We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us. (Or Not)

“Being enough is something you are, not something you earn.”

Curtis Tyrone Jones

I’ve been single for a bit. A spell. A few turns of the hourglass. A season. One might even say an age. I’ve recently decided that it’s time for that to change.

Dating has gotten progressively weirder the older I’ve gotten, and in my mid 40s, it’s the weirdest it’s been yet. I don’t think it gets talked about a lot (at least not in places I am looking) but when you’re putting yourself back in that arena at this age, it can bring up a lot of feelings. A bubbling cauldron of anxiety, optimism, wariness, weariness, hope, insecurity…and mainly feeling like you’re the only one in the world who can’t seem to get this part of life quite right. It doesn’t help that most of my friends are either married or the non-union Mexican equivalent, so there are some barriers to varying degrees about their ability to relate.

I ventured out into the world of dating apps, which were never great, but somehow seem to be devolving even from the last time I’d used them.

Now, I don’t want to disparage dating apps as a concept entirely. In this day and age, there are a lot of good things to say about them. They promote asynchronous communication, provide distance in the beginning to feel out if someone is worth your time to meet, or if you honestly feel safe meeting them. In exchange for those qualities, you have to sell yourself through a few pics and a few blurbs about yourself. It’s…not a great tradeoff…but it’s what you have to work with if you choose to walk that path. (I did once attend a singles mixer which was hilariously awkward, but ended up with me making a few wonderful friends) Besides, a few of the relationships I’ve considered to be my “most successful” to date were born of dating apps, and I have made several dear friends from dating situations that just didn’t really materialize.

So I sent a few messages, opened a few dialogues, even exchanged a number or two. So far, so good. This is the easy part. When I am made of words, I’m pretty incredible, if I do say so myself. My humor translates well to written form and that’s the primary bait on my hook. Then when things go well in this, my chosen arena, I have to come back to the real world, and that’s where things get unsteady.

Once, way back in my 20s I went on a date with a girl I met online. Bear in mind that this is in the age of pagers, before cell phones, smart phones, etc. We hadn’t seen each other before we met, though we had talked on the phone a few times, exchanged a few emails, and there seemed to be a mutual crush forming. We decided to meet up at a coffeehouse…and things pretty much fizzled immediately. There were other people there I knew, so the two of us were spared a lot of the awkwardness by virtue of making small talk with other patrons of the establishment. At one point towards the end of the night when we were alone again, she told me “if you were thinner, you’d be really hot.”

I think maybe she was trying to take the sting out of the sentiment by emphasizing the word “really.”

It didn’t work.

Maybe you winced reading that. I did, reliving it as I typed it. Ooooof. As you might have guessed, that left a mark, one that has stayed with me regardless of what variety of shape my meat wagon took. That single statement stripped away the value of everything that I liked about myself. It reinforced with steel something I didn’t like about myself. It taught me that no good qualities I have matter while I inhabit a fat body. And perhaps worst, it turned me against myself in new ways that I hadn’t yet encountered in a life already marked by self-loathing in a variety of flavors.

Now as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a part in a few relationships I would call a success (even if they didn’t last, I learned a lot from them) and a lot more that never really came together long term, but definitely were good times in the while that they lasted. For someone who is painting himself here as an unloveable pariah, I’ve had waaaaay more success with the fairer sex than I would ever think someone who looks like me would have. What this should illustrate is that there are people who see what all I bring to the table and are delighted by it. What I took from it was that I was somehow “tricking” ladies into giving me a chance. Which objectively I recognize as absolute horseshit. People do what they want to do. But that one fateful date some 25ish years ago, forever skewed how I saw myself as it related to desirability, which is to say I had none.

Take this and couple it with the notion that the world we live in ABSOLUTELY encourages this. Media does not frequently portray heavier people as leading happy lives with rich, fulfilling relationships. Instead we are categorized as being lazy, lacking willpower or moral character, frequently having poor hygiene, low levels of intelligence, and are definitely unattractive. The ceiling for media portrayal is comic relief, which is still to many degrees dehumanizing. Despite there being mountains of evidence to the contrary, obesity is still largely framed as being a personal failure, rather than the amalgamation of a number of varying factors about environment, genetics and issues unique to each individual. This is what all of us are being fed, over and over, and it sticks to us, thick and thin alike.

Which brings me back around to modern dating. There’s a woman I’m currently chatting with. It’s been a lot of fun, she’s got a spicy dark sense of humor that is right up my alley. We share the same political views and we’re both people who feel deeply about…everything. She’s even open to learning some games with me. When things were going well, I asked her out on a date, and she accepted.

