Spent the day rearranging my monitors, and packing. Having trouble falling asleep; I don’t know why, but I’ve always found it difficult to sleep the night before a flight. At least on the way out. I just want to get this over with. I need to remember to change the water in the plant before I go.
Collated a bunch of weather data across a 60-day period for use for reference in Avery’s logs, and as raw input for the weather engine. I need to revisit the plot again some time soon. After some debate I’ve decided that I’ll be bringing my computer after all. Frankly I’ll count myself lucky if I even have the chance to open it a single time for more than five minutes, but just in case. Maybe I’ll be able to get some writing done.
I pushed my first commit in nearly two months earlier this evening. The day’s work was slow, but steady and untaxing. I feel terribly lonely. When I wake up, there’s no one there to greet. The daylight rises and falls with little notice. My nights are passed in silence. But for once, I’m getting things done. Maybe this is the way I’m meant to live, at the end of it. I fear I am not enough to fill this space on my own.
I’ve been trying a bit, day by day, to get back to work. Every day I try to sit down for at least twenty minutes, choose one set of assets or scripts, and go through the code, updating any relevant sections to standard with the new naming scheme. It’s slow, fatiguing work, especially since my ability to keep several things in focus has nearly completely eroded with disuse and confusion. I haven’t tested if the game runs a single time throughout the process, which I know I should be doing’ but I also know for sure that I don’t have the capacity to deal with the work or cognitive burden of troubleshooting at the moment. It’s helped me reacquaint myself with various systems I had designed years ago that I’d either forgotten in terms of function, or even altogether in a few cases. I’ve stopped going out as much. I feel a little bit less trapped in the designs of the past.
I’ve been feeling a stymied motivation to work on the game recently. I think it is in part due to my steady regression into a state of terrible despair, not all too different from the one in which the work was born. I guess this is how my life has gone: cycles of brief hope followed by long stretches of the same precipitous, violent loneliness that has defined The Way Things Are as long as I’ve been aware. Every time I come away from it thinking for a moment that maybe if I had tried a bit more, or slightly differently, or was slightly different, or more capable, or less of me, than maybe things could have been better, could get better. But I think that that’s just some shit I tell myself because I am too inert and stuck in my ways to change or end my life otherwise, and after all, hope is the baseline state I think, the last vestige of divinity present within us after all these years. I cannot convince myself though in the hours I have been living. I cannot convince myself I am anything but less than zero, or that I deserve anything more. Last night I had a nightmare that I had buried myself alive. No matter how much people try to tell me otherwise I just do not believe. I cannot. It is because of this, I think, that I am doomed.
It’s gotten a lot warmer and brighter lately, since I got back. More people outside. Spring is the loneliest stretch of the year. I’m terribly tired all the time, and I can feel myself growing increasingly angry and prone to spasms of vicious, primitive sadness. There’s this hole in my soul that just won’t go away. Once you start, you can’t stop. Days pass by. They just keep on going. They just keep on going.
Christ in the tomb. A free-floating sense of nauseous uncertainty. I am stuck in a loop of self-condemnation: “I feel worthless so I don’t try anything so I am worthless”. I don’t know how to get out of this. Slave to aetiology. Clarity has never helped: what good is it to be able to see the grooves and indentations on the bullet that is hurtling towards you, know its exact caliber and exit velocity and angle of trajectory, when you do not have the ability to move out of its way? It made impact long ago yet my nerves are only just now beginning to catch up, even as it tears a pathway in slow-motion through my life. I don’t know how to describe the sadness. How do I get better? It feels impossible to imagine a future for myself. How can I be fixed? I cannot change, and I seem unable to learn. There have been times in my life where I was so convinced that I was able to get better but every one of them ended in failure. I squandered my opportunities, each and every one. Because of what I am, and what I am not. I think I am doomed. I don’t know what to do or how to live with that.
Haven’t gone to service in over two months. I get the sense that I’m devolving somehow.
It was warm and humid and grey, and the bare branches swirled outside my window with the nascence of a summer breeze. I feel like I’m becoming sick with sadness. It poisons my thoughts with clouds of resentment and doubt and deadens my limbs with dreadful torpor. I need to get something done by the end of this weekend, or I fear there may be terrible repercussions upon my wellbeing.
Another week has passed with little to show for any of it. I’m barely cognisant most days. The burst of energy and motivation I had the other week feels completely alien now. I can barely remember what it felt like or what inspired it. I’m beginning to consider the possibility that I will never really return to a place where I can make games in an inspired or meaningful way.