Mourning

The story of my life isn't but the story of the stories I choose to remember, imagine, reinvent, and tell. Some of them get better and more detailed as time goes by. Others, richer in pain, gloomier and darker. Others cease to exist as I no longer feel interest for them. And others have a special place in my heart, because I was never able to remove the knife.

"I mourn my mother. I mourn my other mother. I mourn so many people that are still alive. When did my life turn into a cemetery of living dead?"

This story is also published in The Night Corner

No outfit credits this time. I logged off before thinking of writing that down. From the top of my head, I'm wearing Coco's Doll, hair is from Truth (Felicity?), the corset is from Zenith, the headdress from Baiastice, the necklace from Maxi Gossamer, the wings are from Remarkable Oblivion, and the Spider from DRD (which I can't remember what brand is.) Oh, and the pose is mine, from the Dark Valentine set.

UPDATE - OUTFIT CREDITS

Mesh body: Coco Doll (Bandage & Cut), from Coco (Cocoro Lemon)
Mesh hands: Coco Doll, Hands (1), from Coco (Cocoro Lemon)
Mesh ears: Coco Doll, Ears (Human), from Coco (Cocoro Lemon)
Mesh head: Coco Doll, Head 002A, from Coco (Cocoro Lemon)
Mesh eyes: Coco Doll, Eyes 002 (Blue), from Coco (Cocoro Lemon)

Hair: Felicity, Reds, from Truth
Corset: Orianna Lace Dress, Black (Coco Doll Size), from Zenith
Headpiece: Dahlia hat, black, from Baiastice
Necklace: Misha Dark Fairy, Chocker, from Maxi Gossamer
Spider: Spider face, from DRD (Death Row Designs)
Wings: Eternity Wings, Carnal, from Remarkable Oblivion

Poses: Dark Valentine #2 - Mirror, Dark Valentine set, Black Tulip (mine)

Insanity (Art exhibit)

Insanity is an inspiring art exhibit. It presents a suggestive scenario, open to interpretation and to creating your own stories. I'm so saturated of the mainstream "cutesy", that the visit has been healing, in some levels. Don't get me wrong: I like cute, even on the silly side. But there's just so much I can take of it. So I went to visit this place, I made up a dark and depressing tale, and I ended up happy as a kid in a candy store with budget enough as to develop cavities.

Now, of course, it's time of putting all the pictures together, reviewing the text in case I want to add/correct something, and be happy again. Happiness is sure a good thing. You all should try it, if you haven't already :-)

Insanity

"So you want to learn how it is the descent to darkness? You've come to ask to the most appropriate one. But I have to warn you of something: Should you decide to follow that path, beware that the deeper you are in the darkness, the lonelier you'll find out you've ever been."

"It may start as a slight disappointment. You suddenly realize that you cannot trust as you wanted, and slowly it turns into a way to resentment."

"Resentment twists the way you perceive the world. Your emotions are intensified. A small gesture, regardless of intention, is deformed into a threatening situation that will attack you, will attack you... And why nobody else can see it?"

"Laments about the world being against you, sure are strange creatures. They are attracted to other laments, but even though they share the same space and tend to be quite of a crowd, none of them is actually listening but to the constant whining of their own minds, minds that, at this stage, have crossed the first door that puts them further from a rational view of the world."

"It will happen. You will eventually bite and push away the few ones that still try to help you at that point. Sooner or later you will scream why nobody gives a damn for your feelings. The slam in the door as they leave you behind is the sound that your mind will do when it finally abandons all sanity."

"Look at yourself. Now. Tied to your altered emotions, the only that's left after all you've destroyed. Was it worth the loss? Still, you have a last chance. Will you cover your eyes too with your current ties, or will you use the keys that were always within you? It is your last chance to decide, and there's not much time left. If you don't use the keys, your mind alone will close your eyes to reality, forever. There's no way back."

"How do I know all this, you ask? It's a good question. But, see, I am just a storyteller. How else could I know?"

Today is my birthday, in that world we call "real". I'm now 37 years old.

However, I would prefer if you don't say "happy birthday." Not yet. I've come to hate my birthday over the years. Intensely. I didn't feel there was anything to celebrate. My world had made clear that it would be a better place if I wasn't in it, and I had no other world to go to. My birthday wasn't but a reminder. Adding to the irony, I was born on the day when my country, Spain, celebrates its own "April Fools" sort of day. Everything in my life was a big joke, from its very start.

Perhaps I had true reasons to feel hurt and despair. Perhaps not. Perhaps I was somewhere in between my pain being justified, or it not being justified at all. In any case, there was something that remained true: I could not realize there was a world for me as long as I continued dwelling in feeling deeply hurt.

