So, I’ve been trying to re-launch this site throughout the year. But I kept falling into pitfalls I didn’t know existed. I’m learning a lot – mainly about myself, though. And there’s a point of learning when it starts paying off.
You see, I discovered I’m quite differently wired than I thought. I knew (at this year’s beginning, anyway) that I’m more introverted than extroverted. And it was big because I haven’t always thought so. That wasn’t the biggest pivot, though. Recently, I discovered I’m also hypersensitive to many things while having an inborn tendency to lose focus. In the long term, that causes a lot of fatigue when I try to cope with those traits, plus some others I’m not going into right now. What’s essential for me in today’s post is this: I’m a neurodivergent person, and this divergence isn’t quite what I thought or suspected it to be. Thus, I’m re-learning many vital skills, such as self-regulation, executing tasks, and so on. And by this point, you’re probably thinking, why am I actually sharing all this – beyond the internet’s conventional overt selfperformance? It all comes down to running RPGs, you see, as I found out just a couple of days ago. It drives many, many things – rewarding and challenging alike – I experience while engaging with roleplaying games.
Narrative processing
First off, it is one of my default and longest-remembered coping strategies. I always had a massive appetite for stories. And I mean all kinds of stories. Child stories, fairy tales, myths, and actual history. It seems they were catalyzing much more of my emotions than it happens to an average human. That’s why I was so into fantasy in general and Game-Mastering in particular.
Safe self-expression
My other thing is I’m hypersensitive to people. Not just that I’m an introvert, and humans tend to provide me with too much of stimuli. I’m also wired in a way that’s called hyperempathetic. That means I sense – intuitively – a lot about how others feel, think, why they’re acting the way they do, etc. But that comes with a trade-off (one of them, really): I don’t see myself and my boundaries very sharply. So, when I’m the one telling a story, I find comfort in being able to speak from my own feelings.
Structured social interaction
Another side to the hyperempathetic trait is that the social stimuli quickly overload me to the point that I can’t really do anything with them. In a conversation, I’m often so immersed in the other person’s emotions and thoughts that I can’t find the energy to act on my own. Not only I can’t do what I myself would like to do (as I mentioned above), but I find it hard to act at all to steer the interaction. Hence, when I get to do a conversational tabletop RPG session, it’s quite a relief to interact safely at last.
The Narratives
For as long as I can remember, I have been weaving narratives about everything. I enjoyed reading and listening to stories of any kind. Even short fairy stories my great-grandma used to tell when I was 3 or 4 – sometimes in the form of half-sung, half-murmured lullaby-like tunes – I exaggerated and expanded internally. When I was 9, that trait bloomed to its fullest.
Enter the Mythologies
When I was at my grandparents’ house for the summer holidays (we used to spend at least a month there, together with my brother and half a dozen cousins), my older cousin had that one book with her. She was a few grades older than me and had some struggles with the literature classes. So, she brought some books to prep before the school year. That one particular book was “Mythology. Beliefs and Sagas of Greeks and Romans”.
While definitely a classic (even if not classic-al, lol ????♂️) entry-level synopsis on the subject that introduced a few generations of my fellow Poles to the myths of antiquity, Parandowski’s “Mythology…” is very concise and, I hate to say it, dull – to the point of an art in its own right. Summarizing the myth of life and the works of Heracles or Odyseus’s journey in two or three pages, without omitting any details really, requires a particular talent. But you can also imagine that the book’s language isn’t especially evocative or vivid. But it wasn’t so for me. I remember reading “Mythology…” with my heart racing. It was like I had traveled to those ancient times for the whole month. Every sentence and paragraph grew and grew. And that only paved the road for an even greater journey.
The Road that Goes Ever On
You see, that year, I was 9. A year later, the first movie of Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy came out. And before it did, I managed to read both the LotR book and snatched “The Silmarillion” from the library. Do you see it already? No? Well, go to any Tolkien-related on-line group and search for “Silmarillion memes”.
For me, it was like that mythical journey to antique myths but a thousand times more intense. That year’s summer was especially rainy. But I didn’t care. I – being a 10-year-old then – spent at least half of it lying on a bed, on a carpet, or sitting at my grandma’s table, jumping between the myth-like narrative of Tolkien’s, the map, my LotR’s paperback appendices, and “The SIlmarillion’s” index and lexicon (yeah, the memes don’t lie about it being a tough one to read). I absorbed it all, inhaled it, and bathed my mind in that fantastical Tale of the Tales. To this day, “The Silmarillion” remains my absolute number-one of Tolkien’s works.
