Category Archives: Personal

Struggling with Structure

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As part of my healing process I’m trying to add more structure to my days and weeks. I’ve never been a very structured person when it comes to time management. I don’t eat or sleep at set times nor do I plan my days and weeks out ahead. I know what I need to do roughly each week and then just do that task whenever I have the time to do it. I show up on time for appointments and I’ve only been late to work twice in the 6 years I’ve held this job, both times because I forgot to set my alarm the day before and overslept.. And even then I was only late by 30 minutes. When there’s commitments where other people rely on me I’ll block my time in advance and prepare to be on time for wherever I need to be. If it’s somewhere I haven’t been before I’ll look up the route beforehand and calculate when I’ll have to leave.
When I’m mentally doing well I’m normally also pretty organised in my house. Every object has it’s place and I try to keep things as neat as possible (although sometimes when I feel bad or tired things can get a bit messy). It helps me later when I’m looking for stuff that I know where things can be found. Which is the polar opposite to how I grew up in my dad’s household where mess was normal and things would always get lost. That’s probably why I prefer it not to be that way.

However. Outside of work and meetups I’m terrible when it comes to managing my time. Often times I don’t know what to do with myself and waste hours upon hours of just not doing anything I really enjoy. I’m terrible at forming new habits, because I’m bad at sticking to them and then I feel bad because I abandon things not even halfway through. I was committed to doing 10k steps a day and I would go on walks after work every day. I managed to do that for a week and a half and then abandoned it. I can’t count how many times I tried starting a new evening routine only to give up after a week. Or going to the gym, or going swimming or picking up a new hobby. I’d set a time to do X and then just, not do it. I can’t even cook dinner around the same time each day, let alone commit to anything else.

I’ve tried anything from different planners and bullet journals to just making lists each day of the things I want done to setting timers for me to start or stop doing things. I’ve planned my day down to the minute and I’ve thrown everything to the wind and just let it all loose and see whatever happens happens. Nothing seems to work and it’s costing me a lot of energy and giving me a lot of frustration. I often look at people in envy who seem to have their shit together and are able to get up at the same time every day, go to the gym, have a good evening routine and overall seem to have a nice structured life. I desperately want the same and I just don’t know how to achieve it. Even when it comes to hobbies I can’t seem to manage my time between the things I enjoy. I feel like I always just go towards an extreme end of the spectrum and it’s tiresome.

I realise that my depression plays a major part in this as well. I’m so often overwhelmed and exhausted and feeling down that I just can’t seem to pick up anything else. But I don’t want that to be my excuse. My mental health can’t be what defines me for the rest of my life. And so I struggle on, trying to find something that works for me. Eventually I hope something will stick, but for now this is just another thing kicking me down. I can’t even structure my days or weeks right, how am I supposed to get through another 40-50 years of my life like this? I guess only time will tell.

Taking Back My Power: Solo Trip Berlin 2022

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I’ve always enjoyed travelling and exploring new places. Maybe because I didn’t get to do it much when I was younger or maybe because I really enjoy exploring new cultures, places and languages. When I grew up we never really left the country for holidays because my mom couldn’t deal with the long drives and heat of southern Europe. So we vacationed inside our own country instead. Which was fun, but I was jealous of all my classmates going to different countries every year whereas I never crossed the border.

I have made up for this from high school onwards. I’ve been to a lot of places within Europe and have seen a good handful of capitals and enjoyed my stays there. Two years of pandemic threw a wrench in the works when it came to travelling and although I discovered Budapest last year, and got to spend a week in Greece, I did miss the freedom of just booking a city trip when I felt like it and leave the country for a couple of days to go exploring. Luckily this is all available again now and as such I’ve picked up my travelling ways again. I’m heading off to New York City in two weeks, my first travel outside of Europe on my own, but I wanted to do a trial run to see if I would be able to handle being on my own in a big city for a couple of days without feeling lonely or bad.
Queue sprs.me a travel agency that will send you to a random city within Europe where you only learn your destination about two hours before you have to be on the plane there. After booking and weeks of speculation where I was going, Lisbon being a prime candidate, I set off last Wednesday and got on the plane to… Berlin.

