Road to Recovery!

This post has been a solid 6 months in the making, and I have started it so many times, in the wrong mindset and never been able to properly (and professionally) explain what happened, why it happened, what it means and what is next for me. Putting it plainly, I have been on an interesting personal journey the last few months, and it has been one of (I hope) immense personal growth. As you know I was leading the development of Mini Melbourne, and the deployment of M:EE across the state of Victoria. Well, in mid July last year, that all stopped, quite suddenly, and what started as a great opportunity for me, turned into a terrible circumstance and one that had serious impacts on me, my family, and most importantly for this blog, my mental health.

I don’t want to, nor do I think it appropriate, to go into all the details of what happened, and why, but I do think it fair to try and explain what impact it had on me, and why, yet again, I disappeared off the face of the blog planet for a significant time, with no reason or warning.

Basically, I was letting someone else’s (possibly several else’s) poor behaviour and choices define my behaviour, to some extent. Most certainly not by choice, but by virtue of seeing no ‘positive’ way forward, and no way to resolve my feelings due to the fact there is no ‘reasonable’ person on the other end of this situation. I wish there was, sitting with someone reasonable, outlining the situation would, I believe, help in a resolution to a very confusing, and I feel unfair situation. Unfortunately, due to the inability to have this ‘reasonable’ discussion, I am left feeling unfairly treated with no way to resolve the feelings I have, no way to ‘go back in time’ and fix the issues I have faced over the last 6 months.

I loved working on deploying Minecraft: Education Edition on a large scale, developing lessons for teachers to use, working with and supporting a large range of teachers across all subjects and year levels, and best of all, being paid to do it. Then due to misrepresentations and poor decision making, outside of my control, I ‘lost’ that opportunity, and what I thought was going to be a new, even greater opportunity, was no longer available to me.

It was a very abrupt change to my plans, and it was very disheartening to feel all the passion and drive I had for pushing boundaries, and supporting educators slowly drain out of me. Something I had managed to hold onto since 2011, something that I valued in myself, something that I felt defined me in a lot of ways. Educational Minecraft has been a large part of my life for a long time, in fact the majority of my ‘teaching career’ has involved Minecraft in some capacity. I have learned a great deal about myself, education and learning, had some awesome successes and I really value all the friendships, opportunities and experiences I have had in this space. My feelings towards all of those great things was souring, and that was not something I wanted.

I have still been helping where and when I am able, but for my own mental health I had to take an immense step back from the M:EE community, not because of the community, but because of the feelings and thoughts and angst I was feeling about the platform in general.

Basically, right now, I feel like I am beginning to come out of the ‘dark days’ of my mental health issues. Reflecting on this ‘change’ in my disposition, I think a large part of that is probably because I am really looking forward to working in a real life classroom with real life students again.

I have also been working ‘outside’ of the education sphere of Minecraft and with some non-educational projects, which has also been helping, slowly transitioning myself back into seeing Minecraft in a positive light, rather than the cause of a great deal of stress and anxiety. I am working on some really cool stuff, that I am really enjoying, is stretching my own knowledge and ability in customising experiences in Minecraft and is generally, going quite well.

I am also back to ‘imagining’ what I could do to support education when M:EE updates to 1.16. This has not been the case for far too long, not being able to ‘see’ my next big ‘innovation’ and project because I could not see myself working within Minecraft. Something I have wanted to do for a long time might actually be a reality when M:EE goes to 1.16. The longer the delay in updating M:EE, and the closer Bedrock gets to 1.16, the more likely that the next update for M:EE will bring it to 1.16, and that long term desire may be a reality, even if it will be with way too many hours worth of work.

Most importantly, I am back to doing what I love, working with students. It is a tough job, coming back into the classroom after a few years out of it, but there is a solid team around me, both locally at the school, within my family and with my friends, local and global. Here’s to continuing in a more positive frame of mind, and going back to defining my own path, rather than letting others define it for me. For those of you out there, that have supported me, in any way, over the last 12 or so months, know that your support has been highly valued, and likely you don’t even know you did it! To those who did know what was going on, and regularly put up with my terrible moods and grumpy rants and still stuck around, thank you! Without your reasoned and well thought out responses, I wouldn’t be mentally where I am now.

So, this is not the ‘goodbye’ post, or the grumpy rant I started writing so many times over the last few months, but instead, and I am very glad to say it, a more positive me is emerging. While I am not back to ‘full strength’ and I still have more bad days than I would prefer, I am certainly on the road to recovering my passion and drive for supporting educational Minecraft, and pushing my own Minecraft boundaries to help me build whatever my next ‘great’ idea is.