Not sure how to start this one, for context you can look at this awesome video here, and then this awesome follow up video here.
There are a lot of things I wanted to say to these videos. The first is I realized that I’ve shed bad friends and I feel like I might be making good friends. At least I really hope I am. I’ve made a home on Twitch and I am happy to have a place to share my music. I have people that I can consider colleagues now, and friends who do music for the same reasons or similar reasons I do and just interacting with them makes me have so many dreams, inspirations and aspirations that I am beside myself with the possibilities!
I am unhappy that my laptop has no more room memory wise so I cannot make vlogs for the moment and that’s frustrating cause I really could be logging all of this the way I wanted my vloging channel to me and I could be really making more of my content shareable and improving my stream, but well baby steps right? I have a temporary plan to resolve that memory issue on my computer but my mind is in such a daze that I can’t even remember what that plan was and I think that is the most devastating part of my life right now. I can’t even communicate to friends online because I have like this constant brain fog now. Thankfully it’s not hurting my day-to-day work yet and I really hope it doesn’t. I am not sure if it’s from my depression and anxiety because of so many things I’ve been processing alone since August on top of more chaos coming into my life because of financial issues or if it’s related to my lack of proper food because of financial issues, but it’s frustrating.
Moving on, I’ve been meaning to set aside time to organize the chaos that is my room for quite some time now that my shoulder injury is better, it’s not like 100% pain free but I am at a job where I can still do my job if I ignore the pain and suck it up and then rest as much as I FREAKING POSSIBLY CAN when I get home and then deal with it. I don’t want to make excuses but when I try to plan it all out I remember how my dirt bag landlord has yet to fix my a/c and the apartment is completely overly warm when I am not doing a lot of physical work and I overheat at night just from doing stuff on my computer that I get anxious just thinking about how sick I will get (besides the crippling shoulder pain) when I finally sit down to clean my mess.
This has been in my mind since November last year, mind you, when I achieved a full year at my job and was awarded a full week’s worth of paid time off and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to purge my room of clutter from all the times I tried to clean and got interrupted by my old job and the idea of going back to school (more on that later) and finally just get rid of a lot of stuff. Then my dad passed away… and I was having what felt like breakdowns at work shortly after the news was official.
I took a day off on my birthday to start the process of sorting out a lot of emotional mess I have. Mind you, I had no one there to talk about this… except one really toxic friend and I am not sure but this might be the only reason I let that person back into my heart at the time because they knew a lot of my story and I had no one else. So cleaning the mess around me was put on hold. Was a day enough time off to sort out everything I was dealing with, probably not, actually not one bit enough but I was able to settle myself enough to not start sobbing at my desk randomly. Shortly after the van we have broke down so I took a financial hit which led to me not eating well, kinda like I am now, and I ended up getting sick.
Happenstance, as some might say, occurred because in this time I learned about the magic of Twitch and all the wonderful musicians on there and I decided I wanted to stream and try to share my music there. Then some oddball things happened to where I was making a lot of bad friend choices, or maybe just a few bad ones and they spoiled the good ones but anyway, it was taking its toll on my already unstable mental state. (Mind you, I know this seems odd since I have been struggling with anxiety and depression for a long time but I mean I felt mostly normal and I felt I had very few bad days since I had gotten a job in November 2016.) Anyway, the sick days lead to less time for me to take off to do this huge project (cleaning my mess of a room) cause I wanted to take time off work as a vacation so I wouldn’t have to call in sick from the pain.
Eventually things started getting stable again maybe around May or June this year even after a lot of things happening that made me want to run away screaming from ever interacting with new people and new friends but anyway, that might be a story for another time. At this point, the good friends are still around and the bad friends have been purged. My plan for cleaning things was looking up, then car troubles and more issues starting in June and running into July and then just my internal battle with my past wreaking all sorts of havoc mentally and suddenly I am having more and more bad days instead of good days and I am binge watching YouTube trying to self diagnose and heal myself just to stay sane! Shane’s series on Jeffree Star really tore into sore spots on my heart that I had been neglecting to heal so everything else had to be put to a halt.
Still, the mess in my life was weighing on my mind; the mess inside and outside. Now my living room is pitch black because there’s an electrical issue and the landlord hasn’t done a thing to fix it or even look at it. Now I am fighting more and more guilt and I really just want to run away and start over. I never wanted to come to this apartment. A lot of me wants to do like Garrett did and find a new place and start over. This time I want it to be MY choice… The day I moved here, was far from my choice. I will explain why.
Now we get to the part where I guess this all felt too much to explain on a simple comment on a video. Well, all of this has been that but this is the bulk of it. I’ve never had much of a problem with cleaning my living space. My room I always left as the last thing but it got done. However, July of 2015 brought a time where even carrying anything more than a few pounds led to crippling pain in that starts in my shoulder and runs down my arm. It was from the job I had at the time. The doc at urgent care said my clavicle was disconnected from my scapula and it was probably due to the repetitive movements at my job. When I saw the specialist he referred me to, he said I was lazy and needed to work out.
