If you’ll pardon me, I need to vent some pressure in my head. I don’t know whether or not it will make me feel better, but I feel like I need to do it anyway.

I feel like shit today with regard to the situation in which I find myself. I can’t, in good conscience, say that I know everything is going to be okay because I don’t know that everything is going to be okay, and that’s frankly kind of scary. Andie and I have bought a house; that is not something you can just abandon if things get a bit difficult. If you mess things up with regard to money, that’s a shitload of cash down the drain with nothing to show for it. While I doubt it will get to that stage — I at least have a little cash saved, though I had hoped I’d be able to hold on to it for a bit longer — it is still a concern.

I don’t feel like shit in the sense that I want to just break down and cry, though. I mean, I sort of do, but it’s not coming right now. Instead, I’m in that sort of bleak, nothingness phase of depression; that phase where all you really want to do is stare into space, but the things going on around you are irritating. It took a considerable amount of mental strength to haul myself up off the bed and come to write this post, and I’m not entirely sure that doing so is helping matters any. But we’ll see. I’ve started, so I’ll finish and all that.

I hate being laid off. I mean, I seriously doubt there’s anyone out there who loves it, but it’s shit, and I’ve been through it several times in my life. I at least have a little under two months to find myself something new to do this time around rather than waking up one morning to discover the site I write for is immediately closing (alas, poor GamePro), but the immediate reaction is one of being upset and disappointed. It is, in effect, being told that you’re not needed or useful any more, so kindly off you go, on your way, off you pop. This is a fact of life and business, of course, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to deal with. Being told that you’re suddenly surplus to requirements doesn’t do a great deal for the self-esteem, after all; it makes you question whether you’ve been useful for the time you were employed.

This isn’t fishing for compliments, by the way; I know that the exaggerated emotions in my mind are just that — exaggerated — and that I was useful throughout my time at USgamer; I also hope I will continue to be so for my remaining weeks there. It just feels extremely weird to still be part of a team and yet not; I don’t feel like I belong any more, and that, too, is a horrible feeling.

Still, I haven’t been resting on my laurels. I have been gradually putting together a side project to tinker with while I look for new work. I’m not quite sure it’s ready to reveal to the world just yet — perhaps over the weekend or early next week, depending on how much time I have to work on it, or perhaps I’ll just say “fuck it” and flip the switch later tonight. We’ll see.

Said project is not something that’s going to make me any money in the short term, but it might be a useful means of gauging interest for something I might be able to do in the future, whether on the side or even — stranger things have happened — full-time. While I’m not expecting overnight (or even overmonth) success with it, it’s something that I personally am pleased with so far, and am enthusiastic about developing further. As I say, we shall see if it actually goes anywhere. (In the meantime, if any of you reading this have any success or horror stories about Patreon as a funding platform, I’d be interested to hear them.)

For now, though, we have reached the weekend, and here in the UK it is, thankfully, another three-day weekend. Tomorrow morning I’m heading off to Kent to get away from things for a few days; some friends and I are going to hang out, play a ton of board games, play some Street Fighter, play some TrackMania, drink, eat and fart. I will be blogging over the weekend, Internet signal permitting, and will be back on Monday.

Here’s hoping things look up a little next week; I made the mistake a short while ago of feeling like things were going along quite nicely. Now I’m back to sleepless nights filled with anxiety again. Fuck that shit.