Re: Announcements
Hi all,
I've rested quite well so far but I'm realizing it's not enough yet, so my hiatus must continue. I hope for your continued understanding in pausing at the brink of action. If I do lose players during my hiatus, I'll do my best to make up for it and keep things going, including fast forwarding some threads to bring more people together, and so forth.
I will try to explain to all of you a bit about what it's like being in my situation, not because I'm looking for sympathy, but because I respect my players enough to explain in detail. This is the only game I'm placing the full explanation in, mostly because it's the only one I've addressed my health issues in detail before. And this game also takes up the largest amount of my creative energy!
But if you don't want to read it, just skip the rest. I will check in again in another week or so, assess my health/mood, and see if I'm ready to post then.
I am a person with an unfortunate affliction. I have been diagnosed with major depression, something that has likely been with me since my teenage years (I am now in my early 30s). For about four years now I have been going through a difficult process of immigration to my husband's home country, and due to unforeseen complications I have been unable to continue my depression treatment for four years.
This means that I do not currently have much control over my illness, which is compounded with strong bouts of anxiety, paranoia, and cripplingly low self-esteem. Most of the time, I hardly even leave the apartment. My games are all the 'work' I do for now, which is why I've had so much time to post at an incredible rate in multiple threads.
One of my biggest problems is that I have a difficult time putting my own needs and concerns above others. Besides my illness, I was also raised in an environment that enforced perfectionism, high expectations and frightening, shameful consequences if I failed. I grew up believing that mistakes were to be punished, not a learning experience. I grew up thinking that as long as I was still conscious and physically well enough to get up and work on whatever needed working on, I had to keep doing so until my body failed me. My stress level, my emotional state, these were never considered good enough excuses for resting. Mix this up with the fact I had a severe mental illness (unknown to me until recently) and you end up with the person I am today. More often than not, my thoughts tell me that to gain people's respect, I have to work at it constantly, even at the cost of my own health and sanity.
Before I even found out about my depression, I ended up leaving college not because of my mental state, but because my body had developed an autoimmune disorder (myasthenia gravis). I had to leave school because I was getting double vision, I could no longer talk for long periods because my mouth would get fatigued, and worse yet I couldn't even swallow food properly so I was losing weight at an alarming rate. It's fortunately not an untreatable disorder (I'm in full remission right now), but still, that disease was what started me on the slow and painful path of realizing that the mindset I grew up with could eventually kill me.
Now, fast forward to today. I left the difficult environment that taught me to push myself so hard. I had to leave the country to even have the chance to survive, as the man who is now my husband loved me enough to take the often exceedingly difficult burden of caring for a person like me. Unfortunately, simply leaving was not enough to cure me, because my mind has carried with it all the bad habits I grew up with, and my instinct is still to apply those habits to every new endeavor I attempt.
In the case of my RPoL games: I have essentially pushed myself posting day by day, out of fear I would lose my player base, out of a complete mistrust that my talent alone was good enough to keep people's interest. I believed (and still believe, for the most part) that the posting rate of my game was the biggest attraction that my players liked. But to deliver that, I have let my health suffer. I have given hours upon hours of my time to posting that I could have used to tend to my personal needs. Because it's not like work or school, I don't have set hours for posting, so the only limit for my pace is myself -- and I don't know how to pace myself in a healthy manner when I think that slowing down will mean disappointing my players expectations.
The sad thing is, I actually do enjoy writing, and involving people in my stories. My creative urges are one of the few things that's given me a reason to live, and my RPoL games are by far not the first time I've ever done something like this. But because of my depression, it's hard for me to enjoy these things purely for the sake of enjoyment, without somehow turning it into an obsessive urge to prove myself to others. My ability to have self-worth without that is broken, and that's why I'm in this position now. I'm burned out.
My hope is that my long wait for treatment and medication will be over by this fall, but even then that won't guarantee a quick recovery. Mental illness is never a simple procedure to 'fix'. All I can do is try to learn to heed my limits in the meantime, when my body tells me it needs rest, my mind is too fatigued to create and my emotions too tense to deal with people's concerns. Right now is one of those times. So I will be attempting to take another week of break and see where that takes me. If I don't rest now, I will be forced eventually to shut down all of my games, so this is the only compromise I have. :(
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:14, Tue 09 June 2009.