I have a lot that I've been thinking about, that has been weighing me down, but I find it really hard to put things into words. I guess that's why I prefer communicating over text rather than trying to speak in person, because I just find it hard to convey things in the right manner where it won't cause further problems. I don't know if it has anything to do with being on that spectrum (Which I really don't want to be associated with, due to some past experiences) But I guess like recently, that's just dug my hole a bit deeper.
Well, anyways...
I wanted to write this update because of a lot of things that have been happening. Some of them recent, some of them dating years back. My physical and mental health hasn't been the greatest, at any time really, but I just feel like I've sunk a bit deeper. Maybe writing about it will help me a little bit, after all, stuff like music that talks about mental health can be a bit therapeutic, even if it sounds heavy and aggressive. I will probably separate this into two or more titled categories to make things a bit easier for people to read. I just have a lot to say.
Physical Health:
Honestly, at least since 2019, I've been having bad swallowing issues where my throat will just refuse to move when I'm eating something, like it's paralyzed, and create the sensation that I'm going to choke. I feel my throat get tired before I ever feel full, my teeth aren't the greatest either (i didn't take good care of them as a kid), which makes it really hard for me to chew or eat things right, and dense/dry foods especially are more difficult to swallow. In 2019 I was 165lbs/74.84kg/11.78 stone, but since then I'm now at 112lbs/50.8kg/8 stone. This is despite being 5ft 8in. Whenever I forget to eat, it feels hard for me to breathe, and when I take off my shirt or go into the shower, it feels like I'm being suffocated by my own skin and I get really self conscious about it. I'm unsure if this is from a head injury or something else, but I've tried doing speech therapy, and it doesn't seem that helpful. I have acid reflux and eosinophilic esophagitus, but from my time taking medication for that, waiting for an upper endoscopy to see how i react to it, I don't feel like much has improved in that regard. For a while, I survived off mashed potatoes and ice cream.
Doctors won't do anything effective about the problem for me, they keep putting me through tests (some of them X-rays, which do have a threat of radiation involved) that seemingly go nowhere. When I went in to the emergency room the other day, because I felt terrible (due to the lack of eating, for a few different reasons) and because I was feeling hopeless, they were more concerned about trying to get me on medication that I haven't had a good experience with rather than fixing my underlying issues. Likewise, my current primary doctor (since my old one left) is extremely dismissive about anything I say, and lets things out one ear and out the other. Pair that with the long wait times for literally anything, and this has been going on for a while with no progress. Likewise the dentists keeps pushing things back, and by the time they actually can get me in, there's more work that needs to be done. My eating has gotten bad, I ran out of stuff to eat, my doctors take forever to do literally anything and I haven't heard a message back from them yet about prescribing me ensure since my nutritionist said I could get a prescription for that. I am not gonna lie when I say that I've lost faith in the healthcare system. I'm not one of those alternate medicine anti-vax nutjobs that browse Facebook and think berries, horse tranquilizer, and special supplements will fix their son's flu or some stuff like that.
Doctors are like "Yeah we get it, you're near dangerous underweight levels, but you're "perfectly healthy" and we want you to get on medication that won't do shit and just make things worse for you, anyways do some more lab results that go nowhere". The business of pharmaceuticals especially with events after 2020 makes things look more dire, how they treat people in desperate need as lab rats to sell them experimental medications where the full rammifications of things are still unknown. People who screw with other people's lives while getting paid six or more figures shouldn't be entitled to their own, like if people in the world get the death penalty for knowingly selling gutter oil (Which gives people cancer) or get murder charges for enticing someone to commit suicide, why should incompetent doctors not be punished by the law for screwing with people's lives? They swear by the Physician's Oath to not harm the health of their patients.
The fact that they're more concerned about getting me back on medications rather than actually fixing my health issues speaks volumes. I've had a rocky relationship with her over the years, but my mom told me that the doctor I was talking to was trying to talk to her about some bullshit when she was picking me up from this ordeal. She thinks that not much is wrong with me outside of doctors doing jack shit and fucking with my health
Feels like if you're unhappy with life, they just assume that you're a "retard" or an invalid, and then chemically lobotomize you with SSRIs. If we were more savage as a society, we would probably be vegetating people like they're Rosemary Kennedy for simply not liking where they or the world is right now. I'm not depressed because of a chemical imbalance in my brain, I'm depressed because it seems like I'm not getting the help I need, and I got like a gazillion things I gotta worry about. Never tell a doctor that you're depressed or suicidal, you'll just make things worse for yourself. Talk to someone you care for and trust.
Mental Health:
It's a bit hard to reach out to IRL/offline friends, because they're usually busy with things, or ghost me (they see it but say nothing), or only really message me when they want to ask me something. If anyone feels like I've done anything similar to them, I want to apologize if I come off that way, just that there's a lot of stuff on my plate at the moment, and I want to be understanding and supportive where I can.
I've had the feeling like I am not good enough, and I will never be good enough. You might have heard this from me before. I'm 26, almost 27, and I see what other people who are younger than me are doing, and I just feel a bit down on myself as a result.
