Nah, it’s fine. That one was hard for me because it hit a spot I hadn’t worked through yet, but I’m good now and not afraid to give details. I just feel weird bringing up personal details when it doesn’t feel relevant—like if I were to start talking about the taste of death blood/vomit unnecessarily :P
On the forethought/practice side of things (as opposed to the emotional prep side), it really depends on your risk level. For MoR!Harry, probably something like “all of the above”. For me personally, the risk level isn’t obscene like that, but given how big my family is and the fun stuff we do, it was almost surprising no one had been seriously injured (before the accident). There’s no way I could have planned out the logistics of incident any more carefully—everything was right there. The only mistake I made that night that definitely would have made a difference was treating the guy in danger as less of a PC and more of an NPC. It’s actually a mistake I’ve made in the past, but I had no idea it would apply to him. Even in hindsight it’s not obvious.
In terms of preparing for that kind of thing, other than common sense safety protocols, I keep in mind which situations are potentially life threatening and which risk a broken bone at most—and taking extra risks in the latter category because it gets me practice and is fun (never actually broken a bone, or been present while one broken, btw).
In terms of learning from the aftermath, it seems like it just follows from taking responsibility but not blame. You’re a deterministic system. Why’d you do what you did? No, “I’m a crappy person” isn’t a real answer since there’s no fundamental crappiness to excise. In my case, there were several things I didn’t think of. None of them I could have been expected to specifically prepare for beforehand, but I probably would have done better if I was less panicked. So why was I panicked? Well, my cousin might die and that’s not okay for one, and two, I had never had panic level problems before—I had always managed that really well, and I wasn’t far above my normal level, so it wasn’t on my mind to regulate it down. I had things to do, and didn’t feel like I had time to think. I didn’t, really, but I didn’t have time to not think and just do the first plan either. So the takeaway is to be emotionally prepared next time and to set myself a lower level of mental excitation to aim for (both actionable for me). I feel like I can let myself off the hook for not noticing a problem that had never impacted me before—I can’t see how I could possibly foresee the next “like” thing without unreasonable amounts of thought.
The one game changing decision was to focus on getting him out of danger instead of wasting time trying to figure out how much time we had on the clock. Even now, there’s no obvious answer. I’ll shift in the direction of more effort towards understanding the situation first, and keep it on mind as a potential source of critical info even if I really can’t take a few seconds to figure things out—which really seemed to be the case. The more likely way I could have gotten that right was to have less trust in him to start with—or to prepare him to be more trustworthy. Both of those get long faster than they get informative, but I’ve been down those paths as well. But yeah, basically take responsibility to change, view yourself neutrally to figure out why you actually did what you did, and what you can actually change so that you’ll do better in the future—and then chase it down until there are no worthwhile changes to be made.
The emotional prep side I’ll write about in response to Benito’s reply to me—maybe tomorrow or something since I have to go have fun now :)
Nah, it’s fine. That one was hard for me because it hit a spot I hadn’t worked through yet, but I’m good now and not afraid to give details. I just feel weird bringing up personal details when it doesn’t feel relevant—like if I were to start talking about the taste of death blood/vomit unnecessarily :P
On the forethought/practice side of things (as opposed to the emotional prep side), it really depends on your risk level. For MoR!Harry, probably something like “all of the above”. For me personally, the risk level isn’t obscene like that, but given how big my family is and the fun stuff we do, it was almost surprising no one had been seriously injured (before the accident). There’s no way I could have planned out the logistics of incident any more carefully—everything was right there. The only mistake I made that night that definitely would have made a difference was treating the guy in danger as less of a PC and more of an NPC. It’s actually a mistake I’ve made in the past, but I had no idea it would apply to him. Even in hindsight it’s not obvious.
In terms of preparing for that kind of thing, other than common sense safety protocols, I keep in mind which situations are potentially life threatening and which risk a broken bone at most—and taking extra risks in the latter category because it gets me practice and is fun (never actually broken a bone, or been present while one broken, btw).
In terms of learning from the aftermath, it seems like it just follows from taking responsibility but not blame. You’re a deterministic system. Why’d you do what you did? No, “I’m a crappy person” isn’t a real answer since there’s no fundamental crappiness to excise. In my case, there were several things I didn’t think of. None of them I could have been expected to specifically prepare for beforehand, but I probably would have done better if I was less panicked. So why was I panicked? Well, my cousin might die and that’s not okay for one, and two, I had never had panic level problems before—I had always managed that really well, and I wasn’t far above my normal level, so it wasn’t on my mind to regulate it down. I had things to do, and didn’t feel like I had time to think. I didn’t, really, but I didn’t have time to not think and just do the first plan either. So the takeaway is to be emotionally prepared next time and to set myself a lower level of mental excitation to aim for (both actionable for me). I feel like I can let myself off the hook for not noticing a problem that had never impacted me before—I can’t see how I could possibly foresee the next “like” thing without unreasonable amounts of thought.
The one game changing decision was to focus on getting him out of danger instead of wasting time trying to figure out how much time we had on the clock. Even now, there’s no obvious answer. I’ll shift in the direction of more effort towards understanding the situation first, and keep it on mind as a potential source of critical info even if I really can’t take a few seconds to figure things out—which really seemed to be the case. The more likely way I could have gotten that right was to have less trust in him to start with—or to prepare him to be more trustworthy. Both of those get long faster than they get informative, but I’ve been down those paths as well. But yeah, basically take responsibility to change, view yourself neutrally to figure out why you actually did what you did, and what you can actually change so that you’ll do better in the future—and then chase it down until there are no worthwhile changes to be made.
The emotional prep side I’ll write about in response to Benito’s reply to me—maybe tomorrow or something since I have to go have fun now :)