I feel lost. Like I can't do anything right. I used to know what worked for me. What I found enjoyable, what I could do creatively to keep myself satisfyed. Right now though, it all feels so useless. every creative pathway I take there seems to be some sort of barrier preventing me from sticking with it. With games essays it was the online culture of everyone keeping a watchful eye and opinion about what everyone is doing. That on top of me having an absolutely painful time trying to sit down and concentrate on writing. With making games, I could never fully finish a project. Every game idea was always a scrap, a concept, a scribble. I could never commit to any of them unless it was in a weeklong frenzy of development. Now streaming is reaching a similar predicament. I haven't streamed anything for a month now and I really am having a hard time figuring out why.
When I started streaming I did it because I wanted to create a project that meaningfully went through an entire game console's catalog and explored what they had to offer. Retro games culture form such strong nostalgias for the past, that many times it erases smaller parts of reality that are just as cool. However, as time went on I found myself making friends in the streaming community. In fact, I would say if you grow at all as a streamer you have to make friends. That's who your viewers are, people that you make friendships with. Then my streams started to get a little less focused and I added more and more ways for the streams to be viewer focused. This included little audio snippets that could play based on viewer redeems or make little visual things interact with my stream character.
It was at this point in time that I started to feel a bit of exhaustion towards certain elements of streaming. The more that my community grew and elements were added on, I found that the less people paid attention to my stream. In the beginning people would tune into my stream and be so engaged. It felt like we were all playing together and that was really satisfying for me. However, as time has pushed on, it seems like most people coming to stream engage less with what I am playing and more just to have me repeat jokes that has been said on stream a bunch of times. And.....yeah I don't know......the performance of doing all that so repetively....It just makes me feel bad!!!!
But maybe it isn't the repetition or the lacking attention towards my stream. I think maybe I also don't feel like I can be so fun and excitable like I have been throughout the course of my stream? I have a stream on right now as I am writing this and......I don't know.....I just dont want to be that way. I just want to play games and chat about them. FUCK! This line of thinking is making my brain catch on fire.
It's not that I don't want to be uppity. It's not that I dislike these elements of streaming. It's that I don't feel like I can keep up with doing them. I feel like with the way my brain functions, I am incapable of keeping up socially with anyone. And it absolutely destroys me. I want to be able to be uppity and make jokes. But I can't!!!!!! It takes it out of me so much!! Every second where I am not preforming in some way I am constantly freaking out about what I am doing right or wrong or if I am being funny. I just want to feel comfortable being myself, and maybe adding some creavitiy into that while playing games on stream. But then I would likely barely be saying anything at all!! I don't know!! I think I am spiraling about this!!
I am in such agony!! Such pain!! I can't figure out how to exist! How to create in a way that doesn't leave me a burnt out husk that lies in bed in pain from the inability to do what I dream.
I am maybe going to try streaming again next week. I know I said I would wait until all my debut materials were finished but......I can't keep on like this. I feel completely incapable of streaming right now. But I want to hope that part of that is just an overwhelming emotion rather than any piece of reality. Yet simultaneously, trying to make myself belief that I want to stream next week only makes me feel an overwhelming sense of pain in my brain. It's screeeaaming. It's fallen on the ground crying, punching the ground without any energy because it doesn't have anything left. I hope I can find a way for that part to heal and rest.