So today is the first day I've felt like myself in a long while. I don't know if there's one thing or many but I had just been feeling really off-kilter for the past month or so. I know part of it has been my cousin staying with us. He's very extroverted and it's honestly exhausting spending large periods of time of him. Maybe some of it has to do with getting stuck in the relationship tangles of two of my friends who have suddenly decided they like each other. It's weird, in so many ways because one of them I used to have a thing with and even though this was long ago, I find myself stricken with needles of jealousy at the oddest times.
A huge part of it has been the fact that...I don't think I like my character anymore. At least I'm not sure I really understand her. She has changed so much since she was first imagined, so much has happened to her to change her, I'm not sure who she is anymore. I think I thought writing this origins thing would make her clearer to me but...it has been really torturous. And it shouldn't be. I should know Illana almost as well as I know myself. I should know how she reacts, what she feels...I should know the forces that drive her. I don't.
I know where she was when she first joined the group. Having lost everyone important to her, having watched her brother be killed by vampires, av the time she was driven very much by revenge. She joined up with Selene and her army despite hating vampires with a passion because she knew they were the ones who could hurt the ones who had killed her brother.
Once she got to know them, her unreasoning hate ceased and she joined with them in a truer spirit, helping Selene with a magical enhancing on one of the vampires and later becoming that vampire's ghoul. It was something the Illana who originally joined would have been shocked at but..it felt right. It felt like the next step. A bigger deal was when she found herself going back to Vancouver with everyone. I think she had assumed she would eventually go back to her life on the road but instead she found herself bound to a vampire and strangely alright with it. She left her old life of searching behind, along with any residual hope she might have had of finding her siblings, and threw herself into her life. One of books and politics and magic.
At one point she lost large parts of her memory...which was superfun to play, despite it annoying the shit out of some people. I was a little bit disappointed when she ended up getting her memory back. She went to Rome, she ended responsible for medicine for an asylum...and she ended up pregnant.
I think this is really when all the problems started. This part of her plot happened right as I had to leave for Virginia to spend time with my cousin. I didn't know how long I'd be staying at the time but it ended up being two months. I missed a session before catching the next two by skype. It just wasn't the same. I couldn't get into her character this way, although I did my best. And it was sad also because I had been looking forward to playing Illana pregnant since it happened and now it just wasn't working. And the vampire she had been a ghoul to ran off. Illana ended up having her children and life went on.
And then I came back home. The campaign had finished and we were starting a new one, five years later in the game world. I was the mother of five year olds who I really knew nothing about but except that they were too precocious for their own good and that almost everything Illana had once been was lost now in the intervening years. The edge which i'd liked about her had been dulled, she wasn't the girl who trusted no one anymore. She was a mature pillar of this community with two boys she was raising as a single mother with a very strange extended family. She had roots and friends and people she trusted to take care of her kids when he wasn't around. At the same time, she'd lost the people who she really connected with and enjoyed spending time, the ones who had taught her to open up in the first place.
So I've been trying to reconnect with her but I'm not sure I'm succeeding. These days in the games, I worry that I'm just playing me. Way back when, I knew all the ways that Illana was different from who I am and I think I exaggerated a lot of those traits to distinguish her even more. Illana was impulsive and she had a temper. She always expected the worst out of everyone and was cynical and sarcastic.She...honestly wasn't the nicest person in the world but I loved her all the more for it. But she grew up. She grew to trust. She learned patience and she learned to dull her tongue. These days I feel like she has grown out of a lot of her issues but...without those issues, who is she, really?
I think I thought that writing her history would remind me of who she really was but...I found myself writing about a different Illana, one who wasn't scarred by her past because it hadn't happened yet. I found a sweet girl who likes being helpful and likes people and manages to be hopeful and optimistic despite the fact that everything has gone to shit around her...and I don't think I can let bad things happen to her. I don't think I can break her heart.
This has never happened to me before. I put my characters through bad things so they can learn and grow past them. I know they're strong enough to take whatever I throw at them so I've never hesitated to get them into things just to see how they'll get themselves out or to put them through pain and suffering so I can watch them become stronger because of it. So it really puzzles me that I'm so hesitant to write the things I *know* need to happen in order for Illana to become the person she needs to be. This isn't like me and I have no idea what to do to get past it.
I started this post talking about how I felt like myself today after a long time. After a month...maybe after a couple months. I honestly don't know why. Nothing has changed. All the problems I had before, I still have. And yet I just feel...lighter...clearer...like I've found something, some sort of purpose that was missing for a while, something I didn't even know I'd lost until now. I'm not sure. Something good.
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