My name is Jon. You can also refer to me as X, or False, or Scarefish/Scare, or Fizzle, or any sort of name of any of the characters of mine that I have personified over the years. I am 32 years old and I'm struggling with depression, loneliness, and high levels of fear at most times.

Few people who follow me online know anything about me in the grand scheme of things. This is my doing. I rarely put myself out there in that way, and as you may have noticed I haven't been doing anything lately. That isn't exactly true, but it feels true. It's a problem I'm trying to work through. I want to generate momentum and get back to creating. I don't lack creativity or ability: I'm drowning in it. Some have told me I have ADD, and that would explain a lot.

I should also say that most of my issues are self-diagnosed. I've been waiting on a family doctor for years now with no luck, and I'm not terribly interested in going back to general therapy. I haven't had a class in years and I'd probably have to pay out-of-pocket. I'm only confirmed to have PTSD, resulting from losing my mother and my brother. They were up north and I was down here attending school hoping to become a doctor someday. My mother wanted me to become a doctor. I now realize I want to stick to creative endeavours.

I was taking a particularly stressful Biology class at the time, with a particularly pedantic teacher who kept docking students for having messy writing rather than grading on knowledge of the material. I was home, and my uncle came by in the afternoon. The landlady cheerfully let me know that he wanted to speak to me, and that she didn't know what of. He kept me waiting for nearly half an hour. I knew what it was some ten minutes before he told me. I understand how hard it was for him to break it to me, but I still resent him for botching it so badly. To be honest, I'm nitpicking. It doesn't really matter how you deliver such news. It would have destroyed me anyway.

My relationship with my family has always been variably strained. My dad was a drug addict and he passed away a while back. As sick as it sounds to say this, it was mostly a relief when he passed. He was always an abusive narcissist and I got sick of his side of the family scolding me for being so negative about him.

To be honest, my mother wasn't very nice while I was growing up, either. I still have nasty memories, as a child, probably 7 years old, with her screaming at me that I'd "better not be gay." As a child, my prospects seemed pretty good. I was never athletic, but I did very well in most of my classes. Sometimes teachers would complain about me talking too much, but usually I did well. I often stuck around the school for an hour. It was a safe space of sorts.

My brother was severely autistic; non-verbal. As he grew up and his mental development stagnated at a toddler level, a portion of the burden of raising him fell on me, since my father was worse than useless in that regard. As time progressed, my mother was forced more to focus on my brother. Most of the attention I got was through scolding which in 80% of cases was my father scapegoating me and my mother enabling him and demonizing me. She was an alcoholic and was simultaneously taking antidepressants.

My dad rarely physically abused me. He usually just threatened to. One time, in one of his crackhead rampages, he whipped an apple at me and it exploded against the wall. He once told me to hold my hand out and he poured out half a bottle of some sort of cleaning acid on it and said "Hurts, doesn't it?" I told him these stories later in his life and he got defensive; "I don't remember that." I only remember him ever apologizing to me once. He apologized because he said he had the idea that at some point he broke my confidence and made me the way I am. In a way, the best thing he ever did for me was die. I was $18k deep in credit card debt and that bailed me out.

My brother is a complicated story, and one that I can't get through honestly without sounding like a complete monster. People assume that given my life circumstances that I would be great with people with learning disabilities, but it's exactly the opposite. I feel awful for what I'm going to say, but he only seemed like a real person until his disability became apparent. I was the first on it. I recall, probably in '03, we were living in some shitty Surrey suburb. My brother came into my room, destroyed the lego buildings I was building, and made a mess of the room. I remember my parents laughing at me. I screamed at him "This isn't normal." Reluctantly, they brought him to a specialist, and he was diagnosed with autism. I often had to scream to get things done. Back in ~'97, I fractured my arm on a curb when playing street hockey with my dad. The pain was agonizing and constant. I was crying that I thought it was broken. They were surprised when the X-ray came back and there was a fracture. My dad told me that he had no idea since I was being all tough about it. I was openly crying the entire time. Then my brother was born in '98. I asked for a sister, but that's an irrelevant detail. I guess this was a cultural thing, but I often had to bathe with my brother and with my cousins; I guess it was a cultural olden-days thing. One time my brother was in the tub with one of those baby seat things. It came loose and he flopped face-first in the water, and he stayed there. I panicked and called my mom. I managed to get him back upright, but it always struck me how my brother just lay there, still, face-down in the water. It's like there was zero self-preservation there. This is where things get nasty, because I had several pets through my adolescence, and it always struck me how my dogs and cats were like people. How clever they were, and how they seemed to connect with me on a deep level, while my brother almost seemed like a zombie. As he grew, he grew fast. Despite his condition, he became incredibly strong, and he had an insanely short temper. He also often headbutted stuff when he was angry, and I had to literally fight him not to bash his head into walls and he'd somehow manage to rough me up even with his condition. My mom was small compared to me, and in retrospect it feels a bit reckless for me to have left for school.

When I was 14, I felt suicidal. I was a misanthrope. I often fantasized of murdering my father. One time, I heard what I thought was an argument. I came downstairs to confront my father, only to find him holding my mother to the bathroom sink, trying to force her to vomit as she laughed and repeated "It's all gone." We traded off and he called 911. She was scared when I showed up, then she passed out, and we carried her out a couple of blocks. We were screaming for help. I screamed "my mom is dying" and my hag of a neighbour yelled, "Shut up." The ambulance showed up, took us to the hospital and pumped her stomach. She had apparently planned to kill my brother and commit suicide, but my brother was in respite at the time. She attempted suicide unsuccessfully three times if memory serves correct. It took me some time to get this out of her, but she had a deep distrust of "homes" for this sort of thing. She was convinced that my brother would be physically and sexually abused, and that at some point the government would take him away to be abused by strangers.

