in defiance of the lady of shalott (Patreon)

been trying for two weeks to figure out how to write this post. really wanted to get it in before april, but fuck.
most important points bolded for readability.

tl;dr project not cancelled but i'm taking a step back to try and learn to human better before returning to active development

cass and i talked and we figure if a few months can make me even 5% better at developing, then that is going to return timely dividends for the rest of my career and life

if it were financially viable for me to pause the patreon during this time, i would. it's not, so i'm going to ask for a spell of patience from everyone. i will still be streaming on weekends at the regular schedule (saturdays excluding last weekend of each month), and i also believe i have at least some reborn-related posts that i can queue up. i may or may not do so in advance so that i can practice existing without the self-imposed pressure of posting regularly. i put an expectation on myself for that that i would never dream of imposing on anyone else, and that is part of what i need to untangle. you have all always been nothing but supportive of me and i really hope to be able to come back and honor that better than ever.

this is different from a break in that my goal isn't to relax here. it might outwardly look similar, but i am treating this as a focused retreat with a clear objective to improve my mental health for the sustainability of development. i'll try to explain why below.

--

the inciting event

the trouble most recently peaked at the start of march, though it is a continuation of my struggles since 2015 and before. i was pet-sitting at my mother's house, working on eventing for starlight in the room i grew up in. i took refuge in there because our poor, naked parrot, who plucks out all of his feathers year after year, was screaming again, and i just wanted to get some work done. my mother is disabled and has done all she can for the creature, but he remains the worst birthday present i was never asked if i wanted.

a clothes moth flew by as i tried to return to the work. after fifteen years, she still has not gotten them out of the vent system. i tried desperately to clap it out of the air, but each try i missed, and it flew safely back into the woodwork.

when i say "eventing" i mean just assembling basic non-programming instructions in rpg maker to make scenes. i have been doing this since i was 11. art and music and writing and programming are all skills i have had to learn and practice from the ground up. were it anything else, i could forgive myself of the struggle. but this is the one, easiest thing i have always done. it is clicking buttons on a GUI and putting together a scene. i'm sure it was in part due to my environment at the time, but i was just so overwhelmed by it all. i have, on multiple occasions, made entire battle systems in purely events. you all have seen saphira's gym, to say nothing of any other puzzle, and although i moved parts of that into scripting to speed it up for stability, it was originally purely eventing.

this is something easy and simple that i have demonstrated time and time again that i know how to do at a masterful level, so why can i not finish a simple scene?

i resolved myself to reduce the overwhelm by narrowing my focus and trying again. "i am just going to try and fix this one bug," i tell myself. in order to replicate it, i need to play through the scene.

here is a dramatic enactment of me trying to do so:

i know what the scene should look like, and the incongruence between that and what it actually was, as well as several other bugs that kept jump-scaring me along the way just pummeled me into resignation. i did eventually fix the singular issue i had resolved to, but it was a pyrrhic victory.

i later realized that the reason for that stark incongruence was because i had not actually evented half of the things i thought i had.
i thought they were broken; i just straight up hadn't done them yet.

i walked away from this experience feeling like the 12-year-old me that lived in that room could almost make a better game than 30-year-old me can.

consulting the oracle

i licked my wounds for a few days and began to drag myself back to work. there is not a day that goes by that i don't wake up and ask myself "what should i do for the project today?"

circa 2015 i asked myself this without regard for my personal health, and this culminated in the somatic pain i have already talked enough about. after that, i learned to take my feelings and health into consideration when asking that question as opposed to trying my utmost to make them not a factor. still, i kept myself on a knife's edge, feeling that if i can do something, i ought to. it is not as bad as it sounds-- i still enjoyed many parts of reborn's development. but i certainly was exhausted by the end of it, and it was abundantly clear to cass that the circumstances were untenable.

cass (c: hiding in ur parentheticals) has done a lot for development that you are all very aware of-- engine optimization and linux/mac porting, for instance. ai reworks. qol changes. postgame child lin/anna dialogues. did you know that one?
but another you might not be aware of is the extent to just which she has played therapist and cheerleader for me. she has told a couple times the story of how i was probably not going to make it through postgame, were it not for the talk we had. as i was there daunted by the sheer number of stupid legendaries stupid gamefreak has stupid made, she sat me down, and said
look, just do what you feel like, and if some of them don't get full quests, oh well. that's fine.
thus the volcanion quest was born.
perhaps it is appropro that the one mon i chose to relax with is the one chilling out in a hot spring?

