Today was ttrpg stuff. Everyone else fast-tracked their character sheets, and I made a whole backstory and “chapter zero” for my guy, which I’ll share eventually. I’ve just been busy trying to keep my schedule going so I don’t find myself falling into regression, piling, or blackout.
Anyway, we RP’ed where we were in the cave (and most of us were at the entrance due to just wandering in, but two of us managed to come up with an idea of falling in through the top of the mountain and landing in a pit of sand inside the cave…I swear we did not compare notes). The story is that each level of the cave is something we have to deal with on the daily, so today was our DM god-modding us back to the entrance (the cave had a beast we could not see in said sandy pit, who swallowed us whole, then sneezed and we landed with the rest of the group, lol). Our topic/theme/layer today was about how we can confidently answer something that we can provide receipts for, and yet there’s always a little imp inside of us that makes us doubt our clarity and understanding — like I said, even when we have receipts/proof. I’m not really sure how to translate how all that went down into a blog post, but I can say this:
The imp is a perfect metaphorical being for how we feel when we start to second guess ourselves. It feels like Bing Bong’s hands squeezing my temples aggressively, and the sinus pressure manifests, and the headache comes out of it and eventually I either accept that you failed or collapse into self-flagellating fits or in my case, look for external validation or regulation. How did we beat the imp? Easy (with practice, of course).
We talked about how the imp arrived. What its purpose was, and how it made us feel. Kind of like pausing a game: I was confident in a situation, and now I am second guessing myself, and the history and experience with this kind of thing has me developing stress-related pressure in my head. One person, btw, had the imp on her shoulders, and her traps were feeling tense. One had the imp on her neck, and he was attempting to GNAW at her!!! UGH THE REALISM!!!
We connected these pressures being from historical data, meaning OLD. So the imps were OLD!!! Ancient, even! We figured out if we reflected the imps’ images back to them, they’d see their true age and wither or at least draw back for now.
We then took a moment and did a breathing exercise, closing our eyes and recentering ourselves in the present and adjacent to what we did earlier that we were confident about, which brought about the fractured knowledge of our pasts. But we focused on how we were correct, and how we knew we were correct. We separated our clarity and confidence from history insisting otherwise. Our mage cast a mirror spell for us, and our imps saw themselves for what they were: a history of conditional knowledge and treatment that was not our present reality.
The imps withered and wilted and were reduced to ash.
Did we still feel them? No, but we felt their shadows. The difference between feeling the choke or the headache or our shoulders rising above our shoulder pads’ regular heights was that we acknowledged the shadows but managed to move on with our adventures.
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They allowed us to leave at noon, today, citing the incoming weather and acknowledging that we might need a buffer for preparation since this will be a distraction/interruption for our rhythms. We have access to live zoom if we want to connect, but it is not mandatory. I’ll check in if folks are on just to make sure we’re all doing okay and aren’t shrinking into ourselves. I have plans and backup plans depending on whether we lose power or not. We might, but it’s not guaranteed. I equipped all 4 of my backup cell phones with offline games specifically for power outages, so add that to the GOOM-B bag and my puzzle books and writing, I think I’m ready to go, Also got plenty of non-cooking food and water for, at the very least, 5 days worth of being stuck at home.
Guess that’s all for today.
