Beyond the summit

I worked my ass off this weekend. I'll start by saying that. I'm not looking for a pat on the back when I say that - nobody's making me do all this stuff, I operate out of sheer boredom. I do not feel owed anything for how hard I've been working, is what I'm trying to say. All of this has just been to stop me from going crazy, and I like being productive and creating stuff. "Working" is fun for me.

Okay, so, I worked my ass off this weekend. And also the week before that and the week before that and also the week before that. This website, the Discord, and the server are the results of about a month's worth of work (most of it got done during this plague break, but I still had a motivator before it), and for some reason, I genuinely thought that after all this was over and everything launched, I would be free of stress and I would just get to cruise and be proud of myself. I was wrong.
When I woke up on Monday, March 30th, I was hyped and ready to finally finish everything I'd been working towards and prove to myself that I could ace a goal if I really set my mind to it. I knew that there would still be some work to be done once I started getting traffic, but all I foresaw were some minor bugs that I've become pretty confident at squashing (big props to Noah aka moose9999/LILSNuP and Sam aka Guapdad4000/_KR0NK_ for helping a ton). When the server went live at exactly noon on Monday, it was the beginning of a new era. Everything was going to pay off and I would finally be able to chill with my friends from school and marvel with them at how great I was at everything. I started playing the game Celeste in November, and it's really helped me with the anxiety I get to have by being a teenager, and remotivated to push myself and climb my mountain(s). (The game is about a young woman who climbs a mountain just to prove a point to herself. It's layered, full of metaphors, and means a lot to me.) I've been thinking a lot about the game in the four months it's taken me to fully complete it, (minus the golden strawberries, I don't need those to manage my anxiety) and I started to view getting these projects I've been trying to finish for forever but have never really had the skill or willpower to see through to the end completed as my mountain to climb. On Monday at noon, I thought I had finally reached the summit. I celebrated with Esther (known online as BirdLark) and my dad with this song. It was finally over.
For about 5 minutes. I briefly reveled in my success that just a month ago had seemed unreachable, and then I hopped on the server to welcome everyone. And that was when I realized that getting a Minecraft server online does not even remotely reduce your workload. Here's a list of stuff that's gone wrong since Monday and has only recently been fixed or is still broken (today's Wednesday):

- Players don't regenerate health
- Trees don't decay
- Warps are broken
- Teleport requests are broken
- It's been 11:41 in game for about 72 hours
- Everyone wants to manage the server for me
- This isn't fun anymore
- I just told a lot of people I was living my best life and climbing my hill or some stupid shit and now my dumbass server is running at 1000 ping and MCProhosting is taking four days to respond to my tickets
- This is something that nine year olds can do right and I have the nerve to ask for $5 donations when everything's falling apart faster than I can put it back together

I guess the lesson I've learned is that there's always more mountains, or something. That sounds dumb. You don't just get put on easy street because you believed in yourself. We're supposed to be getting even more school work next week. I haven't been practicing my instruments enough. I am quick to anger. Video games are stressing me out. I am listening to more angry hip hop. I hate this. I hate being stuck inside. I hate being bombarded with news about the virus whenever I turn on my phone or get in the car. I hate not being able to see my friends. It's not even the virus. It's me. I am actively failing at this. I still think that losing your shit over the virus is stupid yet it's getting to me. It feels like I, along with everyone else, am slipping.
This is really a downer of a dev blog post. I was hoping to write a "good albums to crunch to" post or get all the staff's favorite games to quarantine to. It's okay, though. I'm losing it a little, but I got this. We're gonna get to see each other eventually and nobody's making me stress this much about my projects. I will say that I'm pretty scared my grades are gonna start slipping and I'm even more scared because that doesn't really matter to me. It's still okay. I'm not losing my audience. When the server's really ready, people will stay for awhile. One of my friends made the good point that I have made it this far. That was helpful, thanks for saying that. I guess I've just been upset that the complete peace I decided I'd feel once I was "done" isn't real. It's cool doe. I think I kind of get it now. More. Writing this helped, I might do some more of these (especially since I don't have any social media to vent on) and tag them with "Personal" or something. I don't know. Thanks for reading this far if you did, but I hope you didn't. This isn't the sort of thing I could really write in my journal and I haven't been able to verbalize how I've been feeling in therapy, so getting this all out felt good. And it's good to give my parents a break from my speeches. Dad's probably gonna read this though. Hi, dad.
Stay tuned for real "blog"* entries, which'll probably start when all the bugs have quieted down and I feel better enough to write fun filler stuff. Oh, also, I have 2 announcements that I am going to save for later posts because this one's already like 3 pages, so maybe check in in a week and see what's new.

Thanks for reading,
Henry the Moonrabbit


*ps: I'm not sure why I put "blog" in quotations. "Blog" has always reminded me of the show Dog With a Blog which I used to see ads for after Gravity Falls on Disney XD and I hated it because it made no sense that a talking dog would decide to write a blog it doesn't even work with his talking super power does he also have thumbs? How does he type? Being literate and talking are two different things. Does he have someone transcribe his blog entries? It's stupid. That show's dumb.