River: The path to the Rose Garden

[mdlbear]

Figuring out how my mind works sometimes turns out to be rather like debugging a complicated program: you have to work backward from the effects through the chain of causes until you find out what actually happened. Only in this case it wasn't a bug I found but an unexpected but delightful feature. A butterfly? Perhaps.

So...

This sequence starts with the feeling, rather late Friday evening, of turning a corner in my mind.

The task ahead is daunting, and frustratingly slow. I'm in totally unfamiliar territory, and I don't even know who I am, let alone where.

But somehow, a couple of hours ago, I seem to have accepted that as a challenge instead of turning away and crawling back into my cave. It's the first night of Spring, and it's dark out there. But somehow there's a change in the light again.

The next day, I felt particularly happy. It wasn't until Sunday afternoon that I figured out that I was no longer afraid of something, and it took until later that evening, in The view around the corner, that I figured out that it was the recovery process I'm going through that was no longer frightening me:

Up until now it has been pretty scary. I was confused and lost in unfamiliar territory, and all the old landmarks were gone. The scenery was strange, the path was steep, and I kept getting stones in my shoes. But suddenly I realized that I was enjoying the walk. The scenery is weirdly beautiful, and the water in the river is clear, cool, and refreshing. Now and then I meet people on the same journey. I still don't know where I am or where I'm going, but that doesn't matter now.

I'm still being pretty metaphorical there, so I'll spell it out for the record. Up until Friday evening I'd been very worried about my seemingly-slow progress along this River path of mental recovery and reconstruction. Now I'm not: the process will be long, perhaps even endless, but I am making noticable progress and I'm content to enjoy it no matter how long it takes. I was confused about my mental state and about my changing self-image, and the confusion frightened me. Now it doesn't. It's fascinating. That's what finally got rid of my anxiety about it: the realization that the process was enjoyable and productive and fascinating by itself, and I don't have to worry about where it's taking me.

It wasn't until later Sunday evening that I finally figured out what the trigger was: looking into I Never Promised You a Rose Garden after being reminded of it in an IM session with pocketnaomi.

It wasn't until yesterday during my walk that the last link in the chain clicked into place and I realized that what Rose Garden had done was to engage my sense of wonder. Sure, there was pain and terror and confusion in it, but there were also hope, and a wonderful beauty. Yr resonated for me, and reminded me of my own river journey. The scenery is strange and the path is often difficult, but there is an alien beauty in that scenery, and the walk is exhilarating.

I seem to respond to mental imagery -- must be the poet in me. More on the imagery itself later.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

When I first read I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, my first thought was, "If she would rather live in Yr, why don't they just let her?" I could think of plenty of reasons why a fantasy world might be a better place to live than "reality". Sure, it would eventually interfere with her ability to make a living as an adult - but she was just a teenage girl, and besides, is getting an adult job the highest goal a person can aspire to? And Yr only became painful to her when its internal rules conflicted with those of the outside world; obviously, the solution to that was to stay in Yr.

I was almost the same age as the protagonist when the book came out, and just about as much of a misfit. I'd have loved to have such a structured fantasy to live in. But I was just a little bit too rational...

[mdlbear]

I think I was a bit older when I first read it, but I certainly understood the appeal. Still do. I'll have to be content with putting my fantasy worlds into words and occasionally music.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

And ten years after the book was published, the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons appeared... enabling geeks, misfits, and lonely adolescents to not only live in their fantasy worlds, but share them... ;-)

[mdlbear]

And now we have SecondLife and WoW...

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I tried Second Life. It wouldn't work at all on my usual machine, of course. On my faster computer, there was usually anywhere from half a second to two or three seconds lag between entering a command and seeing my avatar perform it. And the settings for my avatar's appearance tended to reset to defaults with little or no provocation - items of clothing would disappear at random, my bare feet would grow high heels (a bit like Angela Jolie's feet in the movie version of Beowulf), my hair and skin color would revert to standard Caucasian, or my hair and/or eyebrows would simply vanish. And all that ever happened was that random people I didn't know would invite me to join their communities, none of which interested me. I just dropped the damned thing.