I got a new video game that really fires up my dopamine levels. My body has been the site of a battle between dopamine and serotonin for 28 years. Dopamine is the “getting things done” hormone, essential for energy and productivity, get too much and things get manic/anxious. Serotonin works the other direction, regulating sleep, hunger and repair activities. This is the only use I plan to put my science education to, using precise language when describing effects. No one cares, there are no assistantships for people passionate about hard science and good data collection methods.
Anyway, it’s the Hitman series of games, which involves a secret agent infiltrating buildings and killing important people. It reminded me of a game I played as a teenager; “I was supposed to be here.” See, I had exhausted the entertainment prospects at the beginning of sophomore year to the point that I actively began to avoid the subject and order of high school. I snuck around abandoned parts of the school. While it was very cloak and dagger, most of the time I was seeking out a quiet place to read. Isn’t that strange? Kid would rather read than meet the arbitrary guidelines of others.
So, this story has a dark afternote of my life story that I have never dared to tell. My last job before my 2016 break I was a field tech working in people’s backyards, front yards, and all sorts of other places I never asked for access to, all of which I had to be at, but this became a skill. It was the professional version of my high school game. That is until the breakdown, at which point I wandered onto an active building site, and that’s where the cops picked me up and took me to the hospital. Three weeks later I came to in the hospital, picked up and started going again.
On the list of things I’m running from; the knowledge that my teenage impulses got the better of my adult senses. I am feeling foolish often.
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What’s to feel foolish about?
I honestly think it’s just a “me” thing, that due to my previously dashed goals of being a professional author, I keep trying to make my real life storyline better than the ones I come up with…. and that’s a big failure to me. I want my life to be satisfying, not happy, not miserable, satisfying. The kind of world where I could function for decades at a time without a breakdown. The kind of world where health is the last thing I have to think about.
I’m a fool, I believed that humanity could progress towards a better future, and the last decade has been a huge set of evidence that my human centric impulses are old fashioned, possibly obsolete. People would rather believe that they are but cattle and that’s how it is than rise up against the tyrants……
I think I always knew my revolutionary/megalomaniacal impulses are founded in disfunction, it disturbs me to find that the disfunction is that we as a society put things over people, we have for some time, and that is no more true in the past than it is now.