Letting the 2010s Sleep

Time seems strange. To think of where I was in 2010–still in middle school and highly enamored with the capabilities of my first iMac–and to compare it to now? It only being ten years doesn’t feel right. I was living with different people then. I was in a better spot in town. I was a troubled kid, but things hadn’t hit me yet. Everything shifted so damn fast.

Were they truly better? I wouldn’t say so, personally, but there’s something I miss about the naivete and desire I had to make literally anything I could possibly create with iMovie stock music and whatever else I had on hand. I aspired to content, but it was all for fun. 3D models of computers, reviews of old Atari games a la Aqualung, stop motion featuring Smurf figurines, chess pieces, my little Pooky doll (still next to me), God, the works. Didn’t matter that you could count the pixels on that old DSi camera I used. It was fun.

As I went over in my last little therapy session on here (no, they’re not gonna be a regular thing), sometime this decade, I got anxious. I decided that if I wanted attention (even from friends!), I needed to get it by being something special, by making really good things. Problem is, I was like 13. 13-year-olds don’t make anything good. A lot of weirdly undue, crushing stress and insecurity on myself later, and while I’ve made inroads, I think it’s working against me at this point.

I’ve been thinking about letting loose a lot lately. I want to have fun again. I’m tired of the nerves about writing dumb little stories about cartoon animal people. Tired of feeling like everything I do needs to be relevant to other people too. All that stuff I’ve written about these past few years about purpose, about passion, all that? I still stand by it, but it shouldn’t get in the way of just saying “fuck it” and having fun.

I wrote about this sorta thing ages ago after I’d built minerteaux, in my essay “The Day I Became a Nostalgiaminer”. I was just so burnt out on feeling like I needed to use my site for something useful that I threw out the entire deck and did everything I said was bad on said site. Fuck it, old sites are fun, lemme do something ridiculous. Let me ramble like Failure just broke up. Let me ramble like I’m scouring newsgroups for what PS1 games to get. Why? Because it’s fun.

What I’m saying is I want fun to be all I think about from here on out when it comes to my work. No obligations, no mandatory processes, no burning myself out on whether something has a point or whether the dialogue is forced or not. There’s enough room to care about that stuff when I’m up to it. If nothing’s coming out, nothing’s coming out. Let’s go play Mario Kart.

As for 2019? It’s been a year of revisiting things I liked and buried, or things I liked and got away from me. Old friends and family showed back up in my life, for better or for worse. I’ve made peace with all the madness that raised me. Of course, fun stuff too: Flashpoint let me revisit the endless hours on Miniclip I spent. This YouTube playlist is nothing but things little Cammy used to watch. I bought a mom rock album I liked when I was like 7 but got too embarrassed over to keep. Like I said at the start, it’s not an obsession with being 10 again, but that mindset of being too spergy to care much. I miss that.

And of course, the peanut gallery. Brianna and prengle. They barely register anymore, if I’m honest. I used to think Brianna was the one that inspired me to create, but man, she really didn’t. I was doing that on my own anyway. Wasn’t even the first time I wrote; I can remember doing dumb little stories in Wordpad, in essence, video game fanfic when I was little. (It was probably about as good as hers.)

When I think of the 2010s, I think more about the start and end of it; starting from playing too much Minecraft with my first ever friends and ending it with knowing where I wanna be mentally and knowing I have a group of culty dweebs and a girl I wanna eventually marry to join me. I conquered a few insecurities and remembered why I made stuff in the first place. That’s what this decade means to me.

I got groomed in the process. I’m not ashamed of it anymore. That RP’s out there thanks to him, and all it did was show Caby the one major ghoul of the decade, the stuff I got subjected to. The stuff in there I was into? She understood perfectly. The stuff in there of Brianna’s? Only made her more protective. Really couldn’t ask for a better outcome for something I just could not tell her. Good job, Bungo.

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m about to get to bed. Point is, I turned to Caby a few days ago and told her that I want to be the 20-year-old that spawned from that 10-year-old I described at the start, not the 20-year-old licking his wounds over not being a good enough writer to impress his friends or something. I hit a bit of a rough patch for a few years, the severity of which I’m only coming to realize. It’s all fixable though. More fun, more relaxed Cammy. That’s my goal. Shit’s gonna kick ass when I figure it out, and I’m well on my way.

Okay, back to the content come tomorrow. Stories, Tesserae, guitar, real life stuff, maybe drawing! Holy shit.

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