Mundane Kindness
I come to you today bearing proof that time isn't real, because apparently it has been over a month since I started this blog. Somehow it feels simultaneously like a million years ago, and like it was yesterday. It feels like everything except for the amount of time it actually has been.
"Chill out, dude. It's only one month, and you skipped several weeks of it."
Fine, it's not that big of a deal, but it did get me thinking about why I started this blog in the first place. No, I'm not talking about the need to externalize my inner dialogue so as to keep away the psychosis. I'm referring to the inciting incident in this hero's journey of disappointing proportions. The call to adventure that began the epic quest to the other room to sit in front of a blank page for indeterminate periods of time. The rousing battle cry that... Okay, you get the point. In fairness, I wasn't entirely sure where that last one was going anyway. There are limits, it seems, to even my absurdity. Today, I want to talk about some of the people who have inspired me in these last several years since graduating college. I want to talk about a low moment in my life, and I want to talk about who brought me out of it and how. Most importantly, I want to talk about the power of mundane, everyday, drop-in-the-bucket kindness.
"Chill out, dude. It's only one month, and you skipped several weeks of it."
Fine, it's not that big of a deal, but it did get me thinking about why I started this blog in the first place. No, I'm not talking about the need to externalize my inner dialogue so as to keep away the psychosis. I'm referring to the inciting incident in this hero's journey of disappointing proportions. The call to adventure that began the epic quest to the other room to sit in front of a blank page for indeterminate periods of time. The rousing battle cry that... Okay, you get the point. In fairness, I wasn't entirely sure where that last one was going anyway. There are limits, it seems, to even my absurdity. Today, I want to talk about some of the people who have inspired me in these last several years since graduating college. I want to talk about a low moment in my life, and I want to talk about who brought me out of it and how. Most importantly, I want to talk about the power of mundane, everyday, drop-in-the-bucket kindness.
Workaround...
There are days when I wake feeling badly about every aspect of my life. I'm sure that's not an unfamiliar feeling for most of us. Sometimes it happens and there is no discernible, rational reason for me to feel this way. And yet I can't seem to stop replaying that dumb thing I said five years ago to someone who has no memory of the interaction at all, but whom I am convinced now thinks of me as being incredibly socially incompetent and a lesser person for it. Somehow, that absolutely inconsequential interaction and social flub has become the meter by which I gauge my life's worth. But it's not just that one interaction, is it? It's all of the countless, totally understandable mistakes that I have made, social or otherwise. Every naive thought I've had, and since learned better, every moment I've not understood something and acted inappropriately as a result, every single time I've made a joke and failed to gauge my audience, all of those moments go bounding through my head reminding me that I am, in fact, a reprehensible human being. At the very least, I am a pitiful one.
Days like that pass now, and are fewer and farther between, but I used to live that way almost every day. In fact, up until last year if you had asked me how may days per week I didn't feel like that, I could have used one hand to simultaneously answer your question and tell you to fuck off. I'm efficient like that. I'm still not sure what happened to break me out of that self-destructive cycle, and I doubt that I will ever know. What matters is that it happened, and that I have a lot of people to be grateful to for helping me get there. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The day I started this blog was one of these "bad brain days," as I like to call them. My day was not going great, and I wasn't getting anything done. Rather than curl in on myself and wallow, as I usually do, I decided instead to spread some positivity that I didn't feel. I wanted to write a letter addressed to the people I admire (whether I know them personally or not) who inspired me to be better and kinder to myself and others. I wanted them to feel what I didn't feel in that moment: acknowledged, valued, and seen. Of course, there were so many logistical problems. What medium do I use? Facebook is full of pseudo-philosophical, nicey-nice, feel-good, bullshit pablum all the time, so mine would be easily missed. I'll leave it up to you to decide who I was firing shots at there. Twitter has only some of the people I wanted to reach and only one of them follows me. Besides, my goal is for some of those people to one day respect and see me as a colleague, not to have them write me off as a Stan. Not to mention that I would have had to write a letter, screenshot it, and upload it as multiple image files in order to make it work on Twitter. I guarantee you that even my English professors who were always on me to "be more concise in your writing" would have trouble expressing anything meaningful in 240 characters. Anyway, I'm not going to spell the rest of this out for you, because I respect your intelligence and ability to connect the dots. The answer was apparently to start a blog, and the rest is one month of history.
