~ Split Of… Personality ~
Chapter one
“Inner Hatchling”
by
Qahnareen
D’automne Dragon
# 1
A story I don't want
Made a story I want
14.11.2021
(The date when the journal was written.)
I don't want to write it, don't want to share it, but it's time to be honest… Overall, I was planning to publish a lot of stuff this year. I was drawing (digitally) every day, in every free moment, or writing (digitally)... a lot of writing that I haven't published yet… But… I just feel like I need to clarify some things… [Google Translate]
Christian Larsson - That's The Way It Is (cover) RDR 2
[<<] ~ September 2020
(A reference to the past.)
Around this time I said goodbye to everything I was doing; photography, games, metal detecting, following YT channels, my own channels, my own fanpages on Fb… All my passions… ALL MY LIFE…
Everything died.
I withdrew from life. In August 2020 created a new profile in search of dragon-related content. Though I've never been part of that socmedia, in the end, I wanted to create something because I was stuck in a void where I didn't know what to do with my life.
Why?
An idea came up… I've always wanted to record my gameplays because I found my approach to them quite original, outside the scheme, but my hardware limitations never allowed it, and all that interest in games… was actually more of a loss to take my thoughts somewhere else.
Escapism.
However, I wanted to somehow share my gaming adventures. Decided to use my photographic skills and abilities to take screenshots from Skyrim, - because that's what I was playing at the time, and then reworking the images to make some glamorous… images. I’ve posted a lot of this, but afraid of the new surroundings, afraid that my English at that time barely allowed me to form sentences.
Got my first watchers, first comments, first favorites and it was associated with great emotions and, to be honest, stress, because it was a completely new environment. In addition, the only environment in which I chose to be active after abandoning other accounts…
And what…
…And my profile was wiped by the administration, because it turned out that screenshots cannot be published… XD. Oh nooo… anyway. So my whole plan to run the profile collapsed in ruins, and with that I also gave up computer games altogether… It was a blow, but not a big one. Then decided to be just an observer. I didn't feel comfortable as a creator of anything - in a new place, even more so in such a strange place. I wandered there for a long time through various creators, images and stories.
And suddenly something… Suddenly, an element that began to change everything… I’ve just found a fantasy world - “The Dragon In The Dungeon” by Of The Wilds. And for the first time in my life, I started reading a long story. This simple adult novella turned into a great work full of adventure and emotion.
For some reason, I've always liked dragons, since childhood, since "Spyro" on the PSX console. My screenshots were also with dragons, but they’ve been removed. Only feral forms. However, I’ve accidentally found this story - Initially scared by the length, but once I started reading I couldn't stop - and it started to create real images in my head.
Understood more and more that real art is not only quality, effects, but the content and the flow of emotions. And the flow of emotions was so enormous that this story was the first thing that triggered my tears… I was completely absorbed by it that apart from work I did nothing but read… Work didn't matter either. I did everything quickly, haphazardly, just to get to the break as quickly as possible so I could continue reading. It was an addiction.
…
About the time of the pandemic… Because nothing has changed for me. All my life was like a quarantine, so in a way, the even greater limitation of meeting people and family was very convenient for me. I've always kept my distance from people and preferred to be alone. I have no idea when I understood who “ME” was, but knew what state it was. I've been it for as long as I can remember, but it was only two days ago that my browser got acquainted with the term “Depression”.
I really didn't want to read about it… I've always been terribly afraid of this subject. And of course, no one ever saw anything. I never said anything about it.
Then I realized where my reach into the fantasy world came from; where the imaginary world just created colorful images and emotions that I haven't experienced in real life for a long time.
I was reading everything that seemed like an epic and great story. Everything about feral dragons. Everything that contained pain and emotion. The world of stories had immediately dragged me into an addictive state… I had never read books before, no stories, no long texts. From September 2020, suddenly got stuck in a world of stories where I forgot all the life around me… I wasn't even interested in what was happening to me and WHY.
…
I’m working as a bus driver, so I have a lot of contact with people every day - I treat it in a way as a therapy that allows me not to fall into complete loneliness… The times of the pandemic also had a big impact on this profession and caused some changes and more isolation.
…And all that mattered was the stories, mental images, tragedies, more tragedies, more sorrow…
My taste in music also started to change as I read the stories; I had been listening to Rock, Dark Country for a long time, now there was Dungeon Synth, Dark Ambient, sad neoclassic, sad soundtrack from games as a background to reading…
I had thought that art and stories were another part of this therapy that did good for my head. It was better than games, better than movies. These were the real emotions I felt deep within.
