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Hunting Deer
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ab3nd asked why I had a tag "hunting deer," which makes sense since I am vegan and basically only think that deer should be hunted by hurling yourself bodily at them and biting their throat (if lacking correct teeth one may use a bow and arrow, though only to provide meat and not solely for sport). I thought I had posted this post a long time ago, but it turns out I had never finished writing it and private-locked it instead in order to finish it at a later date. That post also contained my notes on why I should make my mother stop calling me by a nickname, which I also thought I posted, but which I have since mostly successfully done.But here it is, from June 30 2009:
Why "Hunting Deer?"
I'd noticed that I'd been feeling distracted, flighty even, since graduating college, like I had no goals and no plan, and I decided to talk to rax* about it. It wasn't that I had no goals: as we spoke, we discussed goals we had, both short- and long-term. Her goals were not tremendously different from mine, and not that much more obviously onerous or achievable. Yet, I had achieved very few of my goals, and had not achieved any creative goals for several years, and in the same time span, she had been achieved many of her goals. I was tremendously bitter about it. Why?
I had been trying to compare us to each other, which didn't work anyway, and damaged our relationship. I tried to work out why I had been comparing us to each other.
I had realized some years ago that the immensely successful structure of how I had persued my goals, both personal and private, fell apart after I graduated from college because it had relied on the framework of school and classes to hold it together. However, I thought the solution was to mimic the structures of the people I had in my life who were getting the most done and having the most fun while remaining the most sane. She was one of these people. I had been trying to mimic her path, using her means to achieve my ends, and had got nowhere. I decided I needed my own way to acheieve goals.
In many ways it makes sense for me, still, to think of myself as a dragon; we ended up framing the conversation in terms of those metaphors.
Rax is built for hunting ideas as rabbits -- small, fast, and relatively easy to catch. Each one doesn't provide a lot of nourishment, but she's quick on her feet and built to run on coney; when she tackles big ideas it wears her out.
I'm a dragon, so: I hunt deer. They're large, they're bulky, they fight back, and they're a lot of work to catch and plan for and even to eat. But they're slower than rabbits, and more satisfying: I catch one and then have enough fuel to gear up for the next one.
Hunting idea-rabbits was wearing me out, wasn't giving me enough sport--and, I notice now, I was starving, too.
So, I'm hunting deer. That's my new path.
Look, a forest.
--
This means that I have been thinking about my mental health for a year now in terms of having it be a big, slow, huge project, but tackleable. That makes sense, and it got even better when
rax said she would hunt with me. At least that was my impression until August 5th, when rax basically said she could no longer stick around to watch me chase something I couldn't bring down. Now I feel like it is no longer tackleable, because every time I take years to tackle it and recover from the effort, it kicks me again and I lose my hunting partners, and go down for the next 3-4 years. I am tired of getting hurt from the kicks. I am tired of having my hunting partners get hurt from the kicks most of all. I know that if I do not try to tackle it I will not get any meat, and I will slowly starve. But I know that if I tackle it I have to do it all alone and that seems really, really tiring, and I am tired of this last set of bruises in particular, because I had just started sinking my claws into it when I feel like rax got kicked and had to let go.The upshot is that I've fucked up again by not bringing my prey down and killing it dead, and this time it kicked both of us too hard for us to go on.
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Perhaps you need a different method of hunting. It sounds like hunting by yourself didn't work and hunting with a partner was too hard on the partner. Maybe you're a group hunter - have you looked into any kind of group therapy? Me - I'm a lone hunter who likes to get together with the other hunters and chat when I'm not hunting.
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Sure, that's a bit of a sideways approach from most points of view, but when you're hunting you usually have to find the trails and marks before you can spot your prey, and the marks I'm seeing tell me that you need friends around you.
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