Getting Back On Track

Time for the “realtalk” post that I think everyone was waiting for. I’m going to be brief, as I don’t like to drag others into my personal life too much. But I’ve been really vague for a long time, this entire summer, about a lot of things happening to me, and why I haven’t been able to deliver on a lot of stuff I said I would. Without people reading I don’t think I’d ever been able to write this much. I think you’re owed more than that. So here goes the explanation for all the troubles I’ve had around this time.

At the start of the summer there were a lot of really charged familial schisms at home resulting from our really bad pocketbook (I live with my family as I’ve said before, since we’re all worse off economically separate than together) and I fell even deeper and more dangerously into depression than before.

I started taking medications for it, but I didn’t like what it was doing to me. I just felt numb and I felt like I couldn’t write anything. I hadn’t a creative thought in my body. I was passive and content but it all felt so artificial and wrong somehow – like nothing was really resolved, or moving forward. All I could muster the effort to do was goof around on twitter, and sometimes barely even that. I tried to maintain a facade that I was okay. You can ask some of my friends about the days where I’d just up and disappear. I didn’t – I was just practically asleep for 18 hours. I still find it hard to write, and I still feel really sleepy and bad as I try to wean off the medication. It really just made everything worse for me rather than better.

I’m feeling better now. For a long time I was a bit ashamed to say anything, because I know there’s gonna be a lot of opinions on the subject – people who think I shouldn’t have taken any medication, people who think I should stay on medication, people who are hyper productive and happy with their medication and don’t understand what I’m going on about. And that’s all okay and I’m getting all that now. I know that on some level all this was kinda dumb, I guess? But it’s my personal decision.

Part of what’s been tormenting me lately is that feeling of futility and lack of worth – like you’ve graduated college but you’re not really doing anything are you? You’re not going out into the world and making it. I’ve tried getting jobs but then all kinds of weird stuff has kept me from doing them. Now I just essentially work for my parents which feels pathetic, I suppose. I mean, I’m doing things, but they’re not stuff that’s acceptable to qualify as “being off my butt and doing something.” Working on a game you want to kickstarter doesn’t feel like it qualifies for this. I’ve had a lot of confidence and esteem problems and it’s inhibited me a lot.

But there was one positive thing that came out of the like four bad months I’ve gone through. I feel a lot more positive and confident, and I feel like the numbness and vulnerability has given me willpower I didn’t have before. Having gotten on medications I feel like I need to tackle these issues, and not suppress them. There’s something fundamental there, with the way I thought about myself and my situation, that is the root of all this. And it’ll always be there unless I confront it.

As far as you all, the readers, we recently cross 200,000 hits which for other blogs is like, they wipe their butts with that, but for me that’s a milestone, and I want to thank everyone for reading, even in this dry spell. I’m gonna really try to get back into the rhythm of writing more stuff here, and that means more fox-eared technophobe polytheist posts, more game design stuff, Expedition (no longer beta – i’m calling it Basic because it’ll be the Basic Game from which I base the compatible Kickstarter Game) and other things. I’m gonna try to stop second-guessing myself and just go out and do stuff because I like it.

That’s all the realtalk then. Hope to get back to you soon with some fantasytalk.