Hello

Probably the tone you wouldn’t expect from me, or maybe it’s exactly what you would have expected to hear. That’s not for me to say or know. I applied to go to College recently at a local institution for a BASc in Data Engineering. I’m honestly really excited for it, but I decided to take the rest of the year off to just do my own thing before going back to school. I’ve been telling myself for the past 4 years that “I’m going to get back into content” and “I’m going to release that album that I’ve been working on slowly” without actually doing anything to get closer to accomplishing these goals. I’m kind of just living on autopilot, letting myself get by day-by-day and it’s been kind of destructive. The relationship I have with my parents has worsened, as they no longer trust what I do or say. I’m someone with a lot of talent in various ways that doesn’t apply any of it to chase some kind of fleeting dopamine generator or something else of the sort. That is either through playing a lot of games like CS2, Balatro, Slay the Spire, or through mindless content seeking on YouTube. It’s what takes over a good portion of my day since, not to my own decision, I spend a good portion of my day idle when I’m not at work. When I’m home, I kind of treat it like my “recovery period” before I go back to work.

What’s honestly the worst part of all of this is the self destruction of my own life and habits. I’ve been enjoying a young and hip 30 year old content creator named yanki and his talks on life, and recently he made a video that I have resonated with a lot titled “I just relapsed”. I related a lot with the message of the video, how he feels when he makes content, how his life has kinda felt like an endless cycle of self-sabotage even, and that everything that goes well is kind of fleeting. That’s me paraphrasing my understanding and my own self-inserted perspective of it, but I’m only 6 years younger than him, and I’m feeling the same way.

My breaks haven’t been breaks

Moments to take breaks or enjoy any semblance of relaxation have all been in vain. It’s been a little better recently, but for a while I couldn’t remember the last time I actually let myself take some time to actually relax without thinking about anything else – without any other internal stresses that I was knowingly pushing away. It’s always been me trying to “prove something” and a lot of the time, I don’t know what I’m proving. I haven’t been journalling basically at all. I’ve been spending hundreds of dollars in CS2 skins and spending time warming up to play with friends, all while they live their lives and do other things. This is all while I neglect the world around me, and those closest to me. My bedroom, my computer room, my washroom, my laundry, my eating, my physical health. Essentially anything that didn’t involve me shaving or cleaning myself, it didn’t matter. So the environment around me has slowly been getting worse. More cluttered, more noise, more obstacles, etc. And the money I would spend, I did get a good portion of it back through selling a lot off of csfloat but not all. I don’t really care about the financial impact it had on me though since it was a hobby and I was collecting. That’s fine. What’s not fine is not allocating that money towards other things that would help organize myself and overall improve my quality of life. Since the new year has begun. I have only gone to the gym probably 7 times. Funnily enough, I have gone to the gym more times that I have finished reading books this year, and I only gave myself a goal of 1 book a month. I stopped reading, I stopped doing things that brought value into my life, and the noise that it was causing slowly but surely consumed me until I kind of just accepted it would be there and that doing anything would prove futile.

I feel performative

I don’t know if this is the right wording, but I feel like I’ve lived a good portion of my life through performing for others to get what I want. It doesn’t matter if I end up enjoying what I’m doing, but there’s always this little voice of ego in my head that tells me that what I’m doing is “impressive” and compares myself to others in order to make myself feel better. It feels manipulative, but I feel this way about literally anything. I feel uncomfortable receiving gifts because I feel as if I have manipulated someone into liking me and getting me something. I work in sales, and if someone really likes the deal I’ve given them, and they go above-and-beyond to show their appreciation, I feel as if I have lost in some way by making someone’s day. I honestly think I might have some kind of personality disorder, but it is most likely my OCD and letting myself ruminate for too long on things I shouldn’t. Thinking in this way doesn’t prove anything unless the actual intention is true. Trying to reason things that I have done just for the hell of it and then trying to put meaning into nothing, it never works out. It never has. It’s how I’ve ended up spiralling.

If I listen to this voice long enough, I end up trying to find ways to make sure I am better than those around me in some way, because I cannot stop comparing. Comparison is the thief of joy, but it’s by far my worst habit. It’s funny because I don’t want to appear superior to those around me; I actually really dislike this. I don’t want to be seen as a “god” or someone insanely skilled. I want to be a background character in the shadows of others success. That’s what most appealing to me. I can tie this into CS2 by saying that probably my all-time favourite rifler has to be Ropz. You cannot create an all-time greatest roster without having him on it, and it’s all due to his passive nature and immense understanding of the game.

I’m not living

I’ve been trying to change this, and I think by writing this I’m doing some good. But I feel like I haven’t been living. I haven’t been enjoying living either. Even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment, I’m wasting a lot of, and have been wasting a lot of precious time that I’m never going to get back. I’ve made countless posts where I speak like this, and some of them I’ve actually deleted quite recently. It’s all just me speaking into a void that a few people read (which is really cool when you think about it). I think it would be disingenuous to end this post with some motivational thing and talk about “the comeback” or things that I’m doing, because I’ve done it before and it hasn’t worked. What I will say is I’m going to continue living day-by-day, and eventually that will materialize into something. I’ve broken too many promises, so I’ll stop promising for now and just do. That’s all.