Before we venture any further into the unknown, it would be remiss of me not to add this disclaimer: I AM NOT A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL. Every piece of advice I'm going to share with you is anecdotal from my own experiences. Your mileage may - and probably will - vary. I 100% recommend speaking with an actual professional about how you may or may not be feeling right now. If you don't already have a therapist you trust and/or that person isn't doing phone/video sessions at the moment, I'll be compiling a list of resources for y'all (and do please feel free to comment with recommendations). Please note that I will not be on this future list. But as I said in my previous post: if my experiences can help just one person out there find a way to get through this debacle, then I'll lead an expedition through the dark. Right, with that disclaimer out of the way, let's get started. STEP ONE: SET UP BASE CAMP
Gamers, campers, and camping gamers (though if you're that last one, I'd like a word with you) will understand what I'm talking about here. This is the only place on the map without a question mark: the place where you're dropped after the cutscene, the place you fast travel from, the place where you respawn and take long rests. No matter how far you fall back, there is no falling back from here. This is a place you cannot lose: the ring of firelight that protects you from all the creepy crawly things in the dark. When all other coping mechanisms fail, base camp succeeds. In case y'all hadn't already figured it out from my other posts, Alice is my base base camp: the one that succeeds when all secondary waypoints fail (we'll get to waypoints as we move forward). Because Alice was such a key part of my recovery, my brain associates it with calm, stability, and order amongst the chaos. Everything about it is a positive association in my brain. So how do you establish your personal base camp? By finding your positive associations. Go as far back into your past as you have to and dig up the good triggers. You know how sometimes you'll hear a song and immediately remember that one time you and so-and-so sang it in your pajamas or whatever? That's the sort of "good trigger" I'm talking about. Maybe it's a movie you had memorized as a kid, or an album you listened to every night to fall asleep, or a stuffed animal you spilled your hopes and dreams to, or the first video game you won without a walkthrough, or even an activity that just made you feel calm. Does the smell of a certain food remind you of lazy days at your grandparents' house? Why not learn to cook that food? Did you find joy in making houses and rocket ships out of cardboard boxes? Get crafting. You don't have to pick just one. In fact, it's better if you have multiple base camps (Evanescence is my second base camp, as Amy Lee's music also played a huge role in my continued existence). But be sure to test them out first and make sure they're as infallible as they need to be. When you feel even a weensy bit sad or down, hit a base camp option to see how well and how often it works. If your base camp doesn't hold, you want to find that out before things get really bad (though we don't always have that luxury). Most of the examples I've used for base camps are rooted in positive experiences from long past, but your base camp doesn't have to be. Your positive association can be something recent. My hypothesis is that a base camp rooted in an older positive association might be stronger because it's been a part of you longer, but again, that's just from my own experiences. That's great, but what if I don't HAVE a positive association to make a base camp out of? That's perfectly ok, too. It just means you have to find one (we'll get to that, I promise). I didn't have a base camp to fall back to when I was first diagnosed with my neurological disorder. I was well and truly floundering in the dark when I discovered American McGee's Alice, and it became my base camp because of how much it helped me. It might take time, but you'll discover something that helps you, too, and when you find it, hold onto it. I've started streaming a playthrough of American McGee's Alice, which you can find on my Twitch channel. We're not quite far enough into the game for the in-depth explanations of its difference through my eyes, but even if there's not much insight yet, there's hopefully some entertainment. In Step Two, we'll be meeting our guides. Until then, keep on keeping on.
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AuthorA strange little girl who's great with typing but not with speaking. Archives
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