Thanks! Sometimes I want to quote Arrested Development: "there are dozens of us!" but I think there's more than that by now, and we're just connecting the threads of a global community at this point.

Yessss absolutely! I love "d&d made me _____" and referenced it very (very) obliquely somewhere in there.
For me, hilariously, it's "opera made me queer" because that's the media I was consuming as a curious teenager. So even there, there's overlap.
I'm curious if therapeutic larp will evolve.

7/ audience (usually) so you can try ideas regardless of what coplayers/director/etc. would want or think. And therefore there's even more room for exploring theory of mind.

That's why I do acting, larp, psych, games, and probably why there's a remarkable overlap among people who do all 4.

6/ what represents your character, in any way, so there's even more freedom for different experiences: e.g. learning about yourself by having the option to make choices you might never think of IRL due to your own biases. There's narrative freedom: go back & try a different way. You're your own

5/ Video games (generalizing but bear with me bc there's a word count, I can't go into every game) let you play a character and even repeat their experiences making different choices on different playthroughs. Also, vidya plays with time in ways larp/theatre can't as easily. And your body isn't

4/ Performer/larper, psych becomes interesting to you because you want to connect to not only your own characters but the people (characters) around them. And you probably want to understand and manage your own reactions to what your character goes through, too. Tossing in a 4th dimension: gaming.

3/ Larps examine it in more improvisational ways: "If my character came from background X, and this larp starts at point Y, what would they do between now and whenever this larp ends (aka point Z)?" Thus acting/larp are appealing to psych-minded folks, and if you think about it long enough as a

2/ Character study is applied psychology: "Different people think differently" -> "What do THIS person's thoughts look like?" Scripted performances examine that in a very controlled (prewritten) environment: "What must my character be thinking to get from the first to the last page in this way?"

Heck yeah! I think all those things have a lot in common at fundamental levels, even if it's not obvious on the surface.

... rather than feeling like I'm always scraping by at the minimum level to survive. If I can take a deep breath and look around, I can see that's not actually true, but I still fear that relaxing for even a moment would be too much, and I'd lose everything. The fears can be debilitating.

The comorbidity with anxiety and depression definitely doesn't help. I've found my way into a community that's really positive and good, but I still feel like my foundations are shaky at best — I had to teach myself so much of how to be an adult, so it's hard to feel like I have space to play...

My ADHD makes me feel this in a big way. I described it recently as the feeling of hitting a wall whenever I start to gain any momentum. I'm not sure how to break that pattern; I'm a product of my early environment but responsible for making change for myself now, and the wall keeps coming back.

How much do you know about ADHD? What you're describing sounds more like narcissism; they are not the same.

Those are good ideas and things I do already whenever I can. I'm stuck in the mindset that makes it hard to get rid of things at all because I can't count on affording to get them again, though, which often stands in the way.

The costumes can stay. The good clothes can stay. The small mementos can stay. 10 years of old cables that I might need someday? Poubelle.