I've had something of a crisis of faith recently.

For the entire time I've been mariteaux, I've been a full-throated supporter of the idea that whatever your niche interest is, you should share it loud and proud. I still get emailed about the Passion essay, most recently a couple days ago. People to this day tell me that what I said back then, what upset a bunch of people who aren't even around Neocities anymore, is still resonating with them, and that those words are what they couldn't say, or felt scared to say.

Over the years, people in Discords and in chats would tell me how they're afraid no one would care about their niche interest, and I'd share the stories of the comments I get on my music video uploads for the most obscure bands, bands like Gliss and Fono that I've run into writing about The Fold Compilation or MP3.com's sampler CD-ROMs. Do you know them? You don't. Do I know them? Barely. The people who do remember them, though, they reach out to me. They ask what happened to these artists. They reminisce to me about seeing them in a room with fifty other people back in 2003. That's someone who connected with me very briefly because of the most obscure things I find in my corner of NEPA and assemble online for all of you.

And for a moment, it really stopped feeling worthwhile.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that contributed to me getting to this point. All my friends are getting older, I'm getting older, and I don't have a lot going on right now when they do. Something really hit me when Savannah, completely supportively and accurately, listed off what everyone in Somnol is up to right now, degrees, releasing albums, releasing wholeass books, and my triumphant final note for 2025 was a Guitar Hero custom disc (a really high effort one, granted). I went "man, I feel fucking silly". I still kinda do.

I thought, maybe if I just do lots of everything and keep myself busy, it'd feel less silly, but it really only exacerbated the issue. Now, not only am I not enjoying the stuff I like, but even if other people like it (which, obviously they're not, it's my niche interests, not theirs), it's too much to keep up with! I started this year wondering how the fuck I'll fit new music from me, new custom levels, more custom discs, contributing to Protoweb, finally doing something with those mixes I made that have been sitting around (and making another!), while writing a ton of everything, drawing, Art Fight, the cammy.somnol refresh that's like 95% done, and that perpetual eventual toyhou.se upgrade all into 2026, even if I was unemployed all year, let alone when I go on a trip for two months and then drop into a job shortly thereafter.

But I've been unwell, and it made sense, because dumb things make sense to you when you're sick.

I really don't want to go into more detail—there's other factors at play, the world at large, where I'm at come 27, being lonely, desperate to not feel like being creative is a waste of time—but this is already not great to write and I'm just putting it somewhere to hopefully put it past me. You think you can minmax your time and be the most productive creative person ever, but it really ain't all it's cracked up to be. You find pretty quickly that, even if everyone was interested in all your shit, nobody has the time to go through it all, let alone reply to it. Already, nobody but me has seen this site network from one end to the other. Why am I piling on more and more forever? Is it supposed to be impressive? Everyone knows I can do it all. I'm not proving anything other than not knowing when to quit.

I'm gonna stop doing that now. You're probably smart enough to not do any of this, but a reminder—it doesn't work. I don't know what this year's gonna look like, but I can't be living it with such grand ambitions for a to-do list of shit that I'm not enjoying and neither is anyone else. That's no way to live. No matter how goofy any of this is, at least if people are enjoying my company and what I'm up to, that's a positive to the world. I should be aiming for that.

It's not great to write posts about being down bad for something entirely self-inflicted, but it do be like that, Mr. Stancil. I'll make tomorrow better. For the foreseeable future, I'm just gonna draw. Cute things that people can just go "oh that's cute" about and I can walk away satisfied.

I'll pick the journal back up tomorrow with some better highlights from the past month. Hopefully you join me. (And hopefully you read that damn PageMill post and lemme know what you think. Indulge me this once, will ya? I could use it.)

Tagged under: real-life