So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

Well this certainly isn’t the post I thought I was going to make today, so if you want the usual talk about my recent gaming, you can see that here.

After a series of events and conversations today, I’ve reached a point where I need to prioritize the things in my life and where I spend my energy. I love board gaming, but the lack of response and impact that I’m having has been eating away at me for some time. That’s not to say that I don’t have friends and conversations about games, but what got me into reviewing was a passion and it has had to fight for my time and energy with everything else that I want to do. 3D printing, proofreading, playtesting, video games, time with my wife, and so much more.

I deal with depression and impostor syndrome on a regular basis. On my best days, I fight to stay afloat. On bad days, I just want to curl up in bed. But I’ve been fighting those feelings to work on publishing reviews and posts, set up and run events, and try to make an impact on this hobby. I spend time feeling guilty about not turning out reviews and posts faster, about not playing the games that I’ve been sent, about not running events online. But my posts have never been headliners, my events have never gotten crowds, and my online events frequently get ignored.

I also deal with hypervigilism and I’m very bad at saying no to people. I work harder than I should and take on more tasks than I can accomplish only to take on even more work because if I don’t do it, no one else will. That combined with the depression and impostor syndrome has left me fighting to feel like I’m doing anything right or for the right reasons.

So for now, I’m putting this away. It’s not like I can run demos right now, and with fewer than 200 views last month on my blog, I likely won’t really be missed. I still have games to review, but I don’t know when those will come out.

I’ll come back and do things, but it’ll be a while.

As I posted on social media, if you are a publisher or designer and want me to send along a game that I haven’t gotten reviewed to another reviewer, please let me know. I’m working with some folks at Punchboard Media to get some games into their hands as well.