I’m aware I had fallen behind with my posts, and for a long period of time I only had a couple publicly available. Nonetheless, I was still attempting to keep up and had a collection of game reviews stored locally on my computer, written in word documents. For whatever reason, the way my brain works prevented me from posting these – despite them already being complete. I’m often too self critical and create my own mental barriers.
I very much have that mentality of putting of a simple task for weeks; building pressure, stress, and anxiety, to then finally tackle it and realize it didn’t take less than an hour or two to complete.
In this case, I felt ashamed that I had fallen behind and convinced myself it wouldn’t be appropriate to publish my posts until I’ve fully caught up with the timeline of this course. Knowing my peers are keeping up with the material, I told myself that I wouldn’t update my blog until I have everything ready. I didn’t want anyone to see the potential of my blog until it was ready and up to date. Of course, hindsight 20-20, that’s logic is completely backwards. Rather than chipping away and posting what I could, I dropped off the face of the earth.
I was ashamed to even come to class and show my face to the professor, knowing they knew how far behind I was compared to my peers. How could I attend tutorial and attempt to be present in the current material when I still have to complete material from a couple weeks ago.
This just snowballed and got worse and worse. My internal logic had me thinking, how could I publish a process post, when I haven’t even published my last couple weeks of main posts. Despite the process posts being straightforward and infinitely easier, I was so hung up on the idea of catching up with my main blog posts that everything continued to slip out of control. But then more and more main posts piled up, I fell further and further behind and felt as if I was Sisyphus – forever rolling the boulder up the hill. Of course, I’m being dramatic here, but hey – the analogy fits my mental at the time. Again, hyper self-critical.
Ultimately, I completely shot myself in the foot with this mentality.
Feeling not only defeated, I began feeling stressed. This made catching up on the main blog posts even more difficult. It became difficult to even consider starting up a new game – the joy of gaming was gone. Knowing that I HAD to find a new game to write about turned a once pleasurable hobby into a chore.
Nonetheless, finally snapping out of my defeated mental state, I’m back. As stated in my previous post, I’ve returned with a new voice and begun finding joy approaching these articles with a new lens. Expanding from mundane, lifeless reviews, I’ve started to add personality and authenticity to my posts. I’ve started detailing my experiences as stories. Feeling unconstrained from a specific writing style, my excitement to share my hobby with the public has returned.
I’d like to extend an apology to the teaching staff for my absence.
