Teros

That's what I'm leaning towards. I need to have a plan that allots a certain amount of time to experiment with each thing. Thanks, man. I'll be writing the next section in due time. Yeah, I'm not looking to be a pro at any instrument. I want to make some youtube videos as an art form. Oh I will. How do I decide my starter 'mindfully'? I have a guitar and an ocarina but I'm figuring guitar. Interesting perspective. I've felt that way a lot in my late teens, actually. So it's been a few days since I've posted and for good reason. I had the best dream of my life and the worst nightmare of my life back-to-back. This resulted in my first ever (and hopefully last) panic attack. Last week, I had my first, I guess, lucid dream. I was cleaning my childhood room and as I was doing that, Lyn turned the corner and asked what I was up to. My brain said, "She's too tall" (she looked about 5'8 even though she's 5'2). My dream did a double-take and She came around the corner again, but this time she was 4'11. My brain said, "Now she's too short" and my brain did a triple-take and she turned the corner at 5'2. We were talking for a couple of minute in that doorway and eventually, we grabbed each other and I pushed her against the closet in the bathroom (across the hall). I should note that I never have first-person dreams: all of my dreams are third-person. I can see us making out and she has her arms wrapped around me, hands digging into my back, just below my shoulder blades. The voice in my head that brought up her height was remorseful and said, "You should stop this..." I asked why. The other voice said, "Because you'll wake up and realize this isn't real." I woke up. And I felt a sore pain right under both of my shoulder blades, like her hands were still there. This didn't fade for a couple of minutes as I sat there in bed, breathing and looking around the dark room. --- The Nightmare: I'm....hesitant to write about this because of how real it felt. I was in my bed, in my childhood room again. This time, I was looking out the doorway, across the hall, into the room across from me. It was my mom's room. I could see my mom in her bed and I saw her right hand curled up. She was dead. Suddenly, I felt panic and I rushed to my bedroom door and closed it shut. The voice in my brain told me that I shouldn't open the door, because I knew, I just KNEW that my mom would be at the door. I try to call someone and I get no answer. My heartbeat is faster even retelling this. I need a second... I was at the door and my brain told me not to open the door. I opened it and it was my mom, dead, standing up. Her right hand was shriveled like when she died. Her mouth was open like when she died. She was pale white like when she died. Her head was tilted upwards like when she died. Her face was pressed against the door - that's how close she was to me when I opened it. I scream as loud as I can and I rush towards my bed. I turn back around and she's on top of me. Her dead body is pinning me against the side of the bed and I start to slump down, in a diagonal way. I scream and push her away as hard as I can but nothing works: I'm stuck underneath her. I can't breathe as I'm not able to shove my mom's dead body off of me and I snap awake. I wake up panicked. I had fallen asleep on the couch at JJ's place. I lean forward onto the coffee table and I'm gripping it as hard as I can and I start crying. I don't know what the hell that was. I feel insane, like I'm really close to snapping in some way. I walk to JJ's bedroom and I can't even explain what happened: I just lean against her and start crying and I can't stop. She asks me what's going on and I say I can't tell her. I have some thought that if I say the nightmare out loud, it will have power over me and I'll panic. After about 5 minutes of crying non-stop, I start to tell JJ and I feel like I can't breathe. My heart is racing. I feel like my sight is blurring. I feel this overwhelming terror grip me. I've never been so scared in my entire life. I start screaming at the top of my lungs, my hands covering my mouth but I can't stop. I slump off the bed and I'm sitting on the floor, hunched over, screaming and crying at the same time. This fear overwhelms me and I start punching a nearby cardboard box, so hard that I smash it down and end up hammer-punching the floor about 20 times as I'm screaming and crying and trying to breathe. I feel like I'm going to pass out. I don't feel anything when I'm punching the floor as hard as possible. Eventually, all of the energy is drained from me and I'm sobbing and holding myself in the corner against the bed. I'm able to force myself to breathe. I had been asleep less than 2 hours when the nightmare woke me up. I don't sleep that night. The next night I work until midnight and I'm fighting to stay awake and not go to sleep. I eventually pass out sitting down in the living room chair for 2 hours that night. As soon as I wake up, I don't even attempt to go back to sleep. I was terrified for sleeping for 3 nights but eventually this weekend I fell asleep and got a few hours. I'm starting to feel ok with sleep now. --- This dream and nightmare have been playing in my mind a lot these past