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I'm Not Doing Well - Confession 58

2015.09.20 20:26:18
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header It's been a while since I updated this blog, let alone with personal stuff. To cut to the chase: right now, I'm not doing very well at all. I haven't been doing well since last Friday when I was once more pulled into the abyss of self loathing.

As you might now from previous entries, my depressive moods usually show themselves towards the evenings, which is very atypical for depression. The reason behind this is most likely that the evening marks the end of the day, which puts my subconsciousness into a setting where it reflects on what I did all day. If that happens to be too little, then I get very disappointed in myself. If that builds up for too long, I tumble down even deeper. So here I am again.

Last Tuesday university started again. I'm now in the third semester as I somehow managed to pass the first year finals. I'm not entirely enthused about this because at multiple points during the studying periods I had the realisation that I did not ever want to have to undergo that again. And now I'm bound to, since there are going to be further exams, this time no later than January 2016 already. Still, the semester has barely begun, so I'm not really stressed out by that all too much. I expect that to become a factor at a later date.

So what else has been going on? Well, for one I've had a huge delay in writing and finishing Flare, the particle effects library I initially wanted to write for Ludum Dare. The delay mostly came down to me not being able to figure out how to make the animation system work. It was a constant back and forth between not wanting to set certain constraints and being unable to fit the entire system into my head. So, that dragged on for far too long and costed me pretty much the entirety of my precious two weeks of holidays between the exams and the start of the semester. I'm still not entirely finished with Flare now, but I'm willing to put it to rest, as the core system is done. It just needs testing and fleshing out now.

I initially planned to use my holidays to work on Radiance and other things that I wanted to return to for a long time now. I also wanted to move the servers to a better hoster again. Sadly neither of those things actually happened. But, things wouldn't be so bad if I actually had worked on Flare consistently during that time. Sadly I did not, and I instead wasted a very considerable amount with just stupid bullshit, watching videos and live streams, and so on. I just really did not even close to get as much done as I could have and should have.

And now it seems that I'm getting back into a low phase with regards to drawing. I'm losing interest, don't feel passionate about it, and the results are barely passable at best and a complete, atrocious failure at worst.

I've never been one to say that I'm good at drawing, but even so there's times when I really, fully realise just how bad I am and how stunningly good others are. There are people my age that are worlds ahead of myself in pretty much every conceivable area. Usually I love looking at their art and seeing what they were able to do, but in situations like these it just makes everything seem like a lost cause. I don't think I'll ever be capable of pulling off things on their level, let alone greater.

At this point a lot of people like to interject that I shouldn't compare myself to others and should instead look at my art in isolation. – That's ridiculous! What a completely insane proposal! What point is there to anything if there is nothing to compare it to? By looking at something “in isolation” you lose all point of reference; you cannot say anything about it. It loses all value and reason, and it merely exists. It would become pointless. You very simply must compare works to other things to give them any sort of merit, to be able to assign them any form of quality.

And so I compare. I especially like looking at sketches other people make, because they can reveal a lot about their skills. Some people manage to draw full characters without any sort of scaffolding, straight onto the canvas and it looks great! All the strokes are very accurate in their form and placement. It's just.. right. I know I can't do that. I can't because I don't know how to draw these forms. It's not something that I've trained (yet), so I'm bound to flub about and rely on scaffolding and thick lines to get things done.

Things like this just really drive it home that I feel like I haven't advanced much at all. I'm still very slow, I still can't draw things straight up, I still suck bad at perspective, I still can't grok complex poses, I still can't draw buildings or other items, I still don't know shit about colouring and shading, and I still haven't worked out my style problems.

So yes, my illustration hobby too is causing me a lot of agony at the moment. But besides that there's still more going on. I've started on level 4 of Pimsleur's Japanese course and they started to really ramp up the amount of vocabulary. I now have to pretty much do every lesson twice just to be able to get any of it. On top of the increase in difficulty, the new schedule the university enforced also caused me to get everything else mixed up, so I haven't done any lessons at all for a few days now. Not great either. Not to mention of course that despite trying to study Japanese for over two years now it still very much feels like I can't speak, write, read, or really do fucking anything with it whatsoever. I don't know if this is normal, but either way it just makes everything infinitely more frustrating. I don't even know if I'm making any progress at all, or if I'll ever in my life get to a point where I'll be able to read and speak something. At this point I kind of doubt it.

Looking back on my life it always seems like I did a lot more when I was younger (that is, everything except for before I was 16. I didn't do shit before then). Whereas now it just constantly feels like I'm wasting my time with stupid shit and can't get anything done for the life of me. Nothing I do feels like an accomplishment, it's just “done” and then the next thing in line shows up. That too probably should've been done already as well, if I hadn't wasted so much time. Of course, mix in a healthy dose of common real life responsibilities, university studying, and all sorts of other crap that I should get to work on as well.

In the end it just always feels like I never get anything done, let alone done well. I almost dropped out of high school, and now I almost dropped out of university as well. I can't take responsibility, and I probably couldn't live on my own if my life depended on it. I'm no good at anything I do. I just fucking suck.

What the fuck is wrong with me.

Written by shinmera