Surviving

I’ve been surviving for so long. This is the construct I’ve built to be okay. Doing things on the computer; setting goals and crushing them. Here’s a metaphorical story:
I’m on a flight to the next stage of my life. The plane crashes. I survive. The people helping me are in turmoil. I survive. I walk many paths of solitude, photographing the exits. Then one day, I’m standing in a hallway, looking out into a field. The walls begin to close in, pushing me toward the exit. I try to remain. Inching, sliding until the last possible place to stand. Pause. Click. I’m outside and the hallway and every space associated with it are gone. I’m in a field of yellow grass and white flowers. In the distance, a picnic party. People laughing. Can this really be it? The end of this road? One of them waves at me. I can’t believe it. Again, wave, beckoning. I walk over. I see the look on their faces: understanding. I pause.

10 years ago, I started programming. Computers entered my life just as things started going downhill. In that time, I’ve known 1 person who was into programming and computers: a teacher I had for 1 year. Everything else has been watching from the outside and building invisible things inside. I’ve been amassing power and it’s time I rise.

Climbing. Getting Over It was not my first climbing game, Pogo Postman was. My first playthrough took about an hour and my last run, 47 seconds. I was into speedrunning. I stopped playing because my computer was too slow to screen record, which I needed in order to submit to the leaderboards. So when I started playing Getting Over It, what may have looked like blind faith was actually trust in the process.

100 times I climbed that mountain, 100 times Bennett Foddy told me I have an obdurate mission to taste defeat. He’s right. You see, I can’t arrive on victors’ ground having barely scraped by, only just made it, winner by a hair. I need to arrive in the glory of the complete and unremittable defeat of all that opposed me.

I have a label over my laptop’s webcam, “RISE”. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of ascent. What I’ve found is that true ascent isn’t about climbing upwards. It’s when the very walls of your prison reject you. When the space you’re in must be unmade because it can no longer contain you. When it pushes you out and ceases to exist. My decade of hibernation is over and all I have to do is join the picnic.

PS: This doesn’t mean I’m done with computers or posting here 😄
PS2: I love reading and writing PS-es.