The Ides of March, 2020

Ides of March post, although it's already the 11th. Resume's pretty much done, although I'm passing it through a friend to give me some last feedback. I have a bunch of internship ads saved and plan to finish off my SAP course so I can finally apply.

My birthday's in 3 days. Used to be a bad time for me. The last time anyone aside from my parents remembered my birthday was my ex - and I left her that day four years ago, beginning the slow slip into depression. I don't really think too much about it anymore. Funny, I don't even really remember how I managed to not be miserable all the time. Flipping back through my diary, I wrote that I did this:

• Finding a major in college that I actually enjoyed and wasn't absolutely hopeless at. And I'm graduated now of course, so that's even better.
• A strict and time-consuming regiment of diet, exercise, and general self-care that would have stunned my parents. I'm happy I no longer need to keep it up to retain a positive self-image, as I'd get nothing done in life.
• Realizing that I wasn't completely friendless in college, much less in life.
• Finding a new hobby - writing a story in the hopes I will be able to adapt it into a video game one day; and planning out the game itself.

I don't know which ones were effective, honestly. I felt like I kind of had to do all of it to get better, and in a way I still think so. I guess I could have had a different hobby, but at the time I didn't really have much time or resources to pursue other hobbies, so I made do with what I had, which was school stationary and a laptop with video games installed.

Speaking of which. The legendary video game designer Hideaki Itsuno once said that all good games need a theme. I was really struggling with this. I had a clear general direction but didn't have an overhanging sentence or phrase that I could point to and say, "this is what my game is about."

Well, that changed a couple mornings ago. I was reading my Twitter feed at breakfast, which was (as with most mornings nowadays) filled with news on the COVID-19 outbreak. But that morning, something clicked.

Call it a silver lining, I guess, that in this crisis I managed to get something good for my story.