A heavy weight of guilt hung from my heart as the sun began its descent yesterday afternoon. Though I had taken the day off precisely so I might recover from the immense energy expenditure that is MAGFest weekend, I still felt as if I had owed something of productivity. I felt compelled to pluck at the thoughts swimming about my mind hazily, sculpting them into something more recognizable as an idea to present in essay form. To sit down and try to edit my next video together.

Instead, my eyelids drooped heavily over my eyes as sleep threatened to overtake me. I forgot for a moment that I had put my clothing into the laundry machine. Basic sentences required effort to string together. Aside from a brief sojourn into Pokémon Shield that morning, I could not even muster the energy required to power up a system and think about objectives, inventories, or tactics.

I finally succumbed to my body’s need to rest and laid down, watching way too many recorded episodes of AEW to catch up on. I probably should have gone to bed earlier, or taken a nap in the afternoon. I needed to recuperate from the late nights, long walks, extended conversations, energetic singing, and hollering. Instead, I went to bed trying to fight off this deep sense of wasted time.

I learned a lot of things at MAGFest this year, but what I really needed was a reminder.

As December was coming to a close I had read through several of my posts throughout the year. The goal was to look back on what I produced and… I don’t know. I was pulling my hair out striving to piece together some valuable lesson I could learn and apply to my future creative output. It wasn’t working. It just turned into gripes about my lack of interesting essays and the absence of a fourth video to be released.

An absence felt due to a sudden shift in plans just so I could have something out by the end of December. The video I had been working on – an analysis of Darksiders – was going to need substantial footage from Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess for some comparisons. I knew this would push the completion time back into this year, so I decided I’d work on a simple enough project in the meantime. After all, I wanted to do an analysis of Twilight Princess anyway, may as try to fold the two over so I could release them both in early 2020. That quick video was going to be a comparison between A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening, my impressions on the two somehow kicking off an argument for why players should replay their games. To argue the benefit of familiarity and how it allows us to better enjoy the games we’ve been playing.

The script was awful. More specifically, it feels like it was an awful idea after having given it to a pal of mine to look over. I still wanted to do my analysis of A Link to the Past, but my efforts to glue those thoughts together with my thesis about replaying games resulted in an unruly mess. There was no clear direction and in the end the video would have been purely self-indulgent.

So, I returned to the drawing board… though I now had so many mixed feelings regarding A Link to the Past that it became difficult to write about it coherently.

Everything only came together after I decided this would be the first of many videos analyzing the Legend of Zelda franchise, similar to how my time with Final Fantasy VI last year encouraged me to want to look at other games in the franchise. A decision that had – and still has – me feeling paralyzed. I now feel locked into a schedule of games to play rather than the more fluid approach I had been taking, and all because I had yearned to release something more before the end of the year.

Nothing says relaxation like large crowds and sensory overload.

There was some relief when I accepted I just couldn’t release this video by end of day December 31st. However, the pressure to put something together – anything – remained. I don’t even know why. I still have this weird feeling no one reads my blog – no one that doesn’t already know me at least. It might have been for myself, this feeling that my blog, podcast, and YouTube channel are how I keep myself sane. From feeling as if I’m just wasting each day away, that I’m gradually building towards something.

This led to the attempt to make some sort of review of 2019, reading through those old posts I’d mentioned. As I did so, I not only found how swiftly obsolete last year’s promises had become, but I already posted a series of “lessons learned” halfway through the year. Perhaps most telling was to reread Speaking With Silence, realizing I had come full circle. I was experiencing the same outrage at myself and self-inflicted pressure that I supposedly was healthily moving away from.

Then came January 1st, the start of a brand new year. A new decade, even. I drove down to MAGFest, met up with some friends, and proceeded to have the best trip there I’d ever had. I had made some plans that hadn’t gone as I had desired, and I had filled my Guidebook with activities to target, but otherwise it was mostly about going with the flow. Doing what felt right at the time. In doing so, I had met a whole host of new friends, ate a whole lot of new and delicious food, rocked out to a bunch of bands, said hello to a bunch of folks that I wouldn’t speak to much more that weekend, and even ditched The Protomen concert when it became clear that I’d overdosed on giant crowds that weekend.

While I had a loose schedule of sorts and a degree of expectation towards the weekend, I was otherwise open to just whatever would happen. I had learned in years past what sort of activities did and did not work for me, and I even learned about some new aspects of myself when it comes to interacting with others.

Returning home, I fell into the same negative patterns of self-pressure and expectation. I needed to put something together, and it required a degree of quality that was above what I could just readily produce.

It missed a key factor into some of my best works, though. I didn’t write The Death of Darksiders II because I had beaten the game and therefore needed to write about it. I did so because I wanted to. The same goes for when I wrote about Caligula Effect: Overdose, or my newfound appreciation for Destiny 2 despite the grind, or my observations regarding “the rut”.

The only piece I wrote more due to the pressure to write than the simple joy of it was my piece on Astral Chain. While I don’t think it was awful, it also did not feel like something I was compelled to write.

Which is where MAGFest comes in. I want to write, yes, and I have piles of unused drafts that haven’t met my personal standards I set for myself. I want to create videos, but now I’m worried about a schedule rather than doing what I did for almost all of last year: making what I wanted to in the moment.

Going with the flow at MAGFest served me well, but it had also served me greatly several times last year. I think, every so often, I may simply need to recalibrate. To return myself back to those expectations of joy rather than any insane standards I manufacture for myself.