2008 was a time of great failure.  I became everything I never wanted to be.  Afraid, lost, and arrogent in the face of that fear.  I became a braggart and bitter when my fear stopped me doing what I wanted or needed, I’ve let people who tried to listen down, by taking their words and no action then demanding more words of comfort and I’m sorry for that and a whole lot more.  I hope everyone can forgive and forget anything that may have offended them, it was unintentional.

I have a lot to carry, and it’s not fair to share, to complain if I don’t do everything I can to prevent the things I ask for help with.  I must be prepared to carry more if I am to hope to lose somthing along the way.  I thought I was was doing well to regain some of my memories, but I allowed the holes to fill with the broken coping mechanics of people I never want to be.  What I’ve been told is I’d won’t be able to access happiness unless I allow myself to face pain.  I have to take the step and take that path alone.  Once I know my actions are pure, and I’ve honestly tried all I could, then I could happily ask for help again.  But I have to be honest.

People say a lot of people have no idea what they want to be like, where they want to go.  I have a hard time believing that.  I’ve always known where I wanted to go, when I was 6, before my mind added holes there were guest speakers in my school.  They were writers.  Some crappy childrens books, of course, with a very simplified example of what writing was, they asked us to use our imagination complete a scene and I was enthralled.  Imagination had not yet become an escape.  It was pure.  Now it’s a double edged sword.  Sometimes imagination is a joy, sometimes it is tainted, but writing… That was from before and I always thought I’d defend it, fiercly.

When I first started University, I fell in love with it again and there were other people who loved it in different ways.  I discovered one of my favourite writers and found a forum through which we got to know him and two others.  It was like lessons beyond anything my tutors were teaching, and I never trusted the tutors no matter how good they said I was because I wasn’t trying my hardest.  They loved my writing or I think they claimed to because I was lazy.  But one did tell me I was good and to work like a dog, but I now that I think about it, my emotions were or are not where they should be and that further caused insecurity.

Now, the last year, without the company of other people who loved writing, I allowed fear and doubt rule.  My self image distorted and still may be, it coloured everything I did, especially SL, it became a cycle of self pity, and I hope I can remedy that in 2009.  Second Life became more than I had intended it to be, and I stretched it thin and strained a lot.  To that end I will be on it less, but I hope when I am on, it’ll be because I have nothing else to do or I want to be on, because I have met some wonderful people who’ll never know how much I appreciate them.

If I were to have resolutions, it is to step up, learn to be sad so I can truly be happy, work until I am satisfied I did my best to not have another year like this or go down swinging.

“A person’s life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they’re actually willing to sacrifice for it.” – CRAIG CLEVENGER

Sometimes, I doubt my place in the world, a lot of us do.  We can see where we want to be, how clear this is and how hard you work for it is what varies.  And it’s not just working against the external pressures, but the internal too.  It sort of depends on the individuals locus of control.  I’m ashamed to say mine is external, with means I probably need to have some approval.  Where I can be deficient is working for my own approval because I may never get it, but I may never get an approval from the outside world either.

Although I haven’t written a blog in a long time, they have always been good for sorting out my thoughts and figuring out my next move because words once written down become something.  And if I have an external locus of control, throwing my thoughts out there to the world may be the best I can do to motivate myself.

Doubting myself, or more likely writing about doubting myself gets boring.  As Landsend mentioned, there have been voice chats and there are a variety of reasonable reasons why I’m not the best at them.  Anything is justifiable especially to someone like me; the trick has to be not  justifying what I see to be weaknesses.  As I sat listening, trying to find a way to speak I wondered if it was a weakness or that I want to just listen because I want be able to write any type of character as a writer.  Sometimes,  being an observer feels like it detracts from me as a person and there is a negative side, where people may not think I’m interested or I am just waiting for them to entertain me or I have nothing to add, which makes me feel dismissible.  But the simple fact is I like to feel sure of what I’m saying and I’m perpetually unsure.  And again, I might be justifying.  So I’m wondering what IS my place in SL?

I can’t totally dismiss the social aspect, even if I don’t always feel comfortable, because I enjoy it even when I’m unsure what I contribute.  The fact is: through social connections I have learned and still learn a lot about building and other things and I know there is always someone I could ask about anything.  For example, I started working on a custom avatar, following the confession that my most ‘customised’ avatar was just parts flung together and custom AO.  It’s not that it made me feel bad, it’s just that after my last blog post, I felt I need to at least try harder to understand building in SL especially with the standards I hold myself to.  I am not quite self taught my methods are my own by way of  Accacia Brissot (Infernal) and Prad Prathivi (Amodica), who have given me a lot of help in the past and know they still would if ask, and Ryker Beck (Genesis) who put up with my constant pestering until she threatened to kill me dead…  Okay she didn’t say that.

I still don’t have a plan and suppose after all I don’t yet have a purpose in SL.  But this blog does:  It helps me see what I need to do with this aspect of my life.

