It’s Christmas Day as I’m writing this. Night, really. It’s 5:45 p.m. I ‘m not doing much of anything, but I got two wonderful prezzies. A minifig of Vyke from Elden Ring from Ian and a worry (crystal) stone from Kathleen.
The latter fits perfectly in my hand and feels really good. It has a few cracks on it, which is just the way it should be. The former is a small, but important character in the game. He is integral to my favorite ending, and there is something you can do with his spear that helps in a very fiddly area.
My nibling sent me a sweet Christmas message from their trip to Taiwan, and it’s been a day filled with holiday cheer. Well, remotely, anyway. I don’t decorate and I’m not a holiday person, but the two forums I follow (one as an active member and the other more casually), are filled with holiday cheer. Especially the RKG Discord. Everyone is posting pictures of the food they are eating, and I’m drooling.
I think that I’m going to change things up for 2024. I have talked about moving to video because blogging is dead. This is for me, basically.
It’s the day after Christmas and I’m back. This is the time of year to think about the year that had passed and the year to come. I don’t do resolutions any longer, but I do like to set goals.
As I was saying, blogging is mostly dead. I accept that people don’t read any longer. To be honest, I don’t read much either. It’s the hazard of being online so much, I think. And giving into the impulse to jump from website to website. It’s too easy to be distracted if you don’t have good discipline–which I don’t more often than not.
For the next few days, I’m going to outline what I want to do in the new year. Again, not resolutions, but goals. The last two years have just been me adjusting to being alive. Again. Still? Still alive. There is the video for the post.
The first month after my medical crisis, my mother started pestering about what I was going to do with my life. I was still battling the drugs in my veins (which were SO NICE) and with the fact that I had died twice. i was not thinking about what I was going to do with my life. I had no idea why she was pushing me on it when she should have just been grateful I was still on this earth. When my brother and I took them to the airport, I was sitting as they walkejd around because I was exhausted. My brother told me later that they pushed him about what I was going to do with my life. Why the hell they asked him, I do not know.
But, then I realized that the answer as to why my mother had been nagging me about it was clear–it was the same answer as to why she nagged me about anything. Because my father nagged her about it and she was too weak to tell him to STFU.
This was the story of my life, by the way. Most of the time my mother repeatedly nagged me was because my father nagged me about it. I would say that her nagging me for fifteen years to have children was all her, but the other shit? Him.
She was always going to put him first. She always had, and I doubted that would change any time soon. She liked to say that my brother and I were first in her life, but that was not true. We weren’t even second. My brother was third and I was fourth (and last). God was first, supposedly, but I think my mother had made my father her god at some point in their marriage. If push came to shove, she would choose my father over her god.
Even taking her at her word, God was first, my father was second, and my brother was third. I was a distant and distinct fourth, and it was only because she needed an emotional support person. It didn’t matter what she said about how much she loved being a mother–she did not. Her only reason for loving me and my brother was because we could do things for her.
My brother did the practical things like buying a laptop for her, bringing it to Taiwan, and setting it up for her (which he did this Christmas). I was, as I said, her emotional support person. I was her dumping ground and had been since I was eleven.
Now that I’d been alive again for over two years, it was time to think about my future, I guess. I don’t think about the future much because I rarely think I have one. I mean, I don’t think I’m going to die for the third and (presumably) last time, but I have never thought about five years from now–at any point in my life.
It’s funny. when I was a teenager, so many adults told me that I should enjoy that time of my life because it only got worse. Oh, they didn’t put it that way, but that was what they meant. I hated life back then, and I remember thinking, “If this is the best time of my life, I’m going to kill myself.”
I wasn’t being hyperbolic, either. I hated my life. I was fat, ugly, awkward, and miserable. At least this was how I saw myself. The thought that it didn’t get better made me want to walk into an ocean.
Here’s the thing. It does get better. At least it did for me. Not in my twenties. My twenties were hellish. My early thirties sucked, too. I started Taiji when I was thirty-seven or so, and that was the start of a new beginning.
Now, at fifty-two, life is the best it’s been. I love my body because it saw me through death (twice) without breaking a sweat. It’s fucking badass, yo! Anyone wants to talk shit about it? Nope. Not having it.
I have to take a leaf out of my brother’s playbook and just try new things. That’s what he does, and it works more often than not. But he’s also able to let go of things much better than I am. I admire that about him. I also know that I can ask him to do videos with me, and he’ll do it without hesitation. I really wish I could channel that.