Note: This post contains spoilers for recent episodes of SK8 The Infinity (episodes 7 and 8 specifically).
It will come as a surprise to no one that much of my sense of self is tied up in my life as a hobbyist. I entered my mid-20s as a mediocre college graduate, employed but not in a field I was passionate about, and began to develop my passions elsewhere by watching a lot of anime and writing about it. I also did fan-art (sometimes) and played some video games here and there. At least as far as those activities were concerned, I felt pretty good about myself. I’d always been praised for my artistic ability as a kid and for a long time I had deluded myself into thinking that I was better than most people, at least when it came to drawing anime-inspired cartoon characters (and any art teachers who may have critiqued my chosen subject matter were just art snobs with nothing to tell me). And as far as video games were concerned, I always managed to play through the most popular ones and when I was younger I’d even give tips and walkthroughs to my friends who were stumped. I spent a long time on the phone walking people through the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, that’s for sure.
Setting foot into the broader world disavowed me of a lot of those assumptions about my own skills. I was never too broken up about realizing that I was “just okay” at video games, because it became clear as I got older that I had less and less time to devote to the sort of sprawling, epic RPG’s I’d loved as a teenager. This felt to me more like an artifact of getting older, and while that’s disappointing to have to confront it’s also predictable. I still play and enjoy games when I get around to them, but I never had dreams of being some big-name gaming journalist or live streamer, so I’ve just never been left with a major sense of loss.