❌ Begin Again
Discover more from The Post-Evangelical Post
Over the last few weeks, the song “Begin Again” has been stuck in my mind (not the T-Swift one, though). The song is part of the action rhythm game Sayonara Wild Hearts. The game was initially released in 2019, and draws heavily on the tarot.
The game follows a heartbroken young woman through a series of fantastical worlds. When the game first came out I played it with my daughter on the iPhone. The soundtrack is composed by Daniel Olsen & Jonathan Eng, and vocals are sung by Linnea Olsson. Here is the gameplay for the level featuring the song:
The hook for the song is just the repeated line “Begin Again,” and while the rest of the verses are about falling out of love, the hook has been bouncing in and out of my head for weeks.
As has been evident in my writing here over the past few months, I have struggled with just how much my public-facing creative work has dropped off as I’ve had to tend to things closer to home during the spring and summer.
I have had to take breaks from publishing before, notably in 2019, when Exvangelical was put on hiatus. At that point, I announced it on Twitter; this summer, it simply happened because it had to. This has been a period of minimal output that has required more rest from one type of work to allow for others.
But hopefully, that period is coming to an end, and I can begin, again, to publish more regularly.
Over a decade of social media use has conditioned me to think that if I am not present online, I (seem to) cease to exist to swaths of people. Further, I think that Facebook and other social platforms have conditioned all of us to become our own PR agents, issuing life updates like marriages, divorces, births, and other things as if they are press releases.
This is something I’ve always had trouble relaying to folks, but that I have been committed to sharing small glimpses into. From the consumer standpoint, every person you read or follow online is one of an infinite number of people you could read or follow. On the creator side, a creator may or may not be able to make a living from their output, for any number of reasons: smaller audience, lack of time needed to produce, edit & publish content because of work/family/life commitments, under- or un-monetized work, and on and on.
All that being said.
I am going on a long-planned vacation this week, and will be back later in the month. I am excited to begin work here again, and to start publishing work, speaking with authors of interesting books, and who knows what else.
Thank you for reading and following along. I’ll have more to share soon.
(the wikipedia plot summary for the game does a far better job explaining this aspect of the game than I ever could, so please, go read that for that angle)