Days like that pass now, and are fewer and farther between, but I used to live that way almost every day. In fact, up until last year if you had asked me how may days per week I didn't feel like that, I could have used one hand to simultaneously answer your question and tell you to fuck off. I'm efficient like that. I'm still not sure what happened to break me out of that self-destructive cycle, and I doubt that I will ever know. What matters is that it happened, and that I have a lot of people to be grateful to for helping me get there. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The day I started this blog was one of these "bad brain days," as I like to call them. My day was not going great, and I wasn't getting anything done. Rather than curl in on myself and wallow, as I usually do, I decided instead to spread some positivity that I didn't feel. I wanted to write a letter addressed to the people I admire (whether I know them personally or not) who inspired me to be better and kinder to myself and others. I wanted them to feel what I didn't feel in that moment: acknowledged, valued, and seen. Of course, there were so many logistical problems. What medium do I use? Facebook is full of pseudo-philosophical, nicey-nice, feel-good, bullshit pablum all the time, so mine would be easily missed. I'll leave it up to you to decide who I was firing shots at there. Twitter has only some of the people I wanted to reach and only one of them follows me. Besides, my goal is for some of those people to one day respect and see me as a colleague, not to have them write me off as a Stan. Not to mention that I would have had to write a letter, screenshot it, and upload it as multiple image files in order to make it work on Twitter. I guarantee you that even my English professors who were always on me to "be more concise in your writing" would have trouble expressing anything meaningful in 240 characters. Anyway, I'm not going to spell the rest of this out for you, because I respect your intelligence and ability to connect the dots. The answer was apparently to start a blog, and the rest is one month of history.
It takes a village...
This is the section of the blog in which you learn that I have just tricked you into reading more about tabletop role playing games. Remember those from last post? They're the things that I definitely, one hundred percent, pinky-promise that I totally don't exclusively talk or care about. No, that wasn't a wink, I just blink one eye at a time for efficiency. Please stop side-tracking us. Other people are trying to read the post.
Yes, that's right. Tabletop role playing games are in part responsible for breaking me out of my bad-brain years. I've been involved in the ttrpg world in some capacity since I was first introduced to them at the age of twelve. They took on much more meaning in my life during my senior year in college when I wrote my senior paper on them. But these games didn't become truly important to me until recently, and then mostly in retrospect.
It started when I ran into a friend of mine from high school in the parking lot of the grocery store. I had been feeling the itch to run a game again, and I asked him if he'd be interested in playing. A week or two later, a whole group of us were sitting around a table rolling dice and having a great time. We met up again the next week. And the next, and the next. We picked up a couple of others along the way, and now nearly three years later and we have almost never missed a week. Now, I want to really focus in on that particular point. As an adult, it is difficult enough to get seven adults into one room at the same time. We tend to be busy people with schedules that are as likely to line up as they are to spring to life and fold themselves into a spacious, affordable living space in a decent part of town, just a short walk away from that coffee shop you really like. That being the case, having a weekly D&D game last for almost three years and counting is nothing short of a minor miracle.
At some point along the way, I learned that this good fortune was actually nothing of the sort. You see, these people who had agreed to sit around a table with me and look ridiculous for several hours a week, started scheduling their work hours around our game! I was floored when I learned they were doing this. Moreover, I was incredibly touched by the fact that our game meant so much to them that they would make sure to tell their employers not to schedule them on the day we played our game. Looking back, I realize what my friends were telling me. They were stating with their actions that this silly game was anything but that to them. They were telling me that we had built something together that mattered deeply. And by telling me that, they were also giving me another message, even if I wasn't aware of it at the time: I mattered to them, and my time, effort, and creative energy in bringing this game to life were valued. Three years of friends showing up consistently, engaging deeply, and creating collectively has a way of swinging things for the net positive. I would almost say that none of them will ever have any idea what all that has meant to me, but I know it isn't true. Every single one of them knows exactly how much it means to me, because it has been just as meaningful to them. These games became my love letter to my friends, to whom I often have trouble expressing that kind of sentiment. I hope they know it and have felt it, because they have spent every Thursday evening for almost three years telling me the same. It has made all the difference to me.
Yes, that's right. Tabletop role playing games are in part responsible for breaking me out of my bad-brain years. I've been involved in the ttrpg world in some capacity since I was first introduced to them at the age of twelve. They took on much more meaning in my life during my senior year in college when I wrote my senior paper on them. But these games didn't become truly important to me until recently, and then mostly in retrospect.