When I joined SL, on April 16th, 2009, I was 32 years old, and I didn't know I was sick. I was indeed naive enough to think that I was starting to recover from all the physical tiredness that had hit me like a truck three years before, after happenings that do not matter here. If anything, my first months in SL were a reflection of how lost I was feeling in my own life. I came to SL because building and creating particle effects were appealing to me, especially after someone in RL showed me the possibilities. It seemed like the perfect kind of distraction that my mind needed. But I was lost. I rezzed prims and I didn't know what to do with them. My mind was a huge black screen.

At this point in my writing, I also feel lost. It's not that I don't know what to say next. I have been writing and rewriting, noticing how something I learned after being in SL for a while, was more ingrained in me than I thought.

I wanted to explain why I had this intense dislike for my birthday over the years. I also wanted to explain why I felt lost in both worlds, and the course of events that made things change. But every road I took was leading me to give away too much of my past, of my life, my pain. Something I have learned is that I own the words I do not say. I have also learned since I'm on the Internet, but even more since I am in SL, that there are many predators out there. Predators are quick in pointing fingers at someone else while deciding their next victim, or draining their current victim's soul. Predators also often cover themselves in a victim costume.

I don't trust easily, if at all. You don't need to know the reasons. Likely, you would not believe my story, so if I told it, that would only serve predators and their dark purposes. I also don't want that you know about my pain. My pain is mine. It belongs to me. I do not consent that predators take on my pain for a cause they can use to manipulate others, or myself. I prefer to tell you a story of hope instead.

In the middle of feeling over the edge, wounded and wary of everybody, perfecting my own master plan that was leading me to my self destruction (body and mind), somebody slipped through all my defenses. I still don't know how he made it, but he did. One student, in SL, that was already on my radar because of his kindness and his sense of humor, asked me out to dance one night. I don't know why I took a picture then, but now I'm glad I did, because I keep a memory of that moment.

We started dating as summer started in 2011. We did as any other couple of lovers does. Talking, dancing, exploring places and exploring ourselves. Then Christmas arrived and I broke over my birthday. Again. But he didn't let me fall into darkness. By that time, he was already an important part of my life. Separated by an ocean, closer than anybody calling themselves "friend" in my "real world" could ever be.

His concern was honest, and part of a "wake up call" that I so much needed. As 2012 went by, I worked more and more in my SL store, which meant a sense of feeling useful to a community and to myself, and so I began stopping the strong desire of self destruction. Writing scripts and books for designers keeps your mind busy with much more pleasant thoughts. Or at least, with other than destructive thoughts.

It may seem irrelevant, but in order to stop with your own self destruction, you have to first really want it to stop. This doesn't mean that once you reach to this realization, everything will magically be fixed. Oh, no. A long path of repairing everything that's broken, if possible, waits for you. You will have to reverse all the habits that were being harmful to your health, physically and mentally, not to mention all the obligations that were neglected for a long time. It looks like so much to do, that you will never be able to achieve it.

What to do?

Start anywhere. It doesn't matter where, when there's so much to fix. It matters that you will be making a step in a direction that will help you. Clean a room. Go see a doctor. Dig out one square meter of weeds. Today you sleep eight hours instead of four. Just pick one so you start to do something.

Yes, everything seems too big and unattainable right now. Today you go to the bank to pay some back taxes, and you are told that you also have to pay for some more things. Today you clean a room and in the way find out that something is broken. You start taking iron because of the anemia, and the next day you will not notice a difference. You're still weak. The car needs repairs. A machine breaks and you discover a mess because of the water. A spider bites your foot while cleaning weeds, and it makes it so swollen that you can't even walk. It seems that your goal will never be within your grasp, and that you've just opened a can of worms that grows worse each day.

However, if you don't give up, you will notice something interesting: your strength is slowly coming back, life is always tough but you have less things to take care of. You even begin having some time for entertainment.

I started taking care of myself by mid September, 2012. My first goal was my sleep. Nowadays, unless we're talking about a critical emergency (hospital, evacuation...), nothing is going to take from me my seven-eight daily hours of sleep. Nothing is more important than that. If I have one less item to release, so be it. If I have to go shopping for food in the evening rather than in the morning, that's what will happen. But my sleep is sacred. If I don't have rest, I am good for nothing, and "good for nothing" defeats the fight against self destruction.

