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A decently productive day. I decided to stream again, during which I was able to successfully finish two fairly involved animations. Although admittedly I don’t particularly enjoy streaming, it definitely helps keep me focused for sustained periods of time, which is probably the area I struggle with most. The awareness of persistent surveillance and external scrutiny ensures that I’m actually working instead and not getting sidetracked by random pitfalls. 

The month is almost over, in less than two weeks. The plan was to have all of the content assembled for the trailer by the end of the month so that I could work full-force come December towards getting the trailer and campaign out in a coordinated manner. While I’m still confident I can make the upcoming deadline, I have to admit I’m cutting it a bit too close for comfort, and as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, my rate of progress but more importantly my mood these past few months has been concerning. My pace is practically glacial at this point and the only thing that really keeps me going consistently is the sense of structure I’ve enforced upon myself. I hope there are no issues regarding the trailer; if it comes down to it, I might have to end up cutting it myself after all, which is a contingency I have to be prepared for.  

There are some days, I have to be honest, where I don’t feel as if I’m working at all. Or as if I don’t even feel like I really exist anymore. It’s when I see what other people are doing – my old friends – with their lives, earning money, moving away to distant corners of the country, even just grinding away at the jobs they hate, day in and day out. There’s a certain kind of envy I feel. Not for their work itself, which I’d hate to do, but for the sense of externalised purpose and meaning. Their work is not solitary like mine is. It’s grounded in something beyond themselves. However petty that ulterior purpose is, they’re part of something – and for now, at least, I’m not. My friends and I, we’ve got each other’s backs and we’ve got others in whom we can entrust parts of ourselves… but at the end of the day, our work is solitary and it’s unbearably lonely, even to one another, and there’s no solace from that, not even release. We’re here I suppose because of that: because we couldn’t fit in with others, because we couldn’t tolerate the stupidity, the redundancy, the sheer repetition of the world. But I’ve discovered now that in all of that, there’s something else too, which we don’t have: the reassurance of one’s place and purpose. I wish I could say the same for myself; but honestly, some days, I just feel lost.