This is something I've been struggling with for a long time.

In Tomsk, where I attend uni, I lived alone, in my own apartment, and it wasn't sunshine and rainbows, but I felt alive. I felt like living. I started running earliest in the mornings and kept at it like I enjoyed it. I dabbled with cooking finally, after years of dread before this life-saving activity. I met new people - made an effort to meet new people - even if the result was just a learning experience. I figured out a lot of stuff and began learning what it's like to be a capable adult responsible for his own life.

Then I came... back. Not home. I don't have a home yet, but even the old apartment that I was renting was more of a home to me than the place I was living in for the previous twenty or so years.

I've finally finished Bastion some time ago, a game with a story so utterly optimistic in the fact of the calamity the people have faced that it struck a chord in me. The game's narrator, Rucks, is an old guy who's clearly seen things (and was among the group of people who caused the Calamity in the first place), and yet he keeps unshaken his bright vision of the future. "It's gonna be alright", he keeps saying, with faith in the Kid unshattered, much like the Kid himself, despite his own scars of life.

It's a stark contrast to what I've been experiencing. The world I've been living in so far has been full of fear, of excessive caution, of comfort before achievement. Don't do this thing: you might get hurt if you fail. Don't talk to these people: they're strange, so they must be evil. It came so far as to ridicule anyone trying to do better than that, as I've experienced quite a few times: "What, you're making a bow? Oh, Antosha...", followed by a wicked smile of laughing at someone discreetly. Never made that bow: the staves just disappeared one day; no one knows where to.

I got reminded of that contrast when I saw the best finale of Blank Dream, an RPG Maker horror game, courtesy of Markiplier's finally finishing the game. No spoilers: it's as contrasting with the game's general feel until the very end like black and white, but you have to work a bit for it past what it takes to finish the game. After all the horrors the girl has to go through, almost getting killed a dozen times, the best finale feels like an amazing result of the player's actions as well as a good resolution of the story.

It reminded me, most of all, that life is enjoyable. For some reason, the fear of life that I've been experiencing the last few weeks has been replaced, just like that, with the love for it. Living feels good now. I feel like going on; making stuff happen; growing as a person and helping other things grow.

It's a ray of light I love to have but don't know how to hold onto. I want to hold onto it. I want to keep it up, so that it would charge me, keep me up, let me see the good things of the world more clearly. It's become so easy to feed into the old bad habits of escaping, of making a choice to not care for myself, especially when I need it, of not confronting what needs to be confronted. I feel more like comfort than like pride in achievement, and it's not what I want to feel like. It's not what I want to be like.