When it came time to actually plan things, I had to step out of my word-filled fantasy world and back into the one where I pray that I can trick someone else into giving me a chance. I sent the following text:

“So I hadn’t discussed this yet, but as we’re planning to get together, I don’t want there to be any surprises here. I’m a bigger guy. Before the pandemic, I was very active and lost a lot of weight, and then a couple of years staying inside undid a lot of that work. I’m working again to reestablish those better habits, but it’s not an overnight process, and I’m dealing with some insecurity about my body. And I get that it’s me. I worry myself to death over it, every time I meet someone new. Only once in my life has anyone ever shot me down because of my size, but that once was enough to cast a shadow over every encounter since. My history indicates that I worry about it more than any of my past partners ever have, but even in the face of all of that evidence, it’s always a struggle for me.”

At the time, I was thinking I was just being honest about things. No surprises, not trying to catfish you. In the context of thinking about this and writing about it and with the benefit of time passed, I am absolutely cringing at it. It also bears mention that this is not the first time I have laid out this disclaimer when daring to admit that I am romantically interested in someone. I don’t think that there’s been a situation where I haven’t done this.

I warn her about me. I apologize for myself and include language that assures her that I Am Aware Of The Problem And Am Doing Something About It (TM). I proceed to overshare and talk about my historic struggle with this particular cycle, and the notion that despite my fears things have worked out generally well for me. Why am I saying all of this? Why that last part? Am I trying to convince her that if she rejects me, she’s the weirdo?

All of this, rather than just trusting to the fact that we wouldn’t be talking if she didn’t see some value in me. That there are plenty of good reasons why this is a good idea. That my happiness with our exchanges is as real for her as it is for me.

Everyone I know suffers from some sort of body dysmorphia. I don’t know if it’s a human thing or an American thing, but I am inclined to think that it’s more the latter than the former. I know all too well how shitty it feels to be judged on this, and I will go well out of my way to spare someone that shame.

I know I’m not the only one here who has felt this, and y’all, we have to do better. For ourselves. We have to try to escape the traps of programming and bombardment on all sides that we are undesirable, and deserve to be. The world is not going to change, but we can. We can believe in our possession of value, of worthiness, that we don’t have to trick people into liking us (which honestly, we never did). We have to fight back with self-love in a world that really encourages us to hate ourselves….and that’s really super difficult…but it’s not impossible.

For the record, she thanked me for telling her if it was a concern of mine, but it was not a concern of hers. We’re planning to meet soon. And regardless of the outcome of that meeting, I won’t lose sight of my worthiness. I can break the wheel. You can too.

Keeping Your Eyes (and your mind) Open

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week. – Voltaire

I guess this is the part where I have to say something about trigger warnings, as I’m going to start this post with talking about my relationship with suicidal ideation. So you are forewarned, and thusly forearmed.

The closest I ever came to leaving the world on purpose was about 7 years ago. I was dealing with a heartbreak on the scope of which I had never seen before. I was absolutely miserable, and most of my friends were done listening to me. (Honestly. I had two people both of whom I adored tell me that they couldn’t talk to me anymore because I was too lost in that grief. As someone who has abandonment issues, this is super rough) (The real bitch of that? Hindsight, time and life experience have all shown that it never deserved all of the hell I put myself through with it.) I had the opportunity to volunteer to teach board games at Gen Con, so I went, thinking that I desperately needed a distraction from life. I knew I was a mess, but I figured that it was Gen Con, always a good time, and my sadness could take a couple of days off. It didn’t exactly work. I was miserable the whole time, and all of my smiles were just masks I was wearing.

One night, I needed to drop something off in the car, which was in a parking garage a few blocks away from the hotel I was staying in. It was a tall building, and the level I was parked on was somewhere in the teens. After doing whatever it was I was doing when I started to walk back to the hotel, I walked to the edge of the wall where I could look down. I was high enough to where there was zero chance I would survive if I jumped. I stood there leaning over the wall, raising onto my toes, considering the end and daring fate to do something with my balance. The temptation was strong, and my resolve to live…wasn’t. I don’t know how long I stood there, staring down from that height, breath short, and body tense; and I don’t remember making the decision to walk away. I do know that I went and consulted a friend who was there with me that I was in my darkest hour and she talked me through it. (Marie, I don’t know if you read this clownshoes blog, but if you do, you very literally saved my life that night).

