#i wouldn't force myself back just to jeopardize my mental health

[colourfullsims]

An Overdue Update

Hey there! Long time no see.

It’s been quite a while since my last update (and several times that I’ve said I would update that fell through lol), but I think it’s finally the perfect time to tell you all what’s been going on behind the scenes. I’ve kept most of you all in the dark with no explanation for my hiatus for months now, but with the end of the year upon us, I want things out in the open before moving into 2021. I will warn you now, that this will be a long post, because there’s a lot of backstory I have to lay out to explain everything. There will also be some brief mentions of emotional manipulation and emotional abuse in the beginning of this post, which I will be content tagging for safety, so please skip over the first question if you would like to avoid this subject.

Now without further ado, I will be answering some frequently asked questions, starting with:

Q: Where did you go?

The short answer to this is that I took a very long, unwanted break from the community, but that answer doesn’t really suffice in explaining why. Typically, I like to keep things lighthearted and chill on this blog, because much of the reason why I play the Sims and do storytelling is for escapism. Things that happened this year took that away from me.

This spring, I broke up with my long term boyfriend of five years. With that separation came a lot of heartache, guilt, and stress for a variety of reasons. We’d been together since my days in undergrad and had shared so many intimate experiences together: graduations, moving out of state into our first “grown up” apartment, birthday trips to our favorite cities. We had inside jokes that I still find myself wanting to make with him, because after so much of our lives intertwined together, he’d essentially become my best friend. But things ended between us for good reason.

Despite the good that came out of that relationship, there was a fair amount of emotional manipulation/abuse that went on, early as the first few months of us being official. Sometimes it was subtle things: when we first started dating, I was in my final year of undergrad and doing all I could to bring up my gpa and buff up my resume, so that I could increase my chances of getting into my grad school of choice. Frequently, he would comment on my academic successes as if they would be the thing that would break us up. I remember presenting a paper on a panel, facing my fear of public speaking head on, and I was so proud of the work I’d put into it all, and then hours later coming back to my student apartment to tell him how it went, and the first words out of his mouth were, “Someday you’re gonna get too smart and leave me behind.” And that wouldn’t be the last time he said some iteration of that phrase to me, and every time it would feel like he was praying I would slow down so he wouldn’t feel I was outgrowing him. Even when I finally did get accepted to my dream school, my first thought after my excitement was that when I told him the news, he wouldn’t be happy for me. My decisions for my future became personal slights to him: I had to move from the midwest out to NYC to attend grad school, and even though I discouraged him from following me if he didn’t want to live in the city (which he 100% did not), he followed me anyway and hung that decision over my head like a giant reminder of some debt that I owed him. I regret not following my gut then and my failure to recognize the red flags, because I would go on to spend 3 more years after our move losing myself as he clutched onto me, in what I can only assume with the hope that if he held on tight enough, that I wouldn’t leave him behind. 

When I look at the more overt signs of my ex’s possessiveness, I realize I should have shared what was going on more with the people close to me: in the early stages on our relationship, he’d already done destructive things like slashing the tires of a guy I had been seeing earlier that same year, and punching a hole into the wall of my student apartment. He’d gone through all my messages on social media, my texts, my emails, all to find out about old crushes that he suspected I might still be in contact with. He even went as far as reading through my private journal, which I previously wrote in daily, but now I struggle to write in more than a few times a year, for fear of my privacy being invaded again. In the wake of realizing our relationship was failing, instead of ending things, I put my energy into hoping that he would do better, and I hid what was happening from my family and friends, to the point that I avoided their messages and phone calls. I isolated myself in increasing measures as time went on until I was too timid to do most things outside of my apartment without my ex-boyfriend by my side. The reason I stayed so long is because of these combined things: the sense of owing him my time after uprooting his life, the fact that I was both physically and mentally separated from my support systems, the feeling of familiarity that had grown from shared experiences and time, and largely, this overwhelming self imposed desire to not appear as though I had failed my relationship.

