A Polymorph You're Looking For
“I disbelieve!”
Those words were one of the hallmark experiences of my teenaged AD&D campaigns, right up there with “Roll for damage” and “I hide in the shadows.” “I disbelieve!” is what you cried when you encountered an angry dragon on top of a pile of glimmering diamonds, the scales on his craned neck flared as he prepared to attack. “I disbelieve!” is what you yelled when you encountered a bare wall at the end of a hallway that should, according to the penciled-in 10”x10” squares on your grid-map, lead to someplace interesting.
For in D&D, there were vicious illusions created by magic. Things that should not be. And when you encountered something fishy, you closed your eyes, thrust your hands into the darkness, and gathered all your will to shout your disbelief at the world.
If you were lucky and strong, the wall would dissolve into a wavering mist and you’d walk into a secret alcove that no one had ever seen before. But if you were wrong, you’d be a pile of charred bones. Sometimes the dragon was real.
“I disbelieve!”
That phrase calls to me, because I disbelieve a lot.
My mind is what plays tricks on me. Every day I wake up and it tells me how I’m unworthy of being alive, a crappy writer, an awful husband, a clumsy git who women despise.
That voice has always been with me, distorting what happens. There have been times when I was carrying on sexual relationships with not one, not two, but three beautiful women at the same time – and still my mind told me that I was charmless and ungainly, that they just slept with me because they felt sorry for me.
Three women were fucking me, and still my brain told me that nobody liked me. And that’s where the illusion is.
All my life, I’ve had to fight to find reality. I may not be Brad Pitt, but there’s considerable evidence in the form of over ninety willing partners that I have something going for me. And every day I have to reach out, blindly, fumbling in the dark as I try to find the anchors of objective proof.
It’s hard. My thoughts twist and weave whatever facts they find to their worst value, waging an endless propaganda campaign designed to tell me how shitty I am. They put on little stage plays where I clearly see everyone laughing at me, talking about what an asshole I am, keeping me around solely for their amusement.
These are not real. But if I’m not careful, I will act as though they are. And acting as though there’s a dragon in the room when there’s not means that I spend most of my life running scared – or worse, launching devastating attacks against innocent victims cloaked under the guise of a dragon.
So it’s scary. Sometimes, there are dragons. But you can’t spend your entire life living under the spells your brain weaves. And if you never try to roll your saving throw, you’re never going to know where reality lies. You’re going to run through phantom dungeons, and never know your own strength.
Every once in awhile you have to thrust your fists against the posts and cry, “I disbelieve!”
Then check for traps. That never hurts.
Tags: mentally i'm still in high school, precedent to the open source boob projec, stupid in public
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