Mental Cobwebs

You know how they expect you to know what you want to do with the rest of your life before you're even out of high school? Almost seven years after graduation I still don't have a clue -- writing was just my best guess. I went about life the completely wrong way based on what society expects.

I was stumbling through community college with absolutely no direction when I took a semester off to get married. We found out we were having Emerson maybe a month later as she was obviously conceived on our honeymoon. Most people wait until they're settled down with stable jobs before they think about kids, but that's mostly a lot of excuses for not being ready. It might have taken some convincing from my wife to get me out of the mindset that we needed to have our career paths in order first, but Emmy was by no means unexpected like most of our family assumed.

And thank GWAR for her. Well, GWAR would probably sell her for crack or something, but thank that hard-working semen for her...or something. Either way, my daughter is the best thing in my life and I would lick dirt off of worms for a living if that's what it took to pay the bills and buy her toys. But back to the point of this article.

A good two years ago when I decided I would pursue writing as a career, it was mostly because that was something I enjoyed doing, but also because I wanted a job that my kids would be proud of. Flash forward to a few weeks ago and I was getting home from delivering as many papers as I could possibly fit into the day, only to plop down with the laptop and pour over emails about the website I was trying to run or the other one I had just gotten hired at.

While feasibly I could get up and play with/take care of my kid and be a loving husband to my wife, and I certainly did on a regular basis, this still lead to a heaping amount of stress when it came to the actual professional writing. I am honored to work with some of the veterans of the game journalism industry over at Bitmob, but the stress of submitting a piece of writing and receiving countless corrections to make -- on top of a two year old running around the house screaming -- kind of killed that whole thing I mentioned about enjoying writing. It's hard to enjoy something when you're agonizing over an edit, trying to deliver the article in a timely manner, as you glance over to the bathtub ever few seconds to make sure the child is still playing and not drowning.

So I'm done. Well, not done done. It would be completely stupid of me to just throw everything away at this point, but I'm shifting my focus. It probably sounds like, "Waaah, becoming a better writer was too HARD!!!" but I'm gonna stop trying to ascend in the games journalism field for awhile and just plateau. My personal blog fell into complete misuse for huge swaths of time, and with this here One A Day Project I aim to change that and hopefully have something to show a year from now. Like, a year in my life. For the future's sake...or some shit like that.

I'll also keep Cerebral Pop up and running and chugging out regular content that I feel like writing, as well as moderate for Bitmob. Yeah, that doesn't sound like much of a change, but trust me, the simple fact that I'm not always thinking about how to advance my writing career is a huge weight off my shoulders. Everything I write now will be entirely my own, which probably means there will be far more misplaced commas. But maybe I'll start to enjoy writing again.

I also have my mind set on starting classes again, maybe getting into electrical work or something, so I may have to shuffle some of the Bitmob and Cerebral Pop stuff if that gets in the way. We'll see. So, like I said, I'm not gone, just changing tracks for awhile.

I'll leave you with a fitting video. It comes from the final moments of the last episode of Louie, Season 1. After trying and failing to fit in at a club where he really doesn't belong, Louie heads home to his children. In a lot of ways I think this clip fits me perfectly. I don't really fit in with the writing world. I could probably make it with a lot of hard work, but there will always be a disconnect in my vocabulary and ability to analyze a topic. And ultimately being a parent is my real calling in life; whatever I do for a living comes second to that.