I reread and unveiled The dangers of resting. There was nothing in it that required it to be protected, really. No sensitive information or anything. I suppose I must have protected it because at the time I had felt so intensely vulnerable, and did not feel safe enough to expose all of my vulnerability to the world.

Since I wrote it, I’ve been in a lot of therapy. And I realize that at that time, I had very little control over my brain. A healthy brain is able to move from topic to topic, emotion to emotion, and not be overwhelmed by a specific topic or emotion. The very next day, after writing this post, I started intense therapy. For the first few weeks of that therapy, it was all about being able to avoid drowning in my pain and my thoughts, to be able to feel and think other things. It is now 3 months on from that day, and there is no longer any danger to my resting. It does not mean that 3 months of intense therapy has been enough for me to overcome everything, since rereading what I wrote then still fills me with pain and grief, as those feelings rush back. But I am able to move on now. When I finish this post, I will start thinking about something else. The feelings of pain will fade and be replaced by whatever feelings are associated with whatever I do next.

At that time, when I restarted my therapy, my therapist seriously considered sending me to a psychiatrist and putting me on meds, since my brain was so out of control, I guess. I am so grateful now for the therapy that has allowed my brain to become healthier, to have the resilience to feel pain and to move on from it. I have had a lot of thoughts, since, about how the world we live in is full of casual abusers, people who indifferently write mean and hurtful things about/to others, and never even consider how their words may cause mental anguish to those about/to which they write. I believe that this culture must be changed if our society is to be healthy and avoid squandering all the potential that this trolling squashes. We have not always lived in a society that condemns wanton physical violence, but that has changed and we now criminalize physical abuse. However, we seem to now live in a world that does not actually condemn wanton mental violence, for how many people actually take a moment to rethink their urge to post some cutting remark about someone else online? So I feel there’s a need for a shift in the culture. But at the same time, since this experience, I feel even more strongly that therapy and a universal education in mental health is also needed. There was a time in human society when physical self-defense may have been widely necessary, and I feel that we are not at a time in human society when mental self-defense is almost universally needed. At least until the mental violence and abuse becomes less rampant.

When I wrote The dangers of resting, I was in some senses, mentally defenseless. Indeed, what I wrote shows that I had no tools other than frantically filling my mind with recruitment-related thoughts to deal with the trauma I was experiencing. That in itself is not a bad tool, but it was not enough. It was like only knowing to curl myself into a ball while being physically beaten. Had I not learned other tools, an inevitable need for rest would have filled my head with such soul-sucking thoughts and feelings that I do believe I would eventually have committed suicide again. Certainly, that’s how it happened the first time around when I was Guild Master of Syzygy. Now, not only do I have more tools with which to prevent my depression from hijacking my brain, I know better when to use them, and when and how to ask for help. Currently, I don’t know if any country provides mental health education to its people. It appears that therapy is how most people who do learn these tools acquire them, often belatedly, after already experiencing harm that might have been avoided if the tools were previously available. Had I had access to these tools all those years ago, I believe I would have not needed to leave WoW, and would have continued being able to employ my specific talents and provide the leadership that so many people appreciated at the time.

I hope that, with time, human societies can shift so that we do not nonchalantly cause mental pain to others. I also hope that, with time, we all recognize the need for everyone to learn tools of mental self-defense, even that people are taught it alongside their math and history and languages. I hope that we can lessen the likelihood that people will go through the mental space I occupied years ago, and again 3 months ago, that I wrote about in The dangers of resting, so that our talents and potentials are less stifled by our mental disorders, and can instead flourish and bloom and provide more good and joy to the world.