Doomworld used to have a section called "blogs" that got merged with status updates 6 years ago now (holy fuck it's flown by). Since status updates are way more disposable and insular in nature, not being really available for the public beyond your buddy list and being basically lost after leaving your profile's front page, I want to make this as a classic blog-style post. Just providing a little context since threads like this obviously became was less common from early 2017 onward, but I still feel they have value.
Blabbin':
I'm about halfway through my 31st year on this rock. Had a lot of experiences in that time and just want to ramble about them. I welcome anyone to join in this thread with questions or comments, or just whatever post you might want to make that's ostensibly related. NOTE: Things are gonna get a little personal and a potentially a little "dirty" so if that's not for you - steer clear.
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Communication Breakdown
When my ex-wife and I ended our relationship in 2017, I had already been going through a couple years of feeling just.. Generally displeased with myself, pretty dumpy in appearance, just not tending to a bunch of aspects of myself and letting them fall into disrepair, and I mean both physically and mentally. My wife and I were very much in love for the first half of our marriage (lasted a bit over 5 years), and even through the end of our relationship we still very much cared about each other's wellbeing, but it was just clearly not meant to last.
My ex had serious issues with her own appearance and had serious trust issues as well. Obviously these are relatable for most people to at least some degree, but my inability to reassure her of her beauty (with any sort of "staying power" at least) led to huge, and frankly emotionally painful bouts of having absolutely NO sex. Sex is obviously just one aspect of a loving relationship, BUT It made me feel as though she wasn't attracted to me, even though she usually assured me that wasn't the case, but I feel it was also responsible for another issue we had fairly often: her accusing me of cheating, based on nothing. (I've never understood the point of cheating.. Just split up if you're that far gone, FFS.)
If I ever went out with a group of friends - which in itself was exceedingly rare, maybe once every 4-5 months or so - Jewel (not her "real" name, but I always called her that) was always jealous the next day. Essentially, all our outings had to be together, unless I was just with other guys. From the moment we met she told me how much she loved my "manliness", and frankly I was already in the midst of trying to repress a big part of myself, so I tried to wear that face throughout most of our relationship. Not to say I was never soft/understanding, but anything "feminine" (I mean barely feminine, like being "too emotionally sensitive" or whatever) was a big turn off for her, due to the aforementioned lack of "manliness". Hey there repression old bud, how's it going?
It sounds like I'm just whining about this girl by now - I swear that isn't my intention. She is highly intelligent, very funny, and bluntly speaking we fell in love for a reason. She was not an "anti"-this/that/the-other, either. Very open minded when it came to who she was willing to befriend - but of course, that's different from romance and a deep relationship.
We just weren't compatible in the end, and that's OK - by that I mean, no one was really "in the wrong", we're all just playing this life shit by ear - but.. I've just been clamping down on so much of who I am and what I want from life since that relationship began on new year's day 2012 all the way through.. Well, about the end of 2022. I have finally decided to be completely honest with myself for the first time in a long time.
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Hiding the Secrets
A little backstory for those interested enough to read this far. As a teenager, I was pretty open with my friends and cohorts at school about being attracted to both sexes. I became sexually active at 14, which is young I know. (but hey, I was already toking the reefer for a year beforehand, so.. to hell with it). Obviously that period of life feels mostly-great on the sexual front if you have a lucky enough home-life to be able to explore that part of yourself with relatively little judgement. Or in my case, if you know which cards to play close to your chest, and which ones you can be a little more loose and open with...
Throughout my pre-teen and teenage years, my parents didn't mind too much that their little well-behaved computer nerd was starting to transfigure into this "hippie goth stoner-type thing", so long as I continued to do alright in school, which I did. They're a pretty open-minded couple and always have been - both born in the mid 50s and LSD tripping hippies themselves back in the day. They cleaned up a little during the 80s and have always presented fairly "normally", but even in my teens I remember them talking about how most of their generation sold out on all their beliefs and wanted to take all the benefits they had away from the upcoming generation: "I lucked out, it's MINE, but you get none!!".
