My creative self

2025.4.2 | Pittsburgh | Spring | Freshman Year

It’s cloudy.

It just came to me that I should use writing to deal with anxiety. As a person who poorly communicates, I hope that putting them down as text can help me find myself.

Ever since I stepped into CMU, anxiety has been constantly by my side. There were and are few times that I could get away with it. It only stops knocking on my head when I am actually working, building my game worlds. But as soon as I stop, it returns.

I hope that it’s less terrible than it sounds, but anxiety is deadly to creative activities for it leads to deadly low productivity. I don’t and can’t fight it, so the best solution is to escape. Escaping from creative work is not a hard thing for a person like me. Yet till now I still take pride in my gift of entertaining myself. I seek pleasure from various hobbies.

Sometimes I manage to escape. I play some games, watch some videos and go exercise. But usually a horrible amount of work and deadlines await. This school won’t give you time to take a break, especially when you have ambitions. If you fall, it’s hard to come back again. The grand wheel would go on as still. I guess I’m knowing how so many people break down.

Unfortunately, I am clearly aware that, right now, where I am is only place in this world that can provide such strong academic education, connections, and opportunities. I can grow into the man I want. But at what price?

It took me a few months to realize that I can’t stop. And I must make peace with anxiety.

Maybe the solution is to figure out the causes and try to improve.

2024.4.3 | Pittsburgh | Spring | Freshman Year

To put it in a simple way, all anxiety happens because of who I am.

I’m not afraid of work. In fact, the actual thing I’m afraid of is working in pathetic quality. The more I think about my mental suffering, the more I am aware of myself being the only cause to it. It has always been myself, from the beginning to the end. I have been torturing, destroying, cursing my competency and my creativity, making myself worthless.

I know that in the end I am the sole judge of my art. This by no means suggest that I ignore the opinion from my players, my peers, my mentors, my friends and my family. Ironically, I usually value them so much that it becomes