-----------------------------------------------------InfoFemale - 20There’s not too many things that I’m -truly- afraid of. Come to think of it, there’s really only one.
I’m petrified at the concept of my death.
Now, let me get something straight, I’m not paranoid or afraid to die. My biggest fear stems a little deeper.
Let me talk about a dream.
Imagine that you literally couldn’t have any influence. Like a spectator in a game. You know what your role is, essentially. Someone who is watching, maybe learning, maybe relaxing. All you know that a major part of your role involves *not* influencing the game as it is played.
Now, let’s imagine a different scenario where you are one of the players.
You are connected to a server in a team-based game. You are assigned to a team of seven other players for a total of eight members on a team. You don’t know any of them, but you are to work together to overcome the oncoming challenge put in place by the CPU.
There are three scenarios that play out:
1. Meh: You decide you don’t want to play after a few minutes and exit out of the game.
2. Yea: You continue playing until you and your team are satisfied and then quit.
3. Failure: You -really- want to play, but due to circumstances that are beyond your control, you fail to have a stable connection.
In the game, you might get a screen freezing, or a audio buffer wavetabling, or at worst, your controller does not move the player on the screen.
You can read the chat logs of people getting disappointed in you for ‘wasting their time’, for to them it functionally looks no different than if you just put the controller down and messed with the flow of the game. The only issue is that you actually wanted to participate. And you are disappointing those that wanted you to participate.
Maybe you’ll get booted from playing the game back into spectating with a CPU taking over your character, even worse so when the CPU directly replaces your “idle” player. The game moves on. Sometimes even the CPU has your name to not affect the other player’s mindset.
That’s it.
Right there.
I’m afraid that I won’t ever leave a major or lasting impact in anything or anyone’s life.
“You aren’t who you used to be.”
In a few cases with family, this -image- of my identity is static. I am the X Y Z that I’ve been since 2 years old. Literally consolidated into a single object, I am not allowed to be different, lest it’s a malfunction that needs to be fixed.
“I miss what we had N years ago.”
This is something that I’ve been struggling with for a few years now, and sadly there’s no real means that I can use to change my image, because I will always be a static image in the eyes of my small family.
“You aren’t acting yourself. What’s wrong?”
With that in mind, the identity of myself at two years (m2y) has been severed from the identity of myself at any other point on the line(m). This single point in time is considered “canon me” and the further down this line is functionally becoming less and less “me” in the eyes of family.
“You changed. You just aren’t my child anymore. I just have to take that to heart.”
And there’s nothing I can do to prevent it.
~~~
It kinda hurts.
I’ve known two people who have died super young. It’s tragic and it just sucks to know that there was nothing more I could have ever done to change that.
And here, the impact of those two individuals have been entirely constructed on my personal relationship with them, and I just can’t help but feel selfish.
Two people, who both had at least sixteen years of life that preceded them and all the impact they resolved with was what I could have done to spend more time with them.
And it resolves to the thesis of this little post.
I know that it would only take about three weeks before my identity would be scraped off this planet. It’s already happened with my family, and it probably wouldn’t take long before my whole image becomes a series of songs with a vacant author.
The sad thing is, people say that “they truly care and that I matter to them” but I’ve learned the hard way that the “I” that matters to them might just not actually be true.
It’s a big reason why started getting into Psychology in college. I want to do everything I can to help and assist others because I know what it’s like to have a functional disconnect between yourself and your identity.
It’s why I love working with children. It’s why I love working with people with cognitive disabilities. Because you don’t truly know what it’s like to lose yourself until the entire world forgets that you are an -active- participant.
The biggest impact is made through the smallest of gestures, and here’s hoping I can continue to make a meaningful influence in others.
