#i feel like i get a lot done for someone with adhd through sheer force of will and scattered coping mechanisms

[brightlotusmoon]

My friend just said this and I agree:

"New writing minsdet I'm trying out: defeat impostor framing by being just as unhinged, just as fragmented, as your worst critics think you are. The correct response to "this is a mess" is "I know, isn't it cool?" The correct response to "what if no one understands what I'm trying to do?" is "then it won't be anything I haven't felt before." Lean into the hate. Use your weight to throw it off balance like a martial art."

[ashintheairlikesnow]

29. — preparation

CW: Discussions of medicating for ADHD (it’s not forced drugging, but Chris has a lot of trauma around pills, so I’m tagging ‘drugging’ anyway), PTSD, trauma responses

“What, what, what if, if, if... if it makes, um, makes me feel like... like it did with, with Sir?” 

Chris’s voice is hushed. He’s hunched in the doorway, staring into the bathroom. The tile is grungy, white but closer to yellowed with time no matter how hard they scrub. There’s an old circular stain in the ceiling, like someone left a coffee cup there upside down. 

Jake hums, filling a clear glass with water and setting it carefully to the left side of the sink. “Then you won’t take anymore. But you should try it for just, for a week or so, okay, Chris?”

“What if it-... what, um, what, what... what, what if it makes me, not, um, not eat? Like before?” Chris is smaller with every sentence, shrinking into himself. “I don’t want-... I don’t, um, don’t want the, the, the the the fog, Jake. I don’t... I don’t want it. I don’t want to feel that way again, you, you promised I wouldn’t h-have to, to feel that way anymore... you promised-”

“I know.” Jake opens the little semi-sheer orange pill bottle with a label wrapped most of the way around it, fake name but real prescription, and takes out a single pill - white on one end and the same orange as a traffic cone on the other. He lays it next to the glass of water. “And I’m not going to force you to take this, but you’ve been struggling trying to study for your GED and I think-... I think we probably should’ve talked about this a long time ago. I think Nat and I have known, and we just... shit. We were just trying to let you have your mind, for a while.”

“Will it... will it, it take my, my my my... my mind away?” Chris’s voice is tiny, infinitesimal, it’s the voice of a child.

Jake swallows against the twist of guilt inside him. “No, Chris. It won’t, I promise. If it’s, if this works, it’ll give all of your mind back to you. You’ll be able to focus when you have to, and get that studying done. You’ll be able to think, even more than you already do. Medicine isn’t supposed to take your thoughts away, especially not medicine like this. If it works, it won’t hurt you at all, it’ll help.”

Chris bites at his lower lip, watching Jake with big green eyes, rocking sideways lightly to knock into the doorframe, twisting one of the hoodie strings in his other hand, pulling and pulling to get the feeling of the tension wrapped around his fingers. “But if I, if I don’t want to do it anymore-”

“Then we stop. One week. Seven days. Seven pills. If after seven days, you can’t stand how you feel, we stop and we figure something else out. No harm, no foul, we tried it and we’ll try something else. But medicine isn’t evil, Chris. It’s just... it’s like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build a house, or to break bones, but the hammer isn’t good or evil. It’s just a hammer. Right?”

Chris swallows, and slowly nods, his eyes on the single, small pill next to that glass of water. “... right.”

Jake is quiet, for a minute, and then he’s in front of Chris, and Chris steps forward into his arms on pure and perfect instinct, knowing they will wrap around him, hold him tightly, hold him close. “I’m s-scared of, of, of drugs,” Chris whispers into Jake’s collarbone, the warmth of his skin. “I’m so scared.” 

His heart beats so fast and so hard Jake can feel it through his clothes, can nearly see the thrum of the pulse in the corner where his jaw and neck meet. He’s so thin, really, and they know he can do gymnastics and yoga and pilates, but he doesn’t look like gymnasts on TV, and yet... there’s a hint of those muscles in him, still.

Like he had them once, and they were siphoned away by starvation and drugs and pain, until a ghost of his strength remains to haunt the body they were able to save.

