#whenever i get around to my rewatch ill obsess over a new character every time super stoked for that

[alcubierre-warpin]

heart suddenly ached for siobhan roy

[panticwritten]

Okay, I’m trying to find the motivation to write and maybe I’ll get it if I complain about my maladaptive daydreaming for a spell. I started writing this in my journal and realized that it’s something worth sharing with other MaDDers. I’m gonna apologize right now because this is digging deep and I might come off as snappy or angry. That’s because I am angry. I promise that I’m, like, okay. I just know that I would have killed to see other people dealing with the same shit that I did when I was younger. 

Uhhhhhhh quick trigger warnings because upon reading this over I should probably add these. I got kind of dramatic because I apparently don’t know how to tell personal stories without theatrics and tangents.

Unhealthy coping mechanisms

Direct suicide mention

Direct self harm mention

Have my truths about MaDD.

I use my daydreams to write. I think I post mostly about my positive experiences with it, I don’t know, I don’t remember ever talking actual shit about it so here we go time to drop the real anger and frustration because I’m just realizing why this particular thing makes me so mad.

I think I’ve been giving it a positive spin but that’s. Not the truth. There are so many things that I could bitch about when it comes to maladaptive daydreams to dash out those responses of “oh yeah I also have a great imagination i love daydreaming /stars in eyes/ i got distracted one (1) time during class daydreaming about summer for half an hour” to every ‘relatable’ MaDD post that makes me want to scream.

I love my characters, I love the stories I get to write, I love the exhilaration that comes out of winning a ‘campaign’ (if I can ignore the more negative side effects), I love Connor, and all (most) of the different versions of me. I still love all of those things. It’s like loving cheese and ice cream when you’re lactose intolerant, except you can actually choose to not eat ice cream goddamn it.

I could talk about how daydreaming sometimes leaves me looking up and realizing I’ve been sitting stock still and staring at the same line of a fanfiction for six hours while my roommate tries and fails to converse with me.

How when I’m alone and I start daydream I pace, compulsively clean until I panic because I can’t get anything good enough, type or write until my fingers ache.

How realizing that I’m not the person (people?) I am in my daydreams cuts me because they can do anything, but also makes me sag in relief because they are not the kind of person I would ever inflict on the people I care about in real life.

How I spent half of senior year hiding tears because I was juggling 3+ emotionally draining longterm daydreams in between school and extracurriculars.

How until I started wearing my necklace of keys and a ring, I would look up from the worst of the dreams with sores up and down my forearm because I would scratch it to bleeding without realizing it.

How in sophomore year of high school I swallowed a bottle and a half of antidepressants because my best friend wasn’t real and had abandoned me the previous year.

How I can’t be in the dark by myself, how the idea of being underground closes my throat with panic, how I wish for physical affection but I can’t handle being touched without warning anymore, how I see characters that remind of Count Olaf and my limbic system tells me I’m not safe, how the sound of those dumb horns every Homestuck cosplayer practically nuts over makes me feel physically ill. All because of the bullshit in my daydreams.

But that’s not what I’m furious about today so I’ll save those particular stories for another day.

So. I always end up having daydreams in the universes of media I get obsessed with. There are some things I randomly don’t daydream with but sometimes I like. Look at a thing I read when I was younger and I remember how great a read it was and I’m like “hey I should read that again it was hecking good”

But I know I can’t touch that series with a ten foot pole because if I so much as read a summary suddenly I’ll have another universe I’m invested in.

I’m talking expressly about Gregor the Overlander, but that’s just the surface of the problem.

I inhaled that entire series in 5th grade and that was when I had time to read every second of the goddamn day and didn’t really daydream all that much because like?? I had books why would I need universes in my head.

That changed when I started getting yelled for reading in class once I hit middle school but that’s a whole other thing.

But yeah, I read GtO in 5th grade and loved the shit out of it because it’s a fantastic series. I want more than anything to revisit it, to read it and write dumb fanfiction involving bats and flying and awesome things, but I know that would be a huge mistake.

