Final Reflection on A Place to Belong
I am currently writing this the day before it posts, thinking about the entirety of A Place To Belong, which is what I would have titled this book should it have ever been a book that could be titled and published. Due to copyright laws, that could never happen, and I most definitely am not big enough to ever write for World of Darkness itself (especially after the criticisms I gave Bloodlines II and V6, sorry guys, but I love your core content too much to accept when you take short cuts). The book itself was originally meant to be just a series of writing exercises that helped me come to terms with who I was as a person, who I was becoming, and why I felt that I would never amount to what I needed to become in order to be worthy of several things in my life that I wanted. Depressing, I know, but hey, WoD.
In fact, currently I’m sure I’m writing this for an audience of one or two. Very few people are reading the blog (because I’m not advertising it well enough) and maybe a handful more have bought the book (again, advertising issues. It’s me, I’m the issue). And people I’ve spoken to have come up with good ideas on how to do it, and even offered me help in pulling the trigger on it, but life has been getting in the way of me actually pulling said trigger.
One would think that launching the tiktok and starting to make advertisements on that would be the easy part, but I’m a rather introverted individual, and the idea of putting myself on social media is anxiety inducing. There are ideas and plans on how to do it in ways that makes my anxiety stay low, as well as be lower maintenance so I can keep living my life the way I want to, but there are costs involved, time involved, and energy involved, that I’ve not had. Mostly due to my current job situation. (It’s the same job situation that millions of people are having in America at the moment. I know I’m not special, but we’re all putting things on hold while we fight to survive. I understand that, and if you’re struggling as well, I support you and hope that things get better for you soon). The problem I’m really having with that though, is that Grey would be jumping on the plan and getting shit done. That's how he is, and how I want to be. I want to be the guy who jumps in and gets it done because it needs to be done. But even after almost a year of reflecting, therapy, struggle, and medication, I’m still not there yet. I know it takes time, but its frustrating, and I feel that many people can share in that sentiment.
A Place to Belong was Grey’s journey to find a place where he fit in, not just in Kindred society, but also in the world as a whole. This is a journey that resonates deeply with me as I’m still trying to find that place in my life. I have places where I belong, people I belong with, but they’re currently in the digital space. Finding that physical place, that third space, where you belong is difficult, especially when you find it difficult to feel at home in the area you’re in. Charlotte is beautiful, and I’ve made some connections here, but I’ve yet to really build my space and my network here, something Grey has managed to do, mostly at my prompting. But he did so in a life that I no longer have. I built him originally to develop the confidence in myself to be successful at a job that I’m no longer in. I don’t work in sales anymore, though I did enjoy working with people who were struggling with the loss of a loved one. It gave me a feeling of purpose to help others, which is probably why I wasn’t super successful at sales, since my boss wanted money to come first and for us to help clients as the paint that went over the mask to hide the viper’s fangs. Not a fan of that kind of business model.
And while I would love to have the confidence and self assuredness of Grey, the more I write him and edit him and see him for what he is, the more I realize that he’s not my better qualities and worse qualities magnified as I originally intended him to be. He’s my more assertive qualities magnified. My self righteousness, my self assuredness, my self interest, my self importance, and my self efficacy. He’s not a “better” version of me, not the version of me I should aspire to be, but rather a different version of me, a potential version that would see the world differently, treat people differently, and would erase the person I am were I to ever attempt to become him, which would not leave me better in any way. Would I be financially better off if I would have followed the original plan and used the Tremere as a mirror to see the best and worst of myself?
No, I don’t think so.
Because I’m still sitting here, worrying about making rent this month, pinching pennies and planning my budget to survive another month. Just like millions of other Americans. Confidence would not get me out of this situation, not because sales wouldn’t make more money than what I’m doing, but because sales is not who I am. The confidence would be a facade, a mask I wore just to pretend to be someone who would be able to do the things that the person I am cannot.
Am I still Tremere? Yes. I have many of the flaws:
I am a perfectionist who sees anything I do as less than perfect as bad, or at least not good enough. One of the reasons I have to remind myself of the expression that sometimes “good enough is good enough.” A friend of mine once said that such an expression was just a way to lower standards, but eventually learned its real meaning. Sometimes just getting something done is better than getting nothing done, even if you didn’t get everything done. Progress, even small progress, is still progress.
The Tremere cannot form blood bonds, and I too feel the struggle of forming bonds. I feel awkward and like an outsider a lot of the time with people I don’t know. I second guess my actions, words, and forms of expression, worried that I’ll offend others or humiliate myself. This makes creating new bonds difficult for me. I have great friends, wonderful friends, who live very far from me, but that I share a great deal with on a regular basis. These are good people who accept me for who I am and call me out when I start going down a bad path. They are my link to humanity when it starts getting fuzzy and I begin to pull back into my more reclusive state.
Do I want to still get better at accepting things as they are and being able to form bonds with people who are close by? Yes. Do I feel that I need to overhaul my entire personality in order to do it? No. Not anymore. I am a flawed person, a whole individual who is still working on developing who he is and who he wants to be. And as the years pass and I move further and further from the age most see as acceptable to be figuring one’s self out, I try to think about Grey and how he’s going to be that “age” forever, and should fortune smile upon him, live for centuries more, and how he’ll still need to keep defining and redefining who he is. This is a process that never ends, we are constantly being reborn into new versions of ourselves, and if we ever stop this process of rebirth, then we have become stagnant, and thus we are what vampires have been believed to be for centuries.
Corpses waiting to meet our final death.