But maybe it's just impostor syndrome or something. Without getting into things in detail, I remember a while ago having an opinion on a game with questionable technical debt on social media that leaked, before it was even popular to dunk on said games for that aspect, and then having to deal with loads of people that say that they work in the industry and others give me hell, sending me death threats, saying that they hope I get blacklisted from working on games, insulting some of the admittedly amateurish art work I done at that point, but mostly for the subject matter. That and the ideological shift of western games basically killed any remaining interest I had working in America or even Europe on games, not even just because of their games not really interesting me anymore.
Truth is that talent doesn't really exist in the way we think it does. It's a skill that anyone can develop with will-power, and suffering and compromises in other things usually come along the way. It's like being cursed with being "smart" or average in a way, you find it harder to enjoy things uncritically. Growing up, I was sheltered a lot due to some stuff with my mother, I didn't like going outside thanks to the heat, cars, and insects, I never got to hang out with friends outside of school, it was hell in both school and outside it. I mostly had video games and drawing to fall back on, loads of disposable time that under normal circumstances would've been put more towards clubs, hanging out with friends, and enjoying life. So when people try and say that I'm talented, I just assume that's them just being kind to not upset me, or their heart being in the right place but not knowing the extent of things. In all honesty, high school was hell for me and I only passed thanks to an IEP and knowing the right people. I never really did my homework in school outside of projects, especially ones that I twisted in a way that I would find interesting. I did some game development stuff (mainly learning Unreal), but I do admit that a lot of the days, I would just spend watching YouTube videos, back when that website wasn't terribly oppressive with monetization. I've always had a problem with not applying myself, and I feel like a fraud in that regards. I did decent in college courses I was actually interested in, but had a hard time and constantly had to redo courses that had no relevance with what I was going for. I just feel average at best regarding things. I've had to take multiple breaks from finishing due to financial aid stuff, and even with disability accommodations, it feels hard. It's been almost eight years since I started college in 2017, and I'm still not done. Almost 27, and I feel like I haven't done much with my life, and the stuff that I've done doesn't feel grand enough. I only really have myself to blame for it. Being a glorified NEET at this point with no actual job is an extremely unfulfilling life. But regarding video games, with the way modern games have been going, that's already hard enough, but playing games I used to enjoy and feeling a deep sadness wishing that I could do something like that, it kills me inside. There's been times where I went on walks outside while feeling down, and pondered why I even bother continuing. I made a new account because I wanted to stay away from politics and culture war stuff because it affected my mental health and it's ultimately out of my control, but now the stuff that kept me relatively sane back then just makes me sad. Working on some of my stuff, there was some points where I held back from crying even.
It feels like a lot of the people that were encouraging me to go places (figuratively speaking) when I was in adolescence are gone. I remember a few times when I was younger, I wanted to end it, and my dad told me that nothing in the world is really worth killing yourself over. But the thing is with him, he had diabetes and ignored taking medication and such for it, he was too concerned with other people's issues. He's been gone for a few years thanks to that (and honestly remembering the day that happened is still pretty traumatizing), but thinking about it still makes me a bit sour. Like it feels like a suicide to me. Knowing that by the time I got there, it was too late to do anything, and one of my relatives wanted to hold on, and I still feel guilt for choosing to pull the plug. Another person that I knew from high school who believed that I could do good thing had a heart attack on the way there.
I know right around when I was having these swallowing issues for the first time, It was a little before Thanksgiving and I was dealing with some drama in a specific rhythm game's modding community that I was a regular in. There was a data hoarder who was trying to hold update content for an arcade game ransom, but they made the mistake of copy-pasting the password when they used a remote desktop connection into my PC to extract the files, and once I told a few friends about it over DMs, said person got mad and got mentally deranged fancop/"anti" people in the community to try and cancel and harass me over an molestation joke I made when I was 16. Some people who were harassing me back then went back to apologize to me because these same people were acting extremely cult like (like for example, with the Uzaki-chan anime that started airing at the time). I dealt with a lot of bullshit from that community. Especially someone who was gaslighting narcissist that tried to call me a "schizophrenic" for not looking at things at face value (I don't have hallucinations or anything like that, so it's really just them being demeaning), and got a close online friend of a few years to distance themselves from me because they were buddies at that point, and there was another person there in the group that I knew from Facebook that tried grooming me into sending "her" nudes when I was 16. After calling out the first person on their behavior, they were attempting to treat me like shit about it, and I decided to leave the community for good because it got formed into something completely different than what I remembered. I was there since the beginning.
There was another modding community that I was in, I felt like I could trust some of the people there, and I made some amends from a previous time that I was there and things didn't turn out quite well. After a bit, I got invited to a private Discord server for the more active members of said community, which was shut off from the more public one. They kicked me from both and tried slandering me and called me a "groomer" because I admitted to someone in DMs that I liked another person (Who is only two or three years younger than me), and because I wanted to see a face reveal photo for the people I talked to quite a bit. In hindsight, I can kind of see why something like that could cause such a reaction, but I don't recall ever doing anything out of line outside of that.
