mortal’s Media Maelstrom
Where I tend to live…
Hello! It’s been a minute. Well, I released that MegaMan article recently, but I had written that months ago, so this is my first check-in in months. How’s it going, Medium?
Launching right into what I’m talking about today. I was a kid who was moderately neglected, underscored, and ignored a lot. I found my own pursuits for my time. And most of those pursuits were books, cartoons, and video games. I can, to this day, talk competently about Voltron and the ThunderCats, most of the first 10 Final Fantasy games and the story behind the earlier Tekken games, and the journeys of Drizzt Do’Urden and Tanis Half-Elven and Rand al’Thor. Even though I haven’t really engaged with most of those storylines in years. Decades, for some.
At the same time, I was able to find one or two people during my first 13 years that I became close to, as peers. Friends that I adored beyond childhood friendship. And puberty thrust me forward into turning some of that adoration into romantic crushes. Between my super-active imagination and society’s pushes towards the nuclear family and the overwhelming push of puberty, I spent a whole bunch of years trying to find how to dedicate myself to the happiness of one person.
My Person
For a long time in my young adult years, that idea of making one person happy didn’t usually have the same target person. I wanted to find my person that I could live my life for. And there were people that I could see being that person, but no one that really fit that narrative. Or, maybe, no one seemed like they were interested in the position. And then I got into the longest romantic relationship of my life.
It was 9 years and I was amazed by that person’s emotional existence and their deep, wonderful mind. And, most importantly to me at the time, they appreciated my attention in this way. They were happy to have me around and to love them with the depth that I felt it. And, isn’t that what compatibility looks like? When someone LIKES the WAY you love them and you reciprocate that feeling?
During that relationship, I did everything I could think of to lift up my person and to promote their lives and values and identity. I was very unhealthy about it, to be honest. I regularly put my own thoughts and needs and wants off to the side to help out this person. That person also had some previous trauma that led them to some abusive tendencies. And those abusive tendencies found a nice comfy home in my desire to put myself to the side to help them.
I don’t want to be negative about my person. It took them awhile, but they noticed how abusive they were being and slowly started to change themselves in such a way that they became more kind and understanding. And, while I can’t truly say this for a fact without BEING that person, I feel like a little bit of that trauma was healed over that time. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking, because I know that sometimes trauma just lives in us forever. And we get used to it and find a way to live with it in a way that doesn’t hurt us too often. But, to this day I feel like I helped, even if it might be false.
Towards the end of that relationship, it started to become painfully clear that I was (am, but I’m talking about the past, here) a polyamorous person desperately trying to force myself into a monogamous position. I’m a very loyal person, so there wasn’t an issue of cheating, but my person wanted to feel like I was possessive in a way that was foreign to me. I can’t say this is a ubiquitous experience, but there are a lot of monogamous people out there who want to feel like their partner “has” them in a really special and unique way. And I was always totally ok if my partner wanted to explore other romantic or sexual interests. This is a part of what led to the end of that relationship.
Now, I’m 8 years past the end of that relationship, and that feeling of wanting to “live for someone else” still exists within me. It brings me the most satisfaction and happiness when something about me or my actions makes someone I love feel more empowered. More able to be their authentic selves. Ironic because I don’t even know if I have any idea what my authentic self looks like. Maybe that’s why I love it so much. Because I’ve never found a way to give MYSELF the space to feel that way…
Enter our current day and age of the online gig economy
I’m honestly lucky that I found my found family and cultivated a place that allows us to all live together. Most of my finances go towards keeping that household afloat(ish), so I don’t have the money to just spread online like I would if I had full freedom. I mean this with all the love in the world, but if I didn’t have responsibilities that I care about as much as I do, I would be destroyed by Patreon.
Creator Support
There are probably 50 Patreons that I would love to be a part of. I adore so many creators on Twitch and YouTube and so many of them have Patreons, because that is the only way those creators can have some sort of a stable income. I’m of two minds about Patreon, though.
I’m so thrilled that we got to the point where we realized that these content creators pushing themselves all the time to create something interesting for the masses of the internet needed to have a place where their fans can just support them. I know that Patreon has all kinds of incentives and “give this much for this reward” type of shenanigans, but I truly believe that most Patrons support the creators because they want to support the creator, and not to get stuff out of it.
This means that we’re finally getting to the point that people are trying to support each other for being cool people. Which is great! What’s not great is that these people are not able to support themselves without this sort of service. Content creation is still an industry that is largely ignored by the majority of the conversation around capitalism. It seems like the idea is mostly “If you feel like trying, go for it. There is almost no chance that it will become financially worth your time, but whatever.”
With all the content with Twitch streamers I’ve had for the last couple of years, I’ve heard many times that if you want to pursue content creation, make sure you’re doing it for fun, Or for social interaction. Or for the sake of the art. I hear some variation of “don’t do this to make money. If you don’t handle failure or rejection well, maybe consider a different avenue to spend your time.”
I think content creation is a huge part of our growth as a sentient species, personally. We struggled for a long time to just figure out survival of a large group of people. We’ve hit the place where survival was taken care of for a few civilizations over the years. And, in most of those that pop up in my head, we moved towards thought and reality and art and imagination. That’s our future. If we ever get to a place where we can stop fighting each other, and we can start making sure that all humans have their basic needs provided for, I truly believe that we’re going to evolve socially so, so quickly.
And people turning on an affordable webcam and giving us their thoughts, feelings, and ideas is a necessary step on that path. Twitter and Facebook are a part of that, too. I know a whole shit ton of people that think it’s ridiculous that people share their every thought and feeling online. “Why do they think their opinion/thought/lunch is so important to everyone else?” they ask me. We’re just still babies in our social growth. As a species, we’re like 4 year olds, just starting to grasp the concept of conversation and we’re just trying shit out.
That’s why you can see so many people just spouting some thought or idea they had, even though it is factually false, or socially seen as cringe. They are just trying shit. They’re trying to see if their thoughts will gain traction or pushback. Or, they don’t think about how other people will receive their words and are just focused on how the words made THEM feel. I think it’s beautiful, even with all the misinformation flowing through all of social media, right now.
I worry hard about the future of America, because it really looks like our social media landscape is fully prepared for a huge tidal wave of misinformation that might lead to something really terrible happening in our future. Regardless of that worry for the near future, when I look at the whole, I have so much hope for the world that exists 50 years from now. We’re going to fuck-up and struggle. And we’ll have to rebuild from the ashes of horrible calamity, both human-made and natural. But, we’re progressing. We’re getting there. Any look at our history will show that we’re on the way up and if we can just persevere through the growing pains (and growing catastrophes) we’ll get to a world that no one living now can imagine or comprehend. Just my opinion, though. lol.
I think that’s it. I’ll go back through and see if I need to change anything before I release it. I know that the article isn’t super visually interesting, yet, but I’ll see if I can spruce it up, a bit. I’ll probably leave this paragraph in here, as well. Just for the vulnerability of it.
Thanks for coming along! Sure the title didn’t really follow the article, but I wrote the title before I wrote the article. And I feel a silly loyalty to the title, so I refuse to change it. :P
I hope you find smiles this day! ❤
P.S. Thanks to The Sturg & The Accidental Monster for the motivation to write this one! ❤