Largely, 2020 has been an absolute trash fire, but I can thank this year for one thing; putting me into a situation of such unrest that I could no longer ignore that I was not living the life I wanted or deserved.

After our breakup, I moved back to my parents’ place and stayed there while the remainder of my lease in New York ran out. When I originally left, I only brought back a small suitcase and backpack filled with essentials and valuable items that I couldn’t leave behind in my apartment, so I had to return again to retrieve my things, which, as you can imagine, was not fun. Not only was traveling during covid a nightmare, my ex was threatening to throw all my stuff out of our apartment, so I had to scramble to get a flight, a hotel, moving equipment, and a moving service arranged on the fly so I could retrieve everything (and when I got there, he had smashed one of my laptops). In summation, from our break up to finally moving out completely, this all happened over the span of mid-spring to the 1st of August.

Since then, I’ve been keeping myself sparse on the internet, partially because I needed the time to recover from the entire experience, and partially because frankly, I’ve been afraid of my ex monitoring any of my accounts to keep tabs on me. He was fully aware of this blog, and since in recent years it's been the only account I’ve kept up with, I was afraid of him trying to find out where I am and what I’ve been doing through here. I’ve only felt comfortable reblogging others content for the past few months.

So that’s where I’ve been. Which brings us to the next question:

Q: What happened to Love Island?

Over the past few months, I’ve received several asks and messages about whether or not I still planned on doing the Love Island challenge, as well as words of concern about my well being. I want to start by acknowledging all those messages by first apologizing to anyone I didn’t get back to: the majority of you got the sense that I was overwhelmed or burnt out, as most of us have been this year, and I really thank you for still having any interest in seeing me do any type of content after I essentially ghosted you all lol. I really appreciate all the well wishes too.

But I also received this:

Which, 1) I don’t know if this was either impeccable timing or horrible timing on your part, considering I planned on writing this update before this landed in my inbox.

And 2),

I don’t know if you were a reader or one of the participants selected for the challenge, but I’m sorry you’re disappointed about me not following through with the challenge. I was really excited to do it when I made the casting call, was ecstatic about the number of creators who submitted complex and diverse sims, and I had even completed the villa and started working on shooting the premiere. But as you can see from everything above, life happened. I wish this year had been more stable so that I could have done the challenge with no problem. 

But I’m not going to apologize for making the choices I needed to to preserve my mental health and safety.

That being said, it’s been so many months since I originally pitched the challenge; many of the creators who were selected are now inactive or have deactivated. And honestly, I didn’t know whether you all would even want the challenge at the point, I mean…? It’s winter time now, and Love Island was definitely more of a summer themed challenge lol.

As it stands, I don’t know if I will be picking up where I left off with the Love Island challenge. I certainly still have some interest in doing it; I built a whole set and had an entire schedule of challenges and dates planned for the project. But I don’t know if I can move forward with the original cast, or if I would have to do a new casting call to fill the spaces of inactive creators. So...I guess I would need feedback from you all. Would you want Love Island still?

Q: What are you planning to do now?

Right now, I’m doing whatever makes me happy. I’m in a much better place than I was about 6 months ago, and I don’t feel the same anxiety about posting as I did. For now, I might just post some casual gameplay until I know whether or not I’m moving forward with Love Island. I’m just happy to come back to do what I love.

So there you have it. 2020 kicked my ass in some really heart wrenching ways, and I needed some time to not worry about keeping up with content creation and just worry about taking care of me. Now that I’m a little more stable, I want to come back, even if it’s just simple stuff for now. To those of you who have stuck around waiting to see if I’d ever pick my projects back up, thank you so much, and I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting this long lol. For the time being, all I have to offer is a very long overdue Follower’s Gift: I will be hosting a giveaway for my followers this week, where I will be giving away $40 worth of sims content each to 3 followers. I’ll have more details about the giveaway tomorrow when the official post goes live.

If you made it this far thank you for reading this long mess, and I’ll see you all soon!

~Cam