Brandenburger Tor

I have been to Berlin before when I was in high school. It was the annual outing for 5 VWO (the year and level of education I was in) and I remember the trip fondly. So after being slightly disappointed that I was being sent to a city I’ve already been to I turned it around and decided that I was going to be a proper tourist there. Seeing as for school we had to follow a certain itinerary I couldn’t actually explore the city proper. I made a list of places I wanted to visit when on the plane and tried to spread them out over the three days that I was going to be there. I tried to pack as lightly as I could, seeing as how I had to drag my bag with clothes and toiletries through the city on at least the last day, and I prayed that the weather would be as predicted and I wouldn’t end up with heavy rain on any of my days.

Reichstag

Besides a few hiccups, I had a wonderful three days in the capital of Germany. I was able to be the ultimate tourist and visit all the places that I wanted to. I stayed in a sidestreet of the Kürfürstendamm, the major shopping street of West Berlin, not far off the Zoo and a lot of public transport connections. I travelled to see all the sights, spent a good chunk of my time in the area around the Brandenburger Tor and walked. A lot. I think I covered more than 40km in 3 days time. My feet are still hurting as I type this up, even with an entire day of doing nothing but recovery yesterday.
A lot of places were exactly as I remembered them to be. Checkpoint Charlie is still rather disappointing. Potsdamer Platz is intimidating and, unfortunately, extremely windy if you’re unlucky. Unter den Linden is a beautiful boulevard. The Fernsehturm is visible from every spot in Berlin and seeing the amount of tourists in the city it was as if the pandemic never happened.
I don’t think I can accurately put into words how much this little holiday empowered me as a person. I’ve come back with so much more confidence in myself and how competent I am at handling stuff. I was able to enjoy this trip my own way without having to take someone else’s preferences into account. I could be as slow or fast as I wanted travelling through the city and seeing the sights. I could sit somewhere for an hour if I wanted to and not feel bad about it. I got over the hurdle of being embarrassed of sitting at a restaurant by myself and was able to enjoy meals and drinks on my own. When I would get tired in the evening I would just end the day and go back to my hotel and rest. If my feet were starting to hurt I could sit down wherever and for as long as I wanted. I decided what I did, when and where and it was exactly what I needed in my journey of healing right now. Of course I would miss someone to be physically present and enjoy things with me. I like having people around and I did miss some company, but only when I had winded down for the day or when I was sitting down somewhere with no real form of entertainment for longer than 10 minutes.

Rotes Rathaus

I also took a few learnings with me for when I fly out to New York in two weeks. First take a powerbank with me to be able to charge my phone during the day when I’m out and about in the city, especially on the last day when I can’t go back to my hotel. I’ve had to deal with my battery draining during the day due to using certain apps to navigate the city and taking pictures and having to go back to my hotel to charge it every single day. Which isn’t that much of an issue but it is when it’s the last day and you have to use your phone as a boarding pass. Second is to take a small form of entertainment with me for when I do sit down somewhere for a while. Time goes by much faster when I would be reading a book or playing a game instead of relying on my phone as only source of entertainment for the entire trip. Lastly, don’t push myself over my limits. Sit down more if needed and take more breaks. I walked a lot in Berlin and by day three my feet were absolutely killing me and I still had to make it home. I think I pushed myself too hard in a way and will definitely be more cautious about this in New York.

All in all though this was a very positive experience and something I will remember as a first step to taking my power back and become the confident woman that’s hiding somewhere deep down inside of me.

Choosing to heal

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World Mental Health Day 2020: Importance of recognising and accepting depression | Lifestyle News,The Indian Express

In March I have been diagnosed with a Major Depressive Episode. It didn’t really come as a surprise to me but it had been camouflaging as a burnout so I guess it tricked me in at least that way. I was feeling permanently tired, burned out, done with life, done with the world. I felt at my lowest of lows after a year where I thought I could finally see a future worth living for. But life has a funny way for knocking the wind out of you and I found myself staring at the edge of the abyss for a little too long.

I’ve been here before. I’ve seen this edge before and I stepped away from it before. But as I find myself to be twice the age I was last time this happened I notice that I don’t bounce back as easily as I once did. Feeling bad had taken over my days and nothing really brought me enjoyment anymore. I had sought help and, even though it took a while to get going, finally managed to get into a trajectory that will help me heal and deal with a lot of issues that have been simmering right beneath the surface. I’ve spent years powering through everything, trying to tell myself that this is how life is, that if I just worked hard enough and did more than what was asked of me and ignore the stress and weariness and pain of life occurences I would eventually get to be happy. To be loved. To finally feel like I was enough.

