Post RP Session Concerns

I was going to practise Net celibacy for the next few days, but it seems the All Mighty wants me to air out some stuff in writing. Any feedback, worded considerately, would be greatly appreciated.

The past couple days have been hard for me. I've been struggling with insomnia and depression. I can hardly concentrate when I'm writing, and even reading or listening to music has been stressful today, so I've bascially been taking it easy. But I'm concentrating on this, even though it takes a supreme act of the will.

There's several factors that explain why I'm feeling this way: the warm weather lately (which has finally let up, thanks to some rain this morning), the fact that this week marks the fifth anniversary of the break-up of my engagement to be married -- I will post at length about that next time; I managed to write it all down, but I'm not emotionally equipped to type/post it right now -- and an emotional moment relating to the "A.I." RP game last night/this morning.

I'm seriously beginning to question if I really should be RP'ing at all. Not because I'm having issues seperating reality from fantasy, though that could be a factor since I already have an odd conception of reality anyway; Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Plato will love to have a discussion with me once I meet up with them in the next world. Not that the phobia of RPGs that my mother instilled in me has come up again (Thanks a lot, Jack Chick and everyone else who's ever sniped against RPGs.). I'll withold names and identities, but there's some friction between one of my characters and another player's characters, and it's seriously bothering me. I'm trying not to overreact to it, but the situation is making me very uncomfortable as a player, and there are times when I don't even want to play this character, if their very nature is going to make other people's characters uncomfortable. I just don't want to cause trouble for anyone on any level of reality. I have to be very honest with myself and admit that my character is very stubborn and impulsive and this character trusts in their own judgement too highly. And those are flaws I see in myself and so I'm trying to fix them. (I should add that another character that I play is the exact opposite: rather indecisive and at times a bit too easy-going. Both are facets of my personality: I know, I'm a very complex person. Anyone who thinks they have me figured out has another thought coming...) My method in creating characters is to find some facet in myself that is similar to something in this character that I have created and use that to play out this trait. (Come to think of it, I think Jude Law uses a very similar method.)

Maybe I'm making a serious mistake in trying to use RP as a method of therapy. I know one of the methods used to help people with Asperger's Syndrome adjust to social situations is to roleplay different scenarios they might encounter. Since I have Atypical AS, that really isn't necessary for the most part (though it really helped when "Damon", my job coach roleplayed a job interview with me), but I like the idea of using RPGs as a method of helping straighten things out in your head. I remember reading one really good article online about a man (a long time D&D player) whose family had adopted two brothers from a Guatemalan orphanage, and he invented an RPG to help his new sons learn to behave better: the kids are now fully grown and people remark at how polite and kind they are.

I'm going to try to get my character to back down and stop being such a hot shot. Most likely, something will scare her and make her shape up. I hope that similarly, the other player can have their character take it down a peg, but this is just my thought. They're free to do as they see fit. Thing is, the Team is in a very tight situation, and the last thing they need is to be wasting energy on internal tensions, which could very well drive them apart. Safety in numbers, folks! Maybe it might work out if my character could somehow earn the respect of the other character, but at the same time, the other character would do well to earn the trust of my character. These are just thoughts of course. I'm certainly not expecting these two characters to become the best of friends: they're both from such different backgrounds that it probably wouldn't be possible, but stranger things have happened. I just don't want any unnecessary tension; I'm not good with it in real life, so I sometimes have trouble with it in RP.

I'm very blessed and lucky to be in as strong, tight-knit a group of players as I'm in (Many of them came out of the "A.I." fanfiction community), who really work together to work things out. We're all female, so that might be why this group works so well (not to say that there aren't male players who are good negotiators, but I have no personal experience with that). We were actually trying to resolve this issue last night in chat, but my comp kept crashing and I was getting too tired and frazzled to continue, which obliged me to bow out before I conked out over the keyboard. I went to bed straight afterward and literally crashed in bed, but I ended up waking up a half-hour later and I had trouble getting back to sleep for an hour because my brain wouldn't stop mulling over the RP worries. Like the worrywort that I am, I kept trying to come up with ways to handle the situation. Of course I came up with the worst case scenario first -- this is just how I am, I have to air out the bad stuff that comes out of my head before I can focus on the good stuff -- the worst case scenario being: kill off my character. (But then the DVD player in my head started playing the scene in "The Matrix" when Morpheus is trapped inside the Matrix, and Tank is about to pull the cable out of Morpheus's head-jack to keep the Agents from hacking into his mind, even though that will kill him.)

If anyone has any good ideas as to how to resolve this, please run them past me: I'll share them with the GM before the next game, whenever we have the next game.