#not to be a hashtag hater but it felt so random? more like an excuse to get back to the status quo as quick as possible

[darcyolsson]

i need every wwdits watcher to accept that what we had in s3 is forever gone and that we must move on now. instead can we please discuss how we feel about guillermo's entire existence (within the story) being about wanting to become a vampire and him suddenly deciding he didnt want to be one anymore after about *checks watch* five minutes of being properly turned. all because he (a serial killer) felt bad about having to kill people

[fentonizer]

Zero Value

“You should do some more writing” my girlfriend said to me in what may just be a narrative framing device.

I have always dabbled in writing, and people have always been polite enough to tell me the things that they’ve read that I wrote have been good.

Truth is, of late I have been in a funk. “Funk” being an offhand and slang way of distancing the problem that is no doubt a depressive disorder. Low mood is the symptom, as as far as symptoms go, it sounds benign. Everything is grey a lot of the time, and I do not know where the colour has gone.

I can’t seem to remember the last thing I looked forward to. Nothing grand anyway, nothing more important than a pizza, or a lie in. The days, like much of my writing are a run-on sentence.

I did write a 2000 word, mostly auto-biographical story about the year of my life twenty-fourteen, a year where a lot of “mad shit” happened to me and which I have never fully internally processed to closure. I probably never will.

Here are a few paragraphs from it I feel comfortable sharing with you:

There’s a documented condition called Paris Syndrome; a form of culture shock, the romanticised view of France and Paris specifically, a city of green grass, culture, love and that European free spirit is at odds with the reality of an overpopulated, dirty city, full of normal French people sick to death of tourists.

Depression itself is like Paris Syndrome, but instead of culture shock, it’s existence shock. You’ve been thrown into a world you don’t understand and are trying to cope. It’s not like how you thought it would be, is it? It’s not like how you were told it would be. Everyone else seems to have it together, right? Why aren’t I like that? Why do I go home and want to do nothing but rest in bed? Where do these people find the energy to do all this stuff? See places. Go to things. What am I missing that doesn’t make me feel capable of doing all that too?

The quintessential existential problem is feeling like you don’t belong and having no memory of the place where you do, if it even ever existed in the first place. How can one hope to fit in and find purpose when we have no template with which to work from? This is the void depressives speak of, like being perpetually hungry for a meal that doesn’t exist, the hole is indescribable precisely because nothing will fill it. It is formless, and we try to sleep, eat, drink, love, talk and fuck our way to a fulfilment that doesn’t exist for us.

We cannot ever get a plane out of Paris.

My intuition tells me only one thing here, and that is that because I am actually quite proud of the literary clarity of my mental state in the above, it is likely trite, probably plagiarised, and essentially of zero value.

Maybe you know or even remember that I wrote the allgamesshouldbedarksouls blog. This was a few years ago, before even Dark Souls 2 came out and society hit what we now refer to as “Peak Dark Souls.”

I don’t really want to go on about it, but it’s easily summarised. Remember liking “the cake is a lie” references? Then remember hating them as overdone and shallow, popularised not because of any real love for the art or end result, but because it was coded “in-language” that separated you from “them?” Like drawing a fish in the sand, we understand, and we’re safe here, away from those neophytes. And when they kneel at my feet, saying “Why!? Why didn’t we listen to you about how Dark Souls was an instant classic?” I will shove them aside. They had their chance, and no, I will not lend you my copy of it now.

The writing was good (people were polite enough to tell me) but as far as “video” “game” “writing” goes, it was shallow and I could see that. It was overly concerned with mechanics and more than implied some measure of objectivity in game-design. Plus, I was really tired of the “angry young dude hates every video game for petty reasons” shtick, knowing full well that if you gave me money and a team to design a videogame I would inevitably shit out something milquetoast.

But nevertheless, it was well received and proved that if I had the inclination I could string words together to create something vaguely compelling, although possibly I’m not accounting for the low bar of the subject matter, in this, the medium where you can wax idiotic about your constitutional right to kill a virtual prostitute.

I bring this up not because it’s the one good thing I’ve ever produced and reminisce about it daily, but because it’s yet another unfortunate example of something in my life that I tried, started to get somewhere with, then got bitter about not being handed fame on a plate and gave up.

I noticed this of myself today; (now, look, this is going to get pretty pathetic, but my girlfriend said I should write more (she didn’t), and I’m being open and honest with you, even if that reveals some... truths.) I have very few twitter followers. Not even 150. I use twitter all the time, every day. I say things, I make jokes, I comment on current events. I have tweeted almost 6000 things. I use hashtags, and I use them correctly. I do not, repeat DO NOT, make up random hashtags about my day like #FentonsTeaBreak, which is, like, something everyone who is new to using twitter does in the first week and thinks they are hilarious for doing.

