The Card Game That Stops You From Being A Bad Partner

Amazing, you are such a keener!

Somehow you managed to get to this page in the ONE DAY it’s going to be up, because I have to still finish writing my account of making this game system.

It’s outlined… It’ll happen…

Come back in like a day.

Come back in two days maybe.

Probably a day though – I should really have this up in a day. I believe in me… I mostly believe in me…

Two days max.

In the meantime sign up for my cheatsheet:

Two Days Later Update:

Alright fine, I don’t have it all done. Dangit. Shoot. I thought I would.

I have the intro for you, you devourer of all things text and thoughtly. Here’s your sneak peak:

The Self-HATRED Prologue:

These days I don’t hate myself, but I do hate the systems of the world. So I am still filled with hatred, but at least it’s not a hatred aimed at making my own life a living hell anymore.

I do still motivate myself, sometimes, to work harder through fear and bullying; but it’s rare, and I only use it when I have no other option (when a clock is ticking down).

And then I rest and recuperate afterward because pushing myself like that is mean and I don’t want to be mean to myself; I don’t hate myself.

But I used to.

I used to spend all day hating myself, and I was happy to do so.

Being mean to myself was the plan.

Until: I got out of that hellhole and stopped hating myself.

But when I went around trying to talk to my friends about getting out of their own hells, they looked at me funny.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” -James Baldwin

I had a luxury. I lived at home after school and I didn’t have to go out and get a job.

I had time to think.

Thinking was the antidote to hating myself.

Real thinking. True thinking. Confrontational thinking, where I really looked at what was happening to me internally, until I understood my own inner workings, and could bit by bit find the times I was hating myself, and reroute the impulse to be something more constructive.

It took years to be able to understand what was going on inside of me, and longer still for me to get my metaphorical hands on the levers of power within my own mind, and change the momentum that ran my life.

I do still hate and bully myself sometimes, but they are now situational events, and not a chronic, all-the-time way of life.

Some people will tell you, “I’m just not that kind of person, I can’t change, I have to be hard on myself.” And I do think they’re right about something: I do think if you cannot see how your mind is working, then you will not be able to easily shift the balance of power and claim majority ownership of your own head.

So I saw that we desperately needed ways to cut down the time it takes for a person to visualize what’s going on in their own minds, if we’re going to have people who are able to cease torturing themselves without -like a decade- of free time off to work through everything it takes to grab the reins of the mind.

I was desperate to find a way to cut down the time it takes.

And we already know I wasn’t fast enough; there has already been a fatality while I’ve been dragging my feet trying to pull my solution together; one of the people I was making this game for died.

Watching someone I cared about, someone I knew hated themself, die before I could get the solution in place, that’s the kind of thing that makes a man want to reinstitute the old policy of using fear and bullying to try and speed up the process. -So I have a bit of self-hatred that has come back, but it’s not running the show, it’s just biting at my heels, and I feel the pressure more than before to get this game complete and into the hands of the people it might help.

You can read on to hear about the saga of figuring out all of the elements this game would need to have if it was going to help people reimagine their own minds, and what they could do to gain quicker control of the momentum of their own thoughts-

But I’ll just tell you now, in case it will help: If you’ve played a deck-building card game, overlay that with real life, and imagine that your job is not to get more powerful cards, but that your deck is full of cards that are junky or actively-bad, cards that were not put there by you, but by the build up of our planet’s stupid mean-as-hell systems that dehumanize us. Picture all the cards that are in the deck, filibustering the cards you try to put there yourself.

Now imagine if all the intruding cards were gone.

Imagine if the only thoughts in your head were thoughts you put there yourself, and on purpose.

I don’t even have that clear of a head, but I know I’m living in a manner that is closer to all the thoughts in my head being there on purpose, and at my invitation; I’m no longer at the mercy of all my thoughts all the time.