Thanks Catherine. You've got your hands full too. That's a lot to deal with.

I grew up and my Scots mum (nurse at that with 4 degrees) taught me about work ethics and about being there when you were needed. What was not discussed, maybe expected to be understood, was that the caretaker needs to take care of themselves (and sometimes get some help). When you are struggling and can't see why, that's a good time.

I think I have some PTS (I omit the D because the effects have to hit a certain severity to qualify via DSM IV) from seeing my mom on the emergency bed with 2 doctors and two nurses fighting to keep her alive, with bones sticking out where they should not have been. With dad down with the leg ulcers and heart attacks or angina raging from the pain in the leg, I had him asking me to bring him a gun because of the unmitigated pain. It was a horrific time, but I did what people do (you do the job, you put the emotional part aside and get it done because the people you love need you). What was not clear (not being a first responder with appropriate training about post-traumatic injuries) is that just getting past that period isn't processing the emotional load. So years later, I started watching my outside contacts shrink, my life contract, and my ability to manage simple things get unreliable. And I had no idea why, as it was 7-8 years later than the accident. Professionals would see stuff like that and seek help because they'd know they needed it even if they weren't in trouble right then. I had no notion of that.

When I finally had a therapist suggest to me I ticked off several of the acknowledged incidents that can establish a (complex) post-traumatic injury, I was stunned. I had been reading about it to help a friend who had been abused as a child and it didn't register to me that triggers related to things you've seen happen to people you care about and are powerless to stop is one of the injuries and that that's what I'd been through and the months after with dad in misery about 24 hours of every 24 .... and the gore... shiver. Let's just say when I heard that, a LOT of things suddenly made sense.

In a roundabout way, I want to say to you or anyone else on the list that's having any form of depression or has experienced or witnessed serious trauma including caring for direly ill loved ones consider getting yourself checked out. It's not a weakness (I thought my life's collapsing was a character flaw I could not see and could not fix), but rather it is simply what happens when a traumatic experience creates an emotional wound that cannot be processed normally (it blew your normal threshold and only a professional can help unstick it in a very layman-like metaphor).

I've had several friends, when diagnosed with ADHD or ADD, said "What? You're kidding." while all of us that knew them kind of knew that and assumed they were aware of that long beforehand. And after they were aware of it, that helped a lot by itself, then getting a bit of additional help (meds in most cases) helped them suddenly be more able to sustain focus. It's not a failure of the person, it's just a health/development issue like a learning disability or even a broken leg - something that needs to be understood, perhaps treated, and then managed in order to have a pretty decent life.

The therapy (around 2010-2011) has carried me through all the subsequent stuff. I've gotten good at recognizing what is mine, what belongs to others, and what are things I can affect and cannot. And when the PTS shows up, I can sense it pretty fast and use adaptive techniques to cope. It's imperfect, but it has let me weather everything from 2015 on without breaking apart... I've bent, I've buckled at times, but I've shaken it off and got back into the fray with some new scars.

My best advice to anyone in a horrible situation: Life has a length to it and if you are in dark straights, and they are overwhelming (which is normal and human), get some help and don't feel it's a deficiency or weakness of character, but also one way to weaken the darkness is to look ahead to a point, even if you can't put a date on it, where your life will be smoother, easier, and manageable again - where crises will have passed, where challenges will be well understood, mitigated, and managed. Look for that light in the darkness, even if you don't know how close or far it is. Keep your eye on that and think of what it will be like to be at that place, the weight lifted, life normalizing. (This also applies for the pandemic really.)

Just putting yourself emotionally and imaginatively into a better place that you think could be out there (an act of faith of a sort) will help lift your spirits. Trying to imagine how it would look and feel helps draw your brain to the positive. That can give you enough strength to dust yourself off and rejoin the battle. Believe you can get to the good future and use that as a torch to help you make the journey.

Also, take the time always to list your gifts. I list my wife, despite her pain and challenges, my mother and my father-in-law, my beautiful red-headed grade 7 daughter, and our 3 cats. And being alive and free of the virus so far. And we are growing food (chipmunk/squirrel trap needed...) and flowers. And we have light, and air, and water to drink.

Churchill said (paraphrase): "When you are going through hell, keep going."

My mother survived the bombings of Scotland in WWII. It is a very similar experience to the pandemic. (Wait, whut? Okay, gimme a bit of rope here...)

In both situations, you could be killed without much warning, people you care about could be killed without much warning, you or people you cared about could be hurt, your houses could be destroyed, and there was nothing you could do to stop it. You didn't know how long it might drag on. You didn't even know who would win and what your fate would be. That's a lot like lockdowns, worries about friends, relatives, coworkers, etc, and the uncertain future. You were powerless to control those outcomes.

