End of the year recap and future projections

Hello there everybody! I hope you're having a great day and enjoying the holidays season. In This post I want to talk a bit about how the end of the year has turned out for me, as well as what to expect from me and my mods from now on.

I'll start talking a little bit about myself and how I got into modding this game.

I started making mods for Rimworld by late 2020, when I published my mod "Argentinian Mate", although I had made some other retexture mods previously, that one was the first mod to actually include something in the game, and then I discovered I could add plenty of stuff into the game, and so I did.

After some time, I released "Expanded Materials - Metals", which was (and still is) my main mod. In that mod, I added a lot of new resources into the game, and my idea was to make a big mod that everyone could use and that had the less amount of incompatibilities possible. It later turned out that it was a little difficult to achieve that goal, and so I began working on a rework recently, to improve the mod now that I have much more knowledge of the game and modding.

But I'm not here today to talk about the history of my mods precisely. I'm here to talk a little about what was going on with me in that moment.

Back then, I was 17 years old, turned 18 on September of that same year, and during 2021 I was going through the sixth year of high school, which was a rough thing to deal with. I had discovered modding and was getting very into it, as well as doing other things like writing my book and learning stuff like programming and graphic design, all that took place during late 2019, a year where I didn't have presential school due to the pandemic, so I had plenty of time to be at home, sitting in front of my PC doing what I always loved to do: create.

So, starting school again in 2021 felt like being chained. Having to spend time in a place full of people I didn't want to interact with (except for my friends, of course), and where I couldn't use my free time to work, because I didn't have my PC nor the comfort of my home.

By late 2021, I fell into a "dark era" (let's call it that way). As you may already know, the teenage years are difficult. One has a lot of thoughts and doubts, and anxiety is always present, but for me it hit a tad hard. I had taken modding way too seriously, and I felt extremely pressured to release stuff and work on modding, even falling into a toxic competition with Vanilla Expanded, some sort of awful mixture of jealousy, frustration, insecurities and depression which all made me both unable to develop mods while enjoying it, and to enjoy VE mods as well. (I say VE for the most part, but I actually felt like I was racing against every single modder in the community).

Turns out I was going through a lot of anxiety. My mind wouldn't stop overthinking and falling into depression because I couldn't control what everyone else thought and I had a lot of fears and frustrations regarding my context and situation, all that in addition to the fact that I was going to school and I was losing time to do my stuff and that made it feel even worse.

So that same year I started therapy, and as months went on it turned out more difficult, I felt worse some days, and I channeled that out with depression and rage.

I don't want to make it sound like I was going through the worst hell, because it is not my intention to pity nor to exaggerate what actually happened, but I remember those times as hard, and I'm glad I got to overcome them and now I feel much better.

So, after that, it all started going downhill when I, ironically, started the seventh and last year of high school, by March 2022. In that month, I also started taking medication to control my anxiety, and alongside therapy and strengthening myself, I slowly started feeling better. I started feeling more confident about myself, and I learned to ignore other people when I disagreed with the way they saw life. After all, as my therapist told me, we are all different people who had been raised in a very different way, and we had lived different experiences, different situations, we had different trauma, different perceptions of our contexts, and that's what makes us different.

With feeling better with myself I also felt in a better mood to continue working on my mods, which I used to love back when I started, and it turned into some sort of forced responsibility (forced by my own mind) and I stopped enjoying it when I was feeling bad.

And now, in December 2022, I can finally say that high school is over forever, now comes a new stage of my life, I'm now 19 years old, and while I'm still young I think I had learned a lot of valuable lessons during this time. So now comes the new projects I have for my life. I want to study something I really like, find a job to earn money and move to a different country. I also want to publish my book, in both Spanish and English. And of course, I want to develop more mods to keep enjoying this game. It has been almost a year since I've played Rimworld for the last time, and there are a lot of new mods, as well as the DLCs, that I want to try out and enjoy.

There isn't much left I want to tell you to be honest, I just wanted to share all this with you, and yes... I know it was a long post, but if you've reached this point I want to thank you for your support. Also, I want to say a huge thank you to all the people who were there making me feel better. Sometimes I was feeling very sad and I didn't tell anybody, and yet there were people who were always cheerful and helpful. They listened to me when I did talk about my issues and they made me feel much more relaxed.

As always, thank you so much for your awesome support. I hope you all have a really nice day, and if you ever feel sad or angry, I hope you will soon overcome it as I did, I'm also more than willing to help others overcome what was so hard for me.

See you around, I may share some pictures of my crossdressing for the prom event.

Cheers <3

Argón.