Some disorganized 1 AM thoughts.
When Deltarune came out for the first time I was 16. I played the original SURVEY_PROGRAM when it first appeared in the world. I barely remember it. I barely remember anything. It felt more than anything to me at the time like a side project, an extra thing that also existed. Neither it nor its characters interested me. Chapter 1 didn't make much of an impact on me. I was more interested in how it connected to Undertale. What this meant about Gaster or Sans or anything else you care to imagine.
Time passed and I grew up.
I am now 24. Eight years. 2018 to 2026. Eight years. Three or four years ago I started using an image of Kris as my pfp on every account, the way I used to use Seer from Hollow Knight on every account, and (shudder) Bismark long before then.
Do I yearn to explore a Dark World and see strange and exciting things? No. I don't yearn for anything. I haven't yearned for anything in a very long time. Something inside me became stiff and hard and I stopped feeling all the emotions I used to be able to. Except, sometimes, I can catch a moment of it. Just a trace of it. I can never hold onto it. Examine it. Understand what it is I want for myself. It's always too faded and distant to grasp.
I would like to make something. A game, most likely. Something to grasp at that. To let other people imagine something different. Yearn for it, even. But a story that was just pure escapism would be irresponsible, too. Which way to go, reality or escapism? Surely they can be blended. But how would I do that? I don't know. The indecision is crushing. Always in my head I'm designing cities and industries and economies, all worldbuilding suitable for the kind of story I don't want to tell. So, I continue not telling a story. And my ideas ever outweigh my finished pieces.
I wish I could have been like Kris, as a teenager. I wish I could have been just that little bit more willing to try and change how I was perceived. But I'm not even really willing to do it as an adult either. I feel trapped at home. I feel trapped at College. The only time I don't feel trapped is when I'm riding the train between the two. Sometimes I don't want the train ride to end. I just want to sit there, unjudged, unnoticed, and unneeded, forever. College is starting again soon. I'm afraid I'll be even more trapped in third year than I was in second year. There is hope though. First year I was more trapped than ever. It could get better. There are people I might be able to reach out to.
I look through fanart of Kris quite a lot. People give them black nail polish, piercings, fingerless gloves, even platform boots and heels, dresses and skirts, eyeliner. Some of them I think about a lot.
I don't know how to tell the difference between my real feelings and the performance of emotion. How much of me is really me and how much is my attempt at maintaining consistency for the benefit of others. Besides possibly safety, I'm certainly not doing it for my own benefit.
So. I don't know what I really, truly want for myself. Sometimes it feels like the only emotions I can feel are anger and sadness. I never express my genuine anger, only performative humerous anger of a deliberately exaggerated and sarcastic variety. So it ends up filtering into misery. I don't feel excited for things. I don't feel happy about things. I don't even cry. I just feel miserable and numb, occasionally angry when I learn about something horrible somewhere else in the world I can do nothing about.
The indecision is crushing. What do I do now. What's the next step. How do I escape from whatever this is. I had no plans or imagined future for myself until I started to consider the possibility that I was trans. I didn't actually know what I wanted for myself. Then as the summer wore on and I remained trapped in a home with an accepting family but a transphobic lodger, nothing changed. I went from euphoric about the future to exactly the same as I always had been. Like a nothing of a person. Do I even feel safe in college to come out? That means changing how others perceive me, and that does scare and intimidate me heavily. I don't know how they'll all react. If I've been performing consistency all my life, of course changing myself would be terrifying. I just wish I had been a year ahead or below, where I would have been in a class with a trans woman from first year, and I would have probably come out a year and a half earlier.
So, Kris means a lot to me. Like a sort of beacon of hope in a hole that was dug as much by me as it was dug by others- and others absolutely participated in digging it, I still perform for them every time I see them and they think I'm someone I'm not. But I could be different. I could change. I can't go back now, I'll have to find a way through this somehow because I can't go back to the world where I pretended to be a gay man. I didn't even really know I was pretending, but if I was a man it was the only way I could stomach it. Kris was still there, though. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Years went and chapters came out and I came to love Susie and Ralsei and Noelle like I had never loved any Undertale character. I learned more about storytelling. I learned more about character arcs, about cohesiveness, about narrative. I see other people still where I was during chapter 1, obsessed with the metatext and completely apathetic to the story actually being told. It seems alien to me now.
I've changed. I can do it again. It's hard to even think about. But after Third year I want to start estrogen. Even just to see if it will clear the brain fog. Let me feel emotions again. I want to be able to imagine things again. All I can think about is infrastructure and engineering and cities. I don't want to think about that. I want to be able to imagine people and characters. I want to be able to remember my dreams again. I don't know if it'll work out or not. But I can't keep acting all day every day. I don't want to live as a man. Maybe I'll have to. But I would like to try something else. I wish I had started eight years ago. I wish I could start right now.
The indecision is crushing.