I haven't finished fixing what there is to fix. I broke so much that I now have to continue working hard. My partner in SL is a constant support. We live a quiet life that helps me in my personal struggle. Visiting places, shopping, and then talking a lot. I've never felt attacked by him and up to this date, I can't recall of a single disagreement that finished in saying things that were later regretted. We've barely needed to say "I'm sorry."

As peace started to enter in my life, I felt I could start to open a bit to the world. SL-related, the first thing I did was to participate in the SL feeds. I started following some people that I had already been reading for a long time in the forums. There's a radical sector that considers a few of these people I follow, no less than Satan's spawn. My being friendly to them, of course, turned me into another of those Satan's spawn. That didn't came as a surprise to me. I've been observing radicals for long enough to know what they would do, and at that point I was strong enough to just ignore their hate.

For somebody like me, always curious about why people do, think and behave the way they do, that extremely narrow view of the world is amusing, up to some extent. It's like observing a three year old, starting to learn the world, needing to have clear and very simplified "right" and "wrong" lines for their toddler minds. The sad part is that this behavior is observed in alleged adults. Their huge corpus of prejudices don't let them realize that the people they slander are often smart, fun, and with an uncomfortable habit of making you think about what you don't want to think: your own preconceptions. So the people they slander could actually teach them a lot about life. But they prefer instead to cover their ears, sing "lalalalala I can't hear you," and are quick in screaming that you are what your friends are. Although I find that simplistic view of life quite laughable, one thing is for sure: I prefer to be surrounded by smart and fun people, than by radicals full of anger and hate. If something has to permeate my life from people that surround me, I prefer it to be a smile and a brain. In the end, I'm trying to run away from self destruction, not return back to it.

Participating in the SL feeds brought very good things to my life. One of those things was to know a few people that were also fighting their own personal struggles, not making an "oh poor me" public spectacle of it, but rather, making others smile despite their own pain. In a way, they helped me, and I cannot thank them enough for the example they set.

Participating in the SL feeds also brought something back to my life. I have always liked, wanted, to write. One of my dreams is that some day I will write a book, but not a technical one. Perhaps essays, or perhaps a novel. Perhaps both. Writing was interrupted by... it doesn't matter what, and now thanks to SL I again have a chance, plus a medium that inspires me through its landscapes and people. SL also gave me the ability to convey some feelings through images, something that I never thought I could do, and the SL feed lets me share all that in a way that is safe to me.

Yes, despite my introverted and reserved nature, I'm also human, and I also want to share what I feel is important to me. It's just, whiners, "victims" and attention whores occupy so much space with their laments and their "it's all about me!" screams... How could I dare ask for a chance to share, for my own space?

My partner had the answer to that: You do not ask for a chance to share. You stop being shy and put yourself out there.

That is not easy for me to do. This may sound stupid, but I often feel like the most uninteresting, dull person in the world. Why would anybody want to read me? Still, I pushed myself. If I was really uninteresting and dull, that would be for everybody else to decide.

And so, with my "second" and "real" lives intertwined, I realize that as my birthday arrives and the year is about to come to an end...

I have saved a garden that was about to die. Nature is grateful and when I now look around, I see no more death, but green and flowers instead. I have started to fix "bureaucracy issues" that were delayed for years. I eat better. I sleep good. I survive in RL thanks to my work in SL, while the economic situation in my country is still critical. I have learned modelling in 3D (something I wanted to do since I was 17)... and I am even teaching about it! I'm writing again, sharing it, no longer thinking that I am uninteresting and dull. I have lost 20 kilo since summer (about 44 pounds), which is making me feel very good on several levels, and is helping me feel stronger. I have made the first step in rebuilding some personal relationships that were broken, and let others approach me again. I have realized that it is not true that everybody wants me dead. Some people even love me. And I also begin to like myself, to smile at the woman that looks at me every morning in the mirror.

True, there is a lot yet to fix, and other things will break along the way. But for the first time in my life, I feel like celebrating that I am alive. I don't want to dwell in the pain. I want to feel that living is worth it. Join me, if you so wish.

Happy birthday, me!

IMAGE: Happy birthday!, in Flickr

Also published in Connecting 365 SL Lives

Life and Death

Single Frame Stories' challenge is here again. The prompt this time is "Life and Death". My first impulse was building a picture with a caption like "Life. Death. Often separated by just a bad decision". I could see a suicide as a part of the picture, but I hadn't much time to prepare everything. I'm not proficient with textures yet, and the avatar would have required a specific blood bath for my idea, which I hadn't the time to learn to do.

