eyes up
in 2015 my best friend was dating a student pilot, so someone got her a private flying lesson for christmas. in 2015 i was, in hindsight, altogether too emotionally dependent on my best friend, so i tagged along.
as it turns out, once you've done all of your checks, flying a two-seater plane is pretty simple. there are two numbers you need to know about to take off. the first is liftoff speed; you go forward fast enough, the air moving over the wings generates enough lift to overcome gravity, and all of a sudden your aircraft starts actually being an aircraft. the second is called V1, and it's a little more complicated.
see, objects have mass, and aircraft with metal frames and big engines in them have a lot of mass, and your brakes are just panels on the wings that push against the air, and a runway is only so long. if you start moving and then get cold feet, you need to stop again, right? V1 is the moment in your takeoff at which you physically do not have enough space left to slow down again before reaching the end of the runway; it's the little mark on your gauge that says "alright buddy, you are taking off right now or you are crashing in less than a minute, no more options".
all through high school and up until i turned eighteen, i was a competitive artistic skater. skating is a gender segregated sport at that level and i was still a man at the time, which actually gave me something of an advantage because i had a small handful of competitors even at a national level. not that i particularly cared about that; i got more out of performing, in an athletic and artistic sense, than i did out of winning.
getting into the performance part of it took me a little while, though; i worried about looking silly, embarassing myself, being cringe. classic teenager shit, not that i can really claim to be that much better nowadays. i do better sometimes. the thing that actually got me out of that was another skater explaining, in painful detail, that the most embarrassing thing you can do in your art is act like it embarrasses you. technical skill can help you not fall over, but it only goes so far. there is a wall that you can't pass until you get over your fear and learn to put your heart behind it.
at the time i quit skating to focus on my uni study (and let my feet recover after several minor-but-painful injuries), i was working on doubles - jumps with 2-2.5 revolutions in them. progressing from single jumps to doubles is a process of brutal refining. males can mostly get by doing singles with a bit of technique and a lot of muscle power to patch up the sloppy bits, but that stops working when you get past one rotation. so you need to actually learn how to do the jump properly on a technical level, but once that's done you need to learn how to learn how to do it emotionally. by simple physics, a person rolling along on one foot is more stable when they're moving faster, and you need to be stable to do fancy tricks, right? plus, a number of jumps involve a kind of pivoting redirection of momentum, and as long as you have the strength for that redirection, a bit more momentum to redirect can help. so you need to be going fast, and then use the benefits of that speed to perform several precise body movements, but at that kind of speed... if you fuck up, you're going to hit the floor hard.
the obvious instinct is to move in such a way as to protect yourself from harm in the event of a mistake. but the problem, the real tricky bit, is that protecting yourself from harm is itself a mistake sometimes. you want to be safe and noncommittal, but if you gingerly put your foot down, you will never have the strength to jump off it. if you swing with your leg but not your whole body, you won't get the lift or the angular momentum to finish your revolutions, and god help you if you make it most of the way but your wheels come down sideways. if you bring one foot down right behind the other you have a split second to actually start jumping before your feet collide and your skull hits the floor (did i mention, for most of these you are moving quite quickly backwards?). you need to fucking commit, you need to put yourself into every movement and you need to mean it, because you might fail if you do but you will definitely fail if you don't.
of course, committing really hard to a jump and then screwing it up hurts way more than trying to cushion your fall from the start.
for a little while i joined my university's branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism. i was never really much of a history person; to be honest, i was there for the sword fighting first and foremost, but i imagine that's how they get a lot of their members initially so i think that's okay.
i got into heavy combat, which uses armour and wooden swords and shields. insofar as it exists competitively, armed sca combat runs on an honour system; you get hit, you call out that you got hit (or otherwise react accordingly), everyone is happy. the thing about heavy combat specifically is that glancing blows are common and don't count if they wouldn't have hurt you using real weapons; if you decide in good faith that a particular hit wasn't hard enough to count, you have general approval to ignore it and go on fighting.1
which means as an attacker, you need to figure out a good level of power; swing hard enough that your strikes will count, but not so hard that you'll throw yourself off balance. a bit harder means a bit faster, and that might be the difference that gets you past their shield - but if you miss, that extra force will keep swinging and drag your body with it. be precise, be reliable, commit to your attack but don't screw it up. and, of course, don't swing so hard that you injure your opponent or yourself.
for the last couple of years i've been working with a slowly-growing team of local creatives to make a game. last year some of us were fortunate enough to be able to travel to gamescom in germany about it, which was a fantastic and terrifying experience. it was the first time i had left australia in about ten years; it was the first time one of our team had left australia ever.
that was the first time i tried to write this post.
