Things have been weird for me lately. Both ingame and in real life. I can’t really describe it properly and I’m noticing I have a very difficult time expressing myself properly in English about this. I’ve been playing around with the idea of having a Dutch blog on the side that I can mostly just talk about my personal life on and the struggles I am having in day to day life with various things and talk a bit about my opinions on hot topics these days.
For now though I barely blog here and I know I probably won’t do much on a new blog once I make it so I’m holding off on the idea untill I’m a bit less occupied.
A few areas of my life have not been going well at all. I’m still struggling with uni stuff and I’m kicking myself in the head over it because I should’ve been done over the summer. For some reason just sitting down and writing has been hard and I’m not sure why I just have this wall when it comes to finishing this project. I’ve worked so hard on this twice now and I really want it to be done. I want my diploma and move on with my life. At this point the diploma doesn’t even mean that much to me anymore, I’m purely getting it out of spite and because it looks good on my resumé.
At work I’ve come to the point where I want to move on and look for something more challenging. I love the department I’m on now and I get along with a lot of my coworkers but I’ve hit my ceiling and the challenge and fun of showing up for work four days a week has been more or less drained. I can’t really develop here and because I know the department is going to be gone soon I’ve started thinking about what I would really want to do. For now I either want to go the direction of Support/IT or maybe something in commerce. I like being the spider in the web, connecting departments together and fixing problems so I hope I can find a job that will be exactly that.
I still live at home with no real option to move out anytime soon and I’m still depressingly single. Partly this comes down to me not really actively searching for a partner and partly it’s because my self image is at an all time low. I feel fat and ugly and tired and I’m not really sure how to change this around. I’ve not felt this down in a very long time and it’s costing me a lot of energy to just do my normal day-to-day stuff, let alone start getting my stamina and muscles up to a certain level again.
Next to all of this I’m slowly realizing that I need to spend less time looking at screens in general. It feels like I’m always looking at a screen of some sort and it’s making me shallow. If it’s not for games it’s for work or constantly checking my phone. Then there’s the tablet and e-reader which are both screens aswell. It’s slowly making me, and everyone else around me, antisocial. During lunch everyone stares at their phones. You plan a meeting with someone and phones are on the table. I stare at a screen at work for eight hours a day only to get on the train and stare at my phone screen and come home and stare at a monitor. It’s kind of driving me nuts. The actual social connections are becoming hard with this. Even visiting my best friend there’s not a single time that the phones don’t come out to message people or look at stuff. It’s kind of weird and it’s making me, and a whole generation with me like this, very unhappy. I notice that my concentration is taking hits. I used to be able to spend all day working on an embroidery project or reading but now I keep taking breaks to check my phone or start up a game. It’s become an addiction and I’m starting to notice the bad side effects that come with this.
Now obviously breaking the trend in a smartphone heavy world is hard but it’s something I feel like I need to do. I don’t want to go through live like this anymore and the only person that can change this is me.
In games I’ve been struggling aswell. My static is still going and they’re a great bunch of people but I’ve been frustrated with my performance on Ninja so much that I bitched about everything to people and now apparently they leaked this back to the static. Things have gotten complicated. I’ve said stuff I didn’t mean and I’ve been grumpy about things that have nothing to do with them but with myself and it’s not really something I can easily discuss with them as group. I don’t want to be taken pity on because I’m not in a position to be pitied. I picked a class to play this expansion and although I’m enjoying it greatly I’m not on the performance level I should be and I’m having a really hard time adjusting. In hindsight I probably should have switched to Bard when I had the chance but I’m determined to make Ninja work and clear O4S. I just really hope my static will give me another chance at doing this and that I can keep my cool about all of it.
I don’t want to be angry about games. They need to be fun and a way to get rid of frustrations, not create them. I’m really desperately finding a way to make it so they are but I’m not there yet. I know partly it’s because I’m having a rough time in my personal life right now that I can’t really seem to find the peace in the games I play that I so desperately want. I’ve used gaming as an outlet for so long now that I don’t think I’ve learned proper coping mechanisms for stuff and it’s impacting everything now, including the games I love so much. And I need to break out of this.
The only question is… How?