I missed service this morning. I don’t know how, but I just failed to wake up. I had a terribly sad dream. I’ve been thinking about killing again lately. Everything just seems to set something off within me. I fear that I’ve grown apart from the people I’ve cared about. I fear that I’ve wasted all of my talent away. I spend all my days and nights trying to come up with new and interesting ways of killing myself. My work feels meaningless. My relationships feel meaningless. I’ve grown sick of talking. Talking never goes anywhere. I was never going anywhere anyways. In my dream, everyone turned against me. I’ve grown sick with longing. I missed this month’s update. I’ve fallen out of love. It’s all gone stale. It’s not that I’ve lost faith in God, just myself. All I can hope is for me to get better. I’m no longer enough.
Talking to the doctor didn’t help at all this time. I don’t feel like she engaged meaningfully with much of what I’d told her at all. Too many interjections of her own biases and assumptions, to the point of being annoyingly unhelpful. Or rather, more charitably, I’m deeply frustrated that I wasn’t able to articulate my concerns effectively. Either way, I’ve come away with an even greater sense of disappointment.
I suspect that this failure of communication has, unfortunately, somewhat significantly accelerated the progression of my symptoms as of late.
A profound sadness has once again taken hold of me. I know now it’s not simple burnout, but something much worse and unforgiving.
The past few weeks have felt, simultaneously, interminably long and yet also unbearably short – and nearly every one of those moments in between has been quietly excruciating in retrospect. My days are filled with a constant, languishing weariness. By noon each day, without fail, I find myself completely depleted of any ability to hold compassion or grace for others, least of all myself. And all my nights are even more exhausting, dominated by thoughts of suicide and sharp, painful bouts of paranoia. I used to think that if hell were to really exist, it would be the best day of your life, and the worst day of your life re-experienced so many times that they become indistinguishable from one another in effect. I’m beginning to feel that way again.
It’s not that any one thing in particular has been distinctly bad, to be clear; but admitting that, too, further confounds and frustrates my thoughts. It feels like any progress I may have made in the first few months of this year have been utterly undone, in the sense of an unraveling. Little bits and pieces from everyone, from every direction… all manner of minor misunderstandings and misschedulings and misinterpretations and miscommunications just piling up day after day in a slow but certain metastasis of disappointment and frustration beyond resolution. In every part of my life.
I have lost my ability to trust others: neither their intentions nor their feelings, least of all in their apparent efforts towards sincerity, which in my confused state feel like, at best, mocking pretence. I no longer trust my own feelings. My heart has betrayed me. I have felt my old inclinations rise within me late at night. In the cramped, stale silence of the afternoons. All of it makes me sick. I get the distinct feeling that, in my efforts to improve myself, I have instead somehow managed to make myself much worse.
Spoke to my producer about my thoughts and feelings regarding development. Fortunately I was met with understanding, and I feel more prepared to handle the next few months knowing that I have some support. My next primary objective is the trailer. I’m going to spend the next week preparing a spec sheet for it so that I’ll be able to break things down week by week. I’m not going to focus on anything else until it’s done. I hope that in working on it, I’ll be able to regain a sense of connection with the overarching plot and themes as the audience will experience them, and create bookends for myself both visually and in terms of implementation.
I feel I’ve arrived at a certain amount of peace regarding the past several weeks’ worth of uncertainty, although I can fairly confidently say I still do not feel like I’m in a position where I can resume working. It’s strange: emotionally, I guess I feel pretty stable, like I’ve worked through most of the things that were troubling me. But physically, and in terms of my ability to work, I feel utterly debilitated: my thoughts are completely scrambled, my memory and ability to form and maintain coherent thoughts have both completely dissolved, and I constantly feel afflicted by a sense of persistent, indeterminate hunger and fatigue which never seem to be satisfied no matter how much I eat or sleep.
I haven’t completely stopped working, to be honest. I’m working with Sam now on the soundscapes and the audio for the trailer, which is exciting. I’ve also got a thing with a magazine coming up to which I’m looking forward. Both, I feel, have restored a bit of my personal interest in the project, and have at the very least reoriented me to the possibility of resuming some kind of work.
The obvious, and extant problem here, of course, is how my publisher will react to all of this. I suppose I won’t know for sure until this week’s meeting, but I’m cautiously optimistic. I’ve come up with a fairly cogent plan for the next few months, and a clear argument (at least in my opinion) for why I feel like this would be good for the project overall. I hope they’ll be receptive to it.
First day of August. First day back to work as well – technically, anyways.
In truth, I feel absolutely terrible. I barely managed to get the strategy document written and submitted just now, at nearly 3am; I’ve yet to even think about anything else. My mind just feels totally flatlined, like I can’t produce a single cogent thought.
I’ve been overcome by a terrible sadness. It’s the onset of a depressive state, I’m certain now.
My thoughts have become entirely clouded by a dismal pall that hangs over every moment of the day.
The thought alone of having to open up the project file and actually work on something, let alone get something done, let alone get the demo done, feels abjectly inconceivable to me at this present moment. Even having taken an entire week off, I feel no better rested or prepared. In fact, I feel even more unsettled and uncertain of the state of both my being, and the future of my project.
It feels like this is going to go on forever, even though I know that it won’t. I’m thoroughly tired of all of this though, and to be honest, I hate working on this project, and I’m pretty sure I hate making games too. If I could do anything else, I probably would. But I can’t.
