Well greetings from the Wasteland. Have a lot of tasks to do in the non-wasteland but I am choosing a little bit of escape right now.

 

The new fishing in the game is fun and I actually caught one of the local Legends just now. For those of you playing along at home it was the Organ Grinder.

 

I’m not sure that the constant escape to the Wasteland is necessarily healthy, but ironically with all the potential dangerous creatures it seems to feel a lot safer than the real world these days.

 

I have had people tell me that it’s just a game and if you die you can respawn. Laughably, however, when I am in a spot that is high off the ground, I get the same sensation as I get if I were actually standing there. Go figure, maybe the game has become an alternate reality.

 

If you think I’ve gone off the deep end, you’d be wrong—that happened many years ago. I just look for distractions, I don’t usually stay that long. I do also enjoy a lot of other things, but when I’m running around the Wasteland is when I tend to find a muse for the blog.

 

If you can’t tell by the last couple of posts—or really, all the posts—I am dealing with some significant long-term feelings that have been brought to the surface by what’s been going on over the last two years for sure.

 

I think it goes without saying that sometimes it’s almost better to be physically assaulted than deal with psychological abuse. When you’ve been with someone for a period of time, you know exactly which buttons to push and what they will cause in that person. With physical assault, at least you know where the injuries will be.

 

With psychological abuse, quite often you don’t realize the injuries until years later. Of course, it also surfaces when you least expect it, and the trigger is often not the person that made the initial comments but some random person who manages to push the same buttons.

 

Again, if I had to choose something it would definitely be physical abuse because at least I would know why a particular thing hurt.

 

Psychological abuse comes in two different directions. The first is the constant hammering of your triggers by that person in person. Then you have the lingering effects of this abuse that can happen months or even years later by someone who unknowingly hits those same triggers. With psychological abuse, time is irrelevant. That’s why narcissists love psychological abuse—it lets them live rent free in your head for the rest of your life at least.

 

I’ve also noticed that trauma tends to heap on other trauma. If you look at the things that happen in childhood that may not have been significant at the time, anything that reinforces those inadequacies later in life makes the depths of those things worse.

 

I have thought a lot about my childhood since my whirlwind trip to Kansas a couple of years ago. I’ve said in earlier pieces that I really ended up enjoying that. It was so strange to see places that were still there after all these years and then see lots of growth that wasn’t there before. When I was up in Clay Center for my reunion, it still had that really cool small-town feel, with lots of things right where I remembered them—and also lots of new things. It was nice to have that feeling that I grew up and understood things better than I did when I was a teenager there. I still regard that to be one of the highlights of 2023, especially in a year that didn’t have many.

 

My mom and my dog are always highlights.