Something weird I think is that that’s where my mind goes now when I think about suicide. I think about that specific parking garage and that floor. Every time. There are a million ways to do it, but for me, it’s always going to that parking garage in downtown Indianapolis. While my therapist is never thrilled with the notion that suicidal thoughts are something I still struggle with (it has gotten much better though, and the urges are fairly rare when they used to be omnipresent) she does like that my most likely path to it involves a 3.5 hour drive, which is plenty of time to calm myself down.

I’ve been struggling lately, my dear five readers, which you might have guessed as I haven’t updated in a bit. As always, there are a lot of factors in play. My work has been pretty hyper busy and stressful lately. I’m still processing grief from things alluded to in earlier posts and the non-linear path of grieving can be maddening. I’ve been moving forward on all of the initiatives that I’ve talked about here, but lately my heart hasn’t really been in it, and the miracle cure I felt I discovered a few posts ago has run into a pretty serious challenge.

For those of you tuning in just now, I’m talking about the basic idea of learning self-love by looking at myself and my decisions as I would if I were my kid. If he had these struggles, what would I tell him? And I thought it was foolproof, because I would be able to navigate him through all sorts of nonsense. But what if my kid told me that he was just tired of everything? And that nothing is fun anymore and that he feels all he does is grind away at work to keep the lights on? What do you say to the person who is struggling to find the point to…well, anything?

This is where I’ve been stuck for a bit. And I wouldn’t know how to navigate my kid through that sort of existential despair. Would telling him “things will get better” be in any way genuine, helpful, or most importantly truthful?

I’m reminded of a reddit post that was circulating around a bit some years ago regarding poverty and some of the myths surrounding it, namely that there is this really perverse idea that if you scrimp and save and deny yourself monetary indulgences of pleasure that it will someday work out for your security, when the truth is that there is no “money heaven” for good behavior, that restricting yourself in these ways will never lift you out of poverty, and that these myths were perpetuated by people in power who benefit from your believing them because the real solution takes them out of that power.

Can I tell my kid that things will get better when I struggle to believe that they actually will? It complicates matters when the mental focus it requires to separate my conscious self from the me-as-my-kid view is…difficult to attain. Spinning my wheels here leads me to despair and thoughts about a trip to Indianapolis.

I should stop a moment here and say that I’m not in crisis mode, and that historically speaking, I’ve dealt with suicidal ideations pretty much the entirety of my adult life on varying levels, but through my hard work in therapy, I got to put them down for a bit and am just less than thrilled that they are coming back around.

I sought the wisdom of my friends because at least on some level I still have the understanding that the reason friends can be helpful in these times is because they can be objective. They’re not the ones fighting to keep their head above water (at least not the same water that you’re in) so they can keep calm and provide insights that the people who are drowning are too panicked to realize themselves.

One of them told me I needed to look into more heavy hitting mental health options. Get a full evaluation and new updated diagnosis and then figure out treatment options so that I can get to a point where I feel better and do things other than work like “have hobbies” and “meaningful relationships that bring me joy.” They’re not wrong of course, but I’m skeptical in that then I’m grinding to be able to afford whatever those treatments are, and that’s a whole different can of worms I’d just as soon keep closed.

Another had presented a more simple option and reminded me that for as much as my feelings and my cynicisms felt true, they were also not the whole story. That I should tell “my kid” that there are a lot of truly great things that were just not on his radar and feel like impossibilities at his lowest points That there are all sorts of miracles that happen that we never expect. In her case, she never thought she was able to have a kid, and she not only became a mother, but lucked into an absolute treasure of a kid. Circumstances can change in the most unexpected ways, that they’re not always bad.

So I am going to try my best to slowly remove my blinders to take a look around and see that as my main man Buddy Wakefield says, that there is life after survival. That peace, satisfaction, and dare I even say a deep happiness, are things that are possible to attain without disassociation. It is going to take effort and consistency on my part to do so (hello blog reminding me to write out my shit!) but I’m going to keep trying, because I know I’m not the only one feeling this way, and if you’re relating to this in any way, I urge you to take a deep breath and remind yourself that like me, you’re not seeing the whole picture. We can do this.

Stumbling Out of the Gate

“If I didn’t have so much of this life all wrong, I would have gotten it right by now.”

– Buddy Wakefield, “The Information Man”

So here we are. When last our heroes met, I talked about how I was rebooting the Captain Hammer Project, and embarking on an action-filled romp with an ethnically diverse group of kids to find a lost treasure only to discover that the greatest treasure of all was inside of us all along. Meaning of course, self love.

