From Bedrock Up

 

What happens when you hit rock bottom?

A sensible person will have been building ladders, making a staircase, or at least been shoveling dirt and gravel out of the way on their descent. Some people will end up here through their own actions, others will have circumstances thrust upon them and find themselves flailing around desperately trying to get out.

Some people find rock bottom by staring at the edge of cliff. They look down into a bottomless pit and ask "why shouldn't I jump?" while they're already halfway down. The best plan for being shoved off a cliff is to have a rope tied around your waist. Barring that, know how to make a rope so you can at least pick yourself up slowly later.

Even the most sensible person will make their way upward once they hit rock bottom. Few will do what I chose to do: grab a drill and keep digging. I'm fairly sure I hit solid ground some time ago and just didn't have the capacity to get myself out. I could definitely make things worse, or at least different, but trying to reach the light was like climbing up a hill of quicksand. Instead I kept building staircases at the bottom of the pit and dug my way further and further into the bowels of the earth.

This path sounds an awful lot like self-destruction. In fact, it was a bid of desperation, grabbing everything I could, ripping apart everything around me and turning it into something else. Stairs made of rock, ladders made of dirt, signposts made of grass, and a single telephone in my hand to keep track of the outside and have the precious deliveries of food and human attention that I needed more than anything else.

I spent a long time making staircases, rope, and yelling at everyone I knew that I could make staircases out of code and rope out of pixels. When you're at the bottom of a pit by yourself, what use are skills like those? They're certainly useful for the future, but you're in the bottom of a pit. Best to make flashlights and grow mushrooms in the dark. Make yourself a bed and a chair and start drooling on the floor because there's nothing else to do. I've seen that song and dance far too many times to want to take part in it, even from the best place to do it.

When 800 hands finally descended to get me out I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I had spent my time trying everything I could to make this place comfortable and build myself up that I didn't think anyone would come and fetch me when I really needed it. I could rely on myself, couldn't I? No, I couldn't. Not anymore. My body was so stressed that it's taken months of readjustment just to be a normal human being, let alone a productive one.

I hit rock bottom 12 years ago. It was the worst moment of my life and has been a progressive series of failures that eventually culminated in a desperate cry for help during the middle of a pandemic to finally break that streak. It's been so hard to continue living that my daily life is just... sort of empty by comparison. I can create freely, my worries are gone, and my needs are met for the first time since before this all started. I've been trying to fill the days with something real, but almost everything comes up as that same vapid drooling sensation. Almost.

The only exception to this has been a single driving force of progression that made a mod as a metaphor for everything I wanted to do. I was trying to tell my story through a medium of creation, growth, and a thriving life in a world of desolation and potential. Minecraft was the perfect vehicle for not only changing my entire life, but for showing everyone what I was trying to do to change it. It's a tragic, bittersweet, and hopeful story wrapped up in a lovely world of creativity that succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

My story is finally at an end. It's been 18 years in the making, and has been the only thing that feels real. I want to tell everyone that story through the only way I know how: By doing my best to convey the experience itself. I want to share this story with everyone in such a way that their own ideas intertwine and can interact with. I am finally free to tell everything from the very depths of despair to the highest euphoria of revelation. The individual experiences are not important; They're mostly repetitive, boring, and I happen to like making things. Making things takes a lot of time... far more time than I want to take of any random person. 18 years is a lot to put into a story, after all.

What does that have to do with this blog?... I'd like to make something. I'm not sure yet what it's going to be, but I do know it's going to take a lot of time, dredging up everything I ever made in my past, and convoluted in ways that are completely obvious to me but foreign to anyone looking in from the outside. I am trying to make something real out of something that couldn't possibly be made before now.

Let me show you the ladder that extends from bedrock to the sky.