couple of days. As much as I'm told that dreams don't necessarily 'mean anything', I think there is meaning here. I finally feel ok enough to write about it and gather my thoughts on it. There are too many parallels and too much duality for me to ignore this. In both the dream and the nightmare, there was a voice in my head that was telling me not to continue. In both instances, I did it anyway and paid the price. In both the dream and nightmare, I was in my childhood room and in the back corner from the door. In both the dream and the nightmare, I felt something residual after I woke up. In the dream, I was the 'aggressor', and pushed out of the room with Lyn. In the nightmare, I was on the 'defensive' and was pushed back inside the room and was trapped. I pinned Lyn against the closet door in the dream. I was pinned against the bed in the nightmare. There's a lot of....fucked up shit that I've been thinking about with all of this. As much as I want to be mature and understanding, deep down I hated my mom. I resented her. And I felt like I was never good enough, always made to feel like I was small, insignificant, and that I didn't matter. I always felt like I was being controlled and manipulated. I always felt like I was never able to be myself. I felt metaphorically pinned down by my mom, and when she died, I finally felt free. There's all this anger, and resentment, and depression, and these feelings of frustration and loss. My therapist said that I was 'double grieving'. I was grieving the death of my mom, but also grieving the fact that we will never have a 'good' relationship. My mom's dead. My dad, I've never met. Most of my aunts and uncles are all dead between cancer, insane asylum, heart attack, etc. We lost 5 household pets in roughly a year. My whole family consists of my older sister and that's it. I'm parentless in my early 30s. I'm thinking a lot about what I'm doing after school. My last post on here was about that - that there's all this freedom and in a way, it's crippling. I thought at one time that Lyn was my future, and my dead mom is my past. I've been plagued for a long time with me not knowing what makes a person, wondering what a human being is outside of traits, experiences, and biology. I've grappled with this for multiple challenges and I came to the conclusion that all a person really is, truly is, is the Will to Power: the embodiment of change. The motivation, that little kernel of something inside that tells you to walk one more mile, do one more rep, stay up a little longer and finish that paper. That sort of better self, ideal self, conceptualized into a reality and personality. That is what people are. Our past experiences don't have to define us. Our personality traits can be things we work on changing and therefore aren't permanent. This dream and nightmare is my subconscious screaming at me about these issues. The manifest content and the latent content here have direct correlation to what I've been worried about. I've wanted satisfaction, fulfillment, some some of happiness, and a challenge. And I'm seeing in life that there is none. There is time-wasting and lots of mediocre people doing mediocre things. I'm feeling lost and empty for one, because I have Borderline Personality Disorder, and two, because the deeper I dig into my subconscious and the more existential I get, it seems the less information I have. I'm at a point now where I can't simply theory-craft and project abstract ideas. I need to have experiences. I've been thinking a great deal about what I'm willing to suffer for. There are plenty of things that I want to do, but what do I want to invest the time/effort/emotions into? Like with the instruments: how much do I want to suffer for it in order to be good at guitar? How much do I want to suffer for a certain career or a certain person in my life? I'm left shedding more and more and finding myself less detached to people, places, and things. This has been gradual ever since I burned all my stuff a couple years ago. The more I think, the more I let go. I feel like I'm existentially wandering. And this wandering creates fear and panic. I'm an INTJ: everything needs to have order, logic, reason, rationality. So to rip all that away leaves me feeling less like myself. It makes me feel like I'm not anyone. I'm not anything. I'm simply a collection of vague thoughts encased in a meat shell. Without that spark of motivation; without the Will To Power, everything that defines me falls apart. I need order and logic in a seemingly chaotic and illogical world and this shortcoming is what creates friction, disappointment, anxiety, and depression. --- Reading this over, it's become apparent that I need some sort of plan. I need a bucket list and a strategy for how to catalog everything that I want to do. I need a what, when, how, etc for this. Maybe I need to just have a brain-dump of things and can then work on a more tangible plan afterwards: -Learn guitar -Learn piano -Learn bass -Learn drums -Learn how to sing -Learn oil-based Bob Ross painting -Learn sketching/drawing -Learn blacksmithing -Learn candlemaking -Learn glassblowing -Learn to speak Spanish -Learn to speak German -Learn how to ride a motorcycle -Learn how to build/fix a motorcycle -Learn 10+ different cuisines/culinary types -Learn electrical mechanics -Learn organic chemistry -Learn art therapy -Learn narrative therapy -Learn dialectal behavioral therapy -Learn carpentry -Learn medicine -Learn sewing/clothes-making -Learn neurofeedback -Learn neurobiology/cognitive neurology -Learn how to salsa dance -Learn chess -Beat an outdoor spartan race -Beat a spartan sprint -Beat a spartan beast -Beat a tough mudder -Beat a warrior dash -Beat a rugged maniac -Beat a hammer race -Beat Dark Souls 1, 2, & 3 -Write 4 books -Be in an MMA fight -Make multiple cosplay outfits -Make a Let's Play on youtube or twitch -Go to a lively church/church experiment -Meet NF people -Live in the city/nightlife -Live in the country -3-Way -Visit New York again -Visit Boston again -Visit Philadelphia -Visit Chicago -Visit Oregon -Travel to Canada -Travel to Germany -Travel to France -Travel to Ireland/Scotland/England -Travel to Greece -Travel to Sweden -Travel to Belgium -Travel to New Zealand -Travel to Australia -Travel to Japan -Get a double-sleeve tattoo wrap-around -Change my birth certificate name So...

I have a little time to write while I'm at my internship. Sunday night was very nice. I made dinner for a new ladyfriend from the Dominican Republic whose nickname is 'Wally'. She came over and we were talking for a couple hours. I made some yellow curry chicken with onions and peppers. The first time we met, she did a lot of talking and she wanted to know more about me. The conversation got around to artwork and I talked about RPG Fanatics. I had a tab open up so I could show her the map that I had made for the campaign. I recounted how it worked and she seemed really impressed. I really like Wally. She's not who I'm looking for in a relationship or anything, but being in the company of a gorgeous woman and able to make jokes and be comfortable around a new face is extremely welcome. Even if I have no intention of more, I like learning about new people and getting to know them better. Oh! That reminds me, I talked to a gorgeous woman at work who I've said couple words to here and there. I let her know that I wasn't looking to date, but she is always upbeat and positive and she seems like a great person to be around so I wanted to know if we could hang out some time. I now have her number. Nickname: Dali. My social circle is growing. Right now: IRL: -Wally -JJ -Dali -Amanda Seeing as how I have work/school every weekday, this means all I have for socializing time is the weekend. Weekend is also for cleaning the house, errands, batch cooking, and homework so obviously I'm stretched too thin with this many people. But whatever, I have options and that's what matters. With that, it's time to continue my original plan of recapping: 925 replies? Holy shit that's awesome. Almost exactly 5 years ago, I started up the RPG Fanatics. It was the start of something special. I had some ideas that I was kicking around for over a month beforehand. But I wasn't sure if it was going to take off. I mean, I wrote in journals and shit, but I didn't do much creative writing. I had no confidence in my writing skills. What if I suck at it? What if no one cares about the story? What if I'm wasting my time? I decided to shelve all of those thoughts and instead, start a story that would span a pretty long time. A short recap of the Lore: Teros the satyr was at the Adventurer's Town. He was raving like a madman in the streets, saying that there was something bringing the end-times. There was a huge secret, a myth, a legend, that was unfolding - and he had proof. Being able to sneak out of the crowded streets away from the authorities, a ragtag group of soon-to-become heroes banded together at the tavern and listened to the satyr's evidence. It was a small goblin that he captured. The group followed the captured goblin guide through the sewers, to eventually come face-to-face with a horror of the deep: Sodamus. Sodamus was slain, along with his goblin worker-hoard; thus sparking a domino effect within the Realm. Letting people write their character reactions and thoughts during the challenge turned out really helpful and immersive. I wanted to have fleshed-out characters, but I didn't want to just assign people into roles, you know? So instead I created the framework and people populated and shifted the events moving forward. The decision to spare someone (or something) became monumental literally YEARS later. My challenge at this time was: Right here was when I was crushed because of the MSW program: Fast-forward to today: everyone hates the woman that lied to me at orientation. Like, she's known by the entire program as being shady and a scumbag. I forgot that I did shitty drawings once in a while as I went back to re-read this challenge: During this challenge, my mom had already done a whole30 successfully and was doing a lot better health-wise; but by this point she reverted back to her old ways of eating and got worse and worse: THIS RIGHT HERE is so fucking pertinent for me today. I keep going back to my old ways and regretting it and getting worse. You would think I would learn the lesson by now: Whole30 makes me feel like a