we were there to pitch our game to publishers in hopes of securing funding to keep working on it, as well as for general networking. i'm not much of a talker, i tend to leave that to our creative director, but there was always the chance he would get sick or something and then i would be the one who had to sell our team and our project to publishers. i thought i was okay with that, i'd practiced with our powerpoint slides, i knew conceptually everything i had to say - and then someone suggested "hey, why don't you try this next meeting, just to see how it goes", and all of a sudden just thinking about it made me feel violently ill.
the problem wasn't the game - i believed in it then and i still do - or our pitch, or my knowledge of it, or anyone else on the team. but i knew, deep in the tarry depths of my soul, that i wasn't good enough, that i would stumble and fail and ruin everything if i tried.
in february we exhibited at the South Australian Game Exhibition (SAGE). one of the new features was a visual model system that i had been working on for several months and spent the last week frantically patching into the current version of the game, and... somewhere, in trying to make things better, i hit a bug i couldn't quite fix and broke the whole thing pretty badly. it was not the first time we had shown people a kind of rough form of this game, but seeing the parts i had been strongly responsible for fall apart so badly was probably the most embarrassed i personally have ever been about it. it hurt so damn much to tell everyone, over and over again, "yes it's broken, yes i know exactly what the problem is, yes i should have known this would happen, and no, there is no possible way i can fix it here and now".
a couple of days ago, i made a snap judgement on a social situation; i felt like no one really needed me there at the time, i got in my own head a little (or a lot), i figured if i picked a good moment while others were distracted, i could leave and go do something else without drawing too much attention to my departure and everyone would be better off for it.
in reality, i got a whole four steps before someone turned to ask "where are you going?", and i replied "oh, just remembered i should turn something off, be right back". which was true, it became true the moment she turned to ask the question and break me out of my increasingly out-of-touch understanding of the world. and that is what it was, to be clear; no one in that group made me feel unwanted, or extra, or excess to requirements. they were just the latest bystanders in the same conflict i keep having with myself.
i prop myself up a lot using the reflected strength from my trust in the people around me, and a lot of the time that's enough, it's a stable base i can stand on. but for the last little while i've been trying to use it as an anvil to crush my lack of self-worth like a nut, and... the stone is stronger than the nut is, but neither shows any signs of breaking, and god are my arms getting tired.
for the last couple of years i've been working with some lovely people to make a game, but the end of that runway is getting real close now. V1 is bearing down on us and i have zero confidence that i am ready to start flying, but there are people i care about who need me to make it so i can't just pull out and stay grounded. i need to start walking, i need to trust that i won't step wrong and roll my ankle if i do; and at the same time, i need to actually not roll my ankle, which is a whole different challenge.
this weekend we are meant to be showing the game to strangers again, and it's the best the game has ever been but i'm still terrified - not of the game, or even of the strangers, but of my own devastating lack of normal social skills. i'm trying to do better! i think sometimes i am doing better! but then i start to get uneasy and all of that falls away and i end up being awkward and insular and everything i need to not be. i know at least one of my friends i had a falling out with a while back is going to be there - i imagine them seeing the game and asking "wow, this is it? this is what you destroyed our friendship for?" and even as i feel ashamed for imagining my friends that way, i also know that in that moment i would know the answer. i would know in my heart how much i care about this project and this team and how every single part of it including the damaged friendships was worth it - but my voice and my strength and my willpower would betray me, and i wouldn't be able to tell them that with any of the conviction it deserves.
for several years starting in 2017 i was a decently active internet moderator, and i was good at this shit; i was certain when i needed it, i could be decisive, and that made me effective in ways i couldn't have been if i didn't trust myself to act. sure, i was confident in some calls that turned out to be major errors in judgement, but somehow even those never really rocked my confidence in myself in general. in late 2015 i was making strong progress on landing double jumps, and however many times i fell i would go at it again with a straight back even through all of the pain. in 2020 i ran a dungeons and dragons game every week for almost a year, and it was kind of thrown together at times but i felt calm and in control and it was easy, and i've been trying and failing to achieve that again ever since. i used to be good at all this. i don't know where i went wrong.
i have this terrible habit of gunning for the high risk optimal outcome with others, but somehow when it comes to myself i fold every single time, and as it turns out you don't actually win anything that way. you can walk on hot coals just fine as long as you don't hesitate and you walk with purpose. you can get things you want sometimes just by being bold enough to ask for them. you can convince people of a lot of different things if you sound certain when you talk. i want to do better, i want to figure out how to be a person who trusts myself again, i need to figure out how to be worthy of that trust. but wants and needs don't actually help much with figuring out how.
i think it's something you grow in layers, like a pearl around a grain of sand. so i just need to figure out some of those starting core points, and then see how i go from there, maybe. until then, i don't know, maybe i just have to pretend. focus on every word, don't rush it, stop staring off into space, stop staring at the floor. come on, eyes up. i'll get there eventually.
with the understanding that your opponent's default response to this is to try to hit you with a wooden pole even harder.↩