I asked mom how they coped. She said "Well, you didn't have really any options. You just had to keep on trying to do the best you could for each other. Falling apart could be a response, but it would not help you or anyone else. The only things you could do (stay in the shelters, then try to go back to regular life until the next raid) were what you had to do. You couldn't do anything else. And helping others helped you have a bit of a focus beyond your own woes. And in the long run, communities survived.

So, my greatest wish for all is that nobody loses a loved one, nobody gets permanently messed up, nobody goes bankrupt, and that we all come out the other side and then worry about the clean up.

My wife is a papercrafter. She makes cards and other papercrafts. She is also a 'planner' girl - stickers on calendars and a daily logging of events. Sort of like a point form journal. She tells my mother and her dad that she has no sticker for any of us getting the virus, so it isn't allowed to happen here. That's her way of saying 'take care of yourselves'.

Take care of yourselves.

Tom B

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 1:30 AM Catherine Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Tom,

My heart was aching reading about your situation. i'm so sorry. I too have been a caretaker way too long. My partner is now recovering from a knee surgery that is supposed to be the last thing she needs to more or less correct (for now) a systemic musculoskeletal defect she was born with, but which waited until her 30s to manifest. The problem is that they said "this is probably the last one" three surgeries ago, before the lower spine fusing and left hip reconstruction and knee replacement over the last year. I was raised by a British father who told me lots of stories about Thermopylae and Agincourt at far too impressionable an age. I will be the last one standing even when the fort around me has been reduced to tinder. And for the first time in my life, the years-long mental and emotional cost of caring for my partner combined with the sudden outrageous pileup of plague and political turmoil and rioting literally across the street from my apartment have proven to me that I do in fact have a breaking point, and that I'm on top of it.

My partner is being a saint despite what she's going through, but she has severe pain and torture-level PT to deal with, and she can't help with anything phyisical. I can't have my friends or family over to help, or even to cheer me up for a while. I realized with a weird kind of dispassionate surprise that I am depressed about three weeks ago. When I mentioned it to my therapist, she said some very kind things that nonetheless added up to "Duh, of course you are."

So, yes, we all have to take care of ourselves, and each other, as best we can, however we can. One of the things I see in the members of the TML that is all too uncommon in the world right now is the basic assumption that we *are* a community, and that the word "community" means something. We respect each other, we are kind to each other, we support each other. However distantly and tenuously, you all feel like a home village to me, and I value that very highly indeed.

Nothing good comes easily. Perhaps the difficulty of these times signals that something wonderful is being born. I try to keep that hope alive in me. Per aspera, ad astra.

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 10:01 PM <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
Kelly,

I'd sure miss you if you left.

That said, I won't blame you for taking a break. I've had to do that from this list, COTI, and other lists at times. Sometimes it was things happening on the lists, sometimes it was the stuff happening in the real world that made extra 'active discussions' just a bit too much.

I find this pandemic with all the uncertainty, isolation, and the latest stream of tough news (numbers up, piles of scientists wanting WHO guidelines changed because it is more airborne than WHO is focusing on, a really good NY Times article showing exactly how incredibly insane it will be if we can actually get a vaccine by 2021 or 2022... historical examples have run in the ten+ years range for others and some not at all, etc).... it all just piles up.

Like Catherine, I had been playing some games (Stellaris which I find amazing, Civ V, and Cities:Skylines, Elder Scrolls:Skyrim) that I just can't touch right now because the struggle in each of them is just too much like the struggle to keep safe and fed my partially-disabled wife (who has been out of work 5 years), my 86 year old disabled shingles-in-the-eye mother (with bones that are see-through and lots of hardware from a 10 wheeler impact in 2003), my 85 year old diabetic father-in-law who just lost his driver's license, 3 cats, and my half-time amazing redhead who just suffered 4 months of school online in grade 7 and missing her peers.

And due to my wife having 3 major surgeries in the past 5 years with long cycles (over 14 months each), and my mom being disabled (and my Dad was, but we lost him to lung cancer 25 Dec 2017 after a summer and fall of illness)... I've been in the caretaker mode for 5 years with the last 3 intenselly. So the pandemic was about the time I was supposed to get interviewing and boning up to try to get back to programming/software design and I was thinking my wife's second hip surgery would end up as well as the first, but no physio has her in a mess now, my daughter needs me to help her make up deficits because online IS NOT equivalent to regular classes and because I do all of the going out (regularly, to feed 5 people, fresh home made meals at least 2 meals out of 3 and now a major gardening effort to add 50% to our existing 160 sq ft up to about 240 sq ft. And interviewing? Good luck. And help from the government? Literal zero here in Ontario/Canada for us.

