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Hello, 2019.

It feels like forever since I last drew anything and actually finished it. I put out two completed drawings this year and I'm only really proud of one of them. But something else important happened in 2018.

I played Celeste.

I won't spoil the game for you if you haven't played it, but if you don't reflexively vomit when you read "quietly challenging 2D platformer that really just wants you to succeed", I cannot recommend Celeste enough. It's my favorite pure platformer of all time just from a gameplay standpoint.

But that's not why I mention it--that would be the story. (This'll be as spoiler-free as possible.)

Celeste got into my head. I can't recap the plot without spoiling everything, but to boil it down to its simplest form, its message is this.

Embrace your demons.
Not "accept", but "embrace". Put in the effort to understand where your anxiety, your depression, your self-doubt, your fears come from. They are not your enemy, some part of yourself you can amputate and leave behind. You won't get very far if you try. They are not out to cripple, but ground you.

Celeste made me realize that my anxiety and depression both stem from two primary sources. My anxiety is born from my inherited habit of worrying about everything. I overthink things until I'm paralyzed by indecision. My depression comes from my habitual self-flagellation, the constant belittling of myself. Everyone else is worth something, but not me.

Celeste made me consider those two sources further. Where do they come from? Why? And why do I cling to them still, like a ratty old blanket well past its time?

The source of my depression is easy. I routinely beat myself up because when I vocalize my own mistakes and hammer them home, I don't usually make those mistakes again. This is what makes me good at most things I do. I reached Platinum in League although my Diamond friends think I play at a Diamond level. I reached Platinum in Overwatch, and I was consistently among the top 200 Priest healers in the world for Mythic+ for the second half of World of Warcraft: Legion. I'm also a reasonably good artist, writer, and one of the most efficient and knowledgeable workers at my workplace, such that even my (direct!) manager and senior coworkers regularly turn to me for help and advice. All of these results, for all my modest protests, speak for themselves.

Beating my mistakes into myself is not a habit I intend to let go of entirely. After all, it got me this far. But I think it's fair to say I need to tone it down. I need to stop beating them into me at some point and learn to love myself, realize that I'm worth my own time, never mind anyone else's. I spend so much time angry at myself on a day-to-day basis. You didn't wash the dishes today. You didn't take out the garbage. You haven't gotten rid of your old mattress. You didn't draw today. The perspective of pure practicality values productivity over all, so any day I didn't do anything productive was a waste of time.

The problem is, that doesn't leave time for you.

I don't give myself time to wind down, relax, and recharge. I constantly expect myself to be productive. Keep drawing. Keep writing. At least clean your room, you lazy slob. Any time a sketch doesn't work out it feels like a punch in the gut, like I've wasted my time, and my depression and anxiety crank up another notch.

Part of that is expectation. I expect a lot of myself. But with literally anyone else, I would be patient and forgiving, I fall back on excessively beating myself up when I fail. I need to learn to be just as patient and forgiving with myself as I would be with another person.

My anxiety, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. I suspect it mostly comes from my reclusive habits and stupid amounts of introspection. But I knew, even when I went for my first job interview some 6 years ago, I knew that you could turn anxiety into a tool. See, if you're anxious about something, you can leverage that to foresee problems and be prepared for them. This was actually something I consciously and unconsciously did playing my Priest in WoW--see, the spec I play is all about foresight and preparation. So I would think through an encounter, identify the common failure points ("But what if this goes wrong?"), and in that way I would be prepared if or when it did go wrong. And I find myself doing that at work, too. Someone proposes a change and my anxiety immediately kicks into overdrive, printing off a laundry list of shit that could go wrong. "Hey, here's a list of things we might need to prevent."

And that's great! Using anxiety as a tool lke that? Man, if only I had known a decade ago.

The problem is when you let it go so far you start severely doubting yourself. It becomes paralyzing. I think that I only put out two finished drawings in 2018 is evidence enough.

So, what did I learn in 2018?

Firstly, Celeste, as a game, kicked more ass than I ever expected it to.

And second, I need to learn to love myself, fail gracefully, and embrace my demons.

Thank you all for sticking with me, and Happy New Year's!

skin by neurotype-on-discord