And then I pretty much face-planted at the starting gun.

Historically speaking, I’ve been able to accomplish more burning hate as fuel. I’ve done some impressive things in terms of weight loss, but it comes at a pretty terrible cost. You use self-hate to motivate you, to power you through that workout, to make the better intake choices, etc., and when you succeed, it validates that hate. Feeds it. Makes it grow. Something something two wolves inside of you. I had lost a person’s worth of weight, and was no happier for it. People would shower me with praise, and I could only see what I hadn’t yet accomplished, and it made me bitter. Hate in, hate out. I made my demon stronger even as I was making huge strides towards my fitness goals.

Strides that as I mentioned in the last post have since been undone, but not because I learned a better way. All of that ended up being for nothing. I wrote the last post clawing myself out of blackness and setting an intention to learn to do better, both by means of results and the methods taken to achieve them. Then I was told something that really tore all of that down, and reintroduced shame into the menu. It took a bit for it to sink in. It was a difficult enough conversation by itself, I’ve alluded to the insane difficulties I’ve faced in the past few weeks. The short version was being told about someone else’s accomplishments in a way that made them….better than me? Oh, maybe there’s some nuance, or maybe that’s not the communication that was intended. but that’s what stuck.

And it burned.

Even now typing this, my jaw is clamped shut in silent rage. But, that’s okay. These are fires I know how to grow. This is my specialty, and I aim to start a fire visible from orbit.

*sigh*…which is NOT exactly the right lesson to learn here. I told one of my best friends about this, and how consumed I was feeling by the desire for revenge, and how this transformation would make me “win.” My friend just told me to examine and reflect on what my definition of win was. And she was right to do so. Buddha said that holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Revenge can’t be a part of this, for about a million reasons. First, it’s short-sighted and this is a long game. Second, that kind of sustained rage is really bad for you on multiple levels, this is something I have extensive experience with. Third, and maybe most important, it. just. doesn’t. fucking. matter. Accomplishing everything I talk about here doesn’t change what made me feel this scorn. So what is the point of that save to torture myself? What am I doing bothering to write this out if I refuse to learn the lessons I so desperately need to learn?

So hate can’t be the answer, but I really struggle with the love part. People keep saying “you have to love yourself” but I ask WHO THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE THAT CAN DO THIS?! I actually leveled this at my friend, furious at the suggestion that it is somehow simple, or even possible. She told me that for her, she didn’t drink herself unconscious anymore, and that she stopped sleeping around, and these were acts of self-love. This prompted further introspections on how to open myself up to this, She’d suggested that hating yourself is like sitting in a field with a pile of rocks. The rocks are all of the bad things that have happened to us. All of the reasons we hate ourselves, hate the world, hate other people, etc. All of the evidence we need to support that hate. We sit with our heads down, hitting ourselves over the head with rocks, throwing them at ourselves and at times others. In this practice, we also torture the people we love by making them watch us do this. She poses that if we take a moment to be mindful, we will notice that everyone around us also has a pile of rocks. Some people are hitting themselves with rocks, others are throwing rocks at other people. Self love, she says, is being able to sit next to the rocks, feel the sun on our skin, look at the ants and the flowers and listen to the birds.

This is another problem for me. I appreciated the sentiment, but…I don’t appreciate those things. I definitely take them for granted, and celebrating that feels silly at best and insignificant at worst. Opting to look at flowers and ants instead of hitting myself with rocks just feels like I’m trying to stop the bleeding, and I don’t know how to wring joy from that. You see, for me, love is a joyous concept. It doesn’t have to be an idyllic fantasy, a fairytale, something fantastic and ultimately unrealistic, but I really need it to feel good. I really struggle to recognize taking actions that just stop or slow my decline as love. Meanwhile, it’s exhausting to keep fighting for stability and to keep my head above water. How does one ever just .be. happy. with themselves?

“I cannot teach him, the boy has no patience.”

Thanks, Yoda. This peels back another layer in the rotten onion that is my innermost psyche, that I am famously impatient with myself while having a near bottomless well of patience for others. I need to get my two-cycle weed whacker of a brain on board with the concept that maybe the goal for now just needs to be the mitigation of hate. Something something walk before you run or something. That there’s no switch you can flip to go from self-hate to self-love. Like everything else, this is going to take time, dedication and effort, and you’re not going to see the results of it until they are unexpectedly tested and you can say “Wow, old me would have reacted much worse to that.” Everything therapeutic takes for-eh-ver. But this, as much as I hate it, is pretty clearly the correct answer.