“I know, Chris. I know you are.”

“I don’t want to, to, to feel that way anymore, I h-hate it, I hate-... I hate it-”

Jake nods, looking out into the hallway, taking a deep breath. “I know. And I’m sorry that you were made to feel like that. I promise you - I swear to you, Chris, and you know I never don’t keep a promise I make to you, no matter what - that if you don’t feel better after a week, I will get rid of this bottle and you will never see it again.”

Chris sniffs against him, twisting fingers into Jake’s shirt now, humming low in his throat, rocking his head forwards and back lightly on Jake’s body, calming himself against the fear that threatens to shatter his fragile peace apart. Slowly, he starts to nod, nodding and nodding and nodding with his rocking, his tapping, finger-twist-tap-tap-tap, and it calms him.

They let him tap here, and rock, and hum, and hold him when it’s too hard and he tries to hurt himself to stop the cacophony of sound that overwhelms him, and they-... they let him have himself, his body, for his own.

Seven days. 

Seven pills.

Jake’s promise is between them, and Jake keeps his promises. Jake comes back, when he says he will. He comes back limping and bruised, battered and hurting, but he comes back.

Chris pulls back from Jake’s embrace, keeping one hand twisted in the bigger man’s shirt, and moves towards the sink. Jake moves with him, watching his face closely, his blue eyes a familiar weight, the kind that doesn’t hurt. “You sure, Chris?”

Chris swallows, and nods, bouncing on the balls of his feet, eyes traveling over the little bathroom, the foggy-glassed window you can’t see in, the shower curtain with dolphins on it that Leila picked out, the sky blue bathmat. “I trust, trust you,” he whispers. “I, I trust you not to hurt me, Jake.”

Jake takes in a hitched breath. “God, I hope I live up to that,” He mutters, and Chris hears him and rocks lightly into his side, then reaches out and take the pill in his hand. It’s so light, barely a brush along his palm. It weighs nothing. It weighs too much.

Jake moves to pick up the glass of water but by the time he does, Chris has already swallowed the pill dry, easy as can be, and feels it move down his throat, closing his eyes against the familiar shift in his esophagus, the little pill traveling to his stomach, where it will dissolve in the acid that lives there and travel through his body.

And he will feel better.

Or worse.

He’s about to find out.

“If it doesn’t help, you don’t have to do it again,” Jake says, softly.

Chris nods, panic a constant white noise in the back of his mind, the threat of the return of the white light, the fog, one thought at a time moving slow as a rock slide that seems like nothing until you are crushed by it. A fire that seems distant until it burns down your house. A rain that threatens on the horizon until the hail starts to slam into your back and make you bleed into the perfect clarity of ice-

Chris whimpers, his moment of courage faltering, and Jake gathers him up again, arm around him, holding him close. 

“I promise it’s medicine,” Jake whispers. “I promise.”

“I trust you,” Chris whispers back, and he does.

But he’s still scared.

--

Tagging: @burtlederp, @finder-of-rings, @endless-whump, @whumpfigure, @slaintetowhump, @astrobly, @newandfiguringitout, @doveotions, @pretty-face-breaker, @boxboysandotherwhump, @oops-its-whump @moose-teeth

[meditationsfromthethirdrail]

Credentials and Credibility

I’ve written about polarization and about empathy, rights and responsibilities in the last couple of blog posts.  I have a long list of interrelated topics to cover before the November elections and I plan to keep plowing through them.  But I’m well aware that my voice is a candle in the wind, to borrow the phrase used by T.H. White in the title of his tale about King Arthur’s dream of a more egalitarian and peaceful society.  The number of readers of my blog thus far may barely run into double digits and that may never change.  We are all drowning in information (and misinformation) unless we are either so socioeconomically disadvantaged as to be denied access or are actively disengaged from media.  People in either category aren’t reading this.

