1357: Le Chien Noir

Been having one of those “crisis of confidence” days today, for a variety of reasons. It’s the culmination of a lot of things, really — a stressful week, tiredness, feeling ill for most of the weekend — and it just gave my sense of self-confidence a bit of a beating this evening. I haven’t quite bounced back as yet, so you’ll forgive the maudlin tone of this post.

To be perfectly frank, I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with my life and the several different directions it’s been going in pretty much ever since I left university. I launched into a PGCE immediately after finishing my degree because it seemed like a logical thing to do with said English and Music degree, plus I’d done some private teaching in the past. Classroom teaching is not, however, the same as private teaching, as I found out to the cost of a considerable proportion of my mental health. I stuck it out for about three years — dealing with being made redundant at the end of my first year, and suffering a complete emotional breakdown at the end of my third — before deciding that continuing on that path would probably do bad things to me.

I followed this up with some work in retail. This went well. I enjoyed the work, and it involved working with computers and tech — which I love — and teaching — which I also enjoy, when it doesn’t involve badly-behaved brats. Unfortunately, it ran into something of a dead end progression-wise, and then I suffered a pretty horrendous amount of workplace bullying that I still haven’t really forgiven the people involved for.

I then went back to teaching for a bit. It was a maternity cover contract, so whatever happened, I’d have a relatively easy “out”. It was also in primary school, so it was more of an attempt to experiment in that field than anything else. Again, I enjoyed the actual teaching side of things, but the dealing with horrible, badly behaved children (who, in many cases, had parents who didn’t give a shit what they did) took its toll on me somewhat.

After that, I did a bit of supply teaching, which was pretty much the most depressing job in the world, and took up an opportunity to start writing for a little, low-paying games site called Kombo. I made some good friends and built up a decent, if small-scale reputation. Kombo eventually folded, sadly, and I was left without work, money or, due to unfortunate circumstances in my personal life at the time, a wife. I moved back home with my parents with great reluctance.

I spent ages looking for jobs, but I have no idea what my real “skills” are besides being knowledgeable about video games, being able to type like the clappers (at least 85 words per minute the last time I tested) and being able to write things very quickly to order. The qualifications I do have are very specialist — my BA is far from being the “good, general degree” I was assured it would be when I was deciding what to do, and my PGCE is pretty much a waste of the paper it’s printed on now — and for the things I do know how to do, I have no real tangible means of proving I can do them. Essentially, I might as well be completely unqualified.

Fortunately, after a long and depressing process of jobhunting, I scored a position on GamePro, a magazine and website my brother had formerly been in charge of. This began as a part-time gig which eventually expanded to full-time after I made a very difficult decision between sticking with it and moving to London for what would have, in retrospect, probably have been a considerably more secure job. (But… London. No thanks.) I stuck with GamePro, as I was enjoying the work.

Again, I worked well, built up a decent body of work and a good — if, again, small-scale — reputation… and again, the site folded. This time around, thankfully, I had another job to jump into, reviewing mobile and social games and apps. It wasn’t a fun job in the slightest and made me never, ever want to work in mobile and social games, but it paid well. Long story short, that site didn’t fold as such, but the majority of the staff left (including me) and I was left without anything to do for a little while… although the possibility of USgamer, my current position, was already starting to bubble.

And, as you know now, I’m working for USgamer. I’m enjoying the work, though it can be challenging at times. On days like today, though, I can’t help but find myself worrying a little about the future. Where do I go from here? What’s the progression? Is this a “real job”? Should I instead be looking for something boring and joyless but stable with good promotion prospects? I’m 32 and I’ve never had the opportunity to say “I got promoted.” Is that a problem?

I don’t have the answers to any of those questions, and I doubt anyone else does, either. I’ll probably feel better by the morning, but for now everything’s just feeling a bit “meh.”

Apologies for the self-indulgent moaning, but it helps to get it out of my head and on to paper sometimes. I’ll try and be more cheerful tomorrow.