The bigger takeaway from her point for me was how much it sucks to watch someone you love hit themselves with rocks. I recall a point when my favorite person on the planet had written something about how they didn’t want to be around anymore and how much that destroyed me. I think that this will likely be very difficult to put into practice, but I think that trying to occasionally see yourself through the lens of someone close to you is probably a good mental exercise.

None of this makes me feel anything. I guess I’m grateful that I don’t feel resentful or bitter about it, but it sure would be nice to feel good about it. About anything. Ultimately I need to learn to appreciate and love myself in a way where I can look in a mirror and smile at the guy I see rather than suppress the urge to destroy the mirror. And the road to getting there is going to be long and hard. These are the only tools I’ve acquired as to where to start with that. So with just a blank parchment to draw my own map on, I’m going to start with a plan. A series of behaviors to mold into habits, and a hope that maybe with enough persistence, something will click some day and this concept of self-love won’t be so paralyzingly inaccessible.

Today I signed up my kid and I with a summer gym membership, for both motivation and to lead by example.

Last night I did some online research and ordered myself a bunch of supplements and digestives to revitalize my gut flora.

I’ve already gotten back on my anti-depressants.

Sunday I wrote out a meal plan to hold myself to to guide my shopping decisions and to avoid getting food deliveries which frequently compromise these goals with low quality ingredients and portion size that encourages overeating.

I’ve put myself on a moratorium with the tabacky of the wacky variety, as I tend to not do anything overly productive if I’ve indulged. Eventually I would like to re-introduce this as a reward. I don’t get to do this unless I’ve accomplished the other things that I needed to do to further my goals here.

And of course, I’m trying to stay accountable by publicizing what I am going through to my 3 readers and forcing transparency on myself. Is this going to work? Can it possibly work? I guess, but it’s going to take a lot. I’m staring down a mountain here, and I will destroy it pebble by pebble.

Episode For: A New Hope

So I came back here to the mouth of the river. To look at my own reflection under the moonlight, and see what it says for myself, where down my whole body it is written: “P.S. See me for who I am. We’ve got work to do.“

– Buddy Wakefield “Human the Death Dance”

*taps mic*

…is this thing on?

Yeah, I know the title has a misspelling. It’s intentional, you nerd.

Wow. So, uh, yeah. I guess it’s been a while, huh? And what a while it was. How radically different a world we live in than the one where I last spoke to you, my 2.84 readers. We all witnessed a shitshow of the most epic proportions with the turn of leadership in the country. We saw the world grind to a halt under a global pandemic. We have all changed.

There’s a lot to talk about, where I’ve been these past few years (SPOILER ALERT: hiding under a rock), what I’ve been doing, etc. And then more importantly to talk about where I’m going. So let’s jump in, shall we?

“You’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here”

Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been a terrible narrator. I can’t even blame the pandemic. I stopped writing here long before that was a thing. At the time, I was going through a pretty rough breakup. I was struggling with my mental health. While I was seeing a therapist regularly, I was off my psych meds (more on that later). It took a long time for me to pull out of that. I had tried to remain friends with the ex in question, but that proved too difficult. She took me to lunch for my birthday in…2019? 2020? She told me that she would always love me. And I had to tell her that the only way for me to heal was to cut her completely out of my life. That was an incredibly difficult decision to make and to execute. She had told me then that she’d gotten me a gift for my birthday already but it had not been delivered yet and she still wanted to give it to me. A couple of days later, there was a plastic shopping bag hanging off of my apartment door with this inside of it.

She bought it for me before I excommunicated her. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. And a choice piece of irony that her last gift to me, bought before the meeting and delivered after it, embodied what had to be. Of course it didn’t strictly end there and I continued to punish myself for reasons that I can’t even make sense of in hindsight, before a dear friend of mine pointed out that my behaviors were more like an addict than the bearer of a broken heart. Which I needed to hear. That perspective really helped me to bring that chapter of my life to its finale.

And then the world closed.