It started when I ran into a friend of mine from high school in the parking lot of the grocery store. I had been feeling the itch to run a game again, and I asked him if he'd be interested in playing. A week or two later, a whole group of us were sitting around a table rolling dice and having a great time. We met up again the next week. And the next, and the next. We picked up a couple of others along the way, and now nearly three years later and we have almost never missed a week. Now, I want to really focus in on that particular point. As an adult, it is difficult enough to get seven adults into one room at the same time. We tend to be busy people with schedules that are as likely to line up as they are to spring to life and fold themselves into a spacious, affordable living space in a decent part of town, just a short walk away from that coffee shop you really like. That being the case, having a weekly D&D game last for almost three years and counting is nothing short of a minor miracle.
At some point along the way, I learned that this good fortune was actually nothing of the sort. You see, these people who had agreed to sit around a table with me and look ridiculous for several hours a week, started scheduling their work hours around our game! I was floored when I learned they were doing this. Moreover, I was incredibly touched by the fact that our game meant so much to them that they would make sure to tell their employers not to schedule them on the day we played our game. Looking back, I realize what my friends were telling me. They were stating with their actions that this silly game was anything but that to them. They were telling me that we had built something together that mattered deeply. And by telling me that, they were also giving me another message, even if I wasn't aware of it at the time: I mattered to them, and my time, effort, and creative energy in bringing this game to life were valued. Three years of friends showing up consistently, engaging deeply, and creating collectively has a way of swinging things for the net positive. I would almost say that none of them will ever have any idea what all that has meant to me, but I know it isn't true. Every single one of them knows exactly how much it means to me, because it has been just as meaningful to them. These games became my love letter to my friends, to whom I often have trouble expressing that kind of sentiment. I hope they know it and have felt it, because they have spent every Thursday evening for almost three years telling me the same. It has made all the difference to me.
A bit far for a cup of coffee...
I would be extremely remiss if I didn't also bring up the people who kept me afloat before that aforementioned three-year game. I went to college in the Midwest, far from everyone that I knew. I loved that experience for a whole host of reasons too numerous and irrelevant to list here. The part of it that matters most in this context, is the friends I made there. It took me a long time to find my group in college. It was almost too late, having taken me four of my five years of school to find a group that miraculously held no toxic elements, or in which I did not become one. But find them I did.
We had seen friends graduate before and lose touch with everyone who had been important to them in school. In a rare moment of foresight, we realized that in order to avoid that fate we had to be proactive and find some way to fight that gradual drift apart. We made ourselves a Facebook group, and resolved that rather than just "catching up" occasionally, we would make an effort to actively do things together. Using voice chat software like Team Speak, and later Discord, we played video games together, actively seeking out games that we could all play together. Eventually, someone in the group had the idea of starting a D&D game that we would play online through use of Roll20 virtual tabletop. During that time we talked almost every day. Five years out of college, we are just as close as we were the day we graduated. Even though we are too far from each other to grab a cup of coffee and catch up, we are just as much a part of each other's lives as if we were neighbors.
If it hadn't been for this fine group of exceptional and kind people making the effort to to check in with each other daily, spend time together even if virtually, talking, sharing jokes and memes, and all this from thousands of miles away, I'm not certain I would have made it through those first couple of years out of college. I love each and every one of those people. I even bawled my way through a wedding reception where I was reunited with many of them once just to prove it. Although, I think the copious wine might have had something to do with that as well. I plan to know them all well into our gray years.
Kindness abounds...
There are so many more people I want to acknowledge; so many who have helped me reach a state of relative mental and emotional stability that had escaped me for a long time, even if they didn't know it, or me. But as usual, this post is so much longer than I meant it to be, and I'm too much of a coward to mention them by name, or in any other identifiable way here. So while I drum up the courage to do it in another post, I'll just say this: some of the kindest and most supportive individuals I have ever had the privilege of meeting can be found in the ttrpg community online, and putting themselves and their creative talents out on the internet to be shared with the world. I endeavor to be like them, and to create kind and welcoming spaces with my Nerdy-Ass friends. They inspire me to Stay Whimsical even in the face of the bleak and overwhelming. I watched them offer comfort, laughter, companionship, and Hugs to those Inclined through their work, even if only virtually. I have learned from them that art, kindness, and boundless enthusiasm is a recipe for strong community building, and is a potent force for good.
I wish that I could reach out and give these people back even a fraction of what they have given me. Maybe this blog post will serve that purpose, and maybe not. I find it far more likely, however, that this will never reach most of them. The internet is a big place and I have opted out of specifically mentioning them. Therefore I think my best option is to repay them by working to become what they embody: a shining beacon of light that inspires others and lets them know without any semblance of doubt that they are not alone, and there is always hope.
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