Ackerteam is a GO!

First, the good reason! The very good exciting awesome amazing reason: I got my dream writing job! I had the amazing opportunity to work as a video game writer on a project I'm so proud of and so incredibly grateful to have been a part of. Understandably, I was quite busy with that for the better part of 2023! The game is out now, and if anyone would like the link/to learn more about it please feel free to send me a dm! (Like, please, I'd love to brag about it!) Not going to post the link publically simply because I've always preferred to keep my blog free of irl/professional details, etc.

Some of you may remember I was briefly part of another game project a few years ago as lead writer, which fell through. Ever since I've been trying to get my first published credit, and now I have it <3 I'm a professional writer!!! 🥳 I'm very proud of the work we did, and I hope some of y'all will try it out!

But if working two jobs for most of the year wasn't enough, there's been something else that's kept me in a strange place this year - the not-so-good reason I've been quiet. This one is a bit more personal, and something I didn't want to reveal until now: content warning here, for both physical and mental health discussion.

Nearly two years ago now, I developed some rather debilitating symptoms of an unknown medical condition. While I've had chronic pain from another condition for most my life, the symptoms this new condition left me with were, quite frankly, terrifying. And terrifyingly, they appeared pretty much overnight. While I don't want to get into all the details, I've had to change and adapt a lot of things in my life to try and come to terms with this new normal - because sadly, these symptoms have not went away.

For the first 10/11 months or so of this condition, I was pretty much brute forcing my way through it - trying to tough my way through life as normal as if everything wasn't suddenly so much harder than it already was. About a year ago, I reached a breaking point. I had been hoping that all of this was just temporary, and was beginning to see that it wasn't.

While I had started the incredibly long and draining process of tests, hospital and doctor's appointments to try and investigate my condition, I realised at the start of 2023 that I had also become scarily depressed. I've struggled with and overcome depression before in my life, but this felt like so much uncharted territory. To be perfectly honest, I've always been proud of my own willpower and determination when dealing with depression in the past, but this year was the closest I've ever felt to truly giving up.

...And that's scary to admit - to myself, let alone anyone reading this! But admitting it pushed me into seeking the extra support I needed (therapy) throughout this journey. And a journey it is - while I'm much better mentally than I was in January, and I'm now on some medication to help alleviate the worst symptoms of my condition, my diagnosis is still a ways off. In the meantime, I've been coming to terms with the changes I've needed to make in my life, and the ones still to come.

It's been a lot, this year, trying to juggle a new disability and a new dream job - on top of the old job, poor mental health, and the complexity of coming to terms with the word 'disability'. There were times throughout the year when I wanted to open up tumblr and just browse through some rivamika internet goodness.

But I couldn't. My perfectionism and imposter syndrome and all these other factors led to me putting quite a lot of pressure on myself - every time I thought about tumblr I thought "I can't log on, I don't have any new chapters to post; I haven't responded to people's messages; it's already been way too long since I've updated; I'm such a terrible fanfic writer I've been inconsistent for years; I'm not allowed to log on unless I update a fic, and even then I'll have to apologise for being so late-".

So, I didn't. In all the weirdness I managed to convince myself that I would come back to... I don't know, interrogations or something 😂 It sounds quite silly now that I type it out. But I'm in a better place now, and I'm hoping I can get back to the no-pressure fun of writing fics soon.

As for my fanfics, would you believe me anymore if I said I still plan to finish them? 😂 I've even had drafts of the next chapters of both A Man, in a Bar and Fear and Fidelity sitting here for ages, but I'd managed to convince myself they weren't good enough to post. I've been thinking about them a lot lately, which is a good sign I think. I've been itching to write Levi and Mikasa again. So while I won't make any promises or such about updates/schedules or whatever, I just wanted to let it be known that I still want to continue these stories. (If I, and the readers, can even remember what happened in them😅). I might even take some prompts soon to get back into the swing of things!