The pandemic was…not good to me. Dutifully, I was vaccinated, boosted, and kept pretty strict adherence to social distancing rules. Maybe too good. I leaned into the curve a bit too hard there. My work had become remote. I had groceries delivered rather than put myself amongst the hoi polloi. I avoided people whenever I could, and was masked when I could not. But then I started avoiding people online too. I was becoming more and more reclusive, and isolation was having some weird and unfortunate effects on me. It got to a point where I was having mild panic episodes about the idea of being around other people. And so I stayed inside. And worse, it more or less undid all of the work that so many of the other posts in this clownshoes blog talk about. I’d put on weight. I’d started hiding myself more. This is not to say that the whole time I simply devolved into madness. I actually did end up meeting someone else through a very unlikely means, whom this post is indirectly dedicated to. Things ultimately did not work out, which is besides the point save to say that it brought me back here. But failing that, I was frequently alone with just my thoughts, which have historically never really been my friends. I felt more and more distant from the species, and this was a struggle for me to begin with. Even in relatively “good” times, I frequently felt like life was a movie being projected on a screen that I was standing in front of and trying to blend into. To anyone looking remotely closely, myself included, it was obvious that I did not belong. But this got worse. I got to a point where I felt like an astronaut drifting in space, and I was terrified to look behind me to see that I was no longer tethered to the shuttle, that all there was left was me and the vast, cold emptiness.

Therapy was having diminishing returns. I wasn’t talking to much of anyone. I was desperately lonely, isolation was actively damaging me. People would make plans with me, and I would secretly pray that something would force a cancelation, even though I needed that connectivity point for survival at that point. My therapist had recommended that I go back on my antidepressants. I’d been off of them for a number of years, citing the solid progress I was making in therapy. I didn’t feel like I needed them anymore. I certainly didn’t notice the glacial pace of my degradation, but the bigger issue was that I didn’t care. I had front row seats to my decline, and was utterly apathetic to it. With nothing left to lose, I went back on my antidepressants. A month later, things were making more sense. None of my problems had gone away, but my ability to process and deal with them had greatly improved. In fact, this last week was the best I’d felt in years. Better living through chemistry, indeed.

And then the bottom dropped out.

I’m not going to go into detail about specifically what happened to catalyze such a huge change, at least not yet, but I can tell you that the fallout was ugly. The past 3 days I have spent mostly crying. I normally have a very manly cry. Some balled up fists, a single dramatically stoic tear, sometimes even two, and some short panicked breaths before I regain my composure. Oh no, this was bad. Ugly crying. Screaming, wailing, gallons of snot. I was completely out of my mind. Oscillating between a searing fury and the deepest and most profound sense of loss I have ever experienced. I didn’t cry like this when my mother passed away. I didn’t cry like this at the aforementioned breakup. I’ve never cried like this for anything. I went from feeling engaged and optimistic and ready to take my life to new places and experiences and dare I say heights, to spending last night on a crisis hotline at my lowest point. It’s been…a lot.

“ummmm…*exhale*….ah….are you okay?”

I bottomed out. I’ve had a lifetime dealing with depression, trauma and self-loathing, and I’ve never been as angry with myself in my life as I’ve been the past few days. I’m talking white-hot anger. It burned me out, and left me hollow. And when the flames subsided, the embers cooled, and the ashes were carried away by the wind, all that remained was me alone in the quiet darkness, with a single glowing strand of light to pull myself out with.

Hope.

I’ve dealt with so much hate in my life. Most of it directed at me, by me. It has at times acted as a motivator of some sort, but if we’re honest, it was always more of a burden than a help, even at its best. And I’ve never really had a lot of success with self love, but I feel that this is the only thing left to me. And it’s very alien. A vast sum of currency for a country that no longer exists. A book with all of the answers written in a language I cannot comprehend.

“Okaaaaay….soooooo…what now?”

What comes next is my attempt to grow. To create. To maybe even become more human. And I can’t do it alone. That’s where you come in, my 4 readers. I’m making a series of commitments here. I am relaunching The Captain Hammer Project. It’s funny to me that I could update my end fitness goal to something more relevant, but naaaaah. I’ll be documenting that journey and all of its ups and downs here. I’ll be starting to write about games again. Or trying to. Playing games that people want to read about means playing with people in real life. Which just typing that made my stomach clench. I’ll be doing my best to update regularly. With no more excuses about why I have not.

And in a wildly uncharacteristic fashion, I’m asking for your support. I don’t know how to love myself. But I have to learn, and I know I am not alone. We are all healing from something, so let’s do it together. Feel the fear…and do it anyway.

Leave comments. Let me know that there are eyes on me, always watching, always judging, and if you feel like it, maybe even always cheering. At some point this will turn into something I do for me entirely, but until then, I need to know that I’m doing it for you…for us, and I don’t want to let you…us down.