» Tue Aug 07, 2012 6:29 pm
I'm chained down due to legal shenanigans for the time being. No job, no prospects, full-on NEET until I can at least acquire an ID card and a GED to start working my way up in the world with a 2-year. A few years ago, I was a much... Well, a much cooler person. I taught myself sword-fencing from watching videos of masters and reading books on the subject, until I could at the very least put on a show and spar well (idk how well my skills would hold in real combat), taught myself to hunt small game with a bow and dagger (but I broke three bows as my draw strength improved and they were all fairly cheap, since my family was pretty poor, then broke a fourth that I made myself that was pretty terrible anyway), ran several miles a day, wrote ten pages single-spaced with normal margins minimum on the various novels I was writing (never finished one, but I got three past 200 pages and one almost complete at about 400 before I ran out of steam- I originally wanted to try publishing over Amazon, but real life concerns overshadowed my ability to focus on a story long enough to finish), had some amount of Internet celebrity for some minour solo programming projects I did here and there and read a book every day or two. I had school for much of this time, mind you, but I also only slept about two hours a night and kept myself going with caffeine; Every week or two I'd sleep twelve hours on a random night to make up for it, but still save a lot of time I felt was wasted sleeping. During this time I also played less videogames than any other point during my life.
As serious advlt issues, the expectation for me to support my family (followed by the failure of that family to give me the means to support them), the lack of money and so forth piled up, I became sedate and more dependent on a small circle of friends than on myself.
When I roleplay, I feel the same dynamism and rush as I did doing things I enjoyed during that period in my life- Once again, I'm out hunting (though the roleplaying environment allows me to hunt humans as well without much penalty or, in most cases, remorse), or I'm sparring with swords, or I'm simply going out for hours and exploring. I'm talking to people, manipulating them, exerting my will on the world, and most importantly, I'm weaving a new story that doesn't involve my constant care, attention and recollection to keep consistent, and again I'm the fifteen-year-old with a cool attitude that always knows exactly what he wants from the world, not the eighteen-year-old who spends most of his time just waiting for the chance to be that person again.