immediately making sure he could get in to do these tests the next day. We don't know the results of these tests yet, though talking with a nurse friend of mine she said that she wasn't going to bullshit me and it didn't sound good though she admitted she had a minor amount of information to go on.

My friend is a stubborn man, and I don't really think he cares if he dies. I will admit to being a selfish prick who has had this person in my life for decades and I want to continue to have him in my life. It's selfish, I know. I am only thinking of my own wants and needs over what he wants. The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach and I know he would be annoyed at knowing he was causing me worry but it's a dear friend.  It's one of those friends where you say "I love you" to them.

Back in the 90's we did a 1920's horror LARP together. I played the coward and he played the big game hunter bodyguard.  By the end of that campaign (which was very cosmic horror and rightfully ended with the end of the world), us and the group of PCs we assembled were the most influential in game faction there. We didn't set out to do this so much as he just drew people to us with our unwavering commitment to help people.

During combat my friend would run around trying to keep people alive and fighting off monsters, all the while whistling "Ode to Joy".  It's funny because you would be fighting for your life and you would hear the whistling increasing in volume as you knew the big game hunter was closing in on the monsters.  It was beautiful. Many years later my friend confessed that his character whistled that when his character was scared.  I never knew that.

I wrote a bad guy for that LARP simply called the Boogeyman. Sacrificed children and the souls of miscarriages would go to his realm. When my wife and I were trying to have a kid she finally got pregnant. We picked out a name, had our hopes and dreams about our future child, and then she had a miscarriage.  All I could think about was the stupid character I had created years before and where the souls of miscarriages go in that story. I truly believed I deserved what happened to me because I created the Boogeyman. I broke down in front of my friend about that fact and he simply said, "I would go to the Boogeyman's realm to retrieve her soul," and that gave me such great comfort.

It's moments like that I can't repay.  My friend has been there far more often for me than I have for him. He makes everything OK.I don't want to lose him, but in the end we all lose. We are all going to die, and there's not a damn thing I can do about that. When my firstborn son Gavin came into this world, I remember looking at him as a baby, and just crying because I knew no matter what I did, one day he is going to die alone.

This is of course the things in my own head I have to deal with. It's my problem, not yours, my gentle reader.

May you have a day of peace.

LARP and Mental Health

 It's an odd relationship between Xanodria and my mental health.

I am very medicated due to my depression and anxiety.  The medication is nice.  I don't want to destroy myself like I used to.  I don't suddenly go from minor mishap until the world is ending. It's a good thing.

However, the medication doesn't work perfectly. During COVID I didn't LARP.  Also during this time I had these - what would I call them - anxiety attacks - waking nightmares? They would involve terrible things happening to my children and I would have to bury them. There were songs at their funeral and everything. I have buried my family (because sometimes my wife was included in these mental tragedies) more than I care to remember. It was horrific enough that I considered getting therapy (which admittedly would help with my situation regardless but my schedule is insanely tight at the moment)

However, once I went back to the LARP, it stopped.  Granted I play a guy who has lost a child to a villain. I honestly think that the LARP helps as a safe space to explore my anxieties.  It's a good thing. 

I have thought that maybe the LARP is the problem, but I used to have these anxieties before, and they were before I played the character I do.  In fact, when they asked for a greatest fear for my character, I explained my character isn't developed enough yet to really have a greatest fear but losing my children is my greatest fear in real life.  The GMs for that particular game played with that and thus I got to experience that fear in game. Like I said, a safe space to explore these anxieties.

Now I know LARP doesn't replace good therapy.  I swear at some point I will get to therapy.  It's just not happening right now. I am functional enough that the motivation for it is not there. My apologies for that.

#LARP

#Mentalhealth