Of the all the commitments made last month, I adhered to precisely one: study French. A hard habit to break, that one, as it’s been a daily companion for 377 days now. Duolingo works. As for the other promises, well. I decided that Hitman Freelancer was the highest and all-consuming priority. I managed to maintain all the other unspoken obligations, though: strict diet; exhaustive physical strength and cardiovascular training regimens; rigid sleep schedules; total hydration; personal hygiene; cold therapy; literature consumption; daily failure and dream journals. It’s been a great month for all those things, just not for the stuff that I told myself I was going to do.
But.
Promises are funny things. How a person makes and breaks them can show how trustworthy they are. Promises should be used as yardsticks by which we measure someone’s dedication. Promises can also serve as waypoints: markers along the trail that show where someone’s been and where they might be trying to go.
I made a promise to myself in 2015 that I would give up on the dream of publishing video games, and for eight years I’d managed to keep that promise. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t doubt my decision. I had spent more than a decade prior to that point preparing myself to be a video game maker. I had blown my life savings on the project. I’d been left with a head crammed with skills that I no longer had a use for. It was like that one drawer that most of us have somewhere in our homes, the one filled with cables and miscellaneous stuff we just can’t bear to part with. Occasionally we need something that we think is buried in there somewhere, so we go digging and we’re reminded of all the seemingly useless crap we’ve accumulated. I opened that drawer inside my head every day for the past eight years and for some unfathomable reason last week I decided that it was time to pull everything out of there and start finding a use for it.
I’m building a game. Details to follow.