Resolutions and Dissolutions
18 January 2023
I’d entered a new phase of life by the time 2023 hit. It should have been obvious, yet didn’t really feel tangible at all.
The signs we all know are the seismic shifts of moving to a new region or starting a new job. Something like the latter happened to me—leaving a job and fully settling into a new one—but it didn’t really feel like the thing that checked off the congrats! you’re at a socially sanctioned “new part of life!!” box, even if most folks say it would.
But, just because the signs were minor, didn’t mean I couldn’t feel the shifts and settles as they happened. I started listening to a lot more music with lyrics, thanks to a bird app moot who memed about a site with a bunch of J-pop albums on it. I started using said bird app less, accelerated in no small part thanks to the “spoilt sadistic emerald heir” dumbass who is now determined to drag all the communities that made it their home into his trash fire. And the big one: enticed by the whispers of “hey.......wouldn’t it be cool to start on a shiny new project” that began scratching the back of my head for the first time in ages, I’ve put the writing endeavor that’s dominated the past three years of my life to the side for a bit.
Was this bound to happen? Probably. Vivify and just about the majority of the stuff on this website at the time of writing are offshoots of hopes and dreams and epiphanies and regrets and growth from my time in uni. Two years out from anything directly related, and now completely separated from anything that was tangential, those leftover threads that aren’t still wound tight with urgency are just unwinding and drifting away, whether I care to grasp for them or not. I still feel compelled to follow what strands are left—but the more I try, the further away each of their ends seem to get, until it feels like too much trouble to keep trying.
There was a foreign exchange program to Japan that I didn’t get to the next stage of. I’d been banking on it being the real next step of my life for the past year, half-boasted to a bunch of folks about it because I was so sure I would get in, raring for the opportunity to toss myself into that churning, personality-galvanizing cauldron that is attempting to make a life in an entirely different land from your own—‘till I got hit with the ‘ol “We wish you all the best in your future endeavors” message last week. Womp womp.
Oddly enough, after all that hoping, I still didn’t feel that disappointed? In a way, trying to set up shop on the other side of the world was probably a tad bit overblown for what I’m looking for to begin with. As much as the opportunity to see how Japan is an actual country on earth would be interesting, it’s the “setting out on my own and making a life” part that’s important. Too bad that program would have paid more than I can feasibly get within the next couple years, and I’m almost certainly going to have to dig deeper into the only slightly filled student debt hole to get a masters at some point. Womp womp womp.
As for the new job (not really, as I was working there fairly regularly since September), it’s just...fine, really. Pretty much a promotion, more pay and hours that are obliged from actually doing duties typical of a front-facing librarian; and since it’s actually in the region I stay in, I’ve plenty more time to try dipping my toes into some of the stuff I’ve mulled over in past posts. Seems like there’s a fair bit of opportunity for advancement if I wanted it, too...which I would consider, if I actually liked the area. My last job might have been far (the DC metro area), but at least it had a lot more that an unworldly melanated masc would want to do than just float around a bunch of default white people. Sounds harsh (lmao), but when you’ve spent your life around people that’ve tried their damnedest to imitate default white people and are trying your damnedest to do something else, doing the dance of pretending you care about ““normal”” milestones of life gets exhausting pretty quick.
On a brighter note, my personal arc of capital G Gamer to a whole person is pretty close to completion (or would be, if the FromSoftware bug didn’t have me going through Dark Souls two and a half times with the rest of the trilogy to follow). I think my attention shifting away from mainstream videogames communities is part of why chipping away at Vivify has been such a slog recently—especially since I have very little motivation to go back and make sure my memory of Dragon Quest or what other-RPG-have-you is fresh outside of my favorites.
I don’t want to stop, though. I’m scared of completely drifting away, not because giving up would make wrenching all the 300,000 plus words out of me so far feel like “a waste,” than just...knowing I can put so much heart into something, then suddenly decide not to see it through, just like that. That the story and the pivotal period it was born from is gone, irrelevant, not worth understanding again. I don’t want to pull another megacorp streaming service cancellation on myself. Especially when I’ve gotten this close to the part pulling me this far in the first place.
That aside, diving headfirst into this next thing would probably be jumping the gun, anyway. All the disparate ideas I’ve scribbled down are congealing into what feels like a natural evolution of my current thematic focus—going from “hey JRPG worlds are kinda fucked up structurally if you think about it” to “hey chosen ones and light and darkness and a whole bunch of standard fantasy tropes are fucked up if you think about ‘em.” I’m also leaning towards resurrecting the other two main characters from the thing that became Vivify...so maybe this is just another effort to tell the same story after all. It’ll be nice to finally take those (eventually) and/or (someday) disclaimers off from wherever I’ve left them, at least.