It feels weird to be doing this again.

It’s been so long since I’ve done this whole ‘website’ thing although it’s only been about a year since my last post. But this really shouldn’t feel strange considering I used to do this every single week for a few years straight. This isn’t a new hobby I’m taking on but for some reason it feels foreign enough to feel unfamiliar, but that’s been the case with just about everything I’ve done this year.

At the beginning of 2022 my partner and I moved hundreds of miles away from our respective comfort zones and left the people and places that were familiar to us thanks to new employment opportunities, specifically new employment opportunities for my partner. While they were working and being productive, I stayed home and found time between cleaning, grocery shopping and being severely depressed and homesick to play a lot of video games. And while I played those video games I got to experience a deeper feeling of self-loathing than I’d ever felt before because it felt like I was wasting valuable working/applying to jobs time.

It was this endless cycle of feeling miserable and responding to it by doing something that was supposed to make me happy, but ultimately making me feel worse cause it felt like I didn’t deserve happiness while I was in this unemployed and isolated state. It got so bad that I was afraid to leave the house and was completely overwhelmed by doing even the smallest of things that didn’t involve me sitting in front of my monitor-crowded desk to play video games.

That was my comfort zone, my 4 monitor cocoon where nothing could hurt me. It was where I spent most of my time, relying on my hobbies in an attempt to stave off the encroaching darkness, but eventually I began to feel listless and apathetic towards everything that was supposed to bring me happiness. I’m pretty sure that’s the textbook definition of depression, actually.

I was in a rut. My comfort zone suddenly turned into this monument to failure. Having fun and enjoying myself felt unearned and unwarranted, and it left me feeling like a complete mess. It took a lot of patience and support from my partner along with me finally finding a job and having to spend time away from my sadness shrine to really claw myself out of that hole.

These days I feel like I’ve struck a pretty good balance between working, being a good partner and engaging in my hobbies. I’ve even started to romanticize the days when I had hours upon hours of free gaming time, which I think means I have a healthier relationship with gaming now. It also means that I’m an idiot who is knowingly looking through rose-colored glasses at one of the worst periods in my life and thinking, “wow, I kind of miss that.”

I really hope this doesn’t read as me trying to dole out advice because it 100% should not be interpreted as such. I didn’t actively do anything while I was struggling to alleviate the stress and just let it envelope me. I do not recommend that. I should have gone out and explored my new surroundings or at the very least I should have spent time in a different room in my house, but I didn’t and ultimately suffered the consequences. I just hope I remember all of this for the next time I’m unemployed for a significant amount of time.