All this is to say: They're pretty damn open minded people and, to be candid, they lean distinctly to the left on most topics. BUT..
My dad was really never that "cool" with, uh, gayness for lack of a better term, with bisexuality and transgender being part of that contingent. Now to be clear - as mind-fucking as it might be - he's actually not some anti-LGBT type, in fact both back then and nowadays, when some douchebag like Tucker Carlstone or Benny Shapeepee (or Bill O'Lielly back in the day) finds his way to my dad's screen talking about the "LGBT+LMNOP agenda!" and whatever other moronic trash like that, my dad will instantly be able to name multiple different ways that what he's saying is not only wrong on the face of it, but is usually also completely hypocritical or impractical. I don't want to represent him as a guy who isn't (at least somewhat) sympathetic/understanding/supportive of "the non-straight types", is what I'm getting at here.
So anyway, back when I was in my mid-teens and I first decided to dye my hair deep purple, my mom was just perfectly OK with it (she's definitely the free spirit of the two lol) and my dad "didn't mind" it, but clearly wasn't a fan. Then I got my ear pierced.. He didn't like that either. Then another year went by and I got my hair cut into a mohawk, and this is where I finally just started getting too "out there" for him and we had a pretty big argument. He's a great man though - that night he apologized to me for trying to control my trajectory and if anything our bond was made tighter.
Similarly, my (7 years older) brother and I also had a heated argument with him about why gay marriage should be legal, and there was a similar process of him thinking about it for the day and apologizing and making peace with us. I feel bad about casting him as a "cause of bad feelings" in my life as he has truly done his best throughout all stages of life to be a loving father and husband. Still though man - when a role model who you see as a great person occasionally but consistently says stuff one might call "shitty and bigoted", it's hard to not internalize all that, even if it's purely unintentional.
Right around that same time, 2007ish, my grandma came over one day and saw I was wearing eyeliner alongside the 'hawk and pretty much instantly gave me a talk about "not falling to any of that gay business". Now granted, this was 16 years ago and she was born in the 1930s, so expecting a bastion of progressiveness in mid-2007 would have been stupid anyway, but it still hurt because she didn't really understand that she was asking me to just shut a big part of my brain off. I just agreed with her, but I felt very low.
It's bizarre - my father, my grandma, and my uncles on BOTH sides of the family are not "anti gay" in that they always vote for the pro-gay-marriage candidate and that kind of thing. As mentioned, my dad can usually refute all the shit that gets said on Fox News (and co) about it. On top of all that, my family was and has always been very loving of me/eachother in general.. But there was always that flipside, where my dad and my uncles would complain about TONS of little pro-gay things that just added up to tell me that life would be easier if I worked on repressing that side of myself.
As readily as he'd argue with a Faux News meat puppet, my dad would also condemn things like "gay days" at Disney as he called it, or when pride-related stuff would come on TV. "Yeah yeah, all that faggy shit is fine, but don't make me look at it for fuck's sake!" kind of remarks.. I guess you could call it dismissive, but definitely falling well short of hateful. The irony is that if Tuck said that same shit, my dad would be the first one to say "change the channel then, you moron".
So, yeah.. Between all of my grandparents and uncles being "not that cool" with it, as well as my dad, I just didn't want to rock the boat. They clearly thought it should be legal and didn't consider it "immoral" exactly, but they frowned on it, which meant they would frown on me. I didn't want to do anything that might disrupt the tight-knit fabric of my family. It felt like it would be selfish to risk it all for my own wants and desires, so when I was getting to my 18th birthday I pretty consciously decided to clamp down on that aspect of who I am, what I am attracted to, and how I express myself. I landed on repression being the most reasonable approach.
