You expect whatever she'd say outside your "control" to be much better than what you could consciously devise for her character? Your expectations are too big, and you aim too high.

That's actually a really good point. My perfectiautism seems to have set a standard that I can't even properly define before I see it fulfilled. That doesn't sound good even from a narration perspective. I'm gonna have to rethink a few things.

It's a long story and my hand hurts. I don't really interact with my imagination anymore.

Fede had a tough imaginary life.

I feel I should mention something about what happened to me a few days ago, which I think I could say is the strangest thing that has happened to me during this whole thing so far. I was just sitting down, happily listening to some cute music, kinda lazily visualizing her in the corner of my eye, sitting in the chair behind me. And I felt the urge to hug her. Nothing unusual so far. So I went to hug her, and along with the rush of happiness I usually feel from that, I felt this tightening in my chest. This was new and interesting, so I started focusing on it, and it grew stronger, quickly getting to the point where it was actually a little painful, but I still embraced it because I was pretty excited by something so weird happening. Eventually I had to let go, but it didn't seem to stop as long as thought of her. I wasn't even focusing that much on her at this point, I was trying to gain control of my breathing, repeatedly planting my face in my hands as if this position would help somehow, and got up to pace back and forth wondering if something is going right or if I'm just finally losing it. Only when I completely stopped thinking about her did it stop.

I've since felt the same slight sensation maybe once or twice while hugging her, but nothing as intense. Not that I've been trying, I don't think I could handle that stuff regularly.

Another uneventful month, to finish up an uneventful year. Yeah, 4 days ago it was a year since I started. Instead of being celebratory, like a birthday (no, I didn't make cake, sorry), I've actually been dreading that date for a while, since it's hard to look at a whole year without vocality without kinda feeling like a failure. But life goes on, and I'll keep on doing this even though my expectations are honestly rock-bottom at this point.

I still wanna be a little hopeful that this year will be more successful, and I'm putting some more hope on meditation this time. I realized that when I fall off from daily forcing, it's not so much that I lose motivation, it's that I feel completely incapable of forcing. I seem to lose my ability to focus on things when I'm stressed out about things in my life, which it turns out I'm extremely prone to. In the hopes that it will be the miracle cure for my troubled mind, meditation is now my top priority in life. I even prioritize it over forcing itself, hoping that forcing less with a more focused mind will be more effective than forcing more with an unfocused mind. Let's just hope I don't achieve enlightenment first.

It really feels like it to me. While other hosts talk about doing all kinds of fun stuff with their tulpas really early on, most of my posts are just reflecting on my methods and bringing up whatever minor stuff that might maybe be taken as a sign of sentience. And telling myself that I shouldn't compare myself to others doesn't change how I feel about this.

Bet you haven't even eaten cake with tulpa.

Until tulpa is satisfied.

This journal might not be too interesting to read at this point, with how many setbacks I'm reporting compared to progress, but I feel I should keep writing, if only for my own sake.

This past year has been totally shit, the kind of year you can look back at and think "I might as well have been in a coma this whole time". Only slowly starting to pull myself out of this mess now.

I've been struggling a lot with my confidence in tulpaforcing with so many setbacks. Usually I've just told myself "this is what I've been doing wrong all this time, so since I'm not doing that this time, everything will be different", but that's essentially placebo, because upon becoming aware that I'm just using it to convince myself I'll be successful, it doesn't really work anymore. My diminishing confidence needs to be resolved some other way, probably by letting determination decide how much effort I put in, rather than waiting and hoping for something to increase my confidence. And ironically, I've noticed that just putting in effort this way slowly increases my confidence anyway. I imagine more confidence will come naturally as I hit some progress milestones.

I've had to take a hard look at my motivation, since there's clearly a disconnect between how much I claim to care about this and the effort I've been putting in. My answer to that is that I'm just too future-oriented. I don't expect too much from what I do today, but I expect a lot from the future. And since I've been telling myself I don't wanna rush things by setting specific time expectations, that point in the future I'm working towards is really vague. I don't think I can use this as my motivation. It's like walking through the desert and only seeing the horizon, with no goal in sight, walking is indistinguishable from standing still, other than the fact that the former is far more tiresome than the latter. Maybe I can incorporate that AA motto, "one day at a time". Maybe I can focus on how Melo will like it if I spend some time with her right now (even if she won't necessarily communicate it), and realize that this is more important than what I intend to achieve with her in the future. Maybe I can have more fun, except actually doing it this time instead of just thinking it would be great to have more fun. It's probably just about shifting focus.

Kinda related to shifting focus, I started experimenting with meditative forcing. It's kinda awkward, because I just told myself I'd try to focus on Melo's "essence", without really knowing what I mean by that, how I do it, or if it makes any sense at all. So I just sit there, trying to focus on something so vague that there's no way to know whether I'm doing it right or if it would help me at all. And it made me realize, those thoughts that come to me as I try to focus, "am I doing this right?", "is this really going to work?", they're just distractions, the kind of thoughts I'm trying to get better at shifting focus away from by meditating. I've been told so many times to not doubt, thinking it means I have to reaffirm my belief or some shit, but it might be even more powerful to just identify the thoughts of doubt in my mind and realize it's my own choice whether to entertain them.

Got some minor stuff to report too. Few days ago I got an interesting auditory hallucination. Not too sure what to make of it, because I wasn't 100% awake at the time (was lying in bed in the morning, awake enough to be aware of my surroundings, but not awake enough to get out of bed), and upon asking Melo if it was her, I got no response. But it felt so uncannily real, I could clearly make out what kind of person the voice belonged to (was cute and feminine, matching up with Melo) and what it said, and even felt a sort of tickling in my ears from it. The tone of voice was really affectionate, which alone makes me really want to believe it was her, but it's hard due to my skepticism towards things I experience in a not completely awake state. If nothing else, it was a good demonstration of what it will be like when Melo gets her own voice, something I've been struggling to imagine before.

And lastly, not a very big thing, but I've gotten sick of seeing the same boring wonderland not too different from how I started on it 2 years ago (jesus christ it's been 2 years now), so I've resolved to just act on whatever random idea I got for how to change it or just make completely new locations. Yesterday I was sitting with Melo in this hottub on top of a star-shaped platform floating high up in the sky, and I realized, wow this is kinda exciting. I don't think I've felt like that since I first started this journey. I hope that the future still has many more moments like that to offer.

Oh by the way, if anyone didn't know, I've been hanging around in the IRC recently, but someone stole my registered nick, so I'm known as shobon now.