My subconscious has been stirring what I revealed in the last post, and I had a dream that reflected this.  It was based on the Christmas Special of Doctor Who that’ll come tonight.  I’ve been looking forward to it, sure.  But this David Tennant’s Doctor in particular has struck a balance in his character that works.  He is silly, cheerful, joyful and also cold and ruthless.  Sure he doesn’t use a weapon himself, but as has been stated in the show, he makes people his weapon.  Not that that’s a way the way forward, but the simple fact he can show both sides may be a lesson my subconscious wants me to learn.

The dream itself was odd.  I was watching and was the Doctor at the same time, even David Morrissey was there.  Martha Jones was the companion (I never noticed a preference, but I guess it was the default).  After a bit of a replay of the Children in Need clip except with Martha, my subconscious really went crazy and went downright normal.  There was a woman, who bumped into me/Doc tor and we started dancing the tango in between market stores with flowing canvasses to mambo italiano.  Interesting fact: That actually happened to me, back in my bar-tending days.  The canvasses were less flowy and I couldn’t dance well.  After that it became some sort of film noir spy thriller featuring the Doctor.

When I woke up I thought how awesome the dream was, I got to thinking about the nature of real life verses a created reality, be it second life, dreams or fiction…  What is the function of dreams when you try to bring them into waking life and is second life good enough?

I admit that I haven’t taken full advantage of everything it has to offer, and I haven’t given too much of myself to it.  I think I have created only one creation of my own free will and here’s a picture:

My first and only build so far

It is a steampunk style furnace/boiler, being steampunk it had to look doable by the average person, so I wanted it to look like it’d been salvaged by a train wreck, then I had to integrate it with the house.  I enjoyed it, but make mistake, it was very prim heavy and I hadn’t even learned the precision primming many quality products need.  Perhaps I am too picky, I had to make each plank different and made sure the furnace looked supported.

Second Life seems like a shortcut to the dream-whelm.  And that is the beauty and the failing of it.  That anyone can dream and people will have different opinions on what is good enough.  Maybe everyone is settling for the closest thing to the dreams they have and won’t take the time to make sure everything is ‘perfect’ to them, but isn’t it worth it when you find something which is obviously to the standard that the builder wanted?

Maybe I don’t focus on my SL building because it does feel like a shortcut to the worlds I am trying to create in my fiction, but maybe that is the wrong way to look at it.  Maybe I should see it as it’s own thing, but that would be denying Second life it’s own right as a window to people’s dreams and I don’t want to take from those people that do have the focus and the quality control.  Some of SL you need to use your imagination to make things better, other parts fire your imagination.  The trick is finding what you want out of it, what kind of dream you want to get out of it and how you use it.

I guess I haven’t found my thing yet.  That said I enjoy RP in SL because there is an element of imagination through words, and not just what you see on your screen.  Sometimes, just sometimes, I dream about writing an original role play and sim for second life.  Maybe that should be my driving force.

A picture depicting my fears

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” – John Milton

To know most people you have to know their fears.  But their fears are precious to many people, because who would they be without their fear?

As a writer, I should be exposing myself willingly to being destroyed by my emotions, writing  and living until my heart is a void, still I am more guarded than a lot of people I meet and I could envy how easy it seems until I meet somebody so guileless it hurts.

What better way to introduce myself then to expose some of the fears I see in the picture?

• Colour:  Apart from the skin and aura effects, there is not much use of colour in this picture as one of the dipictions of the way the struggle between the dark and light side envelops my world, but also fear and hope.  The colour schemes of the angels and myself show this struggle, I am wearing a grey t-shirt and the world itself is in black and white.  Caught between black and white and I have yellow in the soles of my shoes, like the angel’s aura, but even the angel has a little darkness in him at the same time as being a source of light.  The black smoky boarder shows how I am trapped inside this struggle.
• The Figures:  The positioning, poses and clothing figure in a few ways.  Traditionally you’d have the angel and devil on your shoulders.  Left and right.  But here I’ve shown the dark angel central and in focus, a powerful figure, the angel’s movements could be autonomous or he could be taking commands from the dark side, so my hope could be driven by my fear or my dark side.  Finally the human has clothing with aspects of both of the angels, he has the gloves of the fallen, but not the bracers and he has less torn jeans and shoes, not boots.
• Inside Information: The way the location is closed off show how worried I am that I’d never break free of this struggle.  That I’d have to embrace a darker nature, because there is an efficiency to it.  I seem to get things done when I go dark-side.  I’m also afraid of my light side, the side that tries to be everybodies friend, tries to do everything I’m told to without much thought, tries to understand people until they figure they can take advantage of that.  I’m afraid that to be light, I have to be dumb, and to be smart I’d have to be coldly efficient.  I’m afraid that I am used to letting people walk over me and I don’t let much of myself out, because I think the part of me that can navigate the world won’t be someone anybody knows.  So like Rrish noted, I am afraid of redeeming myself, acting how I want too, because I simply have no idea who I’d be because of this gulf between who I show and who I think I am.  So I keep myself trapped in this struggle I fear  and I fear myself.  Who would I be, without fear?