one

Matthew Raccoon – 1/20/2026

Good evening all you freaks and fools. I hope you all are having a pleasant day and are enjoying your projects. Today I felt inspired to start this blog because it’s been a long long time since I’ve done creative stuff just for the sake of doing it and I really want to get back to that.

I also really want to get off my chest how things have been going for the past year or two, since my last game You Donut Get It. I have been struggling quite deeply to be creative and have fun making things. A lot of which I believe to be from external factors outside of my control but also from my response to these things happening that really decided my fate.

Maybe I hope you will learn something from these stories, or maybe I hope that I can learn from things I write out into words more than it filling my head. In any case, it is a crisp winter day, forty-three degrees Fahrenheit, the air feels cold but thick like a soup and my skin was quite happy about that. I am at a local coffee shop in a historical part of town enjoying a “Snow Day” which is a iced coffee with blueberry cold foam and I enjoyed an everything bagel toasted with cream cheese and I am ready to open my heart a bit.

So, I guess I should go back to wear it began. I had started going to local gamedev meetups in 2023 and there I met Billy. I knew he was something different from his ear-piercings and attitude. Unlike the rest of the people who were there who seemed like either corpo-industry people or college students who were soon to be corpo-industry people. Then we got to talking and I fell in love. There was just a calm and put-togetherness he had that all the people around him seemed to be missing, and that’s how I knew he was the one I wanted to work with.

I ended up meeting a couple other people, both of which I ended up having a falling out with, which hurt, but was expected. They clearly were not in this for the reasons I was in this for. Which is fine, but I just can’t see myself working with people who don’t see this medium the same way I do.

Alright, now that I’ve done some setting up, I guess I should get into the difficult stuff to talk about.

In mid-2024, I started getting very consumed in politics. As the election kept going on, the more it felt like life and death. I had been using weed gummies to calm my nerves before this, but by late-2024 I was completely dependent on them and I still am to this day practically speaking. It went from a once in a while when I got the chance to every single day. I just desperately wanted it all to stop and to go away, but it never would, so I would take a larger edible to forget even more.

This, obviously, had an affect on all parts of my life. I became less social, less creative, less inspired. I honestly just wanted to disappear so badly, but I’d wake up the next day and still be here, in this place, right now. It was awful, on my list of worst times in my life… not the worst, mind you, but still pretty bad.

During this time, though, I did not let up my high expectations and my unfulfilled desires only became stronger and stronger. My mental health began to plummet and I began feeling more and more worthless. I do not wish this reality I lived through on even my worse mortal enemies, the pure suffering and misery I’ve seen and gone through living in America in 2025 was practically unbearable.

And here we all are, still alive and expected to work through this completely unprecedented attack on freedom and existence. It is completely unacceptable, but we all have developed a level of conative dissonance and disassociation to it all it borders on psychosis.

I, as an extremely privileged young college student, am supposed to just close my eyes and live in ignorance. Do my work, get a job, own nothing and die happy… and my refusal to do so is basically a death sentence.

I simply do not know how to deal with this reality and stay sane while doing so… so I suppose I am just going to be insane.

So, with all that said, at the peak of this depression in around march or april I forced myself to make a game for a local competition… and to make things worse, Billy was moving away, but I tried so hard to put on a smile and do the work anyways.

What came out of that was my largest failure I believe. I didn’t feel good working on it, I didn’t feel good showing it, I didn’t feel good at all… and the game ended up being unfinished when it was time to submit the project.

I cried that night, I had a pounding headache and I felt so defeated. I had nothing left to give.

I didn’t even show up to the event where they announced the winners to that competition because I felt so ashamed and weak.

After that, I knew something had to change, I knew I couldn’t keep living the way I was. So I decided not to work on games at all and I started going to therapy. It has really helped with my ability to exist in this world, though it is still extremely difficult and obtuse, but I have been trying to be gentle with myself and give myself the time I need to do these things.

So, all of this is to say that… despite how rough things have been, I still refuse to give up on my dreams and desires, but I have realized I need time and space to be able to do these things and I can’t do it when I feel like I’m suffocating by the weight of the world.

I have hope this year will be better, no matter how harsh and difficult the external world will be, I hope to clean my internal world to be a beautiful one that others can enjoy alongside me.

Anyways, thank you for baring with me as I work through all this, I really do appreciate it.

Until next time, peace, love, and kissing dads,

Matthew the Raccoon