So I left my esports jobs

Hey lovelies, if you happen to follow me on LinkedIn you may have already seen the announcement: I’ve left my esports jobs after a year and a bit. My LinkedIn post was about how little I feel like I have it together, over here though is where I'm going to go into more depth about why I left, what comes next and what I hope to achieve after a break (that is much needed) because burnout is a real thing. And burnout hurts like hell. 

 

A while ago I drafted a blog about getting to where I was (though obviously titled where I am) as some sort of advice column. I have no intention to publish it now, as it doesn’t feel in keeping with who I am. Maybe with time I will publish it but for now it is staying in drafts while I figure out everything – and there is a lot to unpick right now. I hope you can understand that. As there may be some who would’ve been interested in reading my journey up to this point. But that’s not what we are here to talk about right now. I'm not sure why I feel like I have to announce this as some huge announcement to shout about, but I guess I'm one of those people who doesn’t like to make it sound like I'm doing oh so well all of the time. I left my job for a number of reasons we will get into, I left it a few days ago at the time of writing (I'm about to go out after I type some of this) and didn’t know how to really write it for my blog. Writing it as a learning opportunity on career sites makes it sound so much nicer than what was going on behind the scenes for me, which wasn’t as nice. 

 

So here’s why I left in a list:

 

-       Lost my passion

-       Massive burnout from May 2023 that I haven’t healed

-       Struggling to write 

-       Want to try something new 

 

I'm going to go into each one of these don’t worry, I wouldn’t be writing this blog if I was going to give you a list and peace out immediately after. Not my style, I'm far too emotionally invested to do that kind of thing. And I appreciate that even one person might read this blog when it eventually goes live considering how long I haven’t updated this blog for. That’s another thing, with time, I'm planning to look more into sustaining and growing this blog into something but we will get to that later. I'm changing up my writing a style a bit as you might notice in this blog, it’s going to be more bullet point marks so you can tell if you want to read something, less long form essay (I write enough of those as is) and hopefully more pictures! As I finally know how to reference images to not get screamed at by people haha. 

 

Here's another list, of what comes next:

 

-       A break 

-       Working out what I want again

-       Moving into content on my own terms for now

-       Working out whether I plan to return to esports 

 

Ok so there’s a lot to unpack in this blog, I know I don’t owe anyone an explanation, but truthfully I find it mentally soothing to talk about it all and I think its’ good for other people to realise that my ‘perfect’ life is not perfect at all, and although I may look like I’ve got it all together and am inherently successful – I'm really not, I have huge imposter syndrome and right now I feel like a huge failure. Please don’t assume this is me being like ‘feel sorry for me uwu’ first up – would never say uwu unironically – secondly, that’s not the point of this blog. This blog is about being honest. For my sake, and for anyone who might’ve looked up to me as the pinocle of success at a young age – look to pro players for that not me haha. 

 

Lost my passion:

 

It’s hard to admit that something I loved so much, I lost passion for. I was so excited to get a Worlds pass this year, but I’ve also been burning the candle at both ends, I’ve been working myself to the point of exhaustion and after a certain point, gaming news just stopped exciting me. It is still interesting but not in the same way, I don’t spend a lot of time online currently, and I didn’t watch that many worlds matches live either – it hasn’t fitted in with other commitments and I found myself enjoying it less and less. And let me tell you, when your passion is your job, you really can’t afford to lose it, because it makes the job so much harder mentally. 

 

Massive burnout:

 

It’s no secret that I worked the majority of MSI in London, I was there most days (which involved a 4hr+ commute), I worked purely on excitement and adrenalin, and genuinely I would describe myself as a hyperactive puppy looking back on MSI. But I didn’t heal my burnout from that time, as soon as MSI wrapped up I was back in with articles constantly, and started a summer job that I balanced (somehow) alongside esports even though the summer job in question required my mental state and physical state to be in use constantly. From the summer job I went into another, even more mentally taxing due to the nature of the topic of work, and carried through all the burnout from May that had no hope in hell’s chance of being healed because I didn’t have enough time to stop – not least because I was telling myself I had to keep going no matter how drained I felt. It will come as no surprise that I could barely stay awake on weekends for longer than 10hrs. 

 

Struggling to write:

 

Something not everyone knows is that I love writing fanfic and stories, I truly love writing, it has been my outlet for years since I was a child (a very long time ago it feels like), and writing is a huge passion for me. In another life I would be an author that’s how much I love writing. But I was struggling massively to write fanfic, my account on a fan site, has the worst publishing schedule I’ve had since I first started writing on there back in 2019. And when you struggle to write for fun, well I'm sure you can realise that writing for work becomes ten times harder. It wasn’t even that I had no motivation, I just had no desire to write, I’d draft and draft and it just would not come out right and that can’t happen in a job such as journalism. Additionally, my school community was deeply affected by journalists who took no consideration for our pain over the last year, and actively documented it, showing no care for us whatsoever, and that massively contributed to my dislike of writing. I didn’t want to be writing, because they wrote too, I didn’t want to be lumped into the same category. I know that sounds incredibly black and white of me, and I pride myself on seeing the shades of grey, but at the time it was incredibly painful. Our pain was being documented and broadcast to the world like we had lost a £5 note, not the incredibly traumatic events that had actually transpired. So writing was a big problem for me. 