Expression
When I talked about this aspect with a few people – yes, I do interact in an ordinary, casual way, even if rarely so – my wife, friends, and therapist even all thought that my narrative focus in GMing is about telling stories explicitly about the emotions and thoughts I want or need to process. It’s not like that at all. I’d rather say that the narratives I weave go through some archetypic cycles and stages, like the ones described as the “monomyth” or “hero’s journey” (see especially “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell). And like in the case of the ancient Greek drama, the tension built up throughout a story helps me catalyze my own tensions. I go through a catharsis.
But there’s even more to that. As I said, I also tend to see myself in a kind of blurred way while interacting with others. That’s why I often feel a need to use a lot of words to express myself. It’s kind of like writing a blog post every time someone asks me casually, ‘What’s up?’ Now, it’s also clear that this blog’s as much for my expression as it is intended to convey something to you. But I’ll come back to that.
Added to my appetite for stories of all kinds and the knack for telling them myself is also quite a vivid imagination. Thus, I always wanted to share what I came up with since it generally was quite liked by others. And that feeling of being well-understood is one of my primary drives. It’s also what weighs me down the most if I lack it, but that’s a story of the year past and not for today.
Socializing
Connected to that feeling of being understood is an interpersonal connection in general. Being able to interact freely and efficiently is something quite rare for me. A few people I know in person who might be reading this may find it a bit surprising. It’s because most of those struggles are internal. On the surface – from what I’ve heard – I usually seem pretty open, spontaneous, and clear-sighted. But it’s very taxing internally. How much taxing I only found out very recently, when finally digging myself out of a large spiral that kept me from writing here.
So when I get to play by the rules, that’s very comforting. All games are fine, and I often play games more for the interaction (and narrative) than winning. In board games, I choose funny or risky plays over optimal ones. Even more so, if a game has an appealing visual aspect, then I’d rather try to arrange plays or pieces into a compelling (at least compelling for me) story than work out a winning plan. That’s why I also enjoy building weird Magic: the Gathering decks rather than winning with them or – Thassa have mercy – net deck.
All that is possible in a far more satisfying way in the case of ttRPGs. They’re conversational in nature, but they’re also fairly structured. I – the GM – spin the main narrative while also following my players’ threads. And with both narrative and structural frameworks in place, the wide sensory stream of people’s feelings becomes much more manageable for me. It then becomes even quite enjoyable, I’ve got to say.
The Tragic Choice
I’ve got to admit I got many of those warm feelings while writing this last section. I reflected on very meaningful things to me and how I often connect with them. But there’s also a hard truth to that.
See, being so taxed on a daily basis, I need some strict routines to function correctly. For the last two years, I drifted very far from the concept of “routine.” And, sadly, running ttRPGs was a big part of that. It was basically wrecking my whole inside. But it’s not that simple, and I didn’t see that this way until connecting some far-away dots.
As I said, I need a solid framework to manage my various sensitivities and other traits. Tabletop RPGs are, for me, a gratifying way of handling the social, self-expression, and contextualization needs. However, they also require a very specific scheduling. And I just realized that they cost me much more than they pay off.
Effectively, ttRPGs break my rest and activity cycle in the middle, and they do it hard. Every week I run an RPG session (or play board games to the same effect), I end up staying up late with lots of social input to process and narrative engines working beyond their full capacity. Not only does it prevent me from resting properly, but it drains me of my mental energy for the following day or two. It probably sounds like a standard, predictable thing to you, but for me, it’s the equivalent of drinking heavily on a weekly basis and dealing with a hangover for the next few days. It’s just a matter of intensity.
How Much Longer Can – or Should – I Go?
I shunned this conclusion for a long time, but I’ve finally faced it: I couldn’t afford to function normally and enjoy my hobbies. It was, of course, more to what was weighing me down than RPGs and MtG, but I’d like to stay in this context here. It was very tough to state that I could only have either a calm, healthy lifestyle or a very enjoyable leisure time.
Should I do something I find deeply satisfying while it costs me so much stress and health? The answer seems to be clear here, isn’t it? But I found a way around those challenges, eventually – and will write more on it next week or even earlier. I promise I’ve got that second part already written, so it won’t be another handful of months of waiting. ????