~ December 2020
From this time, however, a series of tragic events took place, which I don’t want to describe in detail…
Christmas; I was in quarantine at home with my mother. We went through the disease, getting sick at the same time. The second parent was in the hospital for over a month, and his brother died on Christmas Day in another city in the hospital.
For me it was a time when I escaped into “comfortable” solitude during a month of quarantine. That's when I finished reading “Pledged in Blood”, started my first drawing, and began to write my own fantasy story.
After reading many stories, it was time for my own art and that's all what I'm working on. Only. Everything I had been reading at that time was a powerful inspiration and, in a way, I also wanted to have at least some profile description, so as not to be a completely empty soul just with a nickname and avatar with a dragon…
I started to create my first ever digital drawing; [remake]
May, April 2021
My cat passed away after two years of fighting his disease - he had diabetes.
It was the moment when I really enjoyed writing and drawing but something bad happened to my innervation system and for a month I had paresis of my right hand which prevented me from doing both. My hand just hung limp.
It broke me terribly. I was terribly afraid that I would not regain fitness and that I would have to abandon my only passions…
When my hand was recovering, after a series of injections…
I tried to draw, I was desperate, completely devastated because couldn't use a computer mouse. My fingers didn't work…
- Writing was very difficult, but I kept doing it, constantly getting annoyed about not being able to point my fingers at the buttons. Without mentioning typing on the phone.
- Real creating in pain.
- I went back to work, taking long shifts… No, the inertia of my hand didn't interfere with driving the bus.
- Anything was better than focusing on not being able to pursue the new and only passion…
- I also did a lot of work in the garden for my grandma, actually exhausting myself physically. I managed to dig up a lot of heavy scrap and garbage that had always been lying behind farm buildings and overgrown with bushes.
- After six days of continuous work, one day off has come - a long-awaited desire to rest… Then the police came to my house. They did a search and took me away for 24 hours to the cell.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
(They broke me more than I thought. I was completely not myself… Anyway, the most important thing is that I showed myself to them as an open, positive person…)
Police officers were also reluctant to deal with this trivial matter, instead of dealing with bandits. Unfortunately the procedures…
24 hours…
…
…
I was supposed to go to work at dawn, and I didn't tell anyone that I wasn't going to. My belongings, phone, shoes were taken and they took me to a cell in a gray basement.
Waiting for the prosecutor. I wanted to fight for my rights and for the entire community of the metal detectorists, equally oppressed by the idiotic law. In the end, fatigue and a lot of stress overcame my courage. I was sitting with wet eyes, analyzing all the ways of suicide. No one saw me break down.
Mostly thinking about what others thought about me not coming home tonight, having absolutely no contact, not going to work in the morning because I'll be sitting here locked up.
It's like I killed myself and disappeared - then I could imagine it. I watched out the window as it got darker outside. Tried to sleep but couldn't.
Maybe it's stupid, but I had been thinking a lot about my dragon, about the story, about the symbolism.
I asked to go to the restroom. Everywhere under the watchful eye of the cameras. Treated like a common criminal. My whole being had been stuck in an eternal cycle of explaining everything about me in my head, as if I was in a court hearing for 24 hours and had to prove my innocence. All in my head.
I've been thinking about my story. My hand was almost functional, so my strength was to return to my passion. I was waiting for a meeting with the prosecutor... but it didn't happen.
They let me out of the police station… in shorts, a T-shirt, on a cold, windy day.
The phone was off, I didn't know my PIN after changing the card… Great.
The bus left, I still saw it when I was a few dozen steps from the stop. Great. The next one will be… I take out my phone; without unlocking the card I will not check the watch? Great…
Typed in some codes that I had in mind… and blocked the card… Great.
I was standing and freezing for half an hour.
The bus…
It wasn't nice to come home, but I skip it here too… Instead of support, got, as usual, negativity, criticism, quarrels, because I didn't inform my ‘parent’ about what was happening… I didn't even know that I would be in the cell, the police had just taken my phone… Actually, no matter… I backed away, trying to suppress my irritation. All the things were still scattered around the room as if there had been a break-in.
There had been an overwhelming amount of stuff going on in the background. It turned out that the parent called the police station that day and the person he spoke to gave false facts about my detention by the police. He said it as if I had just been caught red-handed, destroying an antiquity.
By the time I was locked up, the lawyer had already been notified of the situation by this parent and therefore my meeting with the prosecutor didn’t take place - which I had been preparing for for a damn 24 hours.
All the surrounding media and forums circulated information that I had done the "damage". The information from the police spokesman posted on the police website was a LIE. I was convicted in the media as guilty, without a trial! That they said wasn’t true. All the media reported that I had destroyed a historic building from the thirteenth century because I had dug up the Tsar's buttons there. (XD).
