Patreon Letter: 1st October 2020 (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

Jackson here with my Patreon Letter for the month! And what a fucking month it has been. There has not been a moment this month where I have not felt like I was about to pass out. So that’s healthy, and certainly not cause for concern. As someone who arrives to podcasts most weeks with “ah sorry it’s been a week,” this year (for obvious reasons) has certainly been impressive with its ability to up the mental and physical stakes I feel in just making it through, let alone creating any hashtag content.

Which is all to say, these letters are particularly difficult to write now. I just don’t have much energy for criticism. I spend most time I’m not preparing for podcasts just kinda disassociating with low or high level anxiety depending on the given day. But it’s hard to complain, as we are all in the same boat and honestly I’m doing better than others. Em basically wrote a version of this letter already much better than me earlier this week and safe to say: fucking same.

So instead of rewriting that I’ll take a slightly different tact and talk a little more seriously about the goofy KonMari Voip Life’s we’ve been doing recently. If you’ve not listened, it’s me and Em going through my library of movies, and deciding which ones are worth keeping, and which ones aren’t. Mostly it’s just an opportunity to riff on movies, which is always fun. They’re surprisingly good for what could easily be just blandly reading out a list of movies released in a decade, I think we did a good job. You should check ‘em out.

But despite being good fun, the core premise of them is something I genuinely, in my bones, struggle with. I am somewhat of a hoarder, not necessarily of goods, but of possibility. This comes across on GGP often as I always say “ah I’ll get to that one day,” about like half of the shows that Em just watches normally. A few months ago I made a spreadsheet of games I’m interested in and would like to play, as an attempt to push against this and turn my backlog into something manageable and concrete. This backfired almost immediately; the spreadsheet currently has 758 entries.

It does not take the Sherlock Holmes of therapists to deduce that this is one half fear of mortality, and another half plans being more satisfying than taking action. Once I have decided that I will, one day, do something, then there is no longer any pressing need to do it. The dopamine is already here. And after all, I am never going to die.

I’m really good at being introspective, at interrogating my behaviours and why I do certain things that I do. This is unfortunately not helpful at all at changing them, but I can understand them somewhat. However, one thing I struggle with more than any other is figuring out for myself where the neuroatypical make up of my brain ends and the maladaptive coping mechanisms begin. 

I have extremely intense Autism and OCD, and only one of those is a mental illness. I have anxiety and depression, and possibly ADHD too? Look, when I went to the doctor he just kinda wrote all of them down, said “I dunno, dude” and then never saw me again. This is extremely unhelpful, obviously, because the field of Mental Health Care, as it exists as industrialised in our capitalist healthcare systems, is absolutely fucking useless. So I have a bunch of diagnoses, no ability to see a therapist because my local area cut mental health care in a budget five years ago, and similarly no ability to get medication, because the people who could prescribe it were all let go five years ago.

While my illnesses are certainly severe, I do not think of them as particularly exceptional, as basically everyone I know also has an extremely normal brain. Sometimes having a normal brain is just the correct medical reaction to living in a hell society. We all have to do what we have to do to wake up tomorrow. And what I do is make lists of all the movies I’m definitely going to watch, all the games I’m definitely going to play, and have strong anxiety attacks about making sure I do these in the right chronological order, before proceeding to do nothing at all.

This is projection. I am not actually terrified about what could happen if I play Oracle of Ages before Majora’s Mask, but I need somewhere for that energy to go and it’s easier to do it here than to do what I’m doing the rest of the time and stare at the wall terrified my sister is going to die working as a Teacher this year.

So I try to forgive myself. Sometimes downloading a bunch of movies is self care, sometimes deleting a bunch of movies is self care. It’s fine. So long as I still manage to live my life in the moments in between I should not beat myself up either way. But I’ve always found identifying that line really difficult, and that I suppose is the constant struggle. There’s not gonna be a day where I suddenly wake up and with the power of catharsis defeat my neuroses, it is a constant process of trying to find solace and calm where I mentally can every day.

Anyway while staring at a bunch of these lists and being paralysed completely be indecision over what to do I just said fuck it and started playing Ocarina of Time again yesterday. It’s been on my backlog for literally eight years. Em’s been actively bugging me about finishing it since 2014. It seems really good.  This is my being normal victory for the week. 

Hopefully this month is not as actively stressful as the last but [gestures to the UK government] y’know that’s not entirely likely. We can only do our best.

See ya in a week.

-Jackson