The Standard

Yesterday was extremely difficult for me.

January, 22nd 2022 was the intended launch date of Arc 5. We worked harder on the debut than we’ve worked on anything in recent memory. I missed sleep, worked 7 days a week, and still didn’t get it ready in time. Don’t get me wrong, the episode was complete, but it wouldn’t render properly. I eventually did figure out the problem and moving forward, things should be a bit smoother. I tried every trick I could think of to get that final file ready. I was absolutely crushed when we had to make the announcement to push the debut back a week. It was the most depressed I’ve been in a very long time. I felt absolutely worthless. I honestly felt like such a failure that the world would be better off without me. Not a great place to be mentally.

Thankfully, I have a wonderful wife and a fantastic best friend to talk things over for a while. The strangest thing was, I couldn’t quite find the words to describe why I was this upset. It’s just a week, right? It’s not a big deal. The episode will be that much better because of the extra polish. I know that all of that is true. Logically, I know all of that. But it didn’t help in that moment. I could feel something coming to a head that had been there for a while. Something I just brushed off or backburnered until it culminated in yesterday. I wrote about burnout in my last post. I didn’t have an intention of a theme or anything, it was just on my mind at the time. I think I know why though.

When you make stuff like we do for a living time and accomplishments feel different. If you create videos, music, books, movies or anything online you probably know what I mean by this. Working a job where you’re on the clock has a lot of drawbacks. It does have one thing though for a lot of people, a sense that you’re accomplishing something. Even if that thing is finishing a shift, you’ve done that. No one can take it away. It’s concrete and you can point to it. Me and Bri sort of work on a “project” system. The workweek never really “ends”. One day blends into the next and you just get used to it after a while. The feelings of accomplishment come from finishing a major task.

“Oh, we finished a book! We should celebrate.”

“That finale was pretty good!”

“Dragoncon went well!”

I’m not sure why the big stuff is a pressure release, but I’m sure someone more intelligent than me has already done a study on stuff like this. I try to hold myself to a standard. When you’re the boss, the buck stops with you. I always say that when D&R is all over, I don’t wanna look back and say “I could have tried harder”. That mentality goes into everything we do. I poured everything into that episode. We crammed this new system, bartered with sponsors, hyped up the debut on social media and worked 12 to 16 hours a day at times. And then we missed it. Every time something goes wrong we try to talk ourselves up. If we lose some support online, we point to the next thing on the horizon that might win them back. If we don’t bring in the numbers for something that we were hoping for, we learn new things about marketing and keep trying. If we lose a sponsor because I didn’t sell enough electric testicle shavers, I practice being a better salesperson. To be very honest with you all, we’d been doing this kind of thing a lot recently. And each time that something bad would happen, we’d point to that debut. I hope you can maybe see why it meant so much. You also might just think I’m crazy.

So, we unplugged yesterday after the announcement. We watched a movie and had a few drinks. We wanted to reset. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to treat myself a little better. I want to be in my best form for every session, every recording, and every stream. I can’t do that if I keep living the way I’ve been living. I’ve back-burnered a lot of my own needs because it wasn’t in line with the show. I’ve always been an overweight guy. I don’t have a great metabolism and I like to eat the wrong stuff because it’s fast and I can get back to work. It’s a super basic formula for being heavy. The thing is, when I was about 33 or so, something clicked. I started eating slightly better and walked a ton. I had a pretty active job at the time and it all just worked out. I started losing weight. Like….a lot of weight. I started out at around 340lbs or so (I’m 6’3” for the record) and ended up losing about 120lbs.

It’s important to note that I didn’t have a plan or a goal. It wasn’t a diet or something super conscious that I was doing. Like I said, it all just sort of clicked. I felt fantastic and it pretty much improved a ton of aspects of my life. I thought my mood had improved, I could buy clothes off the rack in a store if I liked what I saw, and my bad knee didn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to. Shortly after this, I changed jobs and moved to California. I lived a pretty spartan lifestyle at first and rarely had healthy food in the house. However, I distinctly remember buying ice cream one day for the first time in well over a year. I told myself that I would pick at it here and there and just have some in moderation. Here’s the thing about moderation:

I’m bad at it.

You combine that with a job that involves me sitting at a desk for 12 to 14 hours a day and you get regression. I’ve slowly put a lot of weight back on and I hate it. I feel sluggish and heavy. I’m hot all the time and I just want to be better. The problem is, I feel like I accidentally discovered some secret formula and can’t replicate it. My life is just way different than it used to be and I need to try something different. The point of all this is that I need to find a new standard. Treating myself a little more like a person and a little less like a brain in a jar that happens to run a tabletop RPG show. I’ll be giving this all a lot of thought and probably trying some new things. I’ve been bouncing around the idea of an RPG diet of sorts.

In closing, I wanted to thank everyone out there who took the time to write something nice after the announcement. I have a hard time swallowing stuff like that and dealing with feelings. It’s just a thing about how I was raised. I do appreciate it though. I’m far luckier than I feel as though I deserve at times.