I mask so well until I don’t.

I cannot believe I have a full social calendar from now until next Wednesday. Who am I. What is my life.

Hermit era is apparently over??

You can do everything right and still feel wrong. I hate that.

Low key wonder sometimes if I'm drawn to roleplay and other methods of self-expression due to bottling all my feelings IRL. There's a freeing aspect to playing someone else sometimes. It's like permission to be messy and unlikeable, to leave things unresolved, and to break all the way down without expecting to rebuild from the ashes.

Highfive, these are my favorite writing partners also. Finding people willing to commit to longer stories is the best. It's so rewarding to see plots evolve and change over time.

(Ngl though, sometimes the fanfic angle hits just right.)

A loved one told me once, "You can't expect to heal from upheaval overnight, or for your life to become everything that you want it to be all at once. Focus on making changes one step at a time." It's advice I'm grateful for, because we forget change is slow and change is hard.

But the little changes do add up, little by little, step by step, and one day you look back and find you're in a much better place than you started.

Now that I'm not overwhelmed by work, I've been attending regular social events. I've started reading again in earnest and rebuilding my personal library. I'm meeting very kind, very friendly people that I'm excited to get to know better, instead of secretly dreading social interaction as "one more thing to do."

These are such small things when you list them, but they feel very significant to me. I think a lot of life is like that: a series of tiny, mundane, but very hard-won victories. You just have to take it one step at a time.

I broke over 4,000 posts on the character I've been writing the past few years. I'm a solo-main in one community kind of writer. I like to focus all my energy on a single story.

Lmaooo, EXACTLY.

You get it. You get the problem.

What you're describing sounds like the style used in old-school, text-based roleplay (ie, MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MOO stuff).

It's definitely fun getting to describe your character exactly how you want to.

It's also... an experience... reading certain character descriptions. You read some wild stuff in the 18+ communities.

Re: possessiveness and other negative behaviors in roleplay, I think it helps to remember we aren't responsible for regulating other people's emotions. The inverse is also true: we can't expect other people to always change their behavior to accommodate our feelings, either.

If I sense myself getting impatient or crabby or irritable about something minor in roleplay, I tell myself that's a signal I need to log off and do something else. And when someone is upset at me in roleplay for something that I know is more about them than me, I often choose to take a little break for the same reason. Healthy boundaries are important!

Besides, there's always the option of writing original work or fanfic if we ever want complete control over a story.

People are almost always safe from ghosts and ghouls and the living dead in daylight, and they're usually safe from them at night if they're with others, but when a person is alone in the dark, all bets are off. Men and women alone in the dark are like open doors, Jessie, and if they call out or scream for help, who knows what dread things may answer? Who knows what some men and women have seen in the hour of their solitary deaths? Is it so hard to believe that some of them may have died of fear, no matter what the words on the death certificates say?

-Gerald's Game by Stephen King