Thank You Two Dots!

I recently looked back at the amount of money I'd spent on iPhone game Two Dots, which my friends Julianne and Faye got me into playing a few months ago. It wasn't THAT much, to be fair, but it's significantly more than I've spent on any other mobile game before. I looked at the level I'd got to (675) and tried working out the amount of time I'd spent on it, but gave up before getting too down about it.

And I was quite down, briefly. I started thinking of stuff I could have done with the money, and things I could have done with that time. Read more books, written more blog posts, and other things like that.

But while this is a fairly common way for me to react when I lose interest in something I've been invested in, after a few minutes my thought process changed to look at it in a different way.

Yes, I spent more money than I'd planned - but it was at a time I wasn't drinking, and my total spending on it is less than the price of a couple of cocktails would have been. And to be honest I've wasted money on far, far stupider things in the past (than Two Dots OR cocktails) so that's probably not a good reason to beat myself up about it.

And yes, I could have been doing other stuff. But given the stress I was feeling at the time and the lack of enjoyment I was finding in reading and writing I'm not sure that doing either would have been a good thing long-term. I think reading - even looking at some of the excellent books I had waiting - would potentially have led to me giving up on a lot of books very quickly; I tend to cast them aside after a chapter or two if I'm not in the right frame of mind.

And while I'm a little disappointed in not blogging much in October or November, I feel that doing so in that exhausted frame of mind wouldn't have produced anything worth reading anyway. Instead, I took an unplanned but much needed hiatus which lasted much of November and came back to it rejuvenated with so many posts I want to write and have blogged more than ever before over the last couple of weeks!

On a side note, I also started using the Longform app to read stuff while I was waiting for my lives to recharge on Two Dots and have not only discovered some amazing writers and publishers through it, but it also gave me the inspiration to relaunch my occasional links feature as the (hopefully) weekly Twenty Things I've Read This Week which has been so much fun to do!

I wasn't sure whether to write this post, to be honest. Will anyone read this far? Let's face it "I was sad about playing a game a lot and now I'm not" is hardly the most fascinating idea in the world.

But actually I'm proud of myself for thinking about things positively for once and not letting my negative thoughts overwhelm me. And I thought that other people prone to being self-critical about fairly minor things might like reading it and it may even help them a tiny little bit. So if you made it this far, thanks!