How wrong that mindset has been.

I’m learning to love myself. To live with myself. To tell myself that it’s okay if things aren’t always okay. I don’t have to be perfect, I don’t have to push myself beyond my limits. I’m worthy of being around, I have value as a person even if I’m not doing that great. I’m choosing to let myself of the hook. To be kinder, nicer to myself. To not work myself to death. To not expect more when I’ve already done more than enough.
I stop holding myself to impossibly high standards, to an expectation of perfection that is impossible to fulfill.

I’m choosing to heal.

As part of this I want to track my journey here. My ups and downs. My victories and days where things just don’t really go the way I want them to. And that’s okay. No one is perfect. No one has the answer to everything. Life isn’t rainbows and sunshines. And that’s okay.

I’m catching up on a lot of travelling this year after being homebound by the Coronavirus for close to two years. I’m setting off to an unknown destination this Wednesday and have a New York City trip coming up in June. I’m going back to concerts and festivals again. I’m seeing my friends, both online and offline, in real life for the first time in years. I want to document it all. But also the struggles with keeping a good rhythm. For finding a schedule that works. Trying to learn new habits. How to treat myself nicer. How I stumble and fall and get back up again doing things outside of my comfort zone.

All of this and more. I hope you’ll be along for the ride.

Status: Life

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Sittting around with my own thoughts for a week has given me the need to write stuff down. I’m not sure why, but maybe I want to take a screenshot of being at my lowest and being able to look back later and be proud of how far I’ve come from this point. I guess a little story is in order about how I got here in the first place…

I’ve struggled with mental health issues since I was a child. I was bullied at school and even though I had friends I always felt a little left out. My dad was a harsh man who worked five days a week so the main parenting was done by my mother. When she passed away when I was 12 it was the start of real mental issues combined with rough teenage years where a lot of emotional and mental abuse happened. I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD aswell as unspecified anxiety disorders later in life. I have abandonment issues coupled with a deeply ingrained feeling that no matter what I do, look like or achieve in life it will never be good enough. I’m thanking my dad for the latter.

Fast forward to 2019. I got promoted at work and was struggling filling the position. I didn’t really have anyone to support me and the work itself was starting to bore me. I had a lot of plans that never really came to fruition because I kept getting dragged into the day to day stuff which I loathed by that point. Then the pandemic hit in 2020. Right before we got sent home in March 2020 I was getting my life a little bit in order again. I visited the gym and the swimming pool multiple times per week to prepare for my 3 week trip to Japan, something I was looking forward to very much. Instead we got sent home, my trip got cancelled and that was the start of the current almost 2 year streak of working from home. I had my Japan trip cancelled again in 2021 and in the meantime being at home all the time was slowly pushing me into a serious depressed state. I missed going into the office, I missed the social interaction and being at home alone just drove me insane. Alas there was not much I could do about it so I turned to online communities a lot to keep me company and lift my spirits.
In the meantime the resentment towards my job grew and I applied for another one without success.

This is where I met my partner in January 2021. Even though there was a lot of distance between us, both in age and in actual physical distance, we decided to take a leap after about a month and a half of talking and became exclusive. I was happy, he was happy and we met up multiple times throughout 2021. In hindsight though little cracks were starting to show and we didn’t attend to them at the time, leaving time and space for them to become bigger and bigger until we had a major argument around New Years Eve. Things were said, things were discovered, we were both majorly hurt. After a lot of contemplation we broke up last Saturday. The differences were too big, maturing needed to happen and there was just too much hurt to be able to fix. I’m right in the middle of grieving this relationship and am feeling angry, sad, relieved and desperate all at the same time.

Unfortunately this was also the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After resenting my job more and more in 2021, and another failed transfer to another job, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I went to my GP and received a burn-out diagnosis. I’m currently working much less hours and have transferred a lot of my responsibilities to my coworker. I feel tired 24/7 and am just picking up the pieces of a life that I thought would turn out much different than it has. I’m at my lowest point in years and I guess the only way from here is up. I’m not sure yet how I’m going to achieve this, but I don’t want to be silent about it to anyone anymore. I’m done hiding how I’m doing and pretending everything is okay when it isn’t.

So here I sit, trying to rebuild myself from the ground up. I need to be nicer to myself. I need to accept that right now I can’t do all the things I may want to do and be content with the things I can do. I know that I will pick myself up eventually and that this will be one of the biggest learning moments of my life.
Right now though, I’m just tired, lost and left wondering how the hell I ended up here.

