Flashing red lights

I'm a bit worried about my mental health.  This is what I posted on the forums for my favorite MUD, Achaea:

♥♥ Achaea ♥♥

I left once for a variety of reasons from grounding to guilt. None of them, in the end, could keep me safe from Achaea. I got myself busy and tried to immerse myself in RL and find something to fill in the gaping hole it left in my life. I tried not to look back.

But somewhere down the road, you always look back. Once I looked back, it was over. I'd find myself going to the website just to stare at the PLAY NOW button, I'd linger in my writing folder and wish I hadn't deleted all my old logs and other material, and overall just moon over Achaea until I couldn't handle it anymore.

And here I am, more obsessed and addicted than ever. XD Seriously, there's just something Achaea fills that nothing else has managed to substitute for. I feel empty without it, like I might as well just stop living if life-without-Achaea is all there is to life.

This is what a fellow Achaean turned my post into:

♥♥ Crack ♥♥

I stopped smoking crack once for a variety of reasons from grounding to guilt. None of them, in the end, could keep me safe from crack. I got myself busy and tried to immerse myself in RL and find something to fill in the gaping hole it left in my life. I tried not to look back.

But somewhere down the road, you always look back. Once I looked back, it was over. I'd find myself going to the corner just to stare at the crack dealers, I'd linger in my room and wish I hadn't thrown my pipe and other material away, and overall just moon over crack until I couldn't handle it anymore.

And here I am, more obsessed and addicted than ever. XD Seriously, there's just something crack fills that nothing else has managed to substitute for. I feel empty without it, like I might as well just stop living if life-without-crack is all there is to life.

There's a problem going on here.  But I can't take back a thing I said about Achaea... maybe it's because so much in my life is shifting, that I need something constant and sure, concrete and always there.

I don't know who I am, these days.  My entire understanding of who I am and what I want from life has been severely shaken in the month and a half since I began college.  I no longer know what I want to study, what I want to be, what I want to do.  Everything that defined me for eighteen years is crumbling; things I've known about myself forever are suddenly no longer true.

It can't be healthy, but lately Achaea is about the only thing I really know I love to do.  Maybe the real things I like to do have been too far repressed by the things I must do, or maybe my mind is just twisted.  Whatever the case, I have a lot to think through the next few days...

Lighting a fire

"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire." ~W.B. Yeats

Once upon a time, I dreamed of being a chemist, just like my dad.  I wanted to go into his profession and make him proud, continue his work, I suppose.  I was young and full of ideals, not to mention I hadn't started high school yet.  Thirteen was an amorphous age for me, in which I didn't yet know what I was good at, what I loved, and what I wanted to do.

It wasn't until I took high school chemistry my sophomore year that I realized I couldn't stand--or understand--chemistry.  Math and science were still interesting, but I hungered for something more beautiful, more natural to the fairy-struck, ever-pondering patterns of my soul.  I'm the type who, left alone without a God or a purpose in life, would while the years away sleeping in faerie rings and existing more fully in another world than this one.  I'm not naturally content with my everyday existence.

Finding beauty in school has been difficult, to put it in the kindest of terms.  Sometime between eighth and tenth grade, my zeal for learning began to waver and gutter, and the intensity of my inherent longing for something otherwordly grew continuously stronger.  In the words of W.B. Yeats, "education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire."  My world, the tasks, the classes, the homework--it had all transmuted into a slow, reluctant dripping into a tired old bucket.  

Little snippets of inspiration and intrigue served to root my feet, however tenuously, in the grass and the meadows of this world, but I had no spark, no fire.

Enter Honors Program, University of Tulsa.  Reading Homer's The Iliad the summer before college began was an endless white hallway, lined with hundreds of closed doors.  Tedium doesn't begin to describe the feeling of utter sensory repression I experienced.

Whoever thought I'd end up rereading and studying that very same book for fun?  I wanted to dance with the wind, sleep in the curve of the moon, laugh with the voices of bygone legends.  But the moment Professor Howland sat down and began to speak, I was hooked, firmly grasped and drawn by what was an examination of that which I most avoided--reality.  I never thought philosophy was “my thing,” but here I am, declaring every day that it’s my favorite class.

The Iliad is behind us, and we've moved through Aeschylus' The Persians and into Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.  I wouldn't say it's the Greeks so much as the depth of discussion and conversation that I love in this class.  There's something about meeting with twenty peers and a very awesome professor to consider literature written by men who haven't walked this earth in centuries that makes real life interesting. 

The fire for learning that I lost when I was fifteen is back, full force, burning in my veins and driving my mind with inspiration.  I guess education still holds passion for me, hiding dormant all the while in a quaint, gorgeous world known as “humanities.”

It must be love…

Translation

I grew up believing my world was defined in words and text.

It's taken eighteen years, a shattering transition from home to college, a realization that a change in majors is imminent, and an intriguing English discussion to discover the fallacy of that belief.

I've always been a bookworm, and since the age of eleven, I've been an aspiring writer as well.  My hobbies, my dreams, my aspirations, and my lifestyle have always revolved around a long romance with language.  I've been trying to write a novel since the age of eleven, and poetry since two years after that.  My version of gaming is roleplaying, from forum-based novel-style roleplays to text based MUDs online to pen-and-paper.  I used to read enough books to fill the public libary's reading contest list in the two-week period between the beginning of summer and the beginning of the actual summer reading program.  Foreign languages, while difficult for me, were fascinating simply for the beauty of their words.

Naturally, then, when my English teacher asked in class for us to consider what language was most inherent in our thoughts, whether images, like her, or words, or sounds, like her musical nephew, or sensations, my immediate thought was words.  What else?  I'd been dreaming in text since I started playing a text-based roleplay game, the multi-user dungeon, Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands.  Text was my medium, and words were my first love.  It seemed perfectly natural to me, then, that this was my language.

Alas, the perfect beauty of words is a second language to me, though it be my favorite.  My choicest words, I considered, were carefully picked to describe something--to translate something, I should say.  I did not know a word was right by the definition, by the appearance, by the sound--but by the feel.  Every word for me carried an emotion--or a blend of emotions.  Every image an association of pleasure, or pain, or frustration.  Every sound had a feeling to it, of disturbance, or satisfaction, or beguilement.  When introduced to a new word, I felt more than sounded the spelling.  When shown an image, I understood it in terms of the medley of emotions the images woke in me. 

For about a week, now, I have basked in the new awareness of this facet of myself--this emotion-driven entity that describes the drama, the hysterics, the highs and lows, and the need to find exactly the right word for everything in my life.  The words I surround myself with are not mere words--each is laden with the feeling I associate with the meaning.  Chair means not simply an object to sit on--it carries with it trust, security, a dash of indolence and fatigue, and the wash of relief that greets me at the end of a long day.  Erudite does not simply mean learned, but drips with emotions of accomplishment, passion, and a dash of the levity and glamour of Cyrano de Bergerac.  Chemistry is a puzzling mix of hatred, admiration, disdain, inadequacy, frustration, and a sort of scarcely-contained tension.

I've decided I need a sort of notebook to tuck away the tidbits of inspiration, the quick phrases, the nets of words created to capture the essence of a stray emotion.  A place to sort out and translate this aspect of myself.  Ideally, I ought to rise from this place with a deeper level of self-discovery, but also with tendrils of inspiration hastily captured in the most aptly expressive words I can muster, in hopes of eventually weaving a tapestry.

Hence, Inkstained.  So mote it be.