Ok. Obviously I am not in reality a lone space farer in the merciless expanse of the Universe, nor am I a psychic detective who exposes supernatural beings, nor an investigator drowning in his whiskey glass over nightmarish madness encountered lurking in the dark.

Do I want to be one? Probably not.

So, why is it important to me to work my way through Cosmic Horror fiction if I am not, nor want to be, a wretched protagonist of one of the stories I read, play or write about? And how will it help me cope with the depths of my Core if I play journaling RPGs, anyways?

And if so, what sets me apart from the protagonists in a Cosmic Horror story? Well, this is a part-so-part-so answer, I guess.

First of all: I think I dwelled enough on the topic of why the fascination of Cosmic/Philosophical Horror is of special interest to me when dealing with my Core and thus with my Recovery. Now comes the time to get in-situ.

The idea behind it all is to confront myself with aspects maddening aspects of my psyche and how I dealt with it before, and – more importantly – how I can deal with it in the short – to – long term.

In short: Drinking abusive amounts of alcohol and other abusive habits were the actual trial to get around, or out of the way, or to ignore those things that put pressure on my mental health. I think the parallels to near-to-insane investigators from a Lovecraftian story or the self-destructive behavior of certain characters in Ligotti’s text-corpus are more than obvious. And the cause for this is, at least in a Lovecraftian sense, the insight of the protagonist that there is something so overwhelmingly maddening and merciless, something so shocking and fear-inducing, that it causes paralysis and ineptitude in the protagonists to act, so they succumb to madness, substance abuse or they take their own lives (Not that anything like this is what I am close to, at least not anymore). So, there are, taken back to the “real world” paralyzing aspects of life that (seemingly) rendered me inept, helpless, hopeless which in turn manifested in anxiety, depression and so forth.

The question is: Did it really render me inept, paralyzed, helpless? Was I actually confronted with a higher power that stripped me of control or, less dramatically put, paralyzed at least big amounts of my possibilities and left me in a state that I could only freeze into stasis, blame it on “the man” or “the system” or circumstance? Does that ring a bell?

Well, for me it does. And that is exactly why I want a playful approach to my psychic barriers, dealing with them in a simulated universe and through diving into a played situation experience feeling of how an investigator would feel. Or what brought me to act like an inept individual ducking away from the overwhelming challenges of life.

I must say, in real life, I deal a lot with it already: Self efficacy, self esteem, self awareness, altruism, working on my system, whatever you will. But these concepts have certain limits, or they are tedious. And here is where it gets juicy: if it gets tedious and too challenging, my ADHD brain will find ways to digress. And that, in turn, would create and grow feelings of ineptitude, helplessness, feeling inadequate (I hear another bell ringing).

You see, it could become a vicious circle. And since I WANT to deal with my Core, consisting of all these problems that a Lovecraftian investigator encounters in the maddening face of the Old Ones in the fictional world, I find it appropriate, interesting and chillingly motivating to deal with my problems in this way.

Because, rendering myself helpless and inept in the face of the challenges (or the Old Ones, speaking fictionally) would be the reason to turn back to substance abuse, retreat from the real world, procrastinate, blame others, and dig a grave to everything I have worked so hard for in the last months and years that define my self efficacy and thus the very foundations of my identity.

And it is a long way ahead. For

“That is not dead,
which can eternal lie,
yet, within strange eons,
even death may die”

Or something like that…

Until next time: Keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.