
Starting to stream, receiving a huge boost, finding new friends through streaming, increasing my work hours, losing my job… So many things have happened…
Hi, I’m back! 2021 definitely was a roller coaster from start to finish. Strap yourselves in folks, this is gonna be a long one.
So I recently cracked open my, admittedly very failed, Bullet Journal for 2021 (the last spread I did was April…but let’s not talk about that now shall we? 😅) and realized that almost all of the things that I wrote at the very beginning of the year, the things that 2021 should be filled with, 2021 has actually been filled with.
Happiness, ideas, togetherness, positivity, hugs, luck, laughter, growth, opportunities and many more…
But there were also multiple things that went less than ideal. So let’s start the recap, shall we?
As you may or may not know, I started streaming last year in April. Pretty much along the same time, I opened this blog and began writing blog posts. Was, unfortunately, not really able to keep up with it, but more on that and why I’m hoping to change that again in a bit. Pretty soon after I had started streaming, I was insanely lucky to receive a huge boost, for which I will be forever grateful, and suddenly there were people actually watching and caring about what I did. It was an incredible feeling and I was extraordinarily happy. So happy that I wished I could do it all the time. However, I was still working part time and had even recently increased my hours, because I had actually managed to get myself a bachelor’s degree and wanted to focus a bit more on working instead of uni. Didn’t mean that I wanted to stop focusing on uni completely, but at that point we had summer holidays, so stuff worked out, but boy was I naive to think that it would continue being that way. (Spoiler: It didn’t.)
Summer holidays also meant I had more time for being social, which was great, considering I had actually found new friends via streaming. Didn’t think it was actually possible to get this close with people you’ve never met in real life, but the internet, chatting and video phoning did it’s job and we knew pretty quickly that we wanted to meet in real life. All of that required planning and since I was the only one that was working every single day, we had to plan that around that somehow. It worked out, but it certainly wasn’t ideal, however, it wasn’t as if I could have just taken time off anytime someone was coming, so it was what it was.
As the summer faded, work became more and more demanding, which is not a surprise considering more hours meant more responsibility, and I quickly realized that I probably wouldn’t be able to continue as things were, but I tried. I tried to squeeze everyhing I could into the day: work, stream, blog, other socials, uni, workout, social life, at that point also a relationship and free time/time where I took care of myself. Needless to say, it didn’t work out and multiple fights, mental break downs, lost sleep and lost weight, due to simply not having the time to eat, were the result of the lifestyle that I was living, but I tried to keep going. My friends became more and more concerend about me and my health and tried to make me see that I was already at my limit and wouldn’t be able to continue, but I was stubborn.
Then came September, October and the beginning of November. Now, sorry, I know that sounds all dramatic and stuff, like something along the lines of “everything changed when the fire nation attacked” but it was sorta dramatic. At the end of September I lost my, what I thought was a stable job, due to economical reasons. This was a first for me and I knew that I had 6 weeks in order to find something new. I wanted to give Twitch a chance, but doing that meant that I had to see whether or not I could make it work. So I increased my stream hours, while simultaneously looking for a new job, because I didn’t think it would work out financially otherwise.
The next one and half months were hell. Uni had picked back up and that meant that I had even less time for the stuff I was doing. So there I was, trying to manage a week with about 12-15 hours of streaming, 15 hours of work, about 2-3 hours of uni each day, doing organisatory and bureaucracy stuff for the stream, trying not to fry my social life completely, being there for the people who needed me, trying to keep my relationship from completely breaking appart and doing the bare minimum to keep my soul from leaving my body, in order to find a more responsible vessel… Yeah… I don’t think that I need to tell you that this is definitely not something you should do.
Relief came with a talk that I had with my parents, who told me that for now I don’t have to worry about finding something new. That I should give Twitch a chance. That I should cut back at work to do the necessary but not more and also cut back at uni, since I have a degree already and can always focus on uni again, once the other things are sorted out. I am so insanely grateful to them for being as supportive as they are. Yes, I may be 25 years old and no longer need the approval from my parents, but knowing that they do support you is just absolutely incredible. From then on things began to be a bit easier. It was still stressful but the insane pressure lessened. Unfortunately, my relationship did end up falling appart, but I’m not gonna elaborate on that any further. It just didn’t work out, because we had different views.
For the rest of the year I fell into a somewhat comfortable rythm. Doing uni, which sadly started being online again, so my motivation for that flew out of the window never to be seen again pretty quickly, and streaming in between. And for a while that worked out pretty well. However, towards the end of the year and beginning this year I started to notice that something wasn’t right. I felt frustrated and angry with myself and didn’t even know why for some time. After a while I realized that it was, because I wasn’t being as productive as I’d liked to be and that wasn’t happy anymore with the quality of the content I was producing. Granted, I was also dealing with some health issues, but my mentality plummeted and I felt drained more often than not. On top that I felt like I wasn’t improving anymore. I had lost my fire and had gotten too comfortable. I had completely stopped producing any sort of other content other than stream and I had gotten bored of myself, my own content.
All of this I realized with a clarity when I woke up one day, after a horrid night’s sleep, and my head just started screaming at me. All of my insecurities, self-doubt and every negative thought I’ve ever had about myself were there all of a sudden and they were so loud. After I had finally found a way to make them quieten down again, I knew with a clarity that this wasn’t how things can continue. I needed to change something. What those changes are gonna be exactly, is at the point of writing this post still up in the air. I’m hoping to use this week to clean up some “constuction zones” that are currently open, reorganize myself and figure out not if but how I’m gonna continue this adventure I’m currently on.
However, one of the things that I already know that I wanna change, is to create other content besides streaming again, including blog posts. The plan is to do at least one a week, even if it’s just someting I ramble about and it’s less elaborate than this one right here. Some of the other things that I wanna work out is my own health – mentally and physically. I can’t just stop taking care of my body any time things get stressful, so I also need to find preventitive measures to make sure that all of the negative things above don’t happen again, and, on top of all that, I need to find a way to realistically decide, what I can promise others and myself, as to not keep feeling like I’m disappointing people and myself.
So yeah, that was my 2021 and the beginning of 2022. I know that it was a long post, so thank you for taking the time to read. It feels good to be back to writing and I’m hoping that I will be able to keep up with it.
Time to show you what I can do once I have regained my passion!
But for now, see (read) you in the next one! Please stay safe and healthy! ❤
~Luna
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