but it has always been something.
during e19 main development it was i'm so tired of doing this, i need to do something different
so we went to the starlight demo. and during the demo, it was i can't have reborn hanging over me, i need to finish it
and so during postgame development it was i'm so tired of doing this, i need to be done with this project.
now reborn is done.
now i am finally working full time on my own original thing and i have so much love and support for it that i never expected and i am so, so, so grateful for that, i love you all
but i am still tired.
now it is what the fuck is wrong with me?
what do i need?

so a few weeks ago cass sat me down again. we discussed a couple hypotheses.

one of them was that, maybe i should cancel starlight.
maybe reborn was my run, i should retire the patreon, and go find a cozy job at a company.
(c: "you like the bits and pieces (art, dialogue), so what if you just did that?)
i don't actually hate the idea of working at a company if one existed that would give me the creative freedom i need in a socially and ethically viable space. that's a pretty big 'if', but it would be edifying to see the process of the professional side of the industry, it would certainly be more financially comfortable, and it might be healthy for me to not have parts of development outside of my hands. i might even learn to relax again when not on the clock, which is certainly critically important.

when you're self employed, you're always on the clock, is something my dad joked about. it's true. having to solely self-manage my time is definitely the most stressful part of my job on patreon. sure, i can take breaks whenever i want, but that also means that i need to be accountable for getting the work done.
it is why, for instance, i wake up every day and ask myself, what should i do to push the project forward today?

the rest of the corporate perks are nice, but the prospect of actually being able to relax is the truly alluring temptation.

however, it's also a mirage in the distance. setting aside the shame and dread i felt at the mere prospect of cancelling starlight, i also feel strongly that it would not at all absolve me of the time pressure. even if i were to publicly cancel the game, i also can't not make it. i have been sitting on these characters and stories for years. i have wanted to make a tRPG since i was 12. cass jokes that an entire 50% of my brain (c: minimum) is dedicated solely to starlight brainrot.
even if i outwardly cancel it and walk from the patreon, i cannot separate the project from myself. i would still be scrambling to figure out how to make it in my off hours, or else it would be a lifelong regret.

i am proud of the passion and resolution i have to see this project through, but it also puts me between a rock and a hard place. i can't not do it, but the doing of it is currently hurting me.

cass posited a second hypothesis-- perhaps my emotional processing is just too inextricable from my creative work. there's good evidence for this in a number of characters in reborn, but especially the case behind titania and amaria.

for the record, i always intended to talk about that incident here before doing so on stream. and by 'always' i mean, literal years of planning to do that after e19 dropped.
and i just wasn't up for it until i suddenly was there in the playthrough and had to improvise about it on stream. fuck.

so here's a quick tl;dr:
titania was originally imagined as the version of myself that didn't get out of a relationship i had with a boy when i was 16. amaria was based on the boy with some of my own depression mixed in. also i originally made the online league as a personal challenge to him, fun fact.
there's a lot more details in the video i linked, mind the trigger warnings.

so her second guess was that maybe tying up my emotional processing in a decade-long project was not the best thing for my emotional development. (c: gating your feelings behind productivity barriers is bad for both)

this is perhaps fair... but on the contrary, i love having been able to put so much of myself into the work and i wouldn't want to write another way, and i don't think that emotional processing has to be mutually exclusive from creating art about said processing.

still, i clearly have generalized anxiety, and it clearly focuses around development, and it might occasionally drive her a little crazy, and something needs to change. she said perhaps if i put the 50% of my brain that is dedicated to starlight to work actually processing my feelings, maybe i can learn to be a more functional person. it was worth a try, so i began emotionally distancing myself from the project and trying to focus on myself.

a week or so later, a third hypothesis appeared.

my good friend, alex

cass and i watched a movie call 3 Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. we both enjoyed the film quite a lot, but we walked away from it with completely different emotional views of it. i thought it was a bittersweetly uplifting story about a town eating itself and then coming together overcome the entropic lack of accountability and justice in the universe. cass thought it was a heart-rending story about grief. i didn't understand how it hit her so hard, and she didn't understand how i didn't understand the obvious emotional play in it.

i left the apartment to go for a run and give us both time to digest the discrepancy. running is how i've been managing my anxiety lately, to more success than i've had with anything else. also i started medication to help with that at some point during all this, so that's probably been a factor too.