It's funny though in a way because the "more conservative" version of myself I decided to become is still a complete weirdo, heh
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Out of mind --> Out of my mind --> Out Back
13 years of attempting to downplay or deny thoughts you have fairly consistently doesn't take the whole 13 years to grind away at your mental state. It can start right away, or even before you consciously realize what you're doing. I was dating my first girlfriend Krista for about 2 years in highschool, and was DEEPLY in love with her, or at least the closest thing a teenager feels to "true love". When that fell apart (at the young, innocent age of 17) I was already deeply upset, and between the general raging hormonal irrationality of being a teenager and being unsure whether or not I could continue to present as the person I really am or an altered version of that, I kinda started losing my mind.
I always made it clear to my parents and family they were not why I did these things, but I tried overdosing on sleeping medications multiple times at school. My last year at WPHS (11th grade) was stunningly awful, my grades were all like D to D+ from a student that used to average B+ the years prior. I got a reputation as someone who was still "kind/sweet", but also very unstable. I was lucky to have close friends that never ditched me when I was a disgusting mess.
I eventually got expelled one day for setting a trash can on fire inside one of the bathrooms. I wasn't trying to burn the school down or hurt anybody - frankly, I have no idea what the fuck I was doing or thinking. I was being a stupid little drugged-up dumbass, no other way around it, but to be fair, the school made a way bigger deal out of it than it really warranted and decided expelling me wasn't enough, but actually threatened legal action, even though no one was harmed and no damage was done. Afterward, with my parents help of course, I tried going to a few different "schools for people who can't go to normal school" and although I didn't have much trouble there, they were drug testing and I was hitting up the drugs pretty hard at this point.
The drug testing didn't matter too much anyway in the end - it was becoming clear to my parents and I that continuing to live in Florida was untenable for a multitude of reasons. In addition to my personal struggles, my mom and dad had several excellent reasons to leave America. She broke her neck in 1995 when I was not yet 4, she developed tumors in her feet in the early 2000s, and she fell and broke her back in 2009 alongside a bunch of other lesser health issues over the years - she's always been pretty goddamn broken down, and it only got worse over time. The US's system of "rape you in the ass financially for the inevitability we all face of declining health" was making it so we were barely scraping by.
Furthermore we never owned a house in Florida, and rights for tenants are a fucking joke in that country. They were ALWAYS trying to assfuck us out of our deposits despite being very clean and tidy. Oh and worker's rights in the US? Another fucking joke. It's the lowest rated "first world" country by just about every metric. Escape was the only option, that's just the fact of the matter.
My dad was born in Australia and spent his first 20 years of life here, so I was born with a dual-citizenship. Although my mom wasn't a citizen in early 2009 (when we moved from FL to AUS), it "only" took a couple of years as she has been married to an Aussie for decades and has two sons that are Australian citizens. Other than finances being stretched thin, moving over here helped the 3 of us so much. Leaving behind the family in FL - brother and his wife, uncles, grandma, cousins - was hard and continues to be to this day, but I just barely escaped with my sanity in-tact, my mother barely escaped with her body in-tact, and my father barely escaped without financial debt eating his soul.. we DID escape though, and life instantly started improving for all of us.
LOL - WPHS actually sent a cop after us just a few weeks after we moved! They somehow ended up at my older brother's house in Florida, and he was like "dude, they're in Australia, and I moved out years ago. Not my business!" and the cop just kind of bumbled off, or at least that's how my brother described it.. HA, get fucked, cunts! We got away!
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Bottled up peace is fragile
Adjusting to high school life in Australia in 2009 was stunningly easy. All I had was half a year of 11th grade and all of 12th grade, and I can say I could never even conceive of a school this laid-back and accommodating of its students back home. At Winter Park high, the entire school looked like a gigantic prison that just happened to have some trees around. There's an 8 ft high fence with barbed wire for christ's sake, at least one armed police offer on campus (even before school shootings started becoming outright trendy over there) not to mention the underpaid black man who struggled with alcoholism that they employed as a "guard" to chase after kids who would commit the CRIME of trying to leave school early.
