*Note: Copied over from morning pages journal vol. 11, personal journal vol. 14, dated 09/08/2021

Hello and good morning.

I want to take a moment to talk about Pokémon. Not in any strategy sense, or how its impacted my entire life, no. Just that I’m taking a break.

See, recently I surpassed the 999:59 mark on Pokémon Sword for the Nintendo Switch. That’s 999 hours and 59 minutes, to be precise. This was a while ago, like, a month or something? So I’ve definitely played over 1,000 hours, more than 41 straight days of Pokémon. Granted, a lot of that was surviving the early days of the twin baby apocalypse with late nights and crazy hours, but if I’m being honest with myself that most likely only accounted for 200 hours of gameplay? At most?

A lot, sure, but rest is on me.

My doing. My days, aching to play, to catch perfect IVs and prepare teams to play and battle online but always being too busy to sit down and actively play. (I casually play, usually catching Pokémon in the Max Raids while my boys excitedly count 1, 2, 3 until the ball stops moving. I taught my sons how to count through Pokemon. That’s crazy.)

Until I do. Like this past weekend, when I finally got to battle online after thinking about it all week.

And I lost. A lot.

It’s a little disheartening, and not at all lost on me how similar it feels to following a career in writing, to spend so much time on something, dedicating waking hours and breaths to a task, only to have it fail. Could I have been doing something else in that time? Sure. Do I regret it? No.

Pokémon, for me, and I forgot this, should be about the journey. Trading. Thinking of your Pokémon as your friend. Walking from city to city and meeting crazy, unique characters. This was what drew me to this game in the first place. Not trying to attain some kind of imaginary rank….

Pokémon online rank
I’ve never made it past Rank 7. Not sure if that’s some sort of mirror of my life….

Writing is the same.

I like telling stories because I love making up stories. This is the goal. Shouldn’t forget that. I’ll start playing again when I do.

Thanks for reading,

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