Let's Chat.

Hi.

It's been a while. Let's sit down and talk for a bit.

Getting straight to the point: within the past year, the handling of Leave Luck to Heaven has become a gradual collapse. Regardless of your opinion and the few works I have successfully penned and published, the blog has been nothing more than broken promises and bouts of several-month absences. The reasons for why this happened last year were due to a mixture of miscalculations, pure laziness, and the gradual, very stressful revelation of the insecurities that had webbed intricately to massive proportions, all of which have unconsciously hampered my life. Reviews were not finished, new features never came to full fruition, and previous ones were abandoned. It was something I set to resolve for 2012, and life had actually been going swell for the first month and a half.

Largely unbeknownst to me, unfortunately, a series of misfortunes were about to rear their ugly heads and transformed the tone of a year that I was hoping to designate as a celebratory reflection to an utterly demoralizing experience that led to heartbreak and disillusionment, leaving me a shivering, sleepless mess at night. Okay, maybe that mental image was a little dramatic, but that actually is an accurate description for a certain period.

To begin with what I did know, my insecurities struck again in a way that attacked the blog's heart: Its uncertain direction and my writing skills. The blog's fragile, wavering sense of shifting course was not lost on me, and often I wondered if I was really handling it properly. Were writing these reviews in ways that exhaust over a week's worth of time really necessary? Was I really going to risk promising a new feature only to never properly follow up on it? I've also realized I've had a bad habit of comparing my writing to various other outlets, and suddenly it made me feel very small. To provide an example, I tried numerous revisions for the first half of my Skyward Sword review only to never find a satisfactory model for me to build upon. Many times I wondered, "Am I really taking it in the right direction? Will people care if I discuss this bit? Does this whole thing really matter?" So there's one reason.

The second reason has to do with my failure to follow up on Ten Years' Reflection, and this was mainly dumbassery on my part. I found out the hard way that I hadn't been taking care of my older games properly, and it was then I remembered that SNES game cartridges being out in the open and the ubiquitous presence of dust don't mix. Thankfully not too many games were affected, but unfortunately two of my favorites (Earthbound and Kirby Super Star) were contaminated. Both still work, and I can still play Earthbound knowing the occasional graphical glitch won't bother me so much, but that's not the case with the latter. It drove a dagger into my heart in numerous ways and it completely ruined what I intended to do for the year. Good news is that I did repurchase the same cleaning kit that fixed my NES games a couple years back (which are also acting up again recently, yikes!), so we'll get that checked up and see if it works.

Finally, and this is by far the most important, I had suffered from personal crises that opened numerous old wounds. I can't exactly discuss these in explicit detail due to their involvement with other people, but two of these were especially poignant in that a) one incident revolved around someone I had looked up to being arrested for a crime he had previously been accused of, which was something I never thought I would have to deal with again and b) what had initially started as a friendship being threatened by a hazy, uncertain tension gradually revealed an episode that imperiled one of the most important people in my life and the question of whether or not that was actually the case left my mental state completely fucked up for over a week until I knew everything was okay.

So, there you have it, then. But what happens now?

The blog's future has been prodding at my brain for the past several months, and I'd be lying if I didn't think "You know, I might as well just end things here." I mean, why not? I was doing well in college, making bigger strides in reaching out to people, getting used to interaction, finding my path to Christianity, and whatnot. Why let a tiny blog get in the way of everything?

It's funny, though. I had all these plans last year to give my life a kickstart and finally become more active, but it all fell apart. Right now, even after this spring left my life in shambles, I somehow feel more confident, and somehow I find it amusing that I needed a tremendous kick in the ass to become inspired. I guess this was all life's way of saying "Shit happens, don't let everything trip you up all at once, and stand your ground"? Whatever the case, for whatever reason it feels right.

I still want to write. Speak to me in public and you'll find I'm a different man. I'm introverted, I don't like speaking up out of fear and rejection, and the times I do speak are littered with half-hearted attempts at interaction and me being unable to control the rate of my speech. On here, however, I can find solace in saying whatever I want. My desire to speak up can be fully realized here, and I can make all the thoughts I can't orally verbalize a reality right here. More than anything, the greatest joy I have writing here is that knowing that my family and friends can see this side of me they don't normally see face-to-face, and that's a benefit I don't want to lose anytime soon.

So here's the deal: The blog will indeed go on, but I'm not going to start where I left off. While I do have its course roughly planned out, I won't make any promises by not announcing anything. I do have my next post in mind, though, and I already picked a day to begin writing it: Tomorrow! (Well, technically later today). I suppose we can further discuss the blog's future after how well that goes.

See you soon.