Monday Morning Post-Game Thoughts: A Bit of Introspection

“I don’t always die, but when I do, it’s at the tentacles of alien demon-squids intent on tasting the edge of my blade.”

~ Sergei Romanova “Kotetsuame”

That, or something vaguely like it was something that just popped into my head earlier last evening during the weekly game-session with my friends, and a number of other things did as well.

Among them, what things in my life would I have done differently if I could have, and how so?

For one thing, I wouldn’t have been so in need of closure in my knowledge as I was as a teenager. About that time, my religious indoctrination was well on its way to weakening, and even then I flirted with atheism despite knowing precious little of it.

There was enough dogmatic thinking left in my skull to keep me dependent on certitude, which despite numerous opportunities for dating in middle school and high school (I was then quite partial to brown ladies, particularly Filipinas, and find many women of a number of Eastern ethnicities rather striking…) left me so uncomfortable with uncertainty that I rarely had the confidence to ask any of them out.

I was always a nerdy type, not a romeo.

Needless to say, I now regard that dependency on closure as rather absurd, and it got me in trouble in a number of other areas too, like arguments with others, and oh, the irritation I felt when my claims were questioned, often by people more knowledgeable than myself in those areas, I was to find out later on my own.

Silly me. Silly, arrogant, foolish me.

What else? Well, I’d have cultivated a healthier attitude toward learning, and better reading and study habits. This would have been invaluable, but given my…condition…I don’t think it was something I really could have dealt with then, but less even knew to be a problem, at the time.

Only later, after effectively dealing with my condition (which reared its ugly head then and took lots of insight and treatment to overcome — and I still need that, as it’s never completely gone away), was I even able to address that. Well, no time like the more recent past and the present.

Next.

I’d also have developed my people skills more, though I’d always been a bit of a loner as a kid — I didn’t like crowds, and people were just irritating. Perhaps I could have curbed my dislike of social situations, but at the time I just didn’t care, and really didn’t then see the benefits of being more sociable.

Well, I manage to ditch the certitude problem, and I’m much more at home with uncertainty now that the religiosity of my youth has gone, I’m currently having a good time with my home study courses, and with my weekend comic-shop, weekday library trips and gaming sessions, I’m doing a much better bit of work on my social skills. Being on hiatus from Twitter for a week was useful, as it gave me a lot of time to think about what I use it for and how to achieve that now that got back on as of later last evening.

I suppose that as long as I’m alive and not totally incapacitated, there’s time to correct, not everything — that would be a tall order indeed — but whatever a bit of effort is realistically capable of fixing. I suppose that’s all I should expect, to work on what I can and try not to get bent out of shape by the rest. I can’t travel back in time to change things, but then maybe I don’t need to.

I don’t have the ability to never die — I don’t think anyone does — but I do have the ability not to care and to focus on what matters.

The rest should fall into place nicely.

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