New Year, New Look

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Right. It’s been a while hasn’t it. I guess life got in the way again and one of the first things I drop seems to be this blog. C’est la vie. I don’t want to dwell too much on the hows and why’s of me not posting and instead look ahead to this year and all the things it’ll hopefully bring me.
As such I’ve decided to change up the blog a bit. New layout, new background, nice header image. I’m quite happy. It feels softer and more like me.

As you may have seen if you follow me on Twitter I decided last night that it was time for change in Final Fantasy XIV as well. After almost 9 years of playing as a Miqo’te I’ve decided to take a plunge and fantasia’d to Viera. I also threw in a name change, seeing as how my old last name referred to an ex. It feels like a fresh start and that’s something I desperately needed. I’m really happy with the transformation and I hope I won’t miss my Miqo self too much. I’ve found a nice little community in the game with some old WoW guildies and friends and we’re planning to tackle Savage content together eventually, but for now we’re just having fun and poking around everywhere.

I want to write a bit more on the blog and will aim for one post a week (probably on Sunday) as part of me working through my burn-out and establishing more healthy hobbies and activities again instead of only working from home and gaming. For now though I hope you like the new look of the blog and are still interested in hearing my silly stories!

I Set Goals… And Never Came Back

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So. I realized that my last post was setting goals for February. And then I never came back.
Kind of funny how those things go. A lot has happened in the past three and a half months. Work has been extremely overwhelming. I didn’t get the job that I applied for at the end of January, much to my dismay, and in the meantime lockdown due to COVID has been dragging on and on in the Netherlands. We’ve finally had some rules loosened and vaccinations are progressing rapidly so maybe there’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
Next to a lot of disappointments there has also been one big bright point. I guess people driving home the idea that you “shouldn’t look for love because it will find you” scored a point with me this year. I’ve met someone very special, after a long time of being single and basically giving up on the idea that I would meet someone that would love me for who I am. But I’ve met that someone and he’s been brightening my days for the past three months. I’m so incredibly thankful that he came into my life and I hope we can build something that will last for a long time.

As for the gaming front. Well. I guess a lot has happened and not happened.
The World of Warcraft guild I’m in has moved to Horde side. Unfortunately recruitment on Alliance side seems to have completely bled dry so they made the hard decision to swap over to Horde so Mythic raiding can happen in patch 9.1.
I moved with them and rolled a new character and am currently raiding a bit again as Elemental Shaman. I’m having a decent amount of fun although I’ve not really touched Mythic raiding yet and I’ve not really found the time to do Mythic+. I’m hoping with my workload dying down a bit I can spend a bit more time in WoW and push to get some achievements done.

Next to that I’ve been catching up in Final Fantasy XIV. I was a few patches behind and worked my way back up to the patch 5.5 content when it comes to main story. My current goals are getting the final raid of Eden done, the final Nier raid and get completely caught up with the mainstory. I’m also still leveling my crafters and almost have my Alchemist at level 80, which means I only have a few more to go after. With Endwalker getting a release date I have around 5-6 months to get caught up on everything, which should be more than enough time. I just need to remind myself to log in and actually play.

As far as League of Legends goes… I basically stopped playing somewhere in February and I’ve been struggling really hard to get back into the game. I’ve been playing ARAMs and a few normals here and there and participated in some Clash but otherwise I’ve not touched ranked in months. I’m really soul searching on what I want to play and if I still want to make the push towards Gold or not. It also hasn’t helped that I’ve been duoing with people that make me tilt. I think I’m better off staying solo and look to grind up on my own. I’ve been asking for some tips and tricks and once I can settle on a role and a champion I’m going to just start pushing again.

All in all it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster in my life the past few months but I’m finally feeling like I’m landing on my feet again. Let’s hope it will give me enough headspace to do more than just work, sleep and eat.

Switching it up: Job application

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I wanted to write a blog post yesterday about my experiences playing Crash Bandicoot 4 (it’s a really fun game) but something happened in real life that took over my time and as such I had completely forgotten to post. So I’m making it up today by telling you all what the real life thing was!