Being able to go to and leave the campus whenever I wanted was something that blew my goddamn mind once I got to Australia. Obviously you couldn't leave class whenever you wanted, but if you started feeling like shit halfway through the day, you'd just go and tell the remaining teachers you had for the day so they knew you weren't "pointlessly skipping" and you were all good. You still had to make up your work, but it was just crazy to me how a school that was so much more permissive ALSO just happened to enjoy a much more happy and pleasant vibe, very few fist fights and stuff, and generally fostered an environment that made students WANT to learn and hang around the campus.
God damn, I still miss that school just thinking about it! The contrast between the fucking prison in Winter Park and the school in Canberra was insane, honestly. My grades went right back up to solid B+ average, and stayed there til I graduated 12th grade, for what it's worth. I never gave that much of a shit about actual grades anyway, but I just never found schoolwork that painful in general (other than math) since learning is fun...
I met some very cool people at this school, one of whom I am still very close friends with today (he was in the grade above me). Through meeting him in 2009, I eventually met his band in 2010 - a band called Punishment, which had a bunch of incredibly talented musicians all 5 to 15 years older than ourselves. I was already a mediocre guitarist since 2006 and "MIDI tinkerer" since 2004, but this had a huge impact on my life. Without going through each and every one of our adventures or the various (very strange) women I hooked up with after gigs (there's time for that in future blog posts), I joined an adjacent band called The Devilz Work and my passion for music - which was already huge - became a fundamental part of who I am. If I were asked what religion I belong to, my answer would be "Musician", just like Zappa.
From 2010 to late 2013, we played gigs fairly regularly and our bands met up and rehearsed at least once a week. Through friends of friends at a party with my bandmates, I met Jewel (who the opener of this blog is about), and generally during this period of my life I was pretty wild and drinking a lot, but I was very happy overall. Playing gigs and seeing as many as 100 or as few as 10 people in the crowd was always so fun, no matter the turnout or if we were on the "graveyard shift" of the concert.
The whole reason I left that scene behind was to move to a new city (Melbourne, AU) to live with Jewel.. and that's where things began to take a down turn. I was coping "ok" with repression, because my life was very enjoyable otherwise. But having already been crushing one part of myself, then having to essentially abandon another part of myself was just too much in the long run, even with the deep companionship we shared for those first few years.
Life was "mostly peaceful" til our last year together - 2017 to be clear - where it became very much NOT peaceful. We did end things fairly amicably, but it was a really rough and dirty road fought with loud arguments on that last 12-18 months...
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Damage Assessment
In mid 2017, a few months after Jewel and I getting divorced, I pretty much was grossed out by what I saw in the mirror. I had been for a while anyway, but I just somehow managed to accept it when I had a partner. Being alone though, I started taking a whole new perspective on it.. I was living 9 hours away from the nearest family I had (and had been since late 2013), and the only friends I had were "surface level" friends at work, other than two particularly sweet gents I knew named Sammy and LJ - but even they lived over an hour away, so seeing them outside of work was a rarity.
I drank a lot for about a year straight to just shut everything off when I was at home between shifts. My house become really untidy, as did my mind and my body. I would have a toke of reefer here and there ever since goddamn 2005, but I started hitting it wayyy too fucking hard during this period. I managed to stay employed consistently, but that was pretty much the only part of my life I felt I had any control over (obviously not true - but it felt like it).
I got REAL fucking fat during this period. I got kinda chonky by late 2014ish, what with being married and all - and felt pretty comfortable with that!.. But this was different, I got so big it was affecting my health, especially on top of my other bad habits. While lonely in 2018 I decided to try online dating, and by sheer luck I met a girl called Teagan who was actually into me at what I considered my worst. She liked how big and "animal like" I was in my disheveled state, put simply. We were happy together, and this did have an overall positive impact on me, but it just wasn't meant to be and lasted shy of a year. In the early half of 2019 we split up.
