It has been a weird few weeks for me. One of the problems I have had over the years is that people tend to value me way more than they should. This means that I often get pulled in to consult on things that I have absolutely nothing to do with. When you factor in the shift to management… this seems to have only gotten worse. Sure I have an above average ability to troubleshoot software related problems and my borderline nefarious past makes me decent at working through potential system flaws. I’ve always sorta been a jack of all trades and master of none, and it turns out as I have gotten further in my career that is actually a really handy survival skill. It helps me understand how the pieces fit together and how the different roles click into place to make a whirring machine function.
The biggest problem there is I find it mentally exhausting to attempt to solve the problems of others, because I sorta have to pour myself into the situation and ask a bunch of “what would I do” type questions. As a result last night I completely missed the Mythical Nonsense night. I had a dinner that was made up of Jalapeno Chicken, Corn Dodgers and Potato Wedges (Charlie’s Chicken is so good)… and largely crashed out on the sofa until a short time later when my wife was ready for bed… and I followed her extremely willingly to a comatose wonderland. I stayed there until roughly 5:10 this morning when my body decided that I needed to be up… which is about 20 minutes before the alarm goes off. So I sat there quietly petting the cats on the edge of the bed until the cacophony of beeping happened.
As you might be able to tell by now this is not exactly my normal post, because I really don’t have a lot of gaming information to talk about. Instead you are getting something else that may or may not be weird and awkward. For as long as I have remembered I have had this sort of feeling inside that I wasn’t real. I am not exactly sure how to put it other than that, that I am not actually part of my own life. When I get tired or stressed I find myself sorta going on auto pilot and then watching my life happen as though I were watching a movie. I am detached and somewhere else just casually browsing what my meat puppet of a body is doing without me actually being resident in it.
The closest thing I can explain it as is though the me that everyone else interacts with is not actually really me. Instead it is like the real me is someone piloting this flesh mech around and occasionally gets bored of doing so… and instead retreats to just letting the AI take over. Every so often things will shift back into focus and I will with startling realization notice that I am in fact real and I am in fact effected by whatever is going on. This is always jarring when it happens no matter how many times I experience the shift in perspective. It’s like something has tethered me back to my meat suit and forced me to actually interact with the world in first person again instead of the blissfully detached third person I was enjoying.
Now you could just say that I was letting my mind wander, but it has always felt more than that. Its like for a bit the “me” inside of me took a break and wandered off because it got bored with whatever happened to be going on. It is really frustrating when this happens during a conversation because then I sorta have to try really hard to catch up and “grok” whatever the hell was just being said because I know at some point someone is going to expect an answer that makes sense. It is weird feeling like a spectator in your own life. Like I said before… this was going to be an odd post from the start but it was the thing that was presently on my mind.
Perhaps you’ve already done this, but reading about “depersonalization disorder” may help you understand it a bit better.
Hmmm I just read up on it and it seems similar to what I have been experiencing essentially my entire life.