 

Want to try something new:

 

At this point in time, I also want to try something new. Writing is great, I'm so thankful for what it gave me, but at my heart I knew my time was coming to a close and I have other things I want to pursue now. I love chatting with people – it was my favourite part of esports, so moving forward I want to pursue a more people based role. Whether that be inside or outside of esports, meeting people is something I adore, it’s why I work the jobs I do outside of esports. As I mentioned in the LinkedIn post, I want to look at more content creation based work, I love doing graphic design for companies, I love working with pro players and chatting with them, I enjoy working with groups of people, all of these are things I'd like to pursue in the future in some capacity and if its in esports then it would mean me going back to a more team focused role. And that’s cool with me. I'd like to be a team manager or something similar, and I can only do that by leaving my writing job. Just remember kids, burnout is a real thing and taking on too many things is the fastest way to burnout. Take it from someone whose second half of 2023 was made up of it. 

 

So there you have it, a full breakdown of my reasons for leaving my esports job. I haven’t stopped loving esports by any means, but I can appreciate that right now, I need a break and I need it pretty damn desperately. And my esports job was the only thing I could put down truthfully, because on top of working that job, I'm working another job / internship at school, I'm doing school work still, and I volunteer for multiple youth groups local to me – and you know keeping plates spinning isn’t realistic or healthy when it comes to that level. And I can admit that. So learn from me on that one and don’t burn yourself out how I have. It's really not fun.  

 

Onto what comes next!

 

A break:

 

A solid break, where I do not think about working myself to the bone again. This might sound rude but I am so glad to have a few more extra hours in my day now, a few extra hours where I can go ice skating instead of panicking about writing when my brain doesn’t want to write. A break isn’t going to look like me doing nothing, I’ll still be writing, just not for work, I’ll still be creating, just on a private level for a while e.g. scrapbooking, and I’ll be focusing on things I’ve not had enough time to fully dedicate to e.g. taking ice skating lessons on my weekends and doing practice sessions in the evenings. I truthfully don’t know if I will return to esports, a part of me thinks I will after a break, but time will tell on that one. 

 

Working out what I want again:

 

For me, a big part of all of this is re-evaluating what I want and putting in the steps to do it. I didn’t really set out to work in esports I'd say, I just decided I wanted to and made it happen, but now I do need to sit down and work out what I want to do next. That’s not an easy task for me right now as I have a lot of different thoughts and paths for what I could go and do, and so I know I need that time to figure it out with space to figure it out – not what I have been doing where I try and keep everything happening even though I'm not sure if I want it anymore and stress myself out in the process. Not fun I can tell you.

 

Moving into content on my own terms for now:

 

This one probably sounds plain stupid, I don’t have a huge readership right now, I’m not some huge esports person with a huge following. But on the other hand, I really want to make the content I want to make, it doesn’t matter to me if it doesn’t get 100k reads, I can live with that no problem, but I do want to make content that interests and excites me. Like content about new games, fun posts, not breaking news that much is for sure, as of right now at least. I want to go back to doing my silly koala drawings and putting them everywhere you know, just the stuff I do that I like because I like it. Maybe that sounds selfish but there is something so freeing and fun about deciding your content, how it’s going to look, if it matters how big or not the readership is etc. I'm not one of those people who wants to be an influencer but writing is a creative outlet so for now at least, I'm going to write what I want to write. 

 

Working out whether I want to return to esports:

 

Now the big one, truthfully I don’t know. As I’ve said before, I don’t think I'd return to writing if I did go back. I’ve done what I wanted to achieve within the writing sphere and truthfully I'd want to try something new. I’ve come to the conclusion that I would either want to go into working for one team and a team only, or into a corporation like Riot, I want to still do content but I'm not sure how that would look honestly, and while I figure this out, whether I return to esports or not is unclear. I still have so many wonderful friends in esports, who I massively respect and adore, and I know that won’t change even if I do leave esports permanently, but for now I need that freedom and distance from it to work out whether I do want to return and in what capacity this would look like – as I’ve never really given thought to esports being my full time job due to other things like school and not being far enough along in life for it to be a viable option.

 

So that’s all of that, I'm still going to post my backlog blogs from MSI and continue to make new content but I do admittedly need to work out how all of this is going to look – so stick around! We can figure it out together! Thanks for reading lovelies, hope you have a lovely day / night when you read this.

 

Byeeeeeee >.<