I’ve been working at my current department for over 5 years now. I got in on a temporary contract and managed to get a permanent contract in 2019. I also managed to get a promotion twice and the only jump up I can now make is to a fulltime manager position, a jump that I’m probably not able to make for a while yet.
Within those 5 years I’ve seen the department grow increasingly smaller. So many people were let go, partially due to a lighter workload and partially do to automating processes, thus needing less people to do the actual work. However we have hit the point that our team is made up now of the bare minimum amount of people you can possibly have.. And it’s causing a lot of stress. Especially when we are having extremely busy periods it’s all hands on deck and I feel we’re still not getting everything done we should be doing. The last two weeks have been one of those periods where I just shut down at the end of the day and have 0 energy left for anything else. To say I’m exhausted doesn’t even begin to cover it. It makes me resent having to get up in the morning and logging in to work. Something that is a gigantic red flag on it’s own.

However… This week a job application got posted for a job at a department that I have been side eyeing for the past two years now. It’s a department dedicated to implementing Robotic Process Automation throughout the entire organisations and it entails that I would be joining the team that designs and implements “bots”. I’m already in contact with this team due to the bots we have running on our own department and I’ve been developing some of them on my own as a sort of side project. They had put up job applications before but I never felt sure and ready enough to reply, but this time I figured I’d take the jump and just went ahead and turned in my application.

I hope that my familiarity with the team and department will help in my favour. I haven’t heard back anything yet so far but the application is still open to reply untill next Wednesday so I’m not sure when I will be contacted. By taking this step though I would transfer over to a department that has it’s own kind of stress and deadlines but also with a bigger team, less individual responsibilities and more structured systems in place. It’s probably the best step I can take for myself right now and I’m hoping really hard that they’ll consider me for the position. I will keep you all posted how it goes, but this could be the breath of fresh air I need to kickstart other more important life changes.

A home on the internet

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From the earliest days of my World of Warcraft career I’ve always been looking for a home on the internet. It started out with guilds and forums, which were the biggest thing of communications back in the day. Before there was something like Discord. I’ve had many homes throughout the years in multiple games and with multiple communities. They have always been temporary homes, as is the nature of most communities in games. Guilds come and go. I’ve made the jump to several ones over the span of my own gaming career. Sometimes it was because of the raidteam breaking up, sometimes because the guild make-up had changed so much over time that I didn’t feel at home anymore. I think the longest stretch I’ve been in a guild has been from Cataclysm through Legion, although on occassion I couldn’t really call it a guild but a two man show, on account of most people abandoning ship.

Then came the rise of Discord. I’m not sure when exactly I joined there but I’ve been active on Discord as a means of communication for a while now. Things stay the same though, communities come and go and at some point I realised that staying in dead Discords had no use at all, so I left most of the ones I was active in years ago. Some Discord communities are gigantic, so big actually that it’s almost impossible to actively take part in them. Look away for 10 minutes and you have missed a couple of hundred messages. These are also the types of communities that I learned to shy away from. How is it fun to be in a discord with so many other people that you can’t even follow the conversation anymore? That’s not really a home on the internet, that’s just a gathering of people shouting into the abyss.

Raamstickers Home Sweet Home raamfolie - TenStickers

However, I think digging between all the dirt and weeding out a lot of communities where I didn’t really feel like I wanted to stay… I think I finally found a small home or two on the internet that are worth sticking around in. Both of them are Discords and both of them are built around League of Legends personalities. I guess it’s what you get when you start watching streams again and interact with the community in those streams. Both Discords are relatively small, small enough to follow the conversations that are going on in them, but also big enough to be lively constantly. There are some absolutely lovely people in both and I’m happy that I’ve been able to find a community where I can just be my crazy, geeky, League of Legends fangirl self and not be judged for it.
One especially has made my days so much brighter over the past few months of being stuck at home and feeling like I had nowhere to go and no one to talk to. Just being able to be around people who share the same interests and who are happy to jump into voice chat and have fun has absolutely saved my mental wellbeing from the dark place it was headed. Knowing I can just drop in the Discord for a chat with anyone who is online at the time has been so nice. There have been community nights, there have been awesome initiatives for tournaments and movie nights. As added bonus it was so nice to see everyone come together and send the most important member on the server some love and compassion when he was going through a rough time.
It’s just a very wholesome, supportive, drama free environment, although some jabs here and there are common, and it’s absolutely what I needed, and still need, in my life. With the pandemic dragging on and regulations getting more and more strict I feel like they’re slowly squeezing the life out of any offline interaction possible. So I turn to what I’ve been turning to for most of my life and take comfort in the presence of people on the internet. Because no matter what, they can’t take that away from me.