With all the competition for the attention of readers and listeners, if someone wants to be heard above the din, he or she either has to have a forceful personality and a good platform, or actually have something important to say.  I may not have either of those.  Readers will judge for themselves.  But it occurred to me that I ought to at least provide a little background about myself, which may or may not compel you to hear me.  So here it is.

My story is not one of hard knocks and resentment - it’s a success story.  There are a lot of ways to define success but I feel like I’ve grabbed a nice assortment of brass rings during my almost-seven decades on the planet.  I’ve had a long and happy marriage to an incredible woman; I’ve traveled extensively (six continents and all fifty states) and lived for substantial periods in many states; I have three degrees from a major college; I attained a modestly high position in a large, global professional services firm and was financially well rewarded for my efforts; and I have many hobbies and interests that make it easy for me to stay fully occupied in retirement.  Most importantly, I’m happy and at peace with myself and others.  One could argue that these successes may have caused me to be out of touch with those who’ve enjoyed fewer of them, but I don’t think that’s entirely true, and I’ll try to suggest why.

My parents were the son and daughter of a sharecropper and a truck farmer/itinerant salesman, respectively, in rural Mississippi.  They grew up during the Great Depression. They were married and gave life to my older brother when they were still in their teens.  My dad dropped out of high school to sign up for the Army and served in the European theater in WWII.  After the war he got a G.E.D. and served as a tractor mechanic for a while.  Around the time I was born he was hired by a prominent agricultural implement manufacturing company, which led to him being transferred from Mississippi to Maryland to Ohio to Idaho to Oregon and to Iowa in order to earn promotions, and with family in tow.  Later he also transferred to Texas, Missouri and Georgia, after I was left behind to attend college in Iowa.  In those days it was possible to rise pretty high in the ranks of a business like my dad’s, without a glittery collegiate resume, if you worked hard and were willing to uproot yourself and your family whenever it was called for.  So my dad eventually did rise fairly high in the ranks, and in the meantime my mom scrambled her way to a B.A., then taught high school English for a short time.

All’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare once said.  My parents came a long way from the dusty fields where they picked cotton for 50 cents a day.  My own road to success was much easier than theirs.  During most of my childhood our family was financially situated about in the dead center of what was then considered middle class.  My parents were not rich, although they accumulated modest wealth later in life, and they were always frugal, so I grew up with very few toys and a mostly empty closet.  My parents were not the type to devote much time attending to my personal pursuits, other than to quietly demand that I get good grades in school.  So I wouldn’t say I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I understand that’s a relative thing.  I certainly wasn't lavished with material things as a child, but I never went hungry or worried about having a roof over my head.

Aside from a base level of financial and emotional support and protection, the best thing my parents gave me was a solid education in a robust public school system.  This was a pre Betty Devos era.  Fortunately I had just enough innate ambition (or willingness to succumb to my parents’ expectations) and intelligence to perform in the upper tier, academically.  I could have done better but I often didn’t “apply myself,” as they say.  In retrospect I realize I had ADHD but few people understood or cared about that back then.

My college record was spotty at first, but ultimately pretty good.  I had almost no grasp of what I wanted to do with my life.   As a result, I had an abnormally extended adolescence, to roughly age 27.  Maybe I was a trendsetter; I see a lot more of that happening with young people today.  In any case I considered, at various times and among other things, becoming a Baptist minister (I was licensed and briefly attended seminary), an English professor (I have an M.A. in English and instructed freshman writing courses for three years), a novelist and poet (insufficient talent and discipline derailed that plan), and a hotel manager (nah).   A happy accident of my wandering and indecision was that I acquired a lot of knowledge that later paid off in surprising ways I’ll come back to later.  I was financially very poor the entire time, which gave me considerable perspective on what it means to be concerned about affording basics such as food and transportation.