Still, the idea was appealing to me, and while preparing to resume with my classes, I gave a go to modelling a dagger. The dagger came out good (except the texture - I really suck at that), and so next I made the pose. So far so good, but not too credible as a whole. I tried, and although not an "omg I feel so proud!" work, I made a very modest tattoo layer with the blood tears:

With them, I was finally ready to make the first picture. However, I took a different decision about the caption. I preferred the following:

"I know. Nobody saw it coming. They need to see the blood. If there's no blood, there has to be no pain."

No blood... No pain?, in Flickr

Life has pain waiting for us in every corner. At times we stumble against those corners and we get hurt, at times, no. Some people make a world of being victimized because they were scratched and have a little bruise, demanding that everybody pays attention to them and their "unbearable pain". Others hide truly deep, unbearable pain behind a smile, and we never realize until it's too late. For them.

The latter is the case that worries me, and made me to revisit some unanswered questions from my teens. They've remained unanswered for so long, I wonder if they're perhaps rhetorical and that's why nobody wants to give me an answer. I mean, an answer that goes further than a self indulging nod about "how people are", as if they weren't people too.

Are we really so emotionally impaired, that we cannot see when someone next to us is hiding their pain? Do we really need to see their soul bleeding, to realize that something is wrong? Is it the influence of the full-time whiners that makes us insensitive, blind and deaf to the pain suffered in silence by those that prefer not to make it public?

Questions. I'm always making questions about life. I'm not so arrogant as to proclaim that there's "a meaning of life", secretly wishing it suits specifically my whims and nobody else's, because life doesn't make any sense, nor it has to. Life happens before you've had a chance of being asked "do you want to live and face all this absurdity?" You're pushed into this world, and next you know is "go survive". Why would life have a meaning that suits me, exactly, me, from all the millions of people in the world? Believing that life "has a meaning" will make you more miserable, vulnerable, as life hits you with its whimsical, random nonsense.

The idea of life not having a meaning challenges our understanding. Everything seems to have a reason. Everything happens for a reason. Therefore, life should have a meaning. But life just happened. The odds of life, happened. They could have not happened. I know many people that feel uneasy at the idea of life not having a meaning. I'm okay, though, with the Universe running its own course. I just try to live with it, find out what I want to do with my life, and for that, I made myself responsible of the decisions I take everyday, instead of leaving the responsibility to "the odds", whatever name you want to give to it. And I practice one of my favorite sports. I cry to the wind, one after the other, questions, questions. So many questions.

Many of those questions are difficult. Ethical dilemmas. I realize that few people are able to debate about them keeping their cool. Some hate me for having merely posed the questions. It's sad. I haven't found yet an answer to any of those questions, any of those ethical dilemmas. I haven't found answers that remained valid as I've grown older, and each time I meet less people with whom I can safely talk about the questions. Many seem to have everything so clear in their lives. I envy them. My life is full of uncertainty, of uncomfortable questions. I can't take anything for granted. Love. Friends. Trust. My principles. Myself. Everything changes. Everything begins and ends, often before I have time to understand what happened, before I have a chance to realize what's going on.

There's only one certainty I have about life: Eventually, I will die. That's how I came up with the second picture I submitted, which also has a second meaning in its caption:

"Certainty is Death. Life is only all the distressing questions that lead us to the end point."

Certainty is Death, in Flickr

The first meaning is clear. It's basically a literal interpretation of the caption. The second, maybe not so much.

Certainty is Death. Our critical sense dies when we're sure, persisting in an stubborn manner, about what tomorrow could change. Pretending that there's absolute certainty about what tomorrow could be different, kills your ability to adapt, to evolve. To survive. In a way, I feel that to be certain about what is uncertain in its nature, kills us before our time. We're going to die anyway: I prefer living with uncertainty, making questions, than with the false comfort that emerges from the arrogant certainty of taking everything that could change, for granted, without a change.

Incidentally, all the work made to prepare those two pictures materialized into new releases for the store. Double-Win. So, if you like the poses/wearables, this weekend is a good moment to get them at promo price. I'd like to see what pictures you do, what stories you build with them. Would you share, by adding them in the store's group Flickr page? I'd love if you do.

Have a great weekend :-)

I believe

"I Believe", in Flickr.

This is my submission for Single Frame Stories, under the "I Believe" prompt. At first I thought of overlaying text on it saying "I do not believe", the word "believe" being over the blindfold, but once I've chosen the pose and the lighting, I've thought "no need to". I think the message is clear enough.

I like next prompt, "Life and Death". It leaves room for many ideas.

