itch.io

You're right,Even now, while working on the second installment, I've already overturned a great deal of past content, and I've even come to feel that some of my old ideas seem rather outdated (though, funnily enough, to me back then they already felt incredibly cutting-edge and groundbreaking—it's just that the present me has overturned them). Still, I hope I can make the second installment more outstanding and more complete than the first.

Reconciling with one's own perfectionism is truly an agonizing process. Around May, after I finished organizing the English edition (though I don't think I did a particularly good job on it—by the later stages I was so exhausted that I even forgot to update the formatting), I had barely rested before I started conceptualizing the second installment. My mind keeps running through all kinds of profound, philosophical stories, yet it's very hard to actually ground them in reality. Many ideas already begin to distort the moment I put them into words, and after going through translation into another language, the original meaning suffers yet another round of loss. But the good news is that I've more or less come to understand this point, and I've found quite a few philosophical works to analyze this kind of problem (I might devote a large portion of the author's afterword in the second installment to discussing my thoughts on this?).

All in all, objectively speaking, perfectionism has set a very high creative benchmark for me, but it has also brought enormous obstacles. I can't bring myself to be half-hearted with my own work, or to convince myself to accept something flawed. Because of my strict demands and my tendency to overthink, I also constantly push myself to do just a little better, to go one step further no matter what—and this drains my mental state immensely, while also causing my project to be delayed again and again, from August to September. Sadly, even now in September, it still isn't finished. At the same time, because of unpleasant experiences in childhood and in my past dealings with the people around me, I've grown accustomed to doing everything alone, and I'm not very willing to accept help from others. Even asking a programming-related question in a community is something I need to summon up my courage to do. But now I'm slowly realizing that if I want to create a truly outstanding work in the future, I will inevitably need to learn to seek support and feedback from others. I'm currently trying to improve on this, bit by bit.

Still, whether it's perfectionism or my preference for toughing things out alone，these "problems"，perhaps one day I'll make peace with them. After all, if something that was meant to express my own thoughts and liberate my mind ends up turning into a weapon that torments and whips me instead, that feeling is truly unbearable.