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Time has escaped me once again. It’s been ten days since my last entry, and yet it barely feels like two or three have elapsed. I’ve been trying to get back to work, or look for a job, or sometimes, although never for very long, both in the same day; but it’s been excruciatingly slow, to put it lightly, and I am terribly tired of all of it. I feel trapped between the past and the future. The former ossifies and the latter grows dim. I think I’ve become too stuck in my ways, my feelings. My tendencies toward introspection have become indistinguishable from onanistic obsession. I don’t ever even really feel sad anymore: instead, there’s just this gentle, soporific melancholy that clings to me day in and day out, suffusing my hours with a leaden exhaustion that is neither painful nor even unpleasant to endure but simply there. I’ve grown impatient. I’ve been told that I have taken on the self-assuredness of a flagellant. I understand clearly now that my inertness has little correlation to any external deficiencies or impedances I had imagined to be sources of agitation when I was younger. It was I who squandered my potential and buried my talents. My lack is entirely my own.

I’m terribly afraid that my decision to continue making games is compelled less by a genuine love and care for the work, and instead, by the shameful suspicion that, in practice, I am incapable of doing anything else: not even in any grander philosophical or artistic sense, but just the baseline commercial and material one too. Some part of me still finds the work to be quite meaningful and intrinsically satisfying, and harbours a desire to keep on doing it because it is a beautiful thing and that’s what should really matter above all else. But that part’s grown really small as of late and most days, it just feels like a mockery. And the saddest part is that, if I were to claim like a true artist or whatever that that was the saddest part, losing touch with that feeling, I mean, even that would just be a lie in service of a pretence that I’m barely able to convince myself to maintain in the first place. And even then, I don’t know who I’m trying to convince with regard to my supposed merits as a game developer, professionally or creatively, either. Nate was right, after all: I haven’t even finished, let alone released a single game. No, it’s not that I slipped. I never ascended to any meaningful height to begin with.