One picture, one story

I wrote my first own story when I was 15. It was three pages (small letter), and I was quite excited about it. Even more: I felt proud, for I was 200% sure that I was a complete disaster in any aspect of life, so those three pages in my hands could mean something. I hesitated, but I finally gave that story to my father for him to read it. He came back five minutes after. In a stern look, he just said "stop wasting time and our effort in this nonsense" and gave me the story back.

His answer didn't stop me from writing stories. It only taught me to hide from him and my mother when I felt like writing, for any other activity than studying in my room was forbidden since then. I didn't produce much anyway: the stress of their often irruptions (it was also forbidden for me to close the door), almost literally breathing behind my neck to make sure I wasn't doing any other than commanded, wasn't too inspiring.

A few years later, I trusted someone as to show this first story. His reply caught me by surprise, for I never thought I could be writing more than just a story. He realized, and he was right, that the dark creatures from the story were indeed representing my parents. He knew about my situation at my parents' (a place I never called "home") but still, or perhaps because of that, encouraged me to continue writing. Maybe he knew more than I could see at that moment, that letting my mind fly free could help me relieving from the stress that was living with my parents.

Years go by, life has many twists, and I don't get any real chances of trying again to write. The "need to" is there, but the situations to face don't leave much space to it. I land into SL, and slowly, I begin doing it again: writing. Now I'm adult enough as to know that I have to please no one with my writings. It's something between my mind and me. As I've mentioned other times, I'm well aware I'm not too prolific. I wish I could. I try.

Although I'm a bookworm and a fan of text, I'm enjoying the possibilities in SL to create images that tell a whole story, then think a brief caption summarizing every detail, and leave the rest to the imagination of everybody else reading it. I'm sure that everybody else's interpretation would differ of my true intention behind the caption, and that makes it even more interesting.

This week it seems I'm on a roll (for my usual production time), and I've made this twice.

For (Topless) Tuesday, I played a bit with some poses in a prop-room, and when I saw myself lying on the floor, I couldn't avoid thinking of a junkie needing the next dose and despising herself as to give her body to the first stranger that came in just to have it. My mind jumped immediately from "physical drugs" to "psychological drugs," as the need of company and attention when this need is sick, the denial to oneself of the real solitude once in that self destructive spiral, and the caption basically wrote itself.

"I could blame it to loneliness. But it's me. I chose the wrong path of opening my doors to strangers. Now I want it to stop, but I'm already tied to my delusion of company. I need more."

(In Flickr: Attention Whore)

I like exploring those feelings, in an attempt to better understand the motivations behind what we could consider "not too sane behaviours". At times I find people wanting to escape from the problem they created themselves and not knowing how to do it, at times I find true monsters that use pity and social conventions to manipulate others. Independently of my opinion about the motivations, I like the journey of trying to understand how the mind works, specially how a sick mind works, how a deluded person lies to themselves to avoid facing the monster that is looking back straight in the eye when they find a mirror.

Then yesterday, I was arranging a small, romantic area for couples, next to the store (open to everybody). A small open "summer house", then outside a table for having dinner, and while sitting on one of the couches, I was trying out night windlight settings that would look good with the table. When one made everything to go dark with the exception of the light coming from outside ("Phototools- Lo Light 01"), I saw the projector light standing out, and again the caption popped in my mind.

"There are moments when my mind shuts the lights off and plays its own movie. That's my clue for break time."

(In Flickr: Hallucination)

I know that I meant at least two things with this caption. One meaning talks about your mind flying, imagining, creating new stories. Take a break and let all that creativity flow. The second meaning, though, is quite darker.

Obsession, depression, paranoia, psychosis... I wonder if people suffering them do realize that their minds turn each time darker in their descent to insanity. As far as I know, in all those cases, people see things that don't exist. These things they see might be feelings ("I hate her, she's horrible", "nobody loves me", "she doesn't deserve that position", "I do everything wrong"...) It might be fabrications about situations that never happened ("you never came to visit me" -when the visit actually happened-, "this is a confabulation against me", "I never attempted to poison my sister", "I fired her because she was stealing" -she caught you stealing and reported it- ...)

At times, the mind snaps and tops the fabricated feelings with the projection into reality of images and sounds that physically aren't there, but they are real, scary real, for you: you hallucinate. Reality and fantasy are now completely mixed up in your perception. It's time to take a break.

Insanity is one big taboo, and perhaps because of that, people are reluctant to be treated when their mind needs a break, and a cure. "If people know this, they'll outcast me, they'll label me forever". And so many run and quickly scream out "I am not crazy!"

Aren't you?

Anyway, I digress. My own clue, to take a break here. Have a great day :-)