I vividly remember the catalysts for my decision to enter the social mainstream. One was the fallout from a poker game I got into with some friends.  One of my “friends” was a notoriously unethical character who, one late evening when I was especially unlucky and perhaps too full of beer, lured me into some bad bets that resulted in a $700 debt to him.  At that time, when I was working several crummy part-time jobs to afford food and my $50 share of the rent on a slum-quality house we shared with two other guys, $700 dollars seemed like a million dollars.  I didn't realize and no one told me that on the very next evening the same group of friends gathered for another poker game as I was licking my wounds and trying to form a plan.  I was not present to witness the scene in which the guy whom I was newly indebted to suffered an equally humiliating loss - a loss that was forgiven by the victor on the condition that the loser would also forgive my loss.  My friends assumed that Bart (not his real name, or is it?) would inform me that I was off the hook.  He did not.

For the first time in my life, I devised a budget in order to determine how I could repay Bart the debt that didn’t actually exist, because that’s the kind of guy I am.  I believed, and I still do, that a person is morally and ethically responsible for meeting whatever commitments he or she enters into.  So  I scrambled for more hours working as a church janitor, a tutor and a library assistant; I ate Kraft macaroni and cheese almost every day (30 cents a box, if I recall); I stayed in my room as if I had contracted the then-undreamt-of coronavirus; and I turned over every penny that didn’t go for rent and minimal food to Bart in three monthly installments until I was finally clear.  I was six feet tall but my weight fell to about 140 pounds.  On the day I forked over the last $200, Bart skipped town, just as the news finally arrived that I wasn’t supposed to have owed that debt.

That sordid chapter concluded with me taking a job, out of sheer desperation, in a factory where I was paid a below-minimum wage to operate a machine which applied mailing labels to printed advertisements.  It was mind-numbing.  There were perhaps another 100 workers in that factory doing the same thing I was doing.  The output of each worker was measured daily by the factory management.  By the end of the first week I was the most productive mailing label attacher in the factory.  To keep myself from going insane, I approached my task as if it were a game and challenged myself each shift to beat my previous day’s output, which I always did.  During my brief lunch breaks I used to surreptitiously glance around at the other workers and I understood exactly what Thoreau meant when he opined that the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.  I don’t know if he was right about “the mass of men,” but he certainly could have been describing that crew at the factory.

In my second week at the factory I met another newly-hired college guy whose wife and he were trying to save enough money to move to Los Angeles so he could take a shot at professional acting - this was his second job.  Chatting with him during lunch breaks, i was inspired by his desire to fulfill a dream and the difficult steps he was taking to do it.  I listened to him, I looked around at the hollow-eyed, middle-aged folks who had worked for years operating labeling machines, and I squirmed as I considered what a sap I was for racking up a poker debt and falling victim to a con man.  i abruptly abandoned the factory but I felt so discombobulated that I enlisted my good buddy John to drive out to Idaho with me so I could visit my brother and try to get my shit together.  By the end of that brief sojourn out west, the best job offer I could manage was from Roto-Rooter . . . to work in the field, as it were.  Wake up call!

If you’ve read this far you must be wondering how any of this supports the notion that I’m qualified to write about sociopolitical matters.  It doesn’t, except to demonstrate that I have at least a small measure of “street cred.”  But the best is yet to come.  When I returned to Iowa I found a better job in a hotel.   Initially I was a night auditor, which is a position that involves being a desk clerk part of the time and an accountant the rest of the time.  Only a small step forward, financially, but it gave me a taste for something I had never previously thought about doing for even one minute.  Accounting, I quickly learned, was something I had a natural aptitude for, and in some quirky way I found it interesting.  Once again I viewed my duties as a sort of game, but this was a game that lit up my brain much more brightly than did operating a machine to perform an exceptionally repetitive task.  

My whole life is a series of lucky breaks at critical junctures.  In this instance the break was that I met a co-worker - a guy who shared the hotel night auditor position with me - who had previously worked for a large CPA firm.  He had taken the part-time hotel job because he was trying to become a full-time stock trader and that’s what he was doing during the day.  From him I learned what it is that CPAs in a big firm actually do.  Let me assure you I’m not going to get into that subject, in case you were already feeling the dread.  (Thank God for actuaries - the only people who make accountants seem slightly interesting.)  Suffice it to say that I figured out how I could minimize the additional schooling I would need to become qualified to be a CPA and I decided to take a stab at it.