i came back to the apartment to find her mood much changed. she tells me she did some research about general insensitivity to emotions, and found that it is its own condition. (c: i googled "people who can't feel emotions. that was it. that was all that did this.)
it's a... ___thymia, right? i asked. alexithymia?
she nodded. i think we were both surprised and terribly unsurprised that i already knew of it. but i hadn't really connected it to myself.

by official diagnoses, i am neurotypical. even by unofficial diagnoses, the worst things i ever pinned on myself were avoidant personality disorder and an inferiority complex. but i've been in and out of therapy most of my life, and on every diagnostic metric-- ADHD, ASD, major depression, bipolarity, PTSD-- i tend to just be like, two points shy of the requisite score. it perhaps makes sense with me being a generally functional and productive person who is still able to empathize very much with the neurodivergent community.

alexithymia is not really a condition that would be diagnosed like any of the above. it is not even a disorder-- one of the criteria across the board for anything to be considered a disorder is that it represents a significant impediment in the daily life of the individual. and i'm, like, fine. alexithymia is described as a personality trait, more like a symptom of one of the above disorders, and it is particularly common in people with ASD or ADHD.

anyway, alexithymia is apparently the one diagnostic test i studied for, because i passed with flying colors. alexithymia is the inability to feel or communicate emotions. if you're interested in an example of an alexithymic individual, look no further than florinia. she is a particularly melodramatic case what with her style of speaking (though, that was also based on an attitude i used to hold, so...), but the lati@s quest is a good example of how...
it's not that she doesn't have emotions.
she obviously does.
but due to a history of trauma and emotional suppression, she just doesn't know how to notice or talk about them.
even when they might still affect her in the form of, say, umbral-esque corruption or maybe even somatic pain.
perhaps i was a bit ahead of myself there.

i based that quest off of my own experiences in therapy, practicing techniques of noticing sensations in the body (interoception) and then trying to place feelings to them. and i thought i had gotten much better at that. instead of just feeling Nothing all the time, i was quite acutely of my anxiety, for instance! turns out that's still common in alexithymics, and i've got work to do.

for cass, this explained a lot. (c: so much.) for instance, why i can weather a storm of being slandered from twitter with relative indifference, but if i have to ask her for one (1) thing, i fall to pieces. despite, or rather, because of the lack of other feelings, anxiety and depression are pretty common in alexithymics.

(c: my paragraph. :rageface: ame's kind of been at, like, just the edge of a lot of different neuro-disorders without meeting them, so reading up on alexi-shit was like witnessing a checklist for every single one of those near-misses. i've also been historically much quicker to notice when she's feeling off than she is, and this explained that too. really, i think amazonthymia really explained, like, a lot of classic ame-isms that are, viewed positively, maybe a bit charming but clearly point to some emotional issues. having a name for that really changed everything.)

if we assume that i have feelings that, as was demonstrated in 2016 when i was focusing very hard on recovering from somatic pain, i am simply not aware of, then the problem with development becomes easier to understand:

• i still wake up each day and ask myself "what can i do to move the project forward?"
• unlike in the past, i choose to consider my emotional wellbeing in this
• however, i am not getting accurate reports as to what my own emotional wellbeing is
• so in all but the most extreme scenarios, i still end up approaching development in a way that is unhealthy for me.

aside from the purely utilitarian failure here... there are certainly times that i am aware of enjoying the process of development, but i think my ability to feel that enjoyment is on the whole severely diminished.

the advice i always give to aspiring game developers (or really, creatives of any pursuit) these days is this:

just learn to enjoy it. if you enjoy it, you'll want to keep doing it, and you'll naturally get better at it.

but i cannot follow my own advice. i believe in it, but how can i confidently espouse it, when i am not able to live up to it? there is something to be said for kiki's dialogue in e19 here as well...

truthfully, i struggle to feel enjoyment for anything. whether it is being out with friends, relaxing at home with cass, travelling to see new places and meet new people, and even just playing video games. this is different from depression in that, i am pretty sure i do still enjoy all of those things-- i just usually don't know how to feel it. i observe that i still want to sit and play a game i'm liking for hours at a time, but i could not at all begin to describe what the emotion i'm having in doing so is or physiologically feels like. i can congitively genuinely appreciate it all; i've had a like 600 day+ streak on a journal of gratitude, and i truly am grateful for everything i wrote. but i still wasn't sure if i could feel it emotionally.

