The start of growth, perhaps.

Yesterday was the first time since Michael went into the hospital that I wasn’t able to visit him because of Snowmageddon.  It gave me a chance to look into myself and study what I was finding. 

It was so hard for me yesterday. I found myself laying around on the couch for the first time since this ordeal began.  I just felt awful. Which is how I typically feel.  I normally just find myself laying around doing nothing and feeling blah.  I was able to discover last night what that “blah” feeling is.

I felt useless.

Since this whole thing with my brother began, I felt needed.  Like I finally had some sort of a purpose.  Yesterday, it was sort of taken from me by the snow.  I couldn’t go and sit with him.  I couldn’t go and help in the minor, insignificant ways that I typically do (the meaningless ways that yet somehow have given me this odd sense of purpose). So… I just laid there, feeling exhausted and drained.  I napped for a short while (which was probably good, because I’m definitely emotionally exhausted).

I then went about trying to work on Michael’s main Christmas present, which was just… not working.  I was tired, and frustrated, and feeling useless, and I just… yeah.  The stress and frustration was nearly unbearable.  So I took an anti-anxiety pill and that helped with all that, but without all that added emotion, I realized how drained and exhausted I am.  I was able to do some work on it before going to bed to get to work this morning.

In short, I’ve discovered (or rather “re-discovered”, as it’s really something I already knew) that I need to find my purpose in life.  That is basically what I was hoping to find through changing myself through the project.  Realizations are always beneficial, as they bring us closer to solutions.  So as of this time, I don’t have any solutions… but realizations are the start of personal growth, so I thought it would be beneficial to post about it.

Becoming Fantasy © Stephen Marra 2010

The Becoming Fantasy Project: Revisited

We’ve covered my absence. We have not yet covered why I’m returning.

  ”I think we all are fighting for ourselves. 
            For ourselves… and that someone… something… whatever it is, that’s important to us.
                                              You can’t fight without a reason, right?”

The first party member to join (who was with me from the beginning, whether he knows it or not)… my best friend… is sick.  No… that’s not exactly right. As we’ve been saying a lot recently, “He’d be completely healthy if it weren’t for the life threatening illness.”

The short of it: He hadn’t been feeling well for about a month, then vomited around Thanksgiving, which made him decide to go to the doctor. After a couple weeks of waiting, countless blood tests, and a bone marrow biopsy, he was diagnosed.

Myelodysplatic Syndrome. Woah, that even sounds obscure.  That’s because it is.  It normally affects people in their 70s. Very, very rarely does it ever occur in people around the age of… oh… 30.  What it basically does, so you don’t have to look it up, is it alters the way that the blahblahblah Stem Cells in the bone marrow mature. No, not THOSE stem cells. Think of them as just the base cells. Normally the Base Cells will mature into Red Blood Cells, White Blood Cells, or Platelets. Sometimes they will also mature into leukemia cells (this is rare, and refered to as Blast Cells… I think.  I could be wrong). A typical person should be at around 1% or less of these Blast Cells. When it’s higher, there’s a problem.  Anyway… so MDS prevents the Base Cells from maturing into anything resembling what they should be… which means that duplicating themselves is fine, as is maturing into leukemia cells.  So with MDS, there’s a high risk of it becoming leukemia. Which brings us to what it is becoming:

Erythroleukemia. You’ll notice the red and understand the severity that it entails, as red typically means “caution“ (“or beef, if it’s a bouillon cube”). If Erythroleukemia was a child on the playground, you wouldn’t want to play with… that… child, just in case you were wondering.

So… he’s in for extensive chemotherapy for a while and then a bone marrow transplant, which I’m hoping I’ll be a match for.

I know… the question on all your minds must be, “What is the point of telling us this? And what does this have to do with this so-called ’Project’ of yours?”

I was looking for change.  Change found me.  I was thinking about this on the way home from the hospital last night… and it occurred to me that the one thing that all the leading characters have in common is that change finds them, and that is when they grow and adapt and become who they are to be.  We observe their change, their growth and the actions that shape their character as they progress through the challenges and tasks that are presented to them. Their plans and goals are mostly reactive. They react and decide what to do as things occur. That’s what we all do, isn’t it?  I never thought of it like that before. Maybe this is the lesson I need to learn through all this.

In many of the games, a significant event is the catalyst that forces a character’s journey to begin. 

This is my catalyst, and the start of my journey.

Before I knew I needed a change. I knew what I wanted but when it came right down to it, I didn’t know why I wanted it, and when it came time for me to try to force it, I just didn’t have the motivation required. I had no reason.

So… as I process and think and experience, I will react and document. I will do so so that I am healthy and strong in order to help my brother, be it through support, or by giving him my bone marrow. In doing so, we will all witness whatever growth I may experience, and we will all see who I am to become.

            “I think we all are fighting for ourselves. 
                             For ourselves… and that someone… something… whatever it
is, that’s important to us.
                                                      What about you all? 
     I want all of you to find that something within yourselves.
                                                                           If you don’t find it, then that’s okay too. 
                     

 You can’t fight without a reason, right?”

 

Becoming Fantasy © Stephen Marra 2010

*Start… Select* Becoming fantasy?

Alright…

So it’s been a while since my last post.  The Becoming Fantasy Project was put on hold. I won’t lie… I had pretty much abandoned it. The reasoning behind that is complicated in a sense… and I’ll explain it all right now, because I’m resuming it.  Well… in a sense.  I need to do a re-evaluation of the project to see what new goals are and what the desired outcome is to be… but that will come in time.  Now… the rest.

So what was it that made me, in essence, say, “This game is stupid. I’m not playing it anymore.”?

It’s all you.  Yep, that’s right, the readers.

Kidding.  I jest. Trying to start with a joke because realizations and the like are often rather heavy.

When the going got rough and I was faced with the truth of the project (namely being that now I work in a very “conservative” hotel), I realized that there was so much I just wasn’t going to be able to do… and those little things, made me look at bigger things that I wasn’t going to be able to do… and then something that Gabe had said toward the beginning started making a lot more sense.  I don’t know if it was starting to make sense because things were getting difficult, or if they were making sense because they actually made sense and I had just been in typical Air mode. Now… for those of you who don’t know me that well, those who do would most likely tell you that when I get into Air Mode, it’s probably just best to stand back until either 1) the winds calm and dissipate making it as though absolutely nothing happened, or 2) I end up hurting myself, at which point they just sort of make that face that seems to say, ‘well, I tried to tell you this was a bad decision, but… [you have a "listening problem"]‘.

So… that thing that made sense? Something along the lines of:

“But I like you now.”

He went on to say more.  The idea of which was basically just that this was a big change.

And he was right.  It WAS a big change… I wanted a change, but was this what I wanted?  A change, but at what cost?  And how much of myself would I have to compromise to achieve it?  I started to think about what the original outline of the project entailed… “Studying the characteristics of leading characters and adopting and implementing those qualities into myself”… not bad. That’s pretty much life.  We adapt, we grow, we change.  We find traits we admire and try to incorporate them, that’s not a problem… but… then in Disc 3, the goal is to Become someone… else… entirely.  And… therein lies a dilemma. It’s a dilemma because it’s basically changing everything about me to be someone else… changing by forcing, rather than adapting.

See the problem?  I have an icon that’s of Ariel (the little mermaid, whatever don’t judge me *_~) leaning against the pillar on the docks crying, and the words are, “I changed to be with you.”

I guess I was starting to see the project as being basically that.

Anyway. That’s the explanation of where I’ve been.  The next post… which will be made shortly, will explain another realization and another explanation of said realization.  Stay tuned *_~

 Becoming Fantasy © Stephen Marra 2010