2023 Won’t Be My Year

2022 was a burning garbage pit in my life. I quit a high-paying(for me and my background) job over burnout. I was squeezed out of my apartment by a rent hiked and forced to move into a literal slum. I had two distinct mental breakdowns that required a reshuffling of my medication. It’s been a fun time.

I’m not naive enough to believe that the four digit year has anything to do with my experience or quality of life. I don’t believe that seeing that number roll over signifies a fresh start of any sort. But I’m a big fan of data and data needs to be broken down to be useful. Sorting that data by year is as useful as any other standard, so I’m willing to eschew my cynicism in favor of clean start and end points for the various metrics I measure in my life.

So, what did I achieve in 2022? Nothing of note. I made maybe 3 mediocre jam games, wrote a few thousand pages of a novel I won’t finish, and did a bunch of free work for interviews that are just sitting on top of my portfolio waiting for me to actually put the thing together. Not a whole lot, considering I had 365 days to do it and I’ve had individual weeks in my life where I’ve accomplished more.

So 2023… What to say? I want to avoid making a resolution because they’re just dumb promises we use to punish ourselves when it turns out we weren’t an NYC ball drop away from being self-actualized. But I do want to do something, anything, more than I did last year. To shift those data points in a positive direction. I could definitely do less. You have no idea how many PS2 ISOs I have sitting on hard drive right now. I can play 15 year old games for the next 12 months without batting an eye.

But I don’t want to do that because it isn’t me. In my productive times I’m busy and the closest thing to happy I’ve personally experienced. In my unproductive times I’m sluggish, depressed, and antisocial. I hate feeling that way, which ends up causing me to spiral. I don’t like spiraling. I’ve done it too many times the past couple years. How do I stop? I don’t have a clue. My brain is chemically oriented towards depression, anxiety, and self-loathing. If there was a book or meditation technique that could fix that, I’d have found it by now. Psilocybin is great, but I’m too broke for it. I’d like to try ketamine therapy, but I’m WAYYY too broke for that. I don’t have insurance to keep my SSRIs going and with my last few flips, I feel like I’m coming up on the end of what those drugs could do for me.

My mental health is outside of my control. What may or may not be in my control is my outlook. I’m not going to try to hit a series of goals. I’m not going to try to have a year of firsts. This probably won’t be the year I complete a novel. It definitely won’t be the year I get completely on the ball and fix every piece of shit habit I have. But I want it to be better than last year. I want to do more than last year. Honestly, with a bar that fucking low, I actually have some semblance of confidence here.

2023 isn’t going to be my year. But it is going to be a year I live through and I hope like fuck I can live marginally better than I did last year.