Patreon Letter: 31st January 2021

Hey everyone,

Jackson here with the Patreon letter. I hope you've been keeping well. I have been having a minor existential crisis, but that's just regular shit for me and I assume everyone else, none of us are as free to live the no thoughts head empty life as we so desire. No real cause for concern. But I do surprise myself by how often I feel Old.

I should not feel Old. I turned 27 in November, which is the age Char was when he was still Young. But I do, whether this is valid or not, and it's been leading to some uncomfortable nights. My entire approach to how I engage with media is somewhat broken and predicated on the fact that I will, obviously, live forever. I will watch every movie on my hard drive, I will play every JRPG ever made, I will experience in its fullest context and become the only one who truly understands everything.

This is obviously stupid, and basically creates a situation where my terror of death is, for some reason, stopping me from watching Hunter x Hunter. The dual mental illnesses of what if I do it a non-optimal way colliding with how can I do all this while I'm still alive, colliding with the self awareness that this is all stupid and doesn't matter I'm worrying about Cartoons. I worry about a bunch of stupid shit and then end up not doing much anyway so I guess it didn't matter in the first place.

To conclude: Normal Brain.

Anyway the point is that I think coming on a year of not leaving my fucking house, with realising that I've been doing Abnormal Mapping since I was 19 and I'm 27 now, has just stirred up some residual feelings about wasting my life. Not because I believe Abnormal Mapping is wasting my life - I love it, it's easily the thing I am most proud of and I wouldn't trade it for anything - but instead the far simpler explanation that the actual successes don't count. Normal Brain, once again. 

This year I really want to fight against this, but I don't exactly know how. Every Idea I have is to work harder, to Produce enough to validate myself, which is just buying into the exact same ideas of capitalism that are causing all this psychic pressure in the first place. We'll see what this ends up meaning in practice. Maybe - as I say every year - this will be the year I finally find the time to write something more substantial and creative. Maybe I'll edit a video essay, just to show that's something I can do. Maybe I'll just find it within myself to let myself rest. lol.

I guess this current wave of my personal constantly repeating evangelion crisis was brought on by rewatching the Stewart Lee stand up specials for the first time since 2012. When I watched them in 2012 they were electric, as you could imagine they were to a depressed and sardonic British university student. If you've not seen Stewart Lee, here's a short routine you can watch, he's the UK's peak of a comedian for comedy nerds or just writerly nerds in general. And I always found him particularly inspiring at the time, because I was doing a degree in screenwriting and had aspirations of making films (lmao) and wanted to be the kind of person with a body of work that you could see develop over time, and appreciate the stylistic shifts, the choices taken and the interests abandoned.

And in a way, I've succeeded! I've got eight years of podcasts that I'm deeply proud of, and more than that, I think at least 90% of them are shit. I don't mean that. But I do mean if you try to listen to anything I made over six months ago, I will personally knock your phone out of your hand, off the bus and into the road. I don't mean that. You know what I mean. I don't think there is anything static about the work we put out, even in Gundam which is a show about making basically the same five points about a very formulaic cartoon in its design, there are clear phases, areas where we grow and change and shift. And sometimes that results in embarassment for earlier work but that's just part of making stuff and putting it out there, it is what it is. And I think that's good.

Which raises the question, what am I actually unfulfilled about? Why do I feel so anxious about what I'm watching in my offtime, and what I'm producing in my ontime, as if there's going to be some kind of final grade when I die based entirely around my engagement with media for teenagers. Is this simply an inevitable feeling, that no matter what I spend my time on I will always feel as if there is a better road that could have been taken? Probably. 

But I do think, broadly speaking, as this year goes on I want to try new things and push myself more, whether that means different podcasts, writing more, getting back into music - it doesn't matter. The what is not important so much as I want to be less laser focused and scared of failure, I suppose. The constant struggle is simply finding ways to do that when my chest hurts every day and I'm exhausted all the time, because of the world. That isn't changing anytime soon. 

So I guess welcome to 2021. Sorry for the meandering and existential letter, but it's honest to my headspace the past week. Let's remember that all of that is on some level bullshit and hope these twelve months - which are almost certain to be materially worse than the last, somehow - are simply ones that we survive. 

-Jackson