rant

Hibernation | Diecast Diaries

Mounting coursework, endless frustration and the worst possible voices in my head are keeping me far away from the hobby. So I slept. And will wake up soon.

I'll be straight with you: I've burned out. After finishing my big year-end feature (which wasn't too well-received), I found myself in a place I didn't want to be. The lazy place. The dim-blue corner of the room I share with my parents and younger brother where I endlessly replay everything that ever happened over the past year, weeping quietly while doing so. He gnaws into me, taking bite after bite, and after he has chewed me out, he says to me: "This is all your fault for not acting decisively enough and perfectly enough". And I agree with him, every night while I stare at the screen to try and be distracted.

Worse is, my cars don't rev up my heart as much anymore. The television in my head, where the images come to life at the touch of metal, has blurred to static, unable to make an image no matter how hard I hit my head on the bedroom wall or dining table. And with no one else to talk to -- believing that it's futile to look for advice when everything is mediated by screens anyway -- my only recourse is to eat back the tears and detritus, showing a veneer of competence, if tinged slightly by chest pain, to the moving pictures that pass of as classmates on my laptop's retina display. Add to that the fact that I've relied too much on the parasocial thanks to YouTube, and it's easy to see how I may deteriorate day by day, unable to produce something truly powerful that can come only from me.

So I didn't. Rather than waste time on something that I don't think anyone will care too much about, I turned blogging into a night job, hunting for interesting content outside of diecast cars that I can spin up into a click-worthy piece. And it worked! It worked so well, in fact, that I now have three stories going over 100 bumps, and I'm being paid enough pounds sterling that I can actually stay afloat to buy both necessities for myself and wants worth having. I was on my way to achieving a level of self-sustainability that I reckon I can take risks and not feel like I'm gimping my parents or my brother.

But it wasn't satisfying. My blogs weren't furthering my creative ambitions; it was a routine. And even then, it was sporadic; often I find material elsewhere that I find interesting only to end up forgetting that I even thought of saving that, thus making me feel like I have nothing to write even if I have a fair bit. Before I knew it, it was turning into a vicious spin cycle. My car has skipped off the kerb, rolled, and kept rolling down, down, down a cliff, with no way to get out even if I wanted to. Probably because I didn't want to.

Call it ideation induced by anxiety and manic depression, or call it sloth. Thing is, I simply couldn't bring myself to give any more effort and heart into the words because I let the futility pervade my psyche. The routine blog is one thing; in reality, I wanted to tell a different story, one that is unbound by word count or academic standards.

Each day that I look at my draft folder, I disappoint myself. My Hot 5 still isn't finished. I was supposed to review the new TopGear three months ago. I was supposed to talk about race circuit design, the power and importance of Oppositelock, hot takes on who the GOATS of motorsport are, and four flash-fiction vignettes for a world that is now crumbling beneath my palms. At one point I even had an idea to pit the Valkyrie AMR Pro and the Bugatti Bolide in a tale of the tape, two quizzes about Initial D and Super GT, respectively, a long-overdue game review, another reviewoftheGrandTour episode a retrospective featuringrelics frommycollection andaverticalonjeepneysandmyanthologyandsomemoreopiions--

--I should shut up.