EPT
Today I sit with no money, no job, and what little work I have is slowly being taken away from me by people who are simply better connected. There is no point at which hard work starts to pay off. That is what I’m realizing. Nothing you do will get you anywhere if you only just work hard.
You need dedication, but you also need a hidden ingredient: ambition.
You need to realize that the world around you is made up of little tiny bricks and cables, avenues built where only the rich may trod. You have to be willing to give up in order to receive, a skill which only a varied few master. Pacing along the track of life, it’s tempting to veer off into another lane to get an edge, but no sooner do you fly off the beaten path than you find that where you veered wasn’t the greatest pathway. So you stay. You become idle, a machine running in the same track, down the same road, insisting that hard work and perseverance will pay off in the end, but here’s the secret: it won’t.
The only certainty in life is that things will change. You will find yourself in a difficult position, feel trapped, and, clinging to basic instincts, do absolutely nothing at all in order to preserve yourself. You simply stop. However, instead of pausing or playing dead, your focus should rather be on pivoting -- absorbing the blow and using the energy elsewhere.
For me, it’s my writing.
Writing is a craft I have been honing since I was 13. At that age, I had no real interest in writing or reading until I met a wonderful girl with a passion for it. As foolishness at a young age follows, I became entranced with reading myself in order to know her better. And yet, a part of that stuck with me. I loved the lore, I loved grasping onto words and making them my friends. They were internalized into my structure, into my makeup, and I began to write.
My writing at that time was atrocious. Even now, I look back at my old journals and marvel at the boyish bravado I once had and cringe at some of the poorly worded “poetic” phrases. But they were my phrases. They were beautiful then to me, so they are beautiful to me now.
I practiced this in daily journal writing throughout most of high school. I became deeply involved in my own world, writing stories, lyrics, poetry. Honestly, that’s probably the beginning of my introversion. I believed maybe one day I could publish these things, possibly.
And then it actually did happen. I got published. My poetry was selected among several dozen other entries to be featured in the school poetry book called Pegasus. Two poems! I still cling to those bits of poetry, even though they severely lacked the metric consistency to strengthen them. Nonetheless, they were absolute truth, and some of those words I live by even today.
But poetry did not last, nor did journal writing. For a large portion of my college career, I found myself involved in other things -- cooking, gaming, playing piano, etc. This part of my life also contains an entire story about pivoting, but for the sake of this article, I’ll leave it out. The important part was that I lost touch with writing and the words that kept me company at night when everything else seemed wrong.
Then I discovered what it was like to write down thoughts in an Internet forum. I began to discuss ideas and strategies with people, come up with my own ideas, and find new ways to explain my rationale. It was exhilarating to rediscover those words I sought after when I was younger and turn them into something else. I began to write strategy.
Strategy was a great topic for me. I’ve always enjoyed learning how things work and breaking them apart to find out firsthand. Strategy, especially in a game like StarCraft II, was a goldmine for words and opportunities to express myself. I could talk for days and days about why Maru did this or why Snute went Swarm Hosts. It was exciting stuff. I never did much coverage, just strategy. I tried out so many different ideas for article styles and learned how to explain things to the newest pleb so that they could understand the words and translate it into their own play. Even though it’s hard to admit it, this is probably my favorite time to write ever, even if I did have ups and downs with the game itself.
But then the game just became overwhelming. I just got tired of the game, burned out, and I couldn’t play it anymore. I quit StarCraft II permanently, uninstalled it from my machine. I was just tired of trying so hard and getting nowhere -- I did the same strategies over and over trying to refine them, but no amount of hard work could actually take me to the next level.
So I quit. For a while I didn’t do anything. I worked and made money, paid off my debts. I had nothing important to do, and for a while the words slipped away from me yet again.
And then I landed on a new turf: Heroes of the Storm. At first my writing consisted mainly of super technical guides, but as I began to feel more comfortable with my writing, I began to branch out to more coverage. For me, this was an entirely new and exciting field.
I felt I had mastered the technical writing aspect, but I was ready to take on a more journalistic approach. I began writing previews for tournaments and recaps, all interesting stuff I had never done before. I grasped the words in a new way and attempted to take my previously monotonous analytical tone and turn it into a vibrant voice that rang through the article with esports passion! For me, it was all about trying to make something great in a place where I had previously never attempted such a thing.
And then depression. Depression is a fickle beast that always strikes you at your weakest point. For active people, it prevents them from getting out of bed. For unsure people, it preys upon their biggest insecurity. For me, it killed my writing.
Depression for me is like the worst form of writer’s block imaginable. I literally cannot piece together two sentences when I’m under the dark influence of this brooding cloud. And the most painful part of this is that it can last anywhere from a day to several weeks. For several weeks, I can be separated from my words.
Of course, as a writer, this is...bad. Not being able to write is like not being allowed to breath or walk or move. It’s the perfect antithesis of what I need to survive.
Luckily, I got over it. I know at any moment it can come back and destroy me, but for now the beast is in check and I have my phrasing back again. Or so I thought.
Maybe it’s the fallout of my original forays into analytical writing, maybe there’s a half-life on depression, but whatever the case, I still have trouble piecing together sentences sometimes.
I want to write beautiful, flowing articles that deliver feeling and content in the same stroke. I want people to look at my work and adore it because it is, indeed, well cultivated from an early age and improved upon constantly. So I edit the shit out of it. I edit my work a lot. I try to make it like an incredible arrangement of splendor that takes people’s breath away -- at least, that’s my goal.
But sometimes I don’t always have time to edit. Sometimes life is, well, busy. And then, being forced into two articles I never wanted to write in the first place, and being set on a very strict time schedule, I faltered. I made a small error and showed my weakness for one second. And that’s all it took to be thrown out, to be chastised and ridiculed as a writer. Ridiculed? Yes, I’m a fucking editor for God’s sake, I know when something obviously has bad phrasing when I read it.
If you give me an hour to complete an article on no sleep after an exhausting day, I will get you an article, but you have to understand that those are extenuating circumstances.
So here I am, wallowing in the broken bits of my misery and wondering what went wrong. I loved the words all my life, but they fail me now. My head is a constant thunderstorm of aches and cloudy vision. Who am I? What am I?
I’m wondering if it’s time to pivot. I’ve been trying...so hard. I’ve been trying to get these words from my head to the page for a long time, but I just can’t seem to make them work. They aren’t my words anymore, they aren’t truth. They aren’t the beautiful phrases my adolescent brain grasped onto and held on for dear life. They are dull, dead, void, worn out by overusage.
What is the phrase? “There’s nothing new under the sun”? We repeat words over and over, and sometimes it begins to feel like there’s no other combination left, that the words we felt inspired to write once -- be it about cosmic rays of light, the ghost of the navigator, or a pain-dull paradise -- are no longer inspired but rather a repeat of what has already been said many many many times before.
And yet, some things do remain timeless. What makes them timeless? What keeps those words from wearing out when others fade? The only thing I can find is truth.
The only truth I know is -- these words escape me.
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. This video did resonate very strongly with me. I've poured everything I've had into my work here over the past few months and I've hit a brick wall. "Don't cry to give up; cry to keep going." ^^