You have to be a real idiot to write something like that... Seriously, that was the information from the police spokesman. Of course, I dug up tsarist buttons and coins from the 19th century there, but not on the premises of the building, but in the fields next to it, under the observation of an archaeologist on legal searches for historical objects...
And that was in 2018!!!, not now. They’ve screwed everything up to create hype in the media. These buttons and coins had stayed with me because the archaeologist concluded that these items had no historical value. They were just broken things, accidentally lost, with no historical context.
They broke me even more. They destroyed me. They ruined all my respect. They destroyed my whole perception of this failing, stupid country.
I've lost all sense of life and development in this ‘post’-communist sh…
I wrote about it in various groups and everyone was terribly annoyed with how hopeless the current law is and how much trouble and sick the police are, etc. After that, I’ve completely escaped to the world of loneliness, completely closing myself in the four walls. I didn't leave the house anywhere…
Any loss of name or lies in the media were not so important. It was a loss of big dreams and a passion. It was an element that outweighed a mountain of other things in the background. This severely damaged my desire to draw anything.
I was facing 2 years in prison for “misapprehension” a stupid law about the possession of antiques. Misapprehension, but on their side. I knew they wouldn't punish me because the law was so dumb that they couldn't do anything without evidence, even if I was guilty. (XD). Seriously. However, I was afraid of a financial penalty that would take all my savings - it would destroy the rest of the support for the stability of the psyche.
It would be too complicated to describe it all. Stupid law doesn’t protect antiques from bandits at all, it only makes life difficult for history enthusiasts. What hurts is that because of that stupid "antiquities protection law" there has been created a black market, so this law does more harm than good… but I'm not about that here…
Stupid “success propaganda” of the police. They just needed the victim (me) to propagate their ‘success’… destroying me almost completely, taking away from me the only passion that gave me the opportunity to gain contacts with others, which was smashed to its foundations by one idiot… - the person who reported my allegedly “illegal” antiquities search. But no one could have known that this hobby was something that held my broken “self” together.
They’ve taken my “antiques” collection and equipment for about a 750 USD. I also spent a lot of money on an advocate… (I earn around 556 USD per month)
It all came from a stupid system… Dumb politicians have created a law that can be interpreted in many ways… Pictures of items taken from my home appeared everywhere in the media and on the police website, and they described it as “incredibly valuable antiquities stolen from the site of a historic building from the thirteenth century”...
People made fun of it everywhere, how could anyone be such an idiot to write such articles in the media. And how can a country be so sick as to make such a big deal out of it, when there are a million worse problems.
Everyone clearly described me as something negative, completely ignoring my side. They even wrote on one page about who I am by profession and that I had a passion and a YT channel. But absolutely no one saw how everything this isolated entity had achieved over the past few years was just destroyed by a stupid system…
Then I hated this stupid country to the very end, because I know perfectly well that if I lived in the USA or England, I could have a great hobby and a great life on it.
Because of a stupid law, this passion started dying seriously in 2019… But still I tried to continue, albeit reluctantly… And after two years, through some brainless informant, the officials reported to the prosecutor's office a video I posted on YT in fall 2018…
An withdrawn introvert who tried to record videos… It was something big for me… I didn't show my face, the commentary was stiff, but with each video I opened myself up more and more… It was a real passion… (from 2018 to 2020) even though I knew it was going away, part of me really wanted to fight for big ideas to change the law…
I had been very involved in the community… I even got involved with this topic to a political party to put pressure on politicians to completely change this stupid and ambiguous law. There was really a lot going on in 2019 and 2020 and I started to hope for a change... And suddenly such a blow in 2021 that mentally moved everything back to the mentality of communism.
The video (from 2018) was about a legal search for antiques at an archaeological site, but they (police, informer, even officials) didn't know it was legal… because they just didn't check the papers at the museum… The problem was that I had old coins, buttons, etc. at home, and according to them, these things were obtained illegally and I was charged with destroying the archaeological site because they’ve combined it with a legal video from an archaeological site… Ghrrrr… A sick confluence of everything.
It was close to the brink of collapse, but the return to art made it possible to escape from reality. This had a huge impact on the content of the story, and the drawing with the cat and dragon was the opposite side. The worst thing was that when I felt calm again and the inspiration and willingness to create returned, another letter came either from the police or the prosecutor's office and again caused a storm in my mind…
Fall 2021
The case had already been dismissed, but officials have lodged a complaint and the case has been going on like this since spring, which completely poisoned my head…
My family fell apart. My mother has moved out, there’s no agreement, so I don’t know where to live, whether with her or with another parent - who’s hardly at home… and what I have to pay for…
A terrible emptiness.