I kept the hotel job but started carrying a heavy load of college classes - accounting, math, economics, law, etc.  It so happened that I met my future wife, who was just finishing her Interior Design degree at the same college, about the same time I took the first tentative steps down my new career path.  That was even more fortuitous - I give her lots of credit for helping me stay the course.  The two years in which I went to college in the day, worked at the hotel at night, and struggled to get our new romance off the ground, was “character-building,” to say the least.  I can barely remember anything about that period, it was such a blur.  To give you an idea of how much of a blur it was, the major highlight I remember was driving with my new spouse to Des Moines to dine at Spaghetti Works.  $5 for beer-and-cheese spaghetti, all-you-can-eat salad bar and a glass of swill.  Heaven!

When the two hellish years finally ended and I received my B.S. in Accounting, I had already lined up a job in Des Moines as an auditor with one of the Big 8 (at that time) accounting firms.  Not long afterward, I passed the CPA exam and my wife landed a spot with a local design firm, and we were on our way.

Ok, at last I’m where I possibly should have started. In the ensuring three decades I continued to work as a CPA, becoming a partner along the way (meaning that I became one of the owners), and developing a specialization working with clients in the financial services industry - investment management companies and banking and finance companies, primarily.  This is the good part, folks.  My career soon took me from Iowa to New York City, where my background in English earned me the privilege of being a key designer and the principal author of new practice guidance for our international firm, which was just merging with another large international firm.  That put me in the spotlight for a time and gave me a leg up for promotion.  After the merger we relocated to Los Angeles, where I worked with some of the most prominent investment management companies in the world, and numerous banks, mortgage banks and other financial institutions.  Finally we moved to southeast Pennsylvania and I split time engaged with clients there and in California, and with our national financial services practice in New York.

Late, late nights on Wall Street helping to prepare financial offerings with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line.  Late, late nights at client offices in L.A., San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York and Philadelphia, managing teams of young accountants to deal with complex accounting problems under tremendous pressure.  Board meetings, fee negotiations, staff meltdowns, discoveries of fraud and malfeasance, financial crises in which I was an inside observer.  A 60-hour work week felt almost like a vacation compared to many weeks with even longer hours.  It was enough to give me PTSD.  I don’t want to overstate it - it wasn’t like actual life or death combat PTSD - but I still have nightmares ten years and more after the fact.

That’s a very quick summary of the 30+ years in which I obtained hard-won knowledge about global finance and economics - a period in which I also had a lot of experiences with politics, charitable organizations and other components of society I didn’t have time to get into today.  I still spend a lot of time staying informed about subjects ranging from psychology and mythology to current events and hard science.  There’s a ton I still don’t know.  But as my all-time favorite singer Joni Mitchell famously said, I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.

[raginreptile]

Just to get out of my system #1

Do you ever feel like you want somebody to hear your thoughts? Like a terrible need to confess though you haven't really done anything wrong. I just have to write this and post it here, probably will delete it after (can you even delete Tumblr posts?), but just the sheer knowledge that half a person will see this text (you don’t need to read it) makes me feel better. Sort of, I want to socialise and avoid socialising at the same time. 

So, most important things first - you do not need to read it, acknowledge it or comment on it. These are just words that fill my chest up to the point where I can barely breathe and start just talk-talk-talk to myself, or to people around me. It’s like a weird Tourette’s, where I can’t stop, and I won’t be able to do anything until I finish it. Say it. Even if nobody would hear it. A closure. 

Once again - stop right here, unless you want to dive in into petty anxieties and pointless worries. And complaining, loads of complaining. 

