#164 - No New Ideas

The thing about writing everyday is that you have to actually do it and like – I don't know if the nine essays where I try and define my relationship to writing are a hint but I'm kind of stuck and I'd like to uh, not be.

The thing about changing your life is that you actually do have to make changes.

Follow through.

Live it.

And while that's great, it's also not easy. It also is easy in that once you're doing it, you're doing it, but it's just hard to change our relationships to ourselves and therefore hard to navigate our ever-shifting relationship to the world around us.

It's not that I need new ideas – I have so many stacked up it feels like I'll never get to all of them anyway – but those ones are hard to write because there are so many thoughts that I get precious about presenting it to the world.

This happened when I ran a podcast too, the movies we talked about most rarely got episodes because it felt like we were "saving" them for something. But the reality is, we just never talked about our favorite movies.

I'm trying to be less afraid of imperfection these days, but I've also been really hard on myself lately because I have a sneaking suspicion that my lack of self-discipline is pointing to larger unhapinesses that I am unable to solve.

Sometimes it just feels like I'm choosing which fiddle for the burning of Rome, y'know?

But I'm trying to not be pessimistic because I also don't think that gets us anywhere and who wants to be in constant despair?

Today I nailed a hardcore tune-out by combining two of the birthday gifts I got from my sister:

I watched the Lord Of The Rings with director/writers commentary while playing Pokemon Silver on the emulator she got me.

This thing is sick and I didn't even know this kind of thing existed I feel so tapped out of the side of the tech world I was once tapped into.

And it crashed and I lost all of my gameplay and hard earned grind leveled up pokemon with it.

But alas! I started anew. But on Gold this time and I'm saving the game to the console rather than just using the in-game save so, fingers crossed.

The first time I played these games, my dad had brought back cartridges from Japan that were, of course, in Japanese. My brother managed to hack his way through the game but I definitely gave up. During a rough time in Portland my ex downloaded a computer emulator and I became obsessed with Girafarig and had a great time.

It was the second game released and the last time they made an even slightly difficult Pokemon game.

Which is funny because their audience hasn't let go of them since we were kids and there should at the very least be difficulty settings within the games (things like turning off exp. share for example) because they know that's true.

But I do understand that it's supposed to be for children. However I still am holding out hope for a Pokemon Ranch game where you can rescue/raise pokemon and do little farm tasks and bond with them in ways that aren't uhhhhhhh simulated dog fights.

Sometimes I have such specific ideas about video games that I wonder if I should try and forge a different career path, but I never get that far in thinking about it because I routinely dismiss my own wants, dreams, and desires without hesitation.

I don't even look into what it would look like, or research how others got into it, or look up if there are studios in New York City that are hiring and reading what's on the job listing criteria.

And I think that's really sad and I want to really try this next year to heal my relationship with myself in a more wholistic way because I still think I'm overly critical and rarely take myself seriously.

(If I did, I'd be sending all of these to inboxes. But I'm afraid, I'm ashamed, I'm embarrassed, I'm worried people who read these are mad at me, I'm overthinking, I'm so depressed about the state of the world and the fact that the election feels like a net neutral result at best, I'm writing this at almost one in the morning because if I have a deadline for myself, of course I'm going to hit it but I also napped a lot and ate bucatini kind of late so a vicious cycle has started once again.)

Oh man, it's so much easier to write when I'm honest and unable to continue the facade that I've been trying to cultivate for like several years now.

I do feel better than I ever have before in a lot of ways – I'm far more centered and measured and my ability to regulate has come a long long way – but I also feel acutely aware of all the ways I still feel too cowardly to actually engage and let myself evolve (oooo pokemon callback) into the next stage of my life.

I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I am so afraid, and no one has answers outside of myself and I used to be so sure of everything I wanted and now I rarely know day-to-day how things are going. Sometimes people ask me how I'm doing and I narrowly avoid bursting into tears. It's too much, I've been warned I'm too much, so I try to tamp it down.

It doesn't always work.

And it's good to let it go.

I didn't have a plan for this, but I think it's over now.

Maybe being honest is the first step?

Eh. Probably can't hurt!