I've had to retreat into playing zombie shooters (not high stress zombie suspense survival stuff) and Ticket To Ride, Terraforming Mars, and D&D Lords Of Waterdeep. Or watching a movie with my wife and child. Or trying to sort out the leftovers of the insane 6 month move in from my parent's country property which concluded just before Xmas 2019 with mom getting a shingles flare up in the first month... which may take a year to be declared in remission (and the med schedules for 3-4 months was every hour... not kidding...).

I've played or GMed a bit, but it's been hard to sustain with the real world being so demanding. And other folk are going through similar battles so getting a regular schedule up and running is tough. And sometimes, the day just takes it out of you.

This pandemic is beating us all up in one way or another - physical, emotional, mental health, financial wellbeing, sense of hope (where?), sense of despair when you see the idiocy and the mean-ness in some instances, and so on... we're all getting frayed... we look like tattered versions of ourselves. And I and my family have the incredible luck to live in an amazing country with mostly smart folks (Canada) - Our infection totals are just over 100K for 37M people and just over 8K deaths. Our US neighbour, usually similar to us (or vice versa) in most regards, has 25x the case count and up over 130K (as of a day or two ago) deaths (which would be around 70K if they were at the same per-capita rate we have). I'm living in one of the safer jurisdictions and it's still rough.

And what you said, Kelly, about the arguments and re-statements and so on... all true, but not the entire truth. There's some as like the flavour of the early game and the source material it was drawn from. There's some that want from the game the potential one sometimes gets a glimpse of, but that can't really materialize due to past canon and contradictions unless one is willing to toss them out or change them. And some like it as it was (fine for them, no argument).

I just see in Traveller, in my past experiences of same, some systems (2d6, careers, task system, skill list) that are useful to play games I'd like to play. The OTU... it lost its luster for me long ago (interesting, but I've done the parts I wanted to do) and the clunky and heavy parts of the system (vehicle construction, most of the combat stuff for vehicles, system generation that produces patchwork empires, etc) I'm not looking to save. I'll take what is good for me and for those that will give them a try with me, and I'll try to give people adventures that aren't buried into criminality, scams, taking out the natives and looting them, or piracy. Even military campaigns are not something my core group from the old days would play (most have done their time in the real services). But the idea of a bunch of friends bouncing around together and exploring, getting in jams, and helping one another get out.... that's something I can work with.

I'm glad you've been here, I'm sorry you're at a rough place now, and I'll continue to enjoy your input until you decide otherwise. And though I hope you'll consider a sabbatical and return, you need to do what you need to do in order to get through this time. We all do. If that means you need to go a different path, I will wish you 'fair stars, calm jumps' and hope you can find what you do need if this isn't it.

For every one on this list, I want to thank you for your participation, even where I disagree or perhaps argue with you about a topic. This list is a safe haven because whatever happens here, nobody actually dies. My characters may go bust, but that's not like my real world imminent concern.

Take care, Kelly. Take care of you.

And to the rest, likewise.

Sincerely,
TomB (kaladorn)

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 12:06 AM Catherine Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I hear you, and i've taken a few breathers from the TML myself over the years. To me, the ongoing charm is precisely that Traveller is a time capsule, a "future" accumulating ever greater amounts of zeerust. When I'm in the right mood, our endless rabbinical attempts to interpret the hopelessly confused and self-contradictory Holy Canon can be a pleasant distraction from all-too-real issues -- will I keep my job through this ongoing multi-level disaster? How bad will global warning get? Is my country turning into a fascist dictatorship? With all that hanging over my head, a fifteen-minute break in the middle of the day to work out (again) how the X-Boat network actually functions is a huge relief.

In a different mood, I go to where you seem to be, Kelly, and find it an irritatingly juvenile and time-wasting distraction. My solution is not to read the TML when I'm in that mood. If that mood were in effect more than about 80% of the time, I'd probably drop the TML entirely. Currently it's more like 30%.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, for the last three weeks of March, I played an inordinate, unhealthy amount of Civilization VI. I knew what I was doing: Escaping into a model world that, for all its unpredictability, I could at least broadly control and model. Then, right around the beginning of April, some kind of switch flipped in my head and I abruptly lost all interest in Civ. Instead, I found myself drawn to picking up a long-back-burnered effort to learn Android programming. I've been doing that several hours a day ever since. It's another way to lose myself, but it's a lot more productive; eventually, it will produce an app, which I hope will be useful to some people. I can't claim any moral fortitude in this switch; it happened to me, rather than my choosing it.

I think the quarantine is making a lot of us re-evaluate what is worth our time, whether consciously or unconsciously. I consider this the enormous silver lining of this whole sad affair. Kelly, may your time be spent fulfilling your will, whatever that may be.

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 5:02 PM Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
tl;dr - I am/feel really damn old, and this game is based on stuff that
is (and makes me feel) even older, and what even is the point anymore.

--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org

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