Life can be (a) dream

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December 2, 2025 - Motive to create, part 2

"Wait!", you may be asking me! "Why are you writing a follow up to something that you wrote this very day? Why not just merge it into one?" Well, it's very shrimple. I ate chocolate chips directly out of the bag in between this and the last post, and I now feel like a new person. The tone is totally different, so it just has to be split up.

There is a single project that I was able to focus on for longer than a month: the time I tried to make a game. It is the only time I believed in what I was making for a prolonged period of time. I have serious motivation and focus issues exactly because I have no faith in what I want to make or in my skills. But the game was wonderful! I believed in it with all my heart! And it's because it was a bit different than anything else I tried to make before. Lots of programming projects fell through because I found something that did what I wanted to make, but better. Lots of stories or write ups would get deleted after a day because I didn't see any use in it for others, or I just didn't like how it was made.

For some reason, this never happened with my game. The main idea of the game was simple: a girl meets her own personified sins, and kills them off one by one thinking that this will solve her problems. Instead, she ends up nearly killing herself, since killing off sins means killing off yourself. I think this is cringe now, by the way, but I still feel fine talking about it unlike a lot of other scrapped projects of mine. I started making it a full year after my near-attempt, since I was still struggling to express what was going through my head to others and still suffering through random bursts of suicidality. I thought that if I finally got everything out of my head and somewhere else, then maybe I could finally understand what happened to me and offer a new solution to others. I worked on it for hours and hours every single day, and learned the quickest I had in a very long time.

I ended up dropping the project for a funny reason. I was struggling to write dialogue, so my friend suggested that I read a book in a style I like and then write while I was under the influence of it. By pure instinct (I swear to God I hadn't even heard of the novel before this), I looked up Sylvia Plath, found The Bell Jar, read it within a week, and instead ended up writing And the cat screamed. This somehow almost entirely cured me, and I no longer felt the need to make the game.

What's even weirder is that "And the cat screamed" fit almost none of what I wanted the game to do. It's extremely personal and specific, and isn't easily generalizable onto others. It does a horrible job of explaining what made me feel better at all, and it barely mentions the self hatred issues that made me want to kill myself in the first place. I don't consider it to be useful, informative, or really much of anything at all. The only reason it even came to be is because I wrote it all in one night while looping the same song upwards of 30 times over. If I had slept on it, it would have certainly been deleted the next day. It's not good! It's me whining! The game would have been better!

I think I overcomplicated things before. I have two motives, and they play off of each other. The first is the same as before: I want to make something that has a chance of helping others. The second is just that I want to write something because I want to create something. It's a base urge of mine. Well, what the hell? Did I need all of this text to conclude something so circular and basic? I think so. I think these motives work a bit differently, and to sustain work on something in the long term, I need to apply both.

The urge to create is the root. Nothing will ever happen without this urge. This is what makes me stay up late tweaking stupid CSS rules for a site that I know I'll abandon, or why I end up trying to draw stupid recreations of Senko the adorable fox girl in my notebook when I don't even like drawing. This is also what, in my opinion, motivates incredibly self serving works exactly like "And the cat screamed". This doesn't mean that it's automatically bad, but it does mean it's only written for the sake of creation. This is exactly why it would have ended up deleted had I slept on it.

The only way to sustain work is the motive I found originally. It needs to have the potential to be useful to others. If it's not useful, then of course I won't feel right working on it in the long term. Any sort of project of mine at all will be ruled entirely by these two factors. This is why the game was able to survive as long as it did when all other projects failed. My fears of being a moral arbiter can go away if I don't place an expectation on others. The game was about an idea that was useful to me, and that I thought might be useful to others.

Clearly, this has expanded far past writing. I am incredibly happy that I was able to figure this out and record it so well. This has been such a disgustingly long standing issue of mine. This all started when I was thirteen! But, now, I need to make sure that my theory is right, so I am going to do something that I know will be incredibly brutal to myself. I wrote both this and the previous post on December 2, 2025. I am going to go to sleep without posting this, and see if I can make myself post it in two weeks after practicing writing. I think that this has a chance of being useful to others, so it should be able to survive. I will then also post my practice writing alongside this, just to bully myself even more.

...Well! I think I have good news, if you're reading this now!