It’s not easy being me. Many of you can probably say this with a straight face, I’m betting. And it’s the truth. Life is a zero-sum game, no matter which way you decide to look at it.
I’m going to come clean with everyone, in case it hasn’t been readily made apparent already. I was diagnosed a while ago with Asperger’s, a personality disorder that can be classified under high-functioning autism. What it basically means is that out of all my quirks, empathy is my lowest trait. I have an extremely hard time with it. You can guess what this leads to.
I’ve been pontificating a lot lately, and I never seem to write it down. Shit is perpetually hitting the fan, and only now am I deciding to actually chronicle it.
As I said before, life is a zero-sum game. It’s a game that is on the hardest difficulty, you aren’t allowed to stop playing it, and none of the rules are written down. Oh sure, people think they’ve written down the best rules possible, but it’s impossible for everyone to be right at the same time.
It’s one part of the reason why my alias is Red Mage. My life is a game; a neverending series of obstacles, missions, objectives, and the occasional annoying NPC. Happiness is not a state of mind here; it’s an achievement. And I don’t mean achievement like a successful outcome, I mean an achievement like that little point-value blip that you get on your screen when you’re playing a game and do something cool or reach a milestone. And like that blip, happiness is fleeting and temporary. Some people live for those moments; I see them as nothing more than an occasional ray of light in a world marred by figurative darkness.
I’ve gotten to the point where my status ailment has significantly lowered my initiative and ability to take actions. The items that are sold to remedy this don’t take effect until several weeks after they’re taken, and quite frankly I’m too busy fighting demons and completing mandatory missions to bother with any of it.
In the meantime, my strength and constitution decline, my intelligence exponentially rises, and my mana is derived from anger instead of goalsetting. I’ve had way too many instances where I’ve wanted to just drop the controller or quit the game entirely, but something pushes me forward. Whatever it is, I both detest it… and am eternally grateful that it’s there.
And then I realize that I’m the one holding the controller. My thumbs are getting sore.
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