As such I’m going to stick around, talk to some of the lovely people I’ve gotten to know and for a while, even just a little while, feel like I’ve found my home.

2021: A Brighter Future Thanks To Goals

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I guess I’m a bit late to the party, but I would like to talk about my goals for 2021, both on a personal level aswell as gaming related.
I had a bit of time to think about it the past week, seeing as I finally had some time off, and I think I’ve managed to formulate some decent goals to work on. The focus this year will be mostly on personal non-gaming related goals, but as always some gaming has snuck it’s way in because it’s my biggest hobby.

So what do I want to achieve in 2021?
I think the most important overarching goal is get to a better physical and mental health level. Both of those have suffered considerably in 2020 and I don’t think I can sustain how I’m living right now and come out good at the other end. So I’ve set a few goals to help me get back on track. In no particular order they are:

  • Establish a healthy sleeping pattern
  • Exercise every day
  • Work on losing weight, dropping below 70kg is the goal
  • Take better care of myself personally, both inside and out

I was on track with these goals at the start of 2020 but the pandemic threw me back a lot. I’m at my heaviest point right now and I’ve had weeks where I would barely leave my house. It’s been very unhealthy and it’s been causing me both physical and mental issues. As such I really want to take better care of myself. Get myself on a healthy sleep schedule so I’m not exhausted at work every morning and feel like I need hours and hours of sleep once I have a few days off. I’ve noticed that getting some sort of exercise in every day helps with sleeping at night, so I’ve been making an effort to go for a walk every day. Atleast 30 minutes but I’m up to 45-50 most days now. When the weather is bad I’m planning to use my Ring Fit Adventure that I bought on release but barely used. I just need to keep my body moving and this is the perfect way to do it.
Next to exercise I also want to take better care of myself in other aspects. I’ve been very lazy when it comes to some personal hygiene and care and need to fix that. Stuff like picking up flossing again instead of only brushing my teeth. Take better care of my skin. Keep an eye on what I eat, meal plan in advance and stick to it. I’ve been eating way too much junkfood and need to get to cooking more healthy things. No more skipping meals. No more eating breakfast 3 hours after I started working. Just keep a healthy food rhythm going.

Additionally I want to establish/achieve the following:

  • Plan my weeks every week and stick to my planning.
  • Get a cleaning routine going in the weekends
  • Learn to cook more/healthier dishes

Next to not really taking care of myself properly on a personal level I’ve also let my house cleaning slide. I don’t want to say that it’s unliveable here, because it’s really not, but I notice I get lazy and then don’t clean for 2-3 weeks at a time. I let the laundry pile up, and dishes, and I don’t think I’ve cleaned my windows in months. That’s going to change. Sunday is my designated chores day and I’ve made a list of everything that I need to do weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. On Saturday morning I look at my list and plan my chores accordingly for Sunday and actually do them. I started doing this last weekend and I notice that I feel much better once my house is decluttered and cleaned. It also massively helps with my allergies so that’s an extra bonus.
Setting structure in general is going to be important to me, aswell as sticking to said structure. I have a weekly planner that I’ve started using to plan what I do in my weeks outside of work. This covers weekly meal planning, task planning, when to blog, when to call people to make appointments and what games I want to play on which days. It helps me with not just lying down on the couch after work and then doing absolutely nothing but wallow in misery all night. I don’t plan everything into detail but I do write down the things I want to be doing during the evening and try to stick to it. It’s been working so far.

Finally I want to learn to cook more dishes than I currently do. There’s so many things I can experiment with and especially during weekends I have a bit more time to do so. I will probably use that to create some posts on here. Speaking of the blog… I’ve currently planned three days a week for blog posts. I have enough content to write about the coming months, as I will describe in my gaming goals bit, and I just need a steady outlet for the chaos in my head. Right now I have blog posts planned on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Let’s see if I can stick to that shall we?

Of course a goals for 2021 post wouldn’t be complete without writing down gaming goals. This is mainly a gaming blog after all and throughout the pandemic I atleast haven’t stopped playing games so there’s that.

What are my plans for gaming in 2021?

