Life has an interesting way of piling on challenges and additional obstacles to navigate, huh? On top of everything going on, my laptop recently wouldn’t start up at all so I had to drop it off for repair and learned that unfortunately my hard drive was toast and all the files which we thought could be recovered were in fact either missing or corrupted. So not only did I lose five Tarqaron videos that were soon to be edited, but I also lost all of my assets that I had accumulated including logos for different series and thumbnail templates that I had fine-tuned. So that’s a bummer, yet another setback. But hey, it’s not the worst thing to happen to me this year. Since my hard drive has been replaced, I at least have a functioning laptop to work with now. So while it definitely sucks to lose some great videos and all those assets, I can still bounce back from this pretty quickly I think.

There’s not much of a “bright side” to this since I’m $150 poorer and all I have to show for it is the same laptop minus some important files. Ha, lesson learned, I guess. I don’t know why I was an idiot and didn’t have this stuff on my external hard drive to begin with, though. A bright side is that I’m off from work for the next eight days, so I’ll be able to focus all of my efforts on getting myself to where I want to be. I have a lot that I want to get done over this next week, so I’m going to use this blog to hopefully hold myself to it. I want to get my resume/portfolio properly put together, get my damn car fixed, work on more Tarqaron videos despite the lost ones, and start filming videos for my solo channel again. And hopefully take some time to actually relax and enjoy time with friends as well (though I do really enjoy making videos, the amount of time they consume tends to make them resemble “work” in some ways – minus the income).

Overall, I don’t feel like I’m doing too bad mentally, though. I have these pockets of sadness that really bum me out when I think of fun times with former friends, but I have to take solace in the fact that there are a lot of truly good, authentic people in my life now. I’m more grateful now than ever for everyone who brings positivity to my life and everyone who is really there for me. God, I have such a greater appreciation for just simple kindness these days. It’s not too much to ask and yet there are still so many who choose to not be kind. This year I feel like I’ve already experienced both how cruel people can be and how kind people can be. It’s just really refreshing to be experiencing more of the latter than the former recently. Here’s to the bright side.

I think I’ll have reached true happiness once I can have days where I do basically nothing and still feel content at the end of the day. I imagine this is a somewhat common feeling, but I’ll have these days where I decide to laze around the whole day, and at first it might seem like a good idea, but then after the fact I feel bad about accomplishing nothing of value. Even if it was a fun time, I’m still a bit hard on myself, like did I really just waste a whole day when I could have been working on this or that? This is just a thought I had recently, that once I’m at a point where I can shake that feeling, I think I’ll be in a good place in life. As much as I want to say that I deserve to have lazy days for myself, and to some extent I do, I can’t help but think of how much more progress I could have made on everything that I want to work towards if I had just been a little more productive each day.

But maybe that’s just me. Everyone says to live life with no regrets, but I have a lot of regrets. I can’t help it. There are just a lot of things I look back on and think if I just did this little thing different here or there then my quality of life would be significantly better than where I’m at today. A lot of it is stupid stuff that I should probably forget about, but a lot of it ultimately stems from me not fully appreciating my experiences and living more in the moment. And in that regard, I feel like I would never be able to improve my life if I didn’t have these regrets. But there’s a better balance in there somewhere, I’ve gotta let at least some of it go.

Let me just meander back to the subject of “lazy” days. This ties into something I mentioned in a previous blog, which is that “keeping busy” has been helpful for me, especially recently. Having too much to do is much more preferable to having nothing to do because depression takes its toll the most when you have nothing but your thoughts and a lot of time on your hands. I love video games, movies, and TV but ironically I find myself having less time for those things because I’m spending so much time making/editing videos where I talk about them. In an ideal world I would be able to devote all of my time to consuming this media and making videos about it, because that’s really what I am most passionate about. In fact, one of the next things I want to do is get back to making videos for my solo channel which I haven’t done in over a year. I’ve got a lot of ideas for it but it will be quite an undertaking considering I already spend a lot of my free time editing videos for my other channel and this will be even more work to add to my plate. But hey, gotta keep busy, right?

I feel like I was a bit all over the place with this one, not too much to talk about. I never really know what I’m going to write about until I start typing these things. I wish I had more interesting stuff that I could write about, but that’s just where I’m at right now. I’ll hopefully be taking time off from work in a couple of weeks, so that should be good. With all that time on my hands, that’s where the true test comes in. Man vs depression. Can man keep busy enough to combat it? Stay tuned. As always, I appreciate you all.