The good season is here
Overnight the seasons fully flipped over to autumn, it's great! Probably my favorite one of these. The air smells different in a way I can't articulate, there's just a cozier feeling in the atmosphere. I can finally wear layers!
It's a little double-edged, though. This might not make a lot of sense but the colder months remind me a lot of pokemon and how I thought my life would go. I mentioned it on cohost once but I wanted to travel around freely and pursue something that would make me stronger in some way, go to interesting places and overcome some lofty obstacle, meet new people on the same path and really make a name for myself alongside them. Autumn feels like being in the middle of a journey to me, but I haven't felt like I've gone anywhere.
Games and art and all my actual pursuits are very insular, I don't need to go anywhere at all for them and it's not even a career so there aren't any clear advancements I'm making. There aren't any milestones, I just look back at my past work and think "well maybe i got a little better at one part at the cost of other parts getting worse". Various health problems also keep me stuck at home, so I'm not even flying out to somewhere for a hobby thing. Not that I have anywhere to going out to anyway.
Meanwhile my siblings are flying out domestically and internationally for the things they want to do, friends are rubbing shoulders with some really famous people and making huge strides as creators, and it feels like I'll never move out of this completely isolated place. It's great that autumn's here but I'm feeling the passage of time. I could have finished my rpgmaker game by now, I should have finished my vn by now or at least the second part, I should have finished my book by now, but I feel no closer to any of that than I did five years ago. To say nothing of anything related to my actual life.
So I'm reading through my blog posts, and a full year later do I actually feel better at the end of 2025 than I did at the start? Kinda? What even happened between now and then? I released those two vns I already talked about, but as a friend group we finally got together and made Drito Detectives for a jam and that was a ton of fun! Really the sort of thing I've been looking for to feel connected to a space and really doing something. I'm really happy with how that project turned out.
Toward the end of the year I also started my loop of doing full illustrations of my characters and pinpointing something to focus on improving. Supposedly this is the best way to do it but man, it took me literally a month for each one. This hand injury is yet another clipped wing. I did get a little better though! I might not have any more in me for a while but my upper limit got a little better even if my groupdraw doodles are still all squiggly.
I guess I'm overall more positive than the start of last year, but is it going anywhere? I can keep plugging away at all this project stuff but it doesn't feel like I'm far along in any kind of journey, probably because I don't have any particular goal other than the sense of wanting to get somewhere. Rather than improving steadily and stepping up towards a goal it feels like I'm always recovering up to 90% of where I was at before declining again, always trending downward with all my efforts only making the drop slower. There's most of the year still left so I'd like to finally increase my overall state beyond that line and start getting into a positive trend, if I can dare to even hope for that. It feels a bit more possible in autumn.