Gregor the Overlander joins Percy Jackson, Maybird, and so many other series I read when I was a kid that I cannot read. Last time I read Harry Potter, I had a daydream that wrecked me for a while. I started reading Series of Unfortunate Events again and I had to lock the door to that daydream because when I go into that universe I can’t function as a human being because it’s the only daydream that matches (and maybe exceeds) the emotional strain that my Escape From Furnace daydreamshave put me through. I rewatched Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and around episode 10 I started daydreaming in that universe too.

I never know anymore what series will get me. Belgariad didn’t do it, and that’s my favorite book series on the planet. I know that neither Warrior Cats or Guardians of Ga’Hool would do it by some weird fucking instinct. Steven Universe didn’t do it, and that series is the exact kind of universe I would have a field day in. Same with Pokemon (except for the CONCEPT of the third movie, I guess).

Gravity Falls nearly made my depression rocket to worse lows than it had been in MONTHS because of the daydream it triggered. Seven Deadly Sins threw me into one, though to a lesser extent. Trollhunters, Be More Chill, Hunger Games, Homestuck, JTHM, Supernatural, Vampire Diaries, so many things, even things I didn’t expect to trip me up.

And that’s not even getting into the massive trigger that is music because I haven’t found a song that doesn’t bring me into a daydream scene in a long time.

It’s like walking on fucking eggshells.

It’s one of the things that makes me really hate my maladaptive daydreaming.

Like, I’m already fucked because when it pulls me in it turns me into a shitty friend, it gets in the way of school, writing, work, and hurts me because so much of what I care about isn’t real. It tricks me into hating myself for being hurt emotionally by the things that happen in the daydreams because obviously it’s not real how could it possibly affect my real life like this.

But I’d accepted all of that as collateral. It doesn’t matter as long as I have something to write about. I track my depression with how much I write so as long as I’m writing I must be fine. I can mitigate the damage and bend my daydreams to work for me when I really need them to. Coping mechanisms and tricking myself into daydreaming that I’m looking into a new target for the Scouts rather than researching for a paper etc. etc.

But I hate this because now I can’t even like things.

Whenever I want to read/watch something new I have to look at it really hard. I have to think, “Is this good enough that I’ll enjoy it, but not so good it’ll throw me into weeks of daydreaming, scratched forearms, blank stares, guilt, dropped grades, hurt feelings, and general exhaustion?”

I’m normally safe with certain genres. Tame rom coms. Most crime novels. Superhero movies/comics.

But then I read something I should be fine with and suddenly I have a daydream in the Fifty Shades universe so I have an excuse to slap Christian Grey in the face and go to benefit functions in an established universe with Connor. I play a game that I don’t know anything about and suddenly I’m daydreaming in the Two Souls Universe because the idea of Connor being a rift ghost tickles my brain in all the right ways I guess. I reread Homestuck because cringe culture is dead and I find a stack of SBURB discs in the Cube and I’m struggling to keep the daydream from moving further than that because I can’t, not when I already messed up winter term so much with my daydreaming. Not when I know that SBURB would mean creating more than one new universe to keep the Cube from being destroyed. Not when I know that SBURB would mean everyone involved would likely die at least once.

But at this point I know I’m just delaying the inevitable. I can distract myself with fanfiction and Grey’s Anatomy for a bit, but it won’t last forever. Everything feels like screaming in my entire body and when I know that the only way to make the screaming quieter is to find something else to write, something else to make my eyes glaze over for six hours while my roommate tries and fails to talk to me, I know I won’t hold out for long.

I love my daydreams.

But maladaptive daydreaming is about the farthest thing from being fun as I can think of. If the prospect of losing 90% of the people I care about didn’t scare the shit out of me, I would take any chance to get rid of them that was offered to me. To be a normal fucking person. As it is, all I can do is keep it from getting worse.

So I don’t read Gregor the Overlander. And I stay angry. And the screaming gets louder. And I don’t write for several weeks, praying the motivation to write will come back to me again.