Patreon Letter: 14th October 2018

Hey everyone,

Jackson here! Again! I’m doing the patreon letter three weeks in a row because misfortune has befell Em, their family’s only car was in a wreck and they’ve been left without transport and are unsure how much this is going to cost so I offered to step in and take a little load off their back.

What I did not do, however, was prepare anything to write about over the week! So y’know that sucks. I played some drums (the kit arrived! It’s not perfect but for an electric kit it’s pretty good!), I prepared for the Star Trek podcast and I watched Evangelion in preparation for our episode on that which we have now delayed two times. It’s said in the Dead Sea Scrolls that if Em and I meet and discuss Evangelion we could trigger Third Impact. Forces beyond our control are working to stop us.

But we’ll get it recorded. Because we love you. But apologies in advance if the podcast is kinda negative. And also ends the world.

Anyway. In lieu of an actual concrete topic you’re gonna get some more introspection, such is the way of things here in the patreon letters. This one’s probably going to be tough to write, which is why you probably got the email for this at like five in the morning. I’m probably about to be very sad. Fair warning. I'm doing alright, don't worry too much as you read this it's just gonna be about some Things.

Abnormal Mapping is five years old this month. Five years ago today I was probably playing DmC: Devil May Cry in preparation for our very first episode. Five years ago I was living in a house with three other students who hated me, doing a screenwriting degree that I also hated, and I was depressed out of my mind. Five years later, I’ve moved three times since, I’ve dropped out and then completed another degree, and I’m still depressed out of my mind - though I am certainly more high functioning about it.

It’s basically impossible to overstate the influence that Abnormal Mapping has had on my life. It is something I do with my best friend, something I love doing and something that at least a few people care about! I have like, an actual “body of work” I can point to now to say hey: here’s me, I do things, and I’ve got at least one thing to show for every month of my life since 2013. This is huge. I’ve always been one of those people who likes the idea of doing things but gets distracted easily, who is incapable of following through on plans for one reason or another, but because I’m not doing this alone I’m five years in and probably enjoying it more than ever. Diversifying away from video games and getting into Gundam has helped a lot. 

Yet my internal narrative of these years has been basically a shitshow all the way down. I did one degree that sucked and then went right into another degree that sucked. I haven’t made any close friends offline, and now I’ve been forced to move to the middle of nowhere by my dad and the only people I talk to face to face are my mum and whoever I am ordering my coffee from on any given day. This has been true for far more of the last five years than not. I’m going to be twenty five in a month and I feel like the best years of my life are gone and I’ve got nothing but an empty void to show for them. 

Anyway if you’ve been following podcasts we’ve put out recently you figured where this was  going already: we watched The Tatami Galaxy recently (big spoilers coming up) and the climax of the show basically knocked me out. To the point where I physically could not stop shaking for hours after finishing it. The final episodes are all framed around Watashi trapped in an endless maze of parallel versions of his own room, as he views all the other versions of himself from the outside. All these Watashis were deeply unhappy, but the evidence they leave behind is one of a life well lived, and so the trapped Watashi is overwhelmed with how happy he must have been.

These two narratives about my life are fundamentally incompatible. If I were to look at myself, and at the last five years of Abnormal Mapping from the outside I would see me as someone who gets to spend so much of their time working on what they love with people they love. I would be jealous of all these wonderful things that I already have. 

Yet on the other hand I have no narrative conceit from which I can burst with newfound awakening to a catharsis that makes everything slot into place. I’m still poor. I’m still lonely when it comes to face to face interaction. I still live in the middle of nowhere. It’s okay to be sad about those things. They’re not good things!

The struggle, when it comes to Being Depressed and all that is to attempt to weave these two permanently conflicting narratives into a single less extreme narrative, and in so doing manage to cope enough with your depressed as fuck self that you are able to wake up and get shit done at least some days. Which is the slow uphill battle I’ve been working on for the last five years. I don’t know if the next five years are going to be any better, because a lot of that isn’t in my control. I cannot positive-think the money to move to a city I like. But I can record a podcast or two every week and put something I’m proud of into the world.

Here’s to five more years of this podcast. And five more after that. I hope you keep listening.

-Jackson