When I moved out, things with my mom changed drastically. She stopped drinking and she did her best to break up with my father, though the government forced her to maintain contact with him to secure payments from him for raising my brother. She became much more tolerant of others' views, tolerant of my bisexuality, tolerant of my agnosticism at the time. For years I would call her every day and we'd often chat for hours. Those memories are still some of my fondest. I never would have thought her, of all people, would become my best friend. But my brother was getting bigger and stronger, and he was having random seizures. He got kicked out of respite care, and he had the police called on him once (they were understanding, but they were there to subdue him through a tantrum and it apparently took over 20 minutes for him to calm down). I offered to send money to her. I offered to move back up and help her with him. This is a big part of why I blame myself for what happened. I heard that she was scared that I was moving back up; she made it clear she wanted me to live a healthy, normal life. She screened my calls starting in April, and on the 3rd was when they found the bodies. She had given my brother a lethal dose of his medications, and she had apparently gased the house and hanged herself. They told me that my brother's death was painless.

When I lost my mother, I lost everything. I went on hiatus from school. I watched Guardians of the Galaxy with the roommate, and that movie spoke to me on a visceral level. I spent a couple of years in therapy, and several more consuming various movies.

I live with a Christian family, who I've lived with since probably 2011. Conservative and conspiratorial. I guess there's something to be said for them letting me live here, but tolerance is the most generous way of putting it. There's nothing worse than being a hermit in a household where you are the enemy. I am a bisexual atheist. The landlady has mocked me for being an "evolutionist," and has told me that she knows more about biology than I do because she knows that "a man can't become a woman." One of her sons is an atheist as well, and he is the worst: he has full-on Columbine energy and I'll stick by that assessment until he finally does it and gets caught, and I probably won't even be there to say "I told you so" since I'll probably be near the top of the list. I'm in a situation where I leverage my family history with a family that constantly belittles me to keep a cheap place to rent. It's gotten so headache-inducing that I've reached out to coworkers to see if I can get a roommate. It's much harder than I had ever considered to move out, even if I'm willing to spend more money than I do in the current arrangement.

That brings me to a slew of even deeper problems.

In the past year I have logged 4,383 hours on The Elder Scrolls Online. My time in Fortnite is likely comparable. Why have I dumped so much of my time which could have been spent creating and honing my craft on these games? Are they genuinely more important to me? Are they doing anything to ease the tension building inside me?

No.

I have an obsessive compulsion to play these games. I play ESO because it has a great character creator. I play Fortnite because it is an okay game with characters I like the aesthetics of. Outside of these positives, these games have very overt predatory practices for people like me. Rotating shops, limited events, limited cosmetics, and grindy mechanics. I am currently working on getting the achievements for completing 30 daily jobs of each type in each DLC in ESO. Why? Who the fuck knows. It's a compulsion. I feel a need to do medial tasks until it has arbitrarily considered as "complete." There's nothing inherently wrong with playing these games, but I play them as work. I prioritize them above my actual health and actual career. I haven't worked on my novel in a couple of months now, and I was excited when I was just starting it up like a year ago.

That brings me to just earlier this week. I realized my arachnophobia has been getting preposterous. A couple of months ago I killed a massive wolf spider that was just chilling beside the bathroom light switch. The other day, a smaller one scurried past me when I was hanging out with the roommate; that one survived, but I went on a hunt. I found another even smaller one under the toilet scrubber thingy and killed it. Upstairs, in the other bathroom, I found a big hobo spider resting near the wall. I put on shoes and crushed it. I tried to go to bed, but my heart was racing for hours. I felt like crying. I was embarrassed, and I felt terrible for hunting down these spiders. They freak me out, but that seems like a weak excuse to hunt them down and kill them like I did. So I'm planning to get exposure therapy soon. However, I think this and my general depression and anxiety are directly linked. I think I will have to treat my underlying conditions to have long-term affects and to get my life back on track.

I had said for nearly a decade that I would never consider suicide; not after that incident with my mother. Recently, I had a nightmare where I was contemplating suicide. It feels kind of like you're looking down into a vast bottomless pool at night and that you could just jump in and dive down, as deep as you could go, and by the time you've had a chance to change your mind it's too late to get back up to the top, and you panic for a bit, and drown.

I'm scared. I'm scared of social situations. I'm scared of getting a heart attack. I'm scared of loud noises. I'm scared of being struck by lightning. I'm scared of big spiders, cockroaches, and beetles. I'm scared of balloons. I'm still kind of scared of wasps. I'm fucking scared of enlarged things; there's not even a word for that. Things that should be small, but are really fucking big, like wolf spiders, or helicopter blades, or

I had a nightmare where I was standing on the edge of a cliff looking down into a giant forest. It looked kind of like a normal rainforest, except there was a lot of blue atmospheric perspective. The trees might be otherwise mistaken for being normal-sized and close. No, they were thousands of feet tall - some even tall enough to surpass the height of the cliff itself. If I ever get around to writing The Green Owl, I'm sure you'll hear this be referred to as The Great Wide Forest. I think my fears often shape my writing.

It's easy to pile on the fears that I've accumulated. It's hard to drudge up the ones that I've hopefully put behind me. Ants, nightmares, being alone in the house, literally astrological events like quasars and pulsars.

I think I need to cut down to a healthy amount of caffeine. I think I need to sleep regularly and fully. I think I need to diet better and get outside more often, and I think even higher above that I need to start doing the things I really want to do instead of the menial tasks that have thrust themselves into my daily routine.