Actually I don’t have that many big plans for gaming in 2021. Or maybe I do, but they’re condensed to less games, making them seem smaller. For now though these are the main things I will be working on gaming wise in 2021:

  • Climb the solo/duo queue ladder in League of Legends. I want to get to atleast Gold tier, but climbing higher is the aim.
  • Keep up with content in Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft
  • Finish atleast one single player game per month

Only three goals. So small and yet so big. I think the most important one for me will be the League of Legends one. I guess some elaboration is needed and that will come in a future post but let’s just say that I’ve been completely sucked back into LoL since last Worlds. I’ve been following two streamers and am active within their communities. On top of that I’m dabbling in a bit of coaching related stuff to get me better at the game. Again I will detail this more in a coming post but this project will probably dominate a lot of 2021 for me.
Keeping up with the two MMO’s I play will be a standard thing aswell. I’ve been struggling with Shadowlands in WoW and am currently taking a break from raiding for a myriad amount of reasons, but I do want to keep up with the lore and renown cap every week. I’ve been taking a small break from FFXIV, mostly due to Shadowlands launch, but want to pick that back up again and keep up with the content there aswell.

Finally I’m once again going to try and tackle my backlog. I’ve not bought that many games last year and I have actually been slowly pouring more time in single player games over the past few weeks. My aim is to complete one game a month, this can be a long game or a short game, as long as I see the credits roll. As always that is my main goal with playing games, any time I spend extra on it is a bonus.

So yeah. These are my goals for 2021. I feel like I’ve made a good start on them this week, now I just need to grit my teeth and follow through. For now though I’m pretty happy with what I’ve set to achieve for myself and I will keep you updated on how things develop.

2020: The year that was lost.

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2020. A year that the world will never forget. Even if the year has been over for 10 days now, it’s effects will be felt for a long while yet. The pandemic is still running rampant. We are still collectively in lockdown. People are still getting infected and with the mutations of the virus it seems we will live through a very bleak life for the next couple of months still. Yet there is hope. Multiple vaccines have been developed and are being administered world wide. An end into the global lockdown may finally be in sight and I for one welcome a return back to something that we could consider “normalcy”.

The past few months have been very rough on me on a personal level. Getting sent home halfway through March and hoping that this would all blow over in a few weeks has turned into working from home for most of the year last year. I was lucky enough to be able to go back into the office for a few days a week over the summer, but the moment the second wave of COVID hit the Netherlands at the start of September we were all sent home again, where I have been honestly going slightly batshit insane. Being alone, as I am, in a small flat for 7 days a week almost 24 hours a day does crazy things to the brain. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this lonely and vulnerable in a very long time and it’s a feeling that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I miss real world contact so much. Not being able to hug people out of fear of a disease has been heartbreaking. Not being able to go out and do fun things. Not being able to go on vacation so you can relax and unwind and change scenery has been tough. Mentally I’ve balanced on the edge so many times this year. Feeling anxious, feeling depressed and not knowing what to do with myself. I’ve cried so much, especially near the end of the year which is already a harder time for me than normal. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much of a hard time with being single than I have in the past few months and still have today. It’s been awful and horrible and I’m so done with all of it.

In a lot of ways I consider 2020 to be a lost year. When the year started I was well on my way to establish a healthy schedule for myself. I was going to the gym twice a week and I went to the swimming pool 1-2 times a week aswell. I was working on healthier eating habits and preparing for my dream trip to Japan that was supposed to take place at the end of March. I was thinking about putting myself out there in the dating world again and I wanted to pick up a new hobby so I could meet new people. All of that has kind of gone out the window. My lifestyle has become considerably worse with having to work from home. My health has considerably declined, both physical and mental. The dream trip never happened and I don’t know when it will. It’s a year that I feel like should be erased from my life as soon as possible so I can move on and work towards new goals. The whole “new year, new me” feeling hasn’t ever appealed to me that much, but now it feels different. I don’t want to have another year lost and I don’t want to feel the way I do anymore and the only one who can change that is me.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to get out of this year on a personal level and hobby related. I’ve cautiously started to write down what I want to achieve and am thinking about how I want to achieve it. A part of it is definitely reviving this blog and getting some structure set up. Another part is self improvement, both physically and mentally. Finally there are some goals related to gaming, as usual, but I’ve tried to keep them small.
As I get my goals more defined I will post about them here, aswell as updates on working towards said goals. Not everything will be game related but… This is my blog and I can do whatever I want with it. So with that out of the way I’m looking forward to sharing my life and my gaming love with you all again. See you soon!