This is not all that is bad. These were just the last points that made the pile of negativity too big. It all made the creation of my art as slow as a dragon stuck in a swamp up to its stomach.
And I don't care at all.
I just care if I'm going to write a few more sentences of the story today, or if I'm going to draw. Inspiration comes very rarely now, but it does come. The determinant of the meaning of the day was whether I did something related to art or not. If not, I feel like the day didn't make sense, but I enjoy the smallest things, such as good coffee, food, weather (for me the rain and dark clouds), and a more relaxed day at work. Unfortunately, I get off balance easily.
This information was never intended to be externalized anywhere. It was just supposed to be my dragon's profile, for art, stories. It was supposed to be just another profile for me to create something for the environment. I have never written anything about my life anywhere in my life.
Who is “Qahnareen” and the brown-gray dragon?
My nature has awakened as the wildness of suppressed emotions, the desire to escape from the world of civilization. Powerful individualism trapped under my fear. The desire for freedom.
This is how Golgaaryol has been created. The wild beast, but one with only goodness in his heart.
This dragon, in turn, having the life of a wild, free creature, tries to seek some contact with civilization.
The content of Split Of Fate contains all my negativity, but in a twisted way of my subconscious. This dragon came completely out of nowhere and got out of control… so I have no idea where he’s or what he’s doing now… But I’m writing this when the brown dragon is not currently here, because when he’s with me, forces me to write his story. ;]
I myself am curious where this is going, because I don't have a scenario! The whole content is a jumble of rubbish that came to my mind and I'm really satisfied that the story started to look like a well-thought-out whole. (I have almost five parts written. Just a satisfying cause and effect relationship that arose both in the story and in connection with real life. As if writing a story predicts a bit of the future in my life. What was in the plot, happened later in real life.)
Unfortunately, it will still be some time before it is ready for publication. Although I must admit that, for example, during my work I miss this dragon (part of me). - I still live this story.
Does a storyteller create suffering
or suffering creates a storyteller?
I'm writing this to give you some idea of why my story looks what it looks like; chaotic nonsense full of suffering, a lot of mistakes - I write using google translate, “I don't speak human.” You should also take into account that I just like dark art and atmosphere, sad and tragic stories, dark dungeon synth music, dark ambient, neoclassics. This type of art has inspired me.
*
So… Welcome to the story of…
Me?
Have you ever dreamed of reading someone's diary? This is a sequel to the Split Of Fate… Though you don't need to know the plot, but it all will be like one, big story.
Here are my thoughts, nonetheless my dragon is very active here, just in a different form. This series will feature my sincere thoughts enriched with my draconic mood…
So… It’s just part one…
At the outset, I would like to add that this project is something that was not supposed to exist at all. I wanted to be "known" for my ability to do good and detailed fantasy art, mostly dragons. Difficult past, depression, breakdowns, these weren’t supposed to be topics on this profile at all. I don’t want anyone to create an image of me from these journals, because it’s only a collection of my thoughts without showing the whole. It's like a mental shortcut; some of the darkest things I thought while the day might have been generally calm for me, but you will get the reflection of that one thought.
This profile was an escape from the depression that I have known for many years, but what I didn't know was that life was going to break me by giving me some strong shots this year. I was just pushed to externalize it so it wouldn't suffocate me from within, but that's not something I want to be known for.
I don't want to be a character who tries to build a profile based on some kind of lamentation, “how hard my life is…” I wanted to be associated primarily with the art of dragons, making many pictures that are calm, cheerful, beautiful, evoking a smile, in order to completely hide myself behind them and build my new image.
But it's so shallow… And I've done it many times in my socmedia, in videos and photography, but it has brought nothing but empty reflections that I was abandoning.
The beginning of my writing meant that I completely lost my free time and most of my will to develop digital art. However, I’m publishing it because I think I would like my character to have no secrets. I'm sorry this isn't a great guide to coping with depression, how to recover from depression, but despite all my progress, I haven't been able to do it yet (Feb 2022 when I’m adding this description). And be warned that there’s real darkness here, truly sincere.
Maybe it will change? Or maybe it will be quite the opposite... But more on that later.
[28.02.2023]
For some reason, I decided to come back here and fill in the black gaps of this entry and correct some errors. I guess it hurt me too much that part 1 was nothing good that would encourage reading, but rather deterred with its amount of complexity and chaos. After editing it’s a bit more organized.
*
