Most of these posts have been about making games, so far, but I do other things too. Mostly, I write! Or I try to, at least.
Right now, I have a couple of writing projects I’m working on. At some point last year I started writing fiction about some side characters in the TTRPG setting I was running, because I had accidentally put more work into that group of NPCs than anyone the party would ever actually interact with. I have a few other various fics I am maybe writing, maybe abandoning in google docs, and a handful of half complete tabletop systems that I might work on enough to finish one day, and of course a bunch of prep work and worldbuilding for another game I plan to start running in about a month, if I can find players for it.
Unfortunately, when I have eight different things I am maybe writing, I don’t actually write any of them.
The advice I usually get is to keep myself contained, don’t start so many things, try to limit myself to two or three projects at once. Which sounds sensible, and I’ve tried to do that, but not feeding the new ones doesn’t stop them from forming, or give me back the space in my mind that they occupy. The only way I have found to do that reliably is to get them out, put them somewhere else on paper or in a google doc or something, and then I am able to drop that particular set of ideas and move those thinking resources to something else. This makes me genuinely worse as a person, in a functional sense (I hope not a moral sense, but that question is better left to my friends). The more stuff I have sitting in my head, the less space I have to focus on the thing I’m currently trying to think about, and the easier it is for things to build up and overwhelm me. Once upon a time I could spend days trying to work out a really difficult problem, and maybe failing, but learning so many interesting things in the process. Right now, I get a splitting headache and lose most of my functional logic skills if I go more than an hour without meaningful progress.
People have been telling me that I am a good writer since I was a child. Which, I think, is largely a result of me being a voracious reader for most of my childhood, and so picking up on vocabulary and grammatical structures that made my writing better technically than that of many of my peers (when I tried, at least). I think it’s also partially due to the fact that I think in complete sentences, which I have been told by others is somewhat unusual. And, unfortunately, I think in a lot of them. Every different thought I have, every backgrounded idea, every weird side imagining or odd puzzle in the back of my mind. I like the analogy of a “train of thought” - the idea of a fixed carriage that starts at one destination and moves on to the next one on the track, and then the next, and carries the humble thinker along with it. I think that’s just really cute, you know? I guess I have those, but there’s a whole network of them. There are fifteen trains, I know where they all are and which way they are going and I sit back and watch them like the Fat Controller.
The fact is, though, trains are pretty loud. Fifteen of them are pretty loud.
Every minute of every day there are a dozen voices talking in my head. Not as, like, a hallucination or anything, there’s nothing to actually hear. They’re there, though, and I can feel them. Every day the voices in my head get a little bit harder to drown out.
I don’t remember when they started–perhaps they were always there–but I remember being better at dealing with them before. When I was a child, I could keep them controlled, and get rid of the ones I didn’t need. And they would settle down when I threw myself into something hard enough, which is part of the reason I used to read obsessively; I could replace a handful of voices with one, and that one was reading a book to me, and I could lose myself for a while. And then later, high school probably, I lost a bit of that power, and they became a little harder to displace. And then harder, and then harder, and then harder.
The first time I drank alcohol properly, it felt like someone had bundled my head full of cotton wool. It muffled my senses, it muffled my movements, and it even muffled the voices, and it was wonderful. After a couple of times I ended up not drinking any more for years, but sometimes I wonder about that alternate timeline where I didn't have that impulse that pushed me out of drinking before I got into it too much. I wonder what might have happened to her if she didn't find a better way to block things out.
Nowadays, I've found ways to silence them completely. I almost cried the first time I realised they were just gone. It's a weird feeling, you know? Kind of lonely, but I'd forgotten what true calm felt like. Unfortunately that's not really viable most of the time, so I have to find other ways to mitigate all the noise.
I've managed it a couple of times–a while back I wrote about fifty thousand words of fanfic in a bit over a year, and it felt good, and everything got a bit more bearable. In 2020, I ran a dungeons and dragons game for a bunch of my friends that ran for almost a year, and I struggled a little to find the motivation for it sometimes and I think it suffered greatly for that, but it was a lot of fun, and again, for a little while things were a bit quieter. And, you know, it was 2020, I think I really needed that peace and quiet. I've tried to figure out what the significant factor is, and I think it's the constant churning. Things come in, things go out, nothing has too long to stick in place or build up, everything is fluid and smooth. And then I got a job that drained my energy, and I couldn't maintain that flow, and… things got worse again.
And that's where I am now. Stagnant, ossified, trapped by my own built up mess and running at 90% processing capacity just keeping up all of the background processes that I just. can't. close. One would think it would be simple to deal with them, just sit down and write the sentences that one of those voices is saying, but it gets difficult, sometimes, to even tune out the other voices enough to hear one, and when I can, getting it to write things in a useful order is a whole other problem. So instead I just have to use that last 10% to get whatever I can moving, and hope it picks up more mass on the way out, like a weird brain snowball.
And that's partially what these posts are–by writing low effort streams of consciousness, I can try to get things moving, get some of the thoughts out of valuable real estate in my head. I need to push thoughts out so that I am less full of them, I need to be less full so I have more freedom to push things out. And every day they're a little bit louder.
No one can ever truly know how any other person experiences the world, but I have to wonder if this is normal. I can't imagine existing any other way, but at the same time I can't imagine everyone coping as well with the constant yelling in their minds as they appear to, so I'm not really sure either way. The last few times I wrongly assumed everyone around me thought the way I did, I turned out to be a) transgender, and b) horrifically depressed, so with that track record I tend to be pretty cautious about this kind of thing.
Writing this post has helped, for a while. Now there are only three of these posts screaming in my head, where there were four. So now I just have to keep going, let a couple more of them out, and then it'll be easier, and maybe one day I’ll get to experience calm again.