I hate my job and a town I live in. As any young idiot, I have always kinda hated the places I lived at. Its not that I thought I deserved any better, its just I would listen to classmates or neighbours, see their houses, watch films, and realise that I am, pretty much, worse than them. I remember the times when I would compare myself to everyone and see that e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e is better than small and useless me. Better artists, better performers, better mathematicians, better at languages, at PE, at socialising, at getting to places. More beautiful than me. There has always been a place, like a Wonderland, basically “the Betterland” (cringe I know), where everyone was, and I was forgotten. Long story short, I moved multiple times, and ended up here. What is this place? An absolute disaster. I am very nature-oriented person, and there’s no forests or parks. There’s no rivers or sea either. No beautiful places. It’s just and industrial working town, surrounded by terrible grey fields. I haven’t got any DL yet, but I am on my way of getting it. I suffer here. An outgoing person years before, I get anxious before getting out of my room. I need freedom, and this town destroyed it. Only one year left, and I am going away. I do not care where, just somewhere with forest and sea. And the workplace... A lot of responsibility. A lot of important conversations and being “proper” towards people. I can’t be around people, I always behave like an idiot. But this job is my only chance. Christ, I am afraid of getting back after the lockdown, I will not cut it. 

Can’t make any friends, don’t know how to. Never in my life I knew anyone who would socialise with me because they like me or think I am funny. As a matter of fact, I am most definitely unfunny, boring and fail to establish a human-like (empathetic I guess?) relationship with people. Some would think it is weird, and, well, they will be absolutely right. I do not know if I need friends, but sometimes I think... it would have been nice, right? To socialise with someone (not romantically), talk about bullshit, and just be friends. Share weird situations, secrets, and generally fun stuff. Be fans of something together. I don’t know, maybe I have a strange understanding of how friendships work, but I’d like that kind of person. My partner has friends, and I am kinda jealous because I want to have them too. But I am always getting ghosted, ignored or just... well, “a classmate\colleague” and no more than that. People say I talk a lot, and generally am weird - maybe that’s the reason? People feel like I am a freak and an outcast and they don’t want to be around me? I don’t know. I don’t know how to become friends with people, I do not know what is the difference between a close friend and an acquaintance. I will tell them both same thing, and I will hide same things from them two. Never have I managed to get along with someone who would think “wow, RaginReptile is so amazing, let’s be friends!”, people mostly tell me that I am weird. And talk a lot. I am so scared to admit that I hit the point when communicating turned into the unnecessary activity, I prefer to be by myself and talk to myself, do things on my own. So scared. Don’t know which one I want more, have friends or be ascetic. 

Can’t do any more of studying. I said it. Finally. Five years is more than enough, I went from fascination for the subject to absolute hate. I can’t stand the assignments, can’t stand “another cool idea”, no more grades, no more pass criteria, all I want to do is write my own scripts and sell them, but how can I do so if all I manage to think about is deadlines-college-call-work-deadline-money? And those college assignments do not seem to make sense either, I just do not want to do them anymore, I wish to carry on with my own thing. But it would be stupid to quit - I got into student debt, moved from my home country for this education, and didn't even finish school there, just quit in 10 (out of 12) year to go straight to college and upgrade there from Level 2 to Level 5 (Level 6 if Bachelors degree, it is after this year). And, being so close to the end, I realise that I cannot do it anymore. I have so much respect for my tutor, but myself I am... tired. I think I completely destroyed my mental health because of juggling studies, work and family troubles, and moving. If two years ago I cared about my grades and my future, now I am just trying not to sleep 70 hours per day.

Suspecting ADHD and am afraid to go to the doctor’s. I am afraid that it will forbid me from driving (though I do not have any problems with it, lol, just anxious that I will be restricted from it), and I am afraid my family will think of me as of a weak and useless person who can’t take care about themselves. I have been taking care about myself as much as I could. I looked online for the “home” treatments for ADHD (I already checked the symptoms and as far as I am concerned it fits, but it would be a subject for some other post, really), and it worked up to a couple years ago, when college kicked me so hard I had my first public proper nervous breakdown and I have never got well again. Actually, there are much more problems now - for example I hate, hate-hate-hate making decisions, if before I could have forced myself, now I am willing to let everything go and just fail, I won’t feel neither good or bad about it. Sometimes I feel like I am alien to my own body. So many thoughts in this pumpkin-head, everyday I feel like a completely new and different person, and it just circulates in my mind, every day of every week. I think I need to get my head checked, haha, but I know I will not trust a doctor, I’ve seen enough of them and most of them are such an utter dog shite. Well, tomorrow will be another day, ain’t it?

