Learning How to Deal When Life Keeps Changing
I’m putting a new rule in place for myself: if I think about a topic often enough that I want to head to Bluesky to start a thread, I’ll start writing here instead. Right? If I want to be better at regular long-form writing, then I have to actually do it. Retrain my brain out of 240-character chunks. So let’s go.
About four years ago, my wife and I became parents. It’s obvious that having kids changes everything but what I wasn’t prepared for is how it would change the context of my life. See, my particular brand of neurodivergence thrives when I’ve got things going on in my environment which 1. I have no control over and 2. still operate according to rules I can learn to understand.
Prior to being a stay at home parent, I worked jobs, mostly retail. The last job I had before parenthood, I was a beer buyer for a hands-on kind of beer and liquor dept at a local grocery. I got to learn a bunch about alcohol and I got to share that knowledge with customers. People would come to the store to get my advice on what to buy for a night out, parties, etc. I also had a decent amount of down time so I could even write games on a slow Sunday. It was the best job I’d ever had. It had both of those things in spades.
I traded that to stay home and take care of the kiddo (which became two kiddos about 2.5 years ago). It was an awesome choice but what I didn’t reckon with the transitions that were going to happen.
I went from leaving the house to be smart and social five days a week to being home most of the time.
I went from being an expert at my work to having to learn everything new, pretty much on a daily basis.
I went from being social and affable with co-workers and customers to being alone with an infant (they don’t talk much, but their screaming is on point).
And my wife was going through an unbelievably difficult recovery from pregnancy and birth, close friends moved away months into this (just after the pandemic let us see each other in person again), and well, you get the idea.
Life has been hard in a variety of ways. I’ve had to learn entirely new ways of thinking to be able to handle things. It has all been a lot. A whole hell of a lot.
What does this have to do with creating games? I started writing this thinking about how the two items I mentioned above and I’m realizing as I’m typing that it’s so much more.
I’ve never really had a plan or a strategy for how I write games. I thought I was going to have one coming out of the Kickstarters for You Are the Dungeon and Iron Edda Reforged, but I couldn’t handle it. My plans relied on my life being too much like what it had been when I was working. And it’s taken me most of four years to figure all of that out.
Folks, it’s been rough. It continues to be rough in a lot of ways. The really good news is that I’ve figured out a lot about who I am, what I actually think is important in life, and how I want to go about getting it. I never had plans for the future before, not really. Now I’ve got things I want to get done and a life I want to try to live. So I’m going to do my best to do it.
Life with kids definitely has a lot of things outside of my control. It has precious few solid rules I can learn to navigate (aside from “be flexible” which is a tough one). The uncertainty has made me dig deeper, take more actual responsibility for my actions, and generally just work to be a better, more intentional person. I’m glad of that, even if it’s been far more difficult than I expected. I’m a more complete person than before and I’m excited to see what that brings to my work.
Next time, I’ll write some more about what the specific plans are. I think I’ve got a workable model set up, I just need to, y’know, work it.