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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.