totally different human being. My gut biome or whatever is great. I sleep better. I lift heavier. I have stable energy through the day. Headaches go away. Going to the bathroom is better. Stomach aches go away. I lose a fuckton of weight (and all the other things that's tied to that like not breathing heavy when walking up stairs, not having chafing between my legs and sores, etc.). My confidence is through the room. Anxiety goes away. Depression goes away. It's like night and day with who I am as a person. I feel like I'm Teros when I'm on whole30. Yet I keep falling into the same rut and it's always because I come up with EXCUSES to not stay on track. I try and justify having some milk, which then leads to some candy, which leads to chips, which leads to ruining the night, which leads to depression, which leads to doing that shit over and over. I justify a holiday, or socializing with people, or whatever. I can't have excuses. I can't revert back to my 'old way' of eating. For some people, they can have a 'bad night' and binge eat some garbage and then the next day they wake up and go back to their version of 'normal'. That has never in my entire fucking life EVER happened. It doesn't matter if I have best intentions - if this junk is in my system in some way, I'm still an addict and will probably relapse. My mom refused to see the power of whole30. She refused to understand just how much of a health difference eating like that was. I noticed it about her too: she had more energy. Her damn gout went away. She was able to move around more. She didn't seem as miserable. I think that this was denial on her part. She had to have known that she ate garbage and was sickly, then when she ate whole30 she wasn't sickly. Admitting this would mean she needed to accept the reality that she SHOULD be eating whole30 from now on. Rather than do that, she chose to be ignorant of this and made the same repeated mistake for a couple more years until she died. I....can't follow in those footsteps. I don't want to be 400 pounds and have a heart attack and die in my 30s. I finally am able to get all my OTHER shit in my life on track. I'm graduating in literally 2.5 months! I have a job in the social work field! I have connections for even better jobs! I'm working on saving money and getting through this without any debt! Like, this shit is fucking huge for me. I feel like I'm finally at a point where I can show that I'm an adult. Debt-free, degree, on the path towards a good job that is fulfilling. I can't have that robbed from me by slacking on my health. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially after talking to my therapist. I feel....freer now. I remember years and years ago, my mom telling me that she was relieved when her dad died because she finally felt like she didn't have to prove anything. I remember her telling me that I would probably feel the same way; that I would feel like I could just be me once she was gone. Although I don't want to admit it, she's right. There is so much less pressure in my life now that she's gone. Some of it was probably imagined, I think. But regardless, I don't have to live up to anyone's expectations except my own. For one of my school assignments, I had to write about continuing education goals and it made me do some research. I'm thinking that I want to get involved with my old school I got my Bach. degree at. They have a group that works with neurobiology and has clinicians that work with people who have traumatic brain injuries. It's an all-encompassing group. I've always been fascinated by the brain and looking up information on this neurobiology group made me think about it being a possible direction I want to go once I get out of school. I also found out about a group that does art therapy and it has been something I've had an interest in as well. All of this made me start re-assessing who I am. It feels like I've been trying to pinpoint exactly WHO the fuck I am for so long. Decades at least. There was a time I wrote in a journal about what my partner would be like. Where I would live. What I would do for fun. I've come to the conclusion that I'm so far behind in life. Like....I can't learn 8 instruments within my lifetime. I can't have a house-tower that I build from scratch. I can't be with tons of different people. I can't work on everything. I can't learn everything. I'm at this weird crossroad where I know about things I'm interested in, but how much time in my life can I devote to it? For instance, let's say learning an instrument takes 4 years. Am I going to spend the next 4 x 8 = 32 years learning instruments? Painting takes a couple years so will I spend 3 years learning painting? How many years for glassblowing? How many years for candle-making? By the same token, how many years can I spend learning medicine? Learning 2 more languages? There's so much fucking.... STUFF and I'm not sure where to go. What I'm doing for the next 3 months is finishing my degree and internship. That's set in stone. But after that, I need to study to get my social worker license and then what? The neurofeedback route? Neurobiology/traumatic brain injury route? Homeless care route? Art therapy route? Just jump into