"Shouldn't You Be Doing Something Else?"

 "Shouldn't You Be Doing Something Else?"

I've asked myself that question frequently over the past several years. Whether I'm painting minis, working on game design ideas, learning new games, or playing games I've played to death, I often ask myself: "Shouldn't you be doing something else?" Imma ask you to strap in for a couple of minutes, because this post is just a little bit heavy. Maybe it's your cup of tea, maybe it isn't. But it felt like something worth sharing, so...

I spent seven years as the Executive Director of a small theatre company in St. Louis called Solid Lines Productions. We bent all our time, energy, and thought toward using our craft to improve our community. We advocated for domestic and sexual violence prevention, we leveraged our talents to educate nurse practitioner students about stalking and human trafficking, and we facilitated conversations about how to help people struggling with mental illness and suicidal ideations. We worked hard to hire a majority of female actors, and in the last several years I spent with the company, we also hired a majority of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) artists each season. I am very proud of that work and humbled for the opportunity to stride with the giants of this artistic community and a number of others in my time leading that company. And the work I did here sprouted from groundwork laid in Buffalo, NY. It wasn't all brilliant, but it was all good, and I'm proud of it.

But as time-consuming as it was, and as much as I poured into it, there was always more to be done. Now that I've stepped down and I'm figuring out what I'm going to do next, I have more time and even more to be done. But I don't always know how to go about it. And that's where it's easy to ask myself, "Shouldn't you be doing something else?" And by "something else," I always mean "more important than what you're doing right now."

What I'm doing at that particular moment might be reading, or watching a hockey game, or it might be something centered on gaming. For me, personally, my brain latches onto anything I've read or heard or seen in a given week, and quickly become adamant that I should be doing something to contribute to that cause. Last week, I finished a book called "Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic," and I immediately felt as though my time should be spent contributing to the fight against the national opioid epidemic. This week, I finished "The Color of Law," and the need to battle systemic racism in housing has never felt more urgent to me. Several weeks ago, I finally got around to reading "first they killed my father" and I was asking myself what I could possibly do in the face of genocide. Can you see where I'm going with this? There's always more to do, whether it's something big or something small, and so it's easy to feel as though I'm not doing nearly enough in the face of that knowledge. It becomes even easier to start beating myself up for "wasting time" playing games or painting or anything that isn't an active attempt to improve our world. I know that's ridiculously grandiose, but given how much time I spend with games, it's just not unusual to ask myself, "Shouldn't you be doing something else?"

Honestly, it's taken me some time spent talking to my therapist to come to terms with the fact that it's possible that I will never have an answer to that question that completely satisfies me. I'm pretty damn fortunate to call some incredible people friends and colleagues. There's quite a lot of upside to that. But some downside (for me, personally) is that it's easy to see everything they're doing to make the world a better place and feel as though I'm not doing enough. Most days, they inspire me to work harder and do more. But there are days when I look at it all, I feel overwhelmed, and it simply makes me feel bad about the fact that I'm not doing more. This can manifest pretty insistently when I'm painting minis or working on game design or playing games "instead of [insert 'productive thing' here]."

Any leader worth a damn will tell you that there is always more you can be doing. There will ALWAYS be more that needs to get done; it is our individual responsibility to draw lines. Sometimes, that means deciding when to work from home and when to turn off our phones, and sometimes that means deciding to take a day off "for no good reason" other than we need a day off. In my case, because so much of the work I have done is free lance or volunteer, it means I never have any shortage of projects on which I'm working, and I can be doing work at any hour of the day. Even if it's just reading some books about whatever topic I'm working on.

In the end, I have to be the one who draws the line. And for me, that is a very difficult thing to do without feeling as though I'm being lazy or selfish. But honestly, selfish gets a bad rap. Eating is technically a selfish act. So is sleeping, or breathing. That last one is even autonomic selfishness! The point I'm trying to make is that we have to stop thinking of selfishness as a bad thing, because inherently, it simply isn't. In a vacuum, selfishness is not good or bad - it just is. And it exists because we exist. Without selfishness, how would we survive? There are people who are born with an inhibited ability to feel pain, and those people do not always last terribly long, because pain serves a purpose. So does selfishness. They're centered on self-preservation, which is important! Not everything we do can be for everyone else, or we simply won't be around for long. Yes, there are times that call for sacrifice. But every time we fly on a plane, we are reminded to secure our own oxygen masks first in case of an emergency before we help anyone else with theirs. Why? Y'all know the answer: it becomes impossible to help others if we have not helped ourselves first. That's not instinct for all of us, but it still certainly applies to all of us.

Why am I writing about all of this? Well, at the end of the day, I've identified that my gaming hobby is part of putting on my own oxygen mask first. Games bring me joy. They challenge my brain to stretch in ways it either hasn't stretched before or does not stretch often. Games are often one of the very few things that require so much of my attention that I can finally stop thinking about work or volunteering or projects for a couple of hours. It's a way for me to relax, to relieve stress, and that hit of dopamine one gets from solving a puzzle or accomplishing something obviously helps, too. So I may not always have a completely satisfactory answer to the question "Shouldn't you be doing something else?" while I'm playing games or painting my minis. Sometimes, my answer will feel selfish and engender some guilt and bad feelings, or will feel like an excuse. But I'm still learning how to draw my own boundaries and value my time spent on hobbies as much as I value my time spent on work or with family.

I don't know if you ever have a similar experience, but if you do, I hope you'll consider how much more value you have to your community, friends, and family when you're healthy and operating at maximum capacity, and then prioritize the things that keep you running closer to the height of your abilities rather than those things that keep you running on fumes.