Let's get back to it then

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I feel like I should pick this up again and perhaps explain a little bit about what has been going on with me.

One of the goals of my blog, one I didn't really emphasize much, is to have something I can quit if I need to.

I am prone to periods of depression, they aren't incredibly critical or anything, I mean I don't attempt suicide or self harm, but I have noticed a pattern of fucking things up for myself a bit when they happen, this goes back to my second job ever, working at New Seasons Market, which I quit with like four days notice for a stupid reason and spent the next like five years pretty much broke.

Anyway, the point is I have seen this tendency in myself and took steps to minimize the damage in the future. Having this blog to quit writing for a month or two was hoped to be a sufficient lifestyle change that would prevent me from doing something else stupid, like quitting my job to work somewhere else, or just disappearing one night.

It appears to have worked, I had a rough stretch just recently, nothing out of the ordinary, just feeling the usual dead end job malaise and then the brain doing it's doom spiral, I stopped writing eventually, as regular readers may have noticed, and then spent a few weeks wallowing in my failures.

Now usually episodes don't end with a specific event, but I can actually trace this one, see I was considering quitting my job and taking one as a driver for Pizza Hut, equally dead end, and paid less, but very little responsibility and I like driving, Zena talked me out of it and because of that talk I started to improve a little bit, then I bought a book.

I love Brandon Sanderson, I think his world building, specifically the magic systems, are amazing, and his stories are always engrossing, even though they do tend to have protagonists that are just the best at everything. That part has been getting better though.

His big epic fantasy series is The Stormlight Archive and the third book in the series released a little over a week ago, I won't go into the plot details but one of the character arcs is defined by constantly reliving his failures, feeling he doesn't deserve to be happy because of those he hurt and let down in the past, the conclusion he eventually comes to, which I admit isn't applicable to all, was that success is a journey, failure and loss happen along the way, but the only way to be a failure is to stop trying to succeed, because then you have stopped the journey.

It veers perilously close to "it gets better" territory, as well as blaming the victim a bit, but I think a generous interpretation of it doesn't quite go that poorly, for whatever reason it is what I needed to read at the time though.

It's pithy I know, but it worked at the time, and I am ready to start trying again for a while, so to hell with it.

I hope all your holidays were great, and if they weren't I hope that you get a great day soon to make up for it.

See you tomorrow