So I Guess I’m Doing This Thing Again

IF you’ve been a longtime reader of this website, two things: First, hello there! We’re old now. Second, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t really been keeping this place up-to-date over the past few years. In fact, prior to this forced “relaunch” of my entire website (“forced” because my webhost broke my site so completely when pushing an update that I’ve had to rebuild the whole damn thing from the ground-up), my last post was at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic some five-plus years ago. Now, while I would love to say that I neglected this space because I was working on some truly worthwhile cause, or because I was out on a grand adventure, the simple and unexciting truth is that I didn’t update this space because I just didn’t feel like it.

And for a long time, I didn’t understand why I didn’t feel like it.

There was a time where I’d update this website religiously, throwing something new into the ether each and every week. Sometimes it’d be a movie review or a way-too-deep analysis of a DirecTV ad campaign that I’m probably the only motherfucker to remember, while other times it’d be a piece of flash fiction or a narrative analysis of a game I loved (or… not so much). It was how I kept my literary blade sharpened, and it allowed me to articulate thoughts that I’d often struggle to translate to social media.

But around the beginning of 2019 I made a terrible mistake: I got in my own head. You see, I’ve been in the video game industry for a long time. At the time that this is published I’ve been in game development for fourteen-plus years and if you count my time as “enthusiast press” then I’m fast approaching my twentieth anniversary in games. It kinda defined who I was as a person and I wanted my “professional presence” to reflect that. So I made the decision to nuke everything on this website with the intention of rebuilding it as a space where I solely and exclusively talked about game development.

I published two items in six years, neither of which were about game development.

I still played games. I still loved games. I still made games, obviously, but for the life of me I could not bring myself to sit down and write about them. I started to ponder why I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the thing I’ve thrown myself into for the whole of my adult life. Had I lost the passion for the work? Was I SO burnt out that I simply could not formulate thought? No, that’s not it. After all, I have had absolutely no problem posting my thoughts on social media.

No, the reason why I struggled so much was because I felt inadequate. I saw people I respect and even admire already doing the thing I wanted to do. Hell, a few of those people even wrote books about their specific game design disciplines – and they’re great! I own a number of ’em and they are brilliant. Whether it was a blog or a book or a newsletter, other people were already doing the thing and, rather than contribute my own unique perspective and experience it the conversation, I fell into the self-defeating spiral of “well somebody else is already doing the thing and they’re already really good at it and if I’m not doing something wildly different then there really isn’t a point and who cares about what I think everybody knows I suck anyways so…” Combine that with a lingering feeling of creative and career stagnation that I was also struggling with, and in short order just thinking about updating my website exhausted me. This place, this thing was an energy vampire, and I interacted with it as little as humanly possible.

Then my webhost had to go and break the damn thing.

Of course, “the website” was never actually the problem. It was merely the physical(ish) manifestation of self-perceived “failings” that I had deeply internalized. My resume, which is by any metric a display of a successful career, simply wasn’t enough. But rather than look at my achievements and say to myself “oh, dang, I’ve done pretty okay,” all I could focus on what what wasn’t there: novels, comics, maybe a movie or two.

I looked back at my career with disappointment and shame over the things that I hadn’t done, rather taking pride in the work – the award-winning work – that I had done.

JBJ NOTE: During the drafting of this blog post, life decided to imitate art as it was imitating life:

Anyways…

So, why am I telling y’all all of this? Because… well, because it’s what I want to talk about. The entire point of spinning my website back up is being able to do what I want to do, when and how I want to do it. This could mean that I’m talking about my mental health one day, and writing about my out-of-body experience taste-testing the different flavors of Cheeto Mac & Cheese the next (coming soon, BTW).

But it’s also because I wanted to highlight just how insidious these bouts of imposter syndrome and depression, especially depression, can be, and how long-lasting the effects of they both can be. Depression is a filthy liar that will say anything, twist any situation, to make it seem as though it is your fault and that you are worthless. It is a deceitful little coward that thrives on our doubts and uses our anxieties as kindling to fuel its fire. And imposter symdrome… well, that’s just misplaced hubris. After all, on some level one has to be unfairly critical and unflappably confident in themselves to believe that they’ve been able to fool so many people while producing utter garbage.

I also wanted to highlight just how insidious these wonder twins of shit can be, and how long-lasting the damage they wreak can be. Depression is a filthy liar that will manipulate your perception on any given situation. It will say anything, do anything, to keep you underwater. It thrives on our doubts and uses our anxieties as kindling to feed into its furnace. As for imposter syndrome? That’s just hubristic deception. Am I to believe that the same person who was too unskilled to produce anything “good” is simultaneously so Machiavellian that they’ve been able to fool everybody into thinking they’re actually good?

No. I must inform you, dear reader, that the people telling you that you’re good at the thing are correct. You actually are good at the thing that your brain insists that you’re not.

And so am I.