{"id":190,"date":"2025-08-14T23:11:41","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T07:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spudlink.net\/?p=190"},"modified":"2025-08-14T23:11:41","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T07:11:41","slug":"state-of-the-spud-2025-repeatedly-telling-the-impostor-of-syndrome-fame-to-shut-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spudlink.net\/?p=190","title":{"rendered":"State of the Spud 2025: Repeatedly Telling the Impostor (of Syndrome fame) to Shut Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Somehow not as immediately gratifying as a comic page.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

It’s been just over a year now since I finished Friendship is Dragons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes I catch myself thinking “It’s Monday \/ Wednesday \/ Friday, I should check to make sure the next comic’s up.” Every so often I wake up from a concerningly compelling stress dream where I’m unfathomably behind schedule, continuing the comic endlessly via meaningless AI slop because someone is blackmailing me to never stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So yeah, my relationship with stress is still about as good as it’s ever been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look, I’m not going to try to mansplain to you, the reader, how 2025 has been nightmarish for everybody<\/em>, nor how it doesn’t look like the broader situation is bound to improve anytime soon. It’s my birthday, and I’m taking the opportunity to make this about me and me alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the situation there isn’t complicated: I wish I was doing more, but I have to keep reminding myself that what I’m doing has to be enough. But man is it ever frustrating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t have a thrice-weekly comic to publish anymore, which gives the impression that I’m spending most of my weeks doing nothing. Fanfic-wise, I completed a very basic editing pass of the entire Interference saga and published… three new chapters. Which, after nearly 20 years, is significant, but less so when it’s over a period of 9 months. Modding-wise, I’ve got the engine groundwork, two-thirds of the first day’s storyline written, and ten bosses done. Which, just for getting the first-day demo out the door, probably puts me at around… 10% completion after months of on-off work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If this was my full-time job, I’d be an unjustifiably terrible employee who would have been fired years ago, is what I’m saying. But I’ve had to remind myself that the main thing I’ve been trying to focus on this year is: Myself. And not with a great deal of success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My disability application got rejected, so we’re on the appeal process, which has been stalled for literal months in no way I can control or speed up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My stressful home situation hasn’t changed much, except that my younger brother has now graduated high school and gotten his first part-time job, so the handful of hours each evening of rare quiet I get is balanced out by a new source of frustration that can lead to his explosive temper tantrums which lead to my night-long panic attacks. Same crap as ever, different context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one thing that has been going mostly right is that I made a New Year’s resolution to exercise regularly and I’ve been mostly sticking to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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