Tired of fighting. “Forcing myself is the best tactics ever” was my working motto for most of my life. Force through reading, watching, walking, organising, planning, doing what I liked and didn't like. It worked up until the events I described earlier. I don't know how to get back on track with my life. How to get back and start again, be cool and happy and beautiful once again. Just wanna breathe some sea air and... Well, what else do I need?

[popculturedruid]

How would you recommend finding out more about an entity when the source material is very vague, limited, and not very popular? I'm trying to figure out a pantheon based on the Great Ones from Bloodborne, but information about pretty much all of them is few and far between. Also, I have trouble meditating due to literal ADHD, do you have any ideas for how to concentrate better? Thank you so much, your blog is lovely!!

Aww, thank you so much! That means a lot!

This is such a good question. I wanted to take some time here again to really answer this one to give you a proper answer. That’s why it took me a bit to get back to you.

I understand your frustration here. It is very frustrating to look for information about your desired entity and find little to nothing. I looked up Bloodborne just to see what we were getting at, then quickly realized I was going to give myself spoilers because I probably wanted to play this game. :)

From the bit that I let myself get a look at, the Great Ones pantheon immediately reminds me of the Daedra from the Elder Scrolls games. Not in such basic terms as good and evil, but simply from the scope of multiple forms, alternate planes, and just generally screwing with people. There is a fairly large group of Tamriel PCPs on Tumblr, it might be worth a look to check into see how they structure their relationships for ideas to maybe start your own. I’m going to refer you over to @popculturepagan who has a tag on Elder Scrolls PCP. Not saying you need to go that way at all, I’m just trying to show you another pantheon that’s a bit more established that might give you some ideas to help you get yours started!

It appears the direct reference for the Great Ones is H.P. Lovecraft and his “Great Old Ones.” You have undoubtedly heard of Cthulhu. Cthulhu is just a high priest to one of them. Many folks make Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones out to be chibi, but if you read the stories, they’re actually quite terrifying. If you haven’t read the stories, and you’re still itching for more Bloodborne, the best place to go would be for the inspiration for the Great Ones: Lovecraft’s stories. He wrote many, but you can get the stories that just contain the ones with Cthulhu. I think they would also mostly include the Great Old Ones in those as well. His stories are just great in general, however. From these stories of the GOO (I got tired writing that out :P), you could probably pick up a bit more on the general characteristics of your GOs.

I would also encourage you to search through fanfiction. I have called fanfiction our weird version of Shared Personal Gnosis. If the community in general kinda feels a certain way about a character, they generally might be on to something.

For instance, everyone is probably going to say that Luke Skywalker seems like a pretty swell guy. He’s not likely to go nuts anytime soon (I would though, all alone on that planet, let’s be real). If someone writes a version of Luke that runs around murdering all the things for the lolz, people are generally going to disagree.

(That’s not to say you can’t end up contacting a different version of that entity, but that’s getting into something different, and that’s where the theory of multiverses comes into play. And how @octomantra and I have two different Eds in our heads.)

You might point out again that this is a small community still, and a character being out of character this early on is not going to be as obvious as Luke running around killing all the younglings. But I hope you would start to see a trend in how others are viewing this world as well, even if they aren’t viewing it in the exact same way. It’s still getting built.

Here’s the link to the Archive of Our Own Bloodborne Tag: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Bloodborne%20(Video%20Game)/works

Fanfiction.net:https://m.fanfiction.net/game/Bloodborne/

I also noticed there is a huge crossover community at FF.net. Not sure if that really would mean much to you, but here you are:https://m.fanfiction.net/crossovers/Bloodborne/12234/

As for your question about ADHD and meditating, I feel your pain here. I have this, and it takes a lot for me to focus. To get my brain even in the mindset I say the Jedi code about 3 times until my brain realizes we’re going to just STOP for a second. And this takes a sheer force of will to get it to stop and focus. For a moment. It’s fine if you can’t, I’m lucky if I can for about 30 seconds before my brain is on to whatever else I thought I needed to do next.