Simple tasks like putting on my clothes are sometimes painful, back then it was horribly painful. The specialist put me on rest for a month and wanted me to have physical therapy twice a week which the copay was $25 and at $200 a month that was 5% of my already insufficient income. After a month resting from my actual work I felt better to where I could get dressed most of the time without pain and I could sleep at night. I was taken off rest and put on my normal work then chastised for working “too slow” and then eventually I got fired being written up for things I never did and missing work too much because of the amount of pain I was in.
Fast forward to one year without a job and all the time in the world to clean but physically unable to do so. The mess slowly started migrating to the living room. Dare I ask for help, no, it’s my stuff and I wanted to be the one to decide where it all goes cause I lose things if other people move them, and I mean I lose them over and over and over unless I make a place for them. Why I am like this i have no idea. All this time off and poverty was starting to feel more and more traumatic. In the midst of all this, I am not sure when I started contemplating this, but the way I even ended up in the apartment I am in now wasn’t the most pleasant move either.
This is the part that really feels like too much but I just have to talk about this. When my father separated from my mom he left us with months of bills to pay; three months of bills that were unpaid. Why? Because maybe he wanted to save money to move out, because I am not sure… this is the only speculation I feel comfortable sharing and it’s probably the most accurate of them all. Either way, he had promised to pay the second mortgage on the house so that we could survive since my mom’s income really wasn’t enough. Suddenly he decided he didn’t want to pay it anymore, why, I’m not sure. He was working two jobs and living alone but somehow he had too many financial burdens (I know how this probably all sounds but it’s really a lot of raw emotions.) In the end we lost our home and had to move our things to this tiny two bedroom apartment.
I lost my room, that was perfectly personalized and creatively crafted in so many special ways. I spent hours with my mom planning how I wanted my room to look and feel. I still dream that it is my bedroom to this day. The room where I could always escape, where I had just the right spot for every little thing. Now I share a space with my mom, which is okay but it’s difficult when organizing and cleaning, and it was difficult to stuff two peoples bedrooms into one. I don’t know if we thought it would be temporary but we wanted to keep as much as we could. The idea of downsizing wasn’t brought into account mostly because it wasn’t planned.
Watching Garrett talk about all his little personified things made me remember the many times I’ve ruminated over the amount of stuff I have. Having so little money for so long (my whole life mostly) I have always been afraid to get rid of things that are broken, or get rid of clothes cause growing up I rarely got new ones. In fact, shopping for clothes was always a reason to put me down and I hated it really. To this day, I mostly hate shopping and it causes anxiety. So I have a lot of things that just piled up. As much as I fought to get out of poverty along side my mom, I never finished college because of money, but I still have dozens of papers from studying music in school and books that I thought I would need “when I went back to school.” The reason I started the job that cause the shoulder injury was to eventually save up money and go back to school and become a music teacher like I had wanted for so many years at the time.
I know it’s time to let those things go and seeing Garrett’s video is really making me excited about it, The Rewired Soul mentioned something about running away from issues so I am not sure if that’s what I’ve wanted to do since the apartment feels more and more like a death trap and less and less like a home. I am not sure how much of it is my fault and how much isn’t. Either way I want to clean things out and if i move I’ll have less to move but if I stay maybe I can force them to actually fix our electricity to where we no longer have sparks flying out the outlets and the a/c actually cools the apartment and were we can have the TV and lamps on in the living room again.
Will this make my streams more consistent? Maybe, but something The Rewired Soul mentioned which I have been thinking about since I started twitch was not promising a consistent schedule because sometime I can’t stream cause I am exhausted, because some other random thing has gone wrong that makes it impossible to stream and be able to be focused at work the next day. To be 100% honest, I am risking a really bad day at work tomorrow to write this but I really needed to say all this. I struggle to wake up and go to work in the morning, I struggle to stream even though it makes me so happy and makes me feel like I can give to people instead of taking, I struggle with the idea that my life isn’t worth keeping sometimes. One day at a time I think I can be healed, find peace and give & receive love.
In the end I want to do what I can to make things better because I am tired of hurting the people I love, and I am tired or myself not being one of those people. In the end I am super thankful to new friends I have made on Twitch. I am thankful for content creators who care about things that are deeper than entertainment. I am thankful for my mom and my friends from years ago who have stuck around and who have proven to me that love is real and beautiful. Lastly, I am thankful for all the people who support me in the little ways they can, even if it’s just chatting online, taking me out for coffee, taking me to and from work, putting up with me at work and appreciating the things I do well (I can’t even see what they are because I am so deep in my head.) Anyway, I hope for things to get better, and hopefully my little story helps people out there somewhere. I know it’s long and if you got this far, thank you.