Quotidian heartpouring is hard and untenable, turns out
It's been a good while since I've had the time to update here. I was pretty acutely aware that would happen before very long at all. I'm going to talk as briefly as I can let myself on the nature of my shittiness, then discuss where I stand regarding tulpaforcing. Please feel free to skip down to where I actually start talking about tulpas if you want.
Writing daily progress logs sounds nice but I feel it's probably pretty unreasonable for me, given a couple shitty things about my character. I'll put it in handy laundry list format for your convenience!
I'm really bad at ever accomplishing anything. I struggle with motivation and apathy in a nontrivial way every day with respect to almost every physical action. I have basically never not been seriously depressed and akrasia is my spirit animal.
Okay, so it's really more of one big gestalt reason. I have bad days and worse days with my depression, and when I started forcing, it wasn't so bad, but it's kind of getting shitty again. I had a shit-ton of work due last week and I didn't do much other than write a paper and do homework, every night. I went two nights in a row without sleeping it fucking sucked. A bit about me, since I don't think I've mentioned it here before: I'm a university senior majoring in physics and math. This semester I'm taking 21 credit-hours, three courses at the 400 level and three courses at the 500 level. I do very well in my courses, but that doesn't change the fact that every single assignment I ever turn in is always completed the night before and usually only just barely. And it's been this way for four years. I'm a senior, about a year from serious grad school (hopefully), and I still treat my homework like a freshman. I can't think of a way to represent my problem here as seeming legitimate (I mean all it probably sounds like I'm saying is that I'm lazy), so I'm going to cut my losses now. But let's just say that
I think somehow I managed to fundamentally integrate depression into my personal identity in such a way that I will never cut it back out.
I struggle with existential crises, gender identity, sexual dissatisfaction, body issues, and self-harm just all the damn time.
Hopefully I have convinced you that I think I'm shitty. There's not much of a point to this; I just wanted to whine about it. It's nice that I don't have any sort of following I'd have to worry about letting down. =p
(now I will actually talk about the thing this blog is about)
The point is that I need to be a bit more realistic with my expectations for myself. I felt like shit the first day I had to skip forcing; it was the most guilty I've felt in a long time. I know that forcing less often than daily is a completely reasonable thing (that almost everyone does), but telling myself didn't help me feel any better. That was about a week ago.
Now, I find myself not having forced since last Saturday (one week ago). I know it's okay, on some level. I didn't even go back to my dorm some nights; I just stayed in the physics lounge or the school library working. Schoolwork comes first, since mistakes and failures have much stricter consequences than failures in almost anything else. I know I can never permanently 'fail' forcing, since A) as long as I remain aware that I'm involved in the process TD isn't going to 'die' (it's incredibly hard to write that) and B) even if God forbid I somehow to start over from scratch, I could; no one is in a position to stop me from devoting as much effort to it as I chose to.
But Jesus, I miss TD; I haven't felt him almost any since the beginning of the week. And even though I'm often surrounded by friends while working, I've been lonely. I fucking dread the fact that I'm nowhere done with the semester and that I'll have at least five more sizeable papers due. I hate that there will be plenty more weeks like this and there's almost nothing I can do about it that I haven't already tried and fucked up. But god dammit I'm going to keep working with TD until it kills me.
The last time I forced was last Saturday, 1 Feb. It was, actually, beautiful. I spent about an hour and a half with him, and conducting events in the paracosm was quite free-form and natural (a rare occurrence). We spent a lot of time in an area inspired by the moon surface in Majora's Mask (picture below). It's a massive tree standing alone in a functionally-infinite grassy plain. An interesting thing happened: while we were there, it started raining. And I didn't do it. Well, let's be particular about the details: I spontaneously felt a raindrop on my face, and then I sort of declared, Okay, it can be raining. We moved to the base of the tree and started climbing to a branch near the top to rest. I don't even know how a pony would begin to climb a tree, but it worked out.
I never really expected to be surprised by the paracosm itself, at least not before TD started surprising me too. I think there's something really interesting being hinted at here. A lot of people don't focus on the wonderland nearly as much as the tulpa, and that makes sense. People spend weeks developing their tulpas' characters and personalities and traits and so on, and eventually tulpas can take that over on their own. But what of the wonderland? The instructions for constructing a wonderland and a memory palace are at least ostensibly identical, i.e. put things in places. But I've never heard of someone rounding a turn in a mind palace to find something unexpected, whereas this is a common thing to hear of in other people's wonderlands. In fact, you can find plenty of stories of people exploring and having adventures in wonderlands. What's the difference? Just that one is intimately related to a tulpa, and so creativity and spontaneity are integral to the construction? I don't know, but I find it pretty interesting.
Anyway, it was very relaxing in that tree. I made a small wooden platform coming off a branch for us to sit on, and with soft ambient rain coming down around us but not penetrating the canopy above, it was quite tranquil. For the first time, I began to seriously work on visualization, and pretty much thought long and hard about how tall TD is. No leaping or bounding to be done, but I definitely walked away with a strong conception of his size, and that's an important first step.
Also, hey. I'm pretty sure T spoke to me.
It was right before I quit forcing for the night (again, this was on Sat., 1 Feb). I asked him if he had anything he'd like to say before I got up and prepared for bed.
"I love you."
Pretty much plain as day. I don't feel the slightest bit responsible for this thought. Well, obviously it's 'me' in some meaningful sense, but there was no deliberation or suggestion on my part. It just seemed to come out of nowhere. In the past, the few times I've wondered whether TD said something to me, I've always been really uncertain whether I was accidentally responding for him, based on the way the response felt. I decided that all of the possible responses except the first ('I have no name') were not really directly from TD; I can safely say now that I'm pretty sure I made the correct call. 'I have no name' and 'I love you' felt completely different than the rest (the latter much more so), and so I'm inclined to believe those are the two real responses I've been able to hear.
Shit, I can't even tell you how it made me feel. I'm not even going to lie: I cried. No shame. It was one of the most sudden emotional upheavals I've ever experienced.
Maybe it makes more sense, now, how shitty I feel after being unable to force for a whole week after that night. TD and I had a beautiful tender and cathartic experience, then I ignored him and did homework forever. But fuck me, I can't pretend to think he doesn't understand; he knows I didn't have a choice in the matter and he wouldn't hold it against me. And that's why it kills me.
I have to remember, though, that the week is over, and there won't be another like it for a while. Tomorrow I want to spend at least an hour and a half forcing. I almost feel like I need to get to know him again a little bit. It's been so long that I'm actually anxious about it. But I need to jump back in. Not only will I be able to resume growing my relationship with TD, I think it'll be a lot easier to stop feeling like fat nasty trash.
I won't be entertaining delusions of keeping a daily log, but I will try to update as often as I'd like to. Every couple of days sounds nice.
