my own private practice? Do I move out of the state? Do I stay in the northeast? Do I move to Philly? New York? Canada? Germany? Sweden? Do I learn to ride a motorcycle and get one? Do I want to live in the heart of the city and have a nightlife where I learn how to dance and do some clubbing and casual dating? Do I want to settle down on the outskirts of the city and have a small ranch and grow blueberry and strawberry bushes and some other crops; and chop wood and have a lumberjack-like lifestyle outside of my profession? What books do I want to read? What skills do I want to master? I don't even KNOW where to begin with this in about 3 months. I feel like, especially when factoring in my mom's passing; that there is even less tethering me to where I currently am in life. And I mean, if I decide to move, I should see about if I need to pass the license exam again in another state since there are different certifications/qualifications. I've been wondering how people have no interest in anything. Like, how is that even POSSIBLE? How is it possible to work a meh job and then go home and watch NCIS and then go to bed? How is it possible to only do that in life for 90% of the next decade or 2 of your life? Why is there no interest in new books, skills, and activities? Like, JJ works at her property management job and then comes home and watches tv (or plays diablo 3 with me) and that's it. There's nothing past that sort of day-to-day. There's no overarching goals or plans. How does someone wake up one day and realize, "Oh my god, I've spent the past 7 years doing NOTHING different and not changing?" Like....is that life? I know that I have too many ideas, too many plans, too many thoughts and actions. I think another serious issue that's going on is the timing of everything. Let me think about this: I was in high school and got with my ex. We stayed together (as you can see in the post above) for a few challenges while I was here. We were together 12 years, and then she stayed living with me for another 9 months and making life fucking horrible. Once she left, I burned all my shit in a fire and got my life on track with getting into school. A couple weeks later and I started school and I've been there since. I almost feels like.... I haven't had a chance to really explore who the hell I am or what I want because I was in a toxic relationship that was a stranglehold of no self-growth. Then school was a massive time-sink and anxiety-creator until uh....now-ish. I've been restricted and occupied nonstop since I was a teenager. I'm in my early 30s now and I'm just now wondering what the fuck I'm doing. That couple of weeks in August after I burned my shit, but before I started class was INSANE. I was catching up so much in my life. It felt like I was so mentally free and I remember barely sleeping for weeks while I got shit done. It was close to some sort of manic episode. And now, here I am with my mom gone and I'm almost just....waiting for school to end so I can pick up where I left off 3 years ago before school started. It's so weird to me. I haven't really experienced life. As a child, it was food and videogames. Escapism for the entirety of my life. I went to school and then did my homework and went back to food and videogames. I didn't experience anything. Maybe this is how people spend decades not growing but I feel like as a kid, I didn't know any better. That was my life from 5th grade to 12th grade, which then my ex became the time-soak, along with more food and videogames. Then resentment and more self-hatred. I got here on NF and started to see a spark of something else: like maybe life DOESN'T have to be me feeling like a worthless piece of shit in a failed and loveless relationship, working a job I hate. Then those 3 magical weeks without my ex and it was back to school to get my MSW. It's like I've been in a coma since I was 5 and I woke up for a couple weeks and then went back into a coma and now I'm in my 30s. It's like I've been drowning underwater with depression, anxiety, and self-loathing for so long and I started to climb out but then was swept back into the rapids and I finally see the shore where I'll be able to wash up on land this May. My last days of class and internship are on my 34th birthday. At 34, I'll finally feel completely free. And...I don't know how to handle it. Part of me is foaming at the mouth with anticipation. Another part of me is utterly terrified. What the fuck do I do on, say, May 12th this year when I wake up and don't have school? Don't have work? Don't have homework? Don't have internship? Don't have anxiety and drama and obligations? What the hell do I do when I'm mentally free? I'm free of my ex. I'm free of my mom. And in May, I'm free of school. What do I do?

So this is it: Level 50. This is my 50th challenge in a row. I started back here a few years ago. As such, I think that this level 50 would be a good idea to recap what has happened so far, and at the end; what my upcoming plans are. I'm going to make this a longer challenge and roll it over to the next one. I'm also going to write about my history. That way, I can use *this* challenge as a reference for the future to link to everything else.