In answering your question, however, I realized that for me if I truly want to meditate and reach out to my entities I have to create a place in my head where I’m going. It can’t just be “breathe in, breathe out.” Then my brain starts going, “wait, am I doing the breathing right? Wait, is my mind wandering? Wait, I’m still the only person in this room, right?” Even though I know damn well I’m the only person in the room because I would have heard it, but my brain just thinks, “ooh, shiny!” And I’m gone.

If I want to actually talk to my people for more than 10 seconds I have to create a place in my head for me to actually be standing in. You would think it’d be more distracting, but apparently once I’m out of how distracting this world is I’m fine. The other place can’t be too detailed either though, otherwise I’m like, “hey, I got to get closer to that countertop because I don’t know what color it is EXACTLY, and if I don’t know right now, I may literally die.” Forget the fact I’m talking to someone, nope, I’m gone.

You will fail sometimes, and it will be fine. I do it frequently enough. I usually don’t go into meditation to talk to my entities, I just talk out loud. I suppose this could be a talking meditation if I’m focusing hard enough. This doesn’t always work. I have a particularly amusing memory of trying to pseudo meditate/talk to tell Colonel Mustang “happy birthday, Colonel” and “it is good to meet you” in Japanese on his birthday. I’d only been learning the language for 3 days. I had worked fairly hard to get to this point, so I was fairly proud of myself. Colonel Mustang had been grumpy all day, and I had a fairly good idea why. So I thought, “hey, let’s try to greet him in the language his original materials were printed in to see if it will cheer him up.” It did, for about 30 seconds, until my brain completely derailed because I knew one of the words wasn’t translating properly. I spent the next at least 20 minutes tracking the problem until I somewhat figured it out. By then though, the damage was done. He was back to being irritated, and I got the distinct impression he wouldn’t even look at me. At the time, I was disappointed. Now, it’s funny because I realize he was throwing a hissy fit. (The chaos in my head, right now.)

So, as silly as it sounds, make a happy place. A field in the middle of nowhere, a snowy plain, your favorite movie, a library, the actual area your characters are from, wherever. Create the starting place, but let the world build itself. That’s what I do. I don’t build it. I let it happen. It’s less stressful, and less distracting.

It sounds insanely difficult, but it’s not. We don’t let our imaginations run free anymore, but when we do, it’s beautiful.

Besides building your happy place, I also try to minimize distractions by going into a room where I won’t be disturbed by someone for at least a fair bit of time. I have to make sure the room is straightened first. It doesn’t have to be absolutely cleaned, but just tidied first or I can’t concentrate on anything other than, “did you just invite your friends over to a pig sty?” I turn off the lights. I get into comfortable clothing, which for me is just sweatpants and a hoodie. I get into a comfortable position, it doesn’t matter if it’s sitting or laying down, hell it can be standing if it’s what works for you. Just make sure you can stay in it without having to move. I like lighting a candle, because candles. I pull up my hoodie and just start zoning and talking. I focus on a place right behind my eyes, oddly enough. It actually slightly hurts, but I’m assuming it’s because I have strabismus, and I’m making my eyes go straight. I actually caution against falling asleep in this state. I have done it a couple times, and it’s like you bring things back from whatever gate you didn’t close. I have had the oddest dreams while falling asleep mid-meditation. That’s just me. Maybe you’ll find something else. :D

If and when you decide to get your practice started, whether with the Great Ones or whomever, and if you create a Tumblr, please let me know. Or even if you just create anything let me know so I can have a link for the next person who comes asking. This community only gets bigger when we reach out to each other! I am super happy to see new universes get people everyday. It’s super exciting!

Best of luck! I hope I helped a little, and please, please, please let me know if you have any more questions!