For fear of falling back into total depression and alcohol reliance (which I was able to quickly get out of while dating Teagan), I decided to move back to the town where my parents lived, the one that was 9 hours away. They had manage to buy a duplex on a nice piece of land near the beach, and when I told them in detail everything that had happened, they were very eager for me to move into the uninhabited half of the duplex that they were using for storage. I needed a network, and as it turned out - with them both being over 60 by then, and my mom's enormous list of medical issues - they needed someone to help care for them and the house. So in may of 2019, I finally ended my 6 year bout in Melbourne and went back to my "home town" in Australia. It was a rollercoaster to say the least, but I've been mostly doing better since 2019.
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Uncertain, but Afloat
Things have been overall mostly-pleasant for me these last 4 years. It's a much more stable and happy era than.. Well, everything from 2008 to about 2018, as far as my personal life goes. That's not to say things are perfect though - I mean, life never is.
My ex Teagan and I continued to stay it touch in a flirtatious sort of "we might get back together some time" kind of way all the way through early 2022. None of it was committal, but it was frequent enough and flirtatious/loving enough that it made me feel like I should just stay the "straight" fat dumpy guy that I had fallen into for years anyway. After all, even though it wasn't ideal, I thought I had companionship sorted and I was comfortably living as far as work/rent/family life was concerned, so this was a fine path moving forward to put my chips on.
..Well, I was kinda right and kinda wrong. Naturally, even though Teagan and I did meet up roughly once a year since we broke up, as of our last meeting in early 2022, it was plainly obvious to me that this was likely to be the last time. My hopes that her feelings for me would rekindle into a loving relationship were finally put to rest, although it's for the best ultimately. She was nothing but sweet to me and definitely wasn't trying to "string me along" or anything like that - I think she finally had the realization herself at that time as well, and her attraction for me was purely physical. I was not her type beyond that. It was a much more disheartened parting than the other times we'd met up since our breakup.
This left me with with yet another reason to assess myself. Not just my own view of myself, which has always been ping-ponged between "ok" and "shitty", but also my viability as a partner for someone else to love and be with. It wasn't a pretty sight. A guy who is overweight, completely disheveled and out of shape. Internally frustrated and just battling that shit in the background of my mind constantly. The one thing I had going for me is that I've been regularly employed since 2012, but that's about it. I did have my guitar and my drums.. which I mostly neglected from 2014 all the way through up to early 2022, with occasional exceptions, but they were dusty, rusty, uncared for, unattended to and forgotten other than random, very infrequent urges. Just like another big part of me.
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I know this book is way overdue, but I'd like to return it please. Yes, I'll cover the cost.
For the last 6 months, I've finally been slowly but surely practicing a modicum of self care. I went to the gym for a couple months, got burned out on it, but am back on working out again (not at the gym, which is better) for the last 3 weeks and really want to just make it a part of my lifestyle from here on out, rather than some passing thing that just results in me falling back down into a pile of self-hating crap. Doing so will help me to lead a much better life.. and it's not about being some kind of "beacon of perfect mind and fitness". LOL, absolutely not, it's not realistic for me and I don't even want that. I just want to have a little more control over my body and my mind. I want mental and physical strength, and being happy with what I see in the mirror surely will be a big part of that.
In the last year, I have managed to lose over 100 pounds, but I still do need to build up a fair bit of muscle from where I've let myself get pretty lame since leaving Melbourne, where I had a very physical job that kept me pretty buff despite being a fat fuck (think Wario, but with regular human proportions). I'm about halfway through my journey of getting my body to be where I want it. I feel good about it. Not great yet -- but good.
Being in a position where I'm starting to become comfortable with my appearance again for the first time in a long time, where I'm financially stable, has helped me so much. It's helping me to become comfortable with the full breadth of my sexuality and identity as well.