But I am yet to find any more than 150 people who are interested in things I have to say. And 150 is generous as well, I suspect at least half of those are either robots, people who have since died, or people who followed when they signed up because Twitter suggested it might be a good idea and haven’t logged in since.

I actually lose more followers than I gain, and I can assure you that it not because of self-pitying screeds like this (I learnt that lesson about 4000 tweets ago). If you've never felt unsure about your place in the world, imagine the feeling that it is easier to find people who actively regret choosing to listen to you, and you’ve got a good approximation.

Today brought this to the fore as I saw a tweet that was basically the same as a tweet I made, retweeted into the thousands, simply because that person’s audience was bigger than mine. It was weirdly validating, that yes, my thought would have been accepted en mass, but also infuriating like meekly muttering a joke, only to have your confident friend repeat it, louder, to roars of applause (having used better words with a defter sense of comedic timing).

I realise this is incredibly arrogant. People are busy, and the world does not stop when Fenton Makes A Tweet. These days, everyone is a “content producer.” Running the wide gamet of pictures of their cat all the way along to pictures of their latte. There simply isn’t enough internet attention to go around, because mostly, it’s all so fucking boring.

I have come to see twitter more as a diary. A repository of my thoughts so that, like the cold unfeeling robot I am, I can purge the memory banks once this string has been archived, and move on to thinking other things (there is no rider to this joke, I am not going to list two normal things followed by one surreal thing).

For 6 months in 2016, I captured approximately 40 minute chunks of me playing video-game farming simulator Stardew Valley. I uploaded these videos to YouTube and in each I would talk about the game and talk about things going on in the world and it was generally incredibly cathartic. I appreciate there’s not much of a market for what ended up being about 70 hours of unedited video-content of a man, forever teetering on the the brink of an emotional meltdown talk about miking a virtual cow, but goddammit, I produced that content anyway. Fuck the haters (of which there were none).

Someone once said of my brief foray into stand-up comedy, that I was talented but showed an obvious lack of preparedness. That review (3 stars, Milton Keynes SnoZone, 2010) was a more accurate summary of my being than any psychoanalyst has ever achieved. I do not apply myself, and therefore I do not achieve. Even this, these very words that you’re reading right now, I am writing so that I don’t have to practice for a tournament of a game I supposedly enjoy playing and want to be good at.

My entire life feels like a omnibus of half-efforts. Even my job, which I openly loathe, I don’t quit because I do not want to risk trying anything different and have it be worse. I talk myself out of it daily for reasons like “you only know how to do this once specific job anyway” and “other jobs are probably a lot harder.” I give up before I even begin, and then use that same lack of motivation as a self-fulfilling prophecy to convince myself that it was never going to happen anyway, so I’m justified in giving up.

And then, on top of this, the Earth in year 2017 is a shit show to the point that your troubles are pretty small-fry. I’ve drafted tweets, had thoughts, typed internet comments, and then fallacied myself into relative privation by realising “wait, maybe the world doesn’t need THIS JOKE right now, because Muslim’s are being unlawfully detained at airports. Is this really the time for a pun on the word fondant?”

Today is February 2nd. It’s hashtag Time-To-Talk day. And that is as good an excuse as I’m going to get to be this massively self-indulgent and start my commitment to writing more by laying out my neuroses on the shaky pre-tense of lowering the stigma towards mental health.

But please, talk to each other. See your faults, your weaknesses, understand why you feel like you do and then you can start looking at changing patterns and habits that might be bad for you.

Don’t keep this shit locked up. Be brave. Talk. It’s ok. People will understand that you’re a mad-shit. Write a blog post that people will have trouble deciding if it’s too meta or not meta enough.

Society puts so much pressure on us to perform. Be like this. A man should be like THIS, a woman should be like THAT. This is damaging and only serves to alienate.

Mental health is important. My mental health needs constant work. Did you actually read the above paragraphs? That’s my brain all day “Not good enough, stupid weak thoughts, stupid weak job, you’re a failure and it’s no surprise you give up.”

To be Onan just one more time, my mental health is really the only thing I’ve never given up on.

Plus, of course, I have an amazing support network of my partner, family and friends. And if you feel you don’t have this kind of network, then there are plenty of resources which are listed here, the Time To Change website: http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/mental-health-and-stigma/help-and-support or you can drop me a line.