Backwards and Forwards and Goblins

The point of any journey is to move forward. You are at a starting point, you have a destination, and you have to look where you're going. The only reason you're on your journey at all is (I'm assuming) you don't want to stay where you are. Maybe your homeland has been invaded by dragons, or the plague, or fluffy blue aliens have landed and stolen everybody's left shoe. I don't know. Everyone's journey is different, but the first couple steps are always the same:

Face forward, and put one foot in front of the other until you get wherever it is you're going.

Am I right?

Why, yes. Yes, I am.

But the whole moving forward thing is frightening. You've never been where you're trying to go before, you don't know what dangers lie upon the road, you generally start out with no companions on your quest, or one or two, maybe, if you're lucky. I mean, you can always call home, but generally these epic quests start out as solo-events, and you meet your companions along the way.

It's scary. Pants-shittingly, freezing-in-the-face-of-danger, the-voices-in-your-head-screaming-constantly, unknowably, unintelligibly scary.

But you know you have to make your journey.

The more you travel, the further you go, the quieter the screaming inside your head gets. The dialogue with the voices becomes less frightened screaming and more, "Well, we beat the troll and crossed that bridge, so we must be doing alright." "Okay, those bandits really tried to mess us up, but eventually we got them to turn tail and flee from our awesomeness." "Yeah, we totally accidentally picked up a piece of a dragon's horde and had a hell of a time escaping the beast's fiery fury, but we survived that, too, and in retrospect that was actually kind of cool."

It never really stops being scary, but you (supposedly) get more confident in your ability to battle the terrors on your path.

Thus, when you eventually find yourself too far down the wrong path, the need to backtrack becomes a personal affront. I mean, it's not your fault that some jackass switched the signs to make a clean getaway from whatever, but you are definitely on the wrong path, you just managed to escape a goblin horde which is, quite probably, still tracking you, and if you have to turn around and go back the way you came you're going to have to escape that goblin horde again, while heading back towards your starting point, and all that earlier effort to escape that horde will have been for naught.

And yet, nothing can change the fact that you're on the wrong path.

Eventually, you're going to have to face the music and turn around. Hopefully, that goblin horde will have given up on you and you can just tiptoe past their cave or campsite or magical castle of doom and wonder (I don't know where goblins live) without drawing too much attention to yourself. If you have luck like mine, though, you're probably going to fall on your bagpipes or something and accidentally play a Scottish dirge (I don't know how bagpipes work, either) and wake up the entire nest, who will then come out to chase you the way from which you originated, and now since you've ticked them off at least twice, they'll chase you longer than they did last time and you'd better cross your fingers and hope you can lose them before you run out of breath, water, and stamina.

(At least at the end of the chase, your legs will look fantasticness.)

What I'm getting at is that going forward is scary because you don't know what lies ahead, but going backwards is worse because you know exactly what lies behind and how much of a pain in the ass it was to deal with the first time.

And I think(?) I just took a massive step backwards, but maybe not.

I dunno. We're "on a break" because we're stupid and dysfunctional, but we also used the same conversation to outline our personal plans for the future and find ways to incorporate each other in such a way that we're not locked into anything but there's potential to fill in as each others' sidekicks, if that makes any sense (because I'm switching from a DnD-inspired rant to comic books).

I dunno. The specifics of what I learned about myself in this conversation (it's not depressing, or so goes the plan) and the preceding meltdown will go in another post (or so goes the plan), probably later today (or so goes the plan).

In the meantime, though, I'm just going to count the minutes until I can go home (I'm at work-it's a sloooooooow day) and eat my poor little broken heart out while watching little kid movies and snuggling my teddy bear.

Because fuck maturity. Yesterday sucked.

Also, I firmly believe in taking 24-48 hours to mope in these situations.