One trait I have that I both appreciate and despise is the fact that when I get miserable, one of my possible responses is simply to throw myself into doing things that I enjoy in the hope that I can at least stave off the misery, if not banish it completely.
In other words, I am at my most productive when I am at my bleakest. I've produced the writing I'm most consistently proud of when I've been at my lowest ebb, and this weekend, after a week where I've felt more depressed and anxious than I have for a long time, I made approximately three weeks' worth of videos which are now happily churning away and filling up my hard drive, ready to be uploaded tomorrow morning and published over the course of… well, the next three weeks.
I occasionally have a slight crisis of confidence, wondering if I should bother keep doing what I'm doing. But then I look at how much I've managed to produce this weekend, and how much I enjoyed doing it, and I think that yes, yes, I probably should carry on doing what I'm doing — even if it's just for myself. Because, to paraphrase that Japanese lady on Netflix everyone is obsessed with right now, it brings me joy.
I'm not in this to get e-famous or anything like that. I'm happy to do what I do and have a few people genuinely appreciate it, and be able to chat with me as friends about it. And that's what I've got right now. It's good. I like it a lot. And I intend to keep at it for as long as it is practical!
One significant achievement this weekend is that I finally recorded the first "Z" video of Atari A to Z (to be published in a few weeks), which means in recording terms I've completed one whole cycle around the alphabet, finding a game for every letter on the Atari 8-bit! That's exciting and satisfying, and I'm looking forward to the next time around. I'll run out of "X" games eventually, as there really aren't very many of them, but most of the other letters have a pretty solid selection of games available for me to pull from. If you happen to have any particular requests, be sure to let me know!
Here's hoping the coming week is a bit more positive in outlook than this one has been. Although given the resulting productivity over the course of this weekend, perhaps I should be hoping for it to be as miserable as possible…
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