I occasionally do have those deeply negative emotional bouts, I'm currently medicated for depression with prescribed marijuana and have been for a while now, but a consistent struggle throughout my whole life as far as I can remember has been irrationally high highs and low lows, even when I was as young as 10. I switch between feeling confident and comfortable in public to suddenly feeling totally insecure about what my friends think of me, based on hardly fucking anything. However, I have plenty of happy times with my friends and family, and I have a lot to be grateful for (and am).
It's not just me that goes through this emotional battle, I know so many others do, but I still feel like crap a lot of the time even during what has been one of the most stable years of my life. It's a lot more stable than any other prior era of my life - which is a great thing, and suggests a generally upward trajectory - but feeling bad and feeling like you have no excuse for feeling bad just makes you feel worse. That's a puzzle I'm still grappling with and I'm sure most of you can relate to, but I can't help but wonder if it's just a lifelong burden. I feel more equipped to try now than I have in a long time, and part of that is why I wanted to recount a very condensed version of my life story for you all to enjoy/ignore/be entertained by/be disgusted by/laugh about.
I'm lucky enough to be in a position where buying a home is the next big thing on my life radar, alongside all the other little day-to-day things and trying to re-tame my body and finally stop neglecting so much of my sexuality. As much as I've painted life as a struggle - which I guess is kind of fundamental to life anyway - I'm very lucky to be where I am now, and I realize that.
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Lifelong Doom Community Membership / Conclusion of insufferable rant
I can't even put into words how much this game, and the community, all the modders and mappers, but also people who just hang around and chat n play, mean to me. It's been a cornerstone of my life for a quarter of a century now. It's so generic to say this these days, but god damn, this game and the people who make the community what it is have seriously, seriously helped me get through some of the lowest lows of my life, and greatly enhanced some of the highest highs. There are people around here I've known and mingled with for so many years, and even a handful who I expect / hope will be friends with me for many more years to come.
I've put a fair bit of myself into my work and a lot of myself into my presence on Doomworld as well, but this is by far the most candid, long-winded and over-sharing thing I've ever written on here. The handful of long, LONG time veterans probably gleaned at least a little of this over the years - I mean, I have made some personal posts, blog posts, and even got into those long-winded political arguments all the goddamn time back when they were a bigger part of what this site was about, so the long-timers know where I'm coming from to some degree.
Really though, my role in this community has never been to make these kinds of semi-emotional over-sharey type blogs. I've been here to try and teach others all I know, to try and provide resources to players and mappers of all kinds, places to upload wads and play deathmatches, things like the big vanilla wad pack, solo episodes, community projects, make YT videos about Doom, all that fun stuff.. Basically trying to reciprocate all the things so many Doomers over the years have done both directly and indirectly for me. Give and take!
By and large I see this as an outlet for all of us collectively getting away from reality for a while, which is why like 80% of my interactions have been "above the board and Doomy in nature". I've been kinda AWOL lately though, and I want you guys to understand why things like Jamal Jones and the Big Vanilla Wad Pack are so overdue for updates, beyond just computer troubles/everday life/being in the process of buying a home. I've had a lot on my mind. I'll be back on the modding and mapping, and even YouTube horse soon - just gotta let the mental tides calm down a little and get on with what needs doing "IRL" as they say, keeping my Doomy time to just enjoying myself and relaxing rather than actively working on stuff.
Having recently decided to retake control, and finally doing away with as much self-imposed repression as I can, I've had so much crap swirling around up there that I just needed to dump it, admit things, be honest with myself and my life to anyone who even vaguely cares or would be entertained by it. It had to go somewhere, and even though it's not my norm to do so on DW, I decided to have a giant brain dump here.
I really hope you guys don't mind or don't find this incredibly insufferable and fart-sniffy, offputting or anything like that. If anything I'm hoping we can have some fun or thought provoking chats, and that some of you might share your own experiences with me and with the rest of us. This is way cheaper than a therapist, a lot less boring, and frankly I really don't think I need one anyway.