so when i ask myself 'how am i doing? how am i feeling about development?' my answer is skewed by the way i think i should be feeling, or what i should answer in order to still be productive.

lately i've thought of it like this-- emotionally speaking, i am blind: i thought i worked in a beautiful craftsroom adorned with the finest soft silks. i have learned recently that what i thought were silks were actually cobwebs. there are silks among them, true, but i cannot distinguish the two. and this is to say nothing of the spiders themselves, which linger silently on the walls where i cannot detect them.

i have to learn to see again before i can dust up the cobwebs, cleanse the silks, and purge the infestation.
a feeling i can acknowledge: i am excited to be able to do so, to reclaim my workroom and restore it to the beauty i imagined it held.
but before that, i must still learn to see.

since starting with an app meant for alexithymics to practice experiencing, identifying, and regulating emotions, i feel like i've been able to understand myself much better. i am doing better, as above, about noticing and identifying feelings i have. but it still takes measured effort, and it's still going to take a lot of practice before this becomes an automatic, inherent part of my existence. i am still peeling the crumbs from my eyes, rubbing and squinting them to to try and make out the faintest shapes, and that is hardly an ideal condition for spider-hunting.

but i will get there. i retreated from the craftsroom partway through march, and i am determined to return, no matter how long it takes me to be equipped to do so.

plans, meet wrench

if the above is a finely-baked cake, we've yet to add the icing.

cass and i have been troubleshooting my anxiety for... well... um... years, but more actively in the last few months. (c: it's been a long process but it recently just felt like it hit lightspeed.) partway through january i acknowledged that a lot of the reason i have much of this anxiety is because of how my father treated me as a child. it was not very kind. as a result, i was suicidal as an eight year old. we don't have time to unpack all that, but you can see tidbits in my relationship with him reflected in some of the dialogue taka and blake/cal have with and about their fathers.

still, i stopped being around him when i was a teenager, and we were reduced to talking, on average, twice a year. we have never addressed the room-laden elephant that is our relationship, and when had talked last year we agreed that maybe it would be helpful to eventually do so. so for the sake of perhaps finding some answers and closure that i might lay the original sin of my anxiety to repentance, at the end of january i texted my father and asked if we might finally talk about it.

he did not respond. i thought that he may have immaturely shrunken from the challenge of the conversation, until he spontaneously called me last week, just a handful of days after i had been getting used to the prospect of alexithymia and practicing acknowledging some feelings. he had been out of the country for the entire time, as he is wont to do, and missed my text. we had an in depth conversation then and there where i learned many things about him, including that he somehow was entirely ignorant to the fact that i had multiple times, to the alarm of my mother, friends, school, and court magistrate, attempted to kill myself because of him. and he had no idea.

it has been what some might refer to as A Whole Thing. it is still ongoing.

and while it is important for me to work that out, it has done no favors for my ability to learn to emotionally process things. i tried and could not remotely acknowledge how i felt about the initial conversation after we had it. the somatic pain spiked up the next day. it's been on and off since. i am still negotiating with him, and my mother, and archived court records about what all did actually happen. it is a Process, and while it provides lots of good material for me to practice emotional reflection, i am hardly a functional person right now and by all indications may not be for the near future.

but something something burn it down rise from ashes phoenix reborn wow

--

so that is the full account of why i have not posted recently, likely will not post much in the coming future, and have a lot of work to do before i can return to development.

as i said before, relating to the patreon, i am (against my insecurities) asking for patience during all this and for you all to stay with me here. necessity is certainly part of it. but as i said before, it is our hope that the overall development time of starlight will be lesser if i am permitted the opportunity to fix myself. i acknowledge a development cycle over a handful of years (as seems to simply be the standard for all video games these days), and i hope you all can trust with me that in the grand scheme, this will be but a blip in the timeline as my recovering from somatic issues was in 2016.
in the meanwhile, i may still be maintaining the community, stream, keeping up with the other starlight devs, or perhaps even working on some side projects, to the best ability that my emotional wellbeing appears to permit. for that reason, neither do i want to commit to any of those things, but they are on the proverbial table.

if you've read all this, thank you for caring enough to listen to where i'm at, and for being here at all. i may struggle to feel that gratitude in a way that i can point to on a doll, but it is all there in full force and i really endeavor to dig every ounce of that gratitude up and sip the feeling of it like a desert traveler chanced upon a cool springwater well.