Another one centering around a fan translation of a Japanese game that didn't come to the US (despite also being on Steam), I was working as a tool developer on, I ended up leaving due to some drama with one of the Discord moderators (obsessed with Haruhi Suzumiya) who has been suspended from X/Twitter many times and now does video essay slop on YouTube. They were a massive puritan and ideological grifter that was trying to stir shit constantly in the community, and that wished for grifters to go in and ruin other communities that they didn't like from the inside. We as a team did a survey asking if people wanted more accuracy or didn't mind dialogue and stuff that was punched up for effect, and (since they were obsessed with memes) they took great offense to this. I saw several people working and testing on the project admit to me privately that because of this individual, that they were considering quitting.
In all honesty, don't associate with modding communities, they're toxic and full of grifters. And if you aren't dealing with them and working independently, you're dealing with people who expect free technical support and updates who will not be kind enough to give you donations for your work. All of that kind of stuff just made it really hard for me to trust other people. A lot of people act very sadistically and self serving, but if an animal bites you, it's mostly out of survival instincts, animals are too good for this cold world.
But looking at things, seeing as how I was getting into mods for games that attempt to fix technical and PC specific issues, I felt like working on this kind of stuff for free (even for larger games that aren't niche) was making me burnt out, and it felt more like an obligation already, and I wanted to take inspiration from others who left to work professionally (for example, Durante from PH3 who worked on the DSFix mod for Dark Souls and now works on Falcom ports) try and up the ante a bit by doing testing for a certain game publisher's games alongside giving some feedback with some technical findings about things. Since said publisher moved to Unity for their games, this really opened up the door for a lot of things, since those games are pretty easy to modify code for, even without source code access. So I spent an obscene amount of time, countless nights working until morning, and then waking up at noon drinking energy drinks despite my weight issues to keep working on it. I was working on a mod that tries to fix a lot of these issues, and I've even wrote about some of my findings and fixes for things, just for those things to largely be ignored by the developers. Some of them even admitted to me that I didn't have to go through all of this effort, but what's the point to any of this or the test to begin with when everyone is apathetic? I felt forced to release the mod before it was even fully ready by the time the game released, as I was still working on it even months after the beta test ended, and that really didn't make me happy. But I figured that was a fluke, so I went into some of their other game tests since then, and I found that they don't really care about quality, the testers don't care about quality and will want meaningful changes reverted because "it would be too much work" to fix the remaining issues even if as I've shown, a lot of those could be fixed in a single afternoon, and because most of the testers there are silent, in the off-topic channel talking about other games, or are simply there for a free Steam key. I even tried reaching out to the developer's recruitment page and getting in contact since they had some positions open, but I never really got a response back, even after translating the email to Japanese.
I had some time to think about some things, The one interview with Yoko Taro about how Nier Automata saved someone, and how he talked about his haunting experience with someone who was in a game development thing with him at the time, who ended up committing suicide made me reassess my rather aimless (or rather self-serving) reason for working on games, making me think about some of the stuff I was coping with growing up. I guess the way that I see it currently, it's like writing a song that had a piece of you in it, but you want it to help others, if that's not a terrible way of putting it. I feel like I need something good at this point of time to help me again.
So with the way things were looking with that venture, my own opinion of where Japanese games and the industry has been going since 2020 (I would be burnt at the stake for saying it), and some other things, I had to look at alternatives. I find where ACG (anime, comics, games) stuff is headed in Korea and China to be fairly interesting, and it's funny how countries where porn is effectively banned has more risqué and inspired games than anything coming from Japan in this day and age. But that aside, I'm not going to get into any specifics, but I did reach out to a fairly prominent artist who is working on a game (let's just say they draw pretty nice cute and funny art), I showed some interest and I linked them my GitHub (think of it like a resume), and while they said that "I am talented/gifted" and they're flattered that I reached out, the biggest problem outside of having programming work done on their current project specifically, is the language barrier. I was honestly a bit scared about reaching out, one time being stuck in a negative thought cycle at night and making it hard to sleep thinking of every possibility that could result in. But, it felt nice to have someone I looked up to complement the work that I felt like wasn't for much, but I really don't know if I can take the complement at face value though. They're open to reaching out to me for testing, and I'm hoping that the stars align with some things to make it a bit easier to show what I can do. I still talk to them on occasion, even if it takes a bit for them to get back to me on Pixiv, so I hope I'm not being annoying. I've always found it a bit hard to work cooperatively with others I don't have common interests with, so I hope something comes out of this.
I wanted to also eventually finish up college for what I was going for (game art), so I feel like I need to get better at drawing, because while I had no problem with 3D art at the time, I had some difficulties at the time with reference art and anatomy, and I had a lot of pressure from having to do two different characters when my skills were getting a bit rusty at that point.
So I guess my current goals are to fix my weight issues, to get better at drawing, and to learn Chinese (Although I do admit that this one seems a bit daunting, and I need to come up with a good plan that hopefully won't take a while). I'm sorry if I worried people the other day, I figured I'd try and say everything that's been on my mind.