It's Once More Time to talk about myself and my troubles for a bit. Not because I want anyone to listen or to care, but merely because I need to do something –anything to at least find some peace within myself. Writing seems to let me at least vent some of my frustrations, even if not by much. So, even though I would've liked to have a much bigger gap of informative and nice articles between this and my last lamenting post, I guess it'll be as it has to.Since about November I've been in a huge drag. I've felt tired every morning regardless of how much I slept, had massive difficulties working up the motivation to work on anything at all, and generally have felt more miserable more frequently again. I'm quite sure that this is heavily tied to the end of the semester and the impending doom that is the upcoming exams. I didn't study enough during the semester, so I've constantly felt like I should somehow be able to compensate for this during this “break”. But that didn't happen either.
I could barely bring myself to study anything at all. I can't explain what it takes for me to actually study, what keeps me from just doing it like most people seem to be able to force themselves to do. On the other hand I couldn't get anything else done either since I was supposed to be studying after all. The resulting situation is a deadlock; there's nothing I can do on either side, no advancement that can be made, only time can be wasted.
Mind you, I didn't do absolutely nothing. Doing that is an impossibility for me, as it would probably drive me absolutely insane if I was ever even capable of trying it. I did do some drawings, but not enough of them and all of them have been wholly unsatisfactory in terms of quality of execution. I did do some coding, but only very minimal amounts of it and on all the fronts that I should be working on I got stuck. I've barely remembered to study Japanese and still no matter what I do with that it feels like I know nothing at all, no sentence ever looks like something I could understand or write myself.
In regards to art I've been lacking heavily in inspiration. I haven't had any ideas for things I really wanted to draw for a very long time. The style is also another thing that constantly bothers and annoys me massively as I simply cannot seem to make any headway on it at all. Hell, it almost even looks like I've regressed since a year ago. I feel clueless about which direction to go in. On and on I keep looking at how other artists I like do it, but it doesn't give me any idea on how to fix my own works to look the way I want them to. All the more I'm always scared to do anything exaggerated or too different as I'm way too perfectionist and fear I'll fuck it up anyway. It's just been months upon months of blind stabbing in the dark with no success. Mindless, fruitless,
With programming I've started working on Colleen3, but there I've stumbled upon problems with the central new idea surrounding the agnostic event delivery system I've been cooking up. Solving these problems requires plenty of good and hard thinking, something that I just can't seem to be able to do as of late. No matter how much I try to concentrate, I can't seem to keep it up for more than a few minutes at best. There's always something else I get side-tracked by immediately, mostly mentally. Some stupid thought that catches my attention and suddenly I'm thinking about something else and many minutes have passed without any productive result whatsoever. I've also tried getting Parasol started back up as a project, but the same problem offers itself there. There's a lot of complicated architectural problems I need to solve before I can proceed without having to fear wasting a lot of effort on it again. Yet I can't solve any of the problems because there's no concentration.
I've finished the fourth level course of Japanese that Pimsleur put out, but still I feel like I've either forgotten 90% of it or it's still so insufferably little that there's just nothing I can actually understand still. Now I'm trying to get back into Genki and have started to study the vocabulary of it using Anki, but I have no idea if that'll actually get me anywhere. Despite the years now that I've tried to slowly learn this language it still feels like I'm back at square one where no matter what kind of sentence I could think of I have no damn idea how I would go about saying it.
Everything just feels stuck. I'm stuck without much progress in studying. I'm stuck without much progress in drawing. I'm stuck without much progress in coding. I'm stuck without much progress in Japanese. I'm stuck without much progress in my life altogether. I feel like I should be much further than where I am now, should have produced more, should do better at university. I feel like I should have my shit together, but I really, massively, without a single doubt or crumb of ambiguity do not.
I'm so utterly pathetic that I can't even get myself to study a bit for some petty exam so I can get this degree and perhaps move on to somewhere better from there. I'm so spoiled and stupid that despite all this shit I still somehow dare to think that there's something I could be worth. I'm a lazy good-for-nothing, leeching off his parents' money and bringing nothing but a short temper, an unbearable resistance to doing anything useful, and a big-headed, snooty attitude in return. How could I even hope to deserve all of this?
It's cold in my room; my hands are freezing. Complete blackness lies outside my window. I'm surrounded by technical equipment, books, collectable figures, an assortment of tea, a bunch of scrap paper and dirty dishes, and a variety of other small trinkets. Aside from the faint melodic tunes that can be heard through my headphones, the only other audible thing is the clacking of the keys as the springs bend and jump back up under the pressure of my fingertips. On the screen in front of me, an Emacs window is opened in full, on which individual letters appear sporadically, forming words, sentences, and eventually paragraphs of a whiny, self-pitying, and angst-filled article that I somehow thought was a good idea to write.
As so very often with the decisions I make, they end up being not very smart ones. I don't expect that to be any other way with this. In fact, I already regret it this very moment. I wish a lot of the stupid crap I wrote above had never seen the light of day, especially considering how entirely unoriginal and routine they are. Many people have said very similar and already borderline cheesy lines before. Of course, most of it is completely idiotic blabber too. After all, there's no justness, no real concept of “deserving” anything in the first place. You simply get what you get, and then you make the most of it. Hopefully.
And this is the epitome of my confusion about myself. While at the same time having these ludicrously cringeworthy and annoying episodes of self-loathing I always at the very same time realise and reason about how entirely stupid it all is. There's always this completely rational part of my brain that tells me what I'm doing and saying right now is dumb by all accounts, yet I still do it anyway– I still feel it anyway. Ah, if only there was a way to simply terminate thoughts, but sadly enough the brain works in a much different way from our brains.
But enough of all of this. The venting is done, and I'm cold and exhausted. Maybe I can manage to fit things back together in my life once the exams are over. Perhaps there is still some hope left for me, even though the issues I'm facing with studying never seem to change in all the years that I've been trying to battle them now.
Anyway. If you managed to indeed read through this: my apologies to you. Nobody should have to waste their time with something like this. I'll be better again before too long– at least that's how it usually turns out anyway. I won't even read this through again myself to check for grammar or spelling errors. If you did notice any of them, apologies once more.
Written by shinmera