Tag: Feelings

  • You’ll Ask for Me

    I’m trying to learn how to focus better, and I’m starting to scale down.

    The past few weeks or so, I’ve been keeping myself busy ramping up production on my little home-based server. You might recall that I was doing something similar in the spring, only I was attempting to self-host everything on a paid VPS (virtual private server) and didn’t know much about any of it. I was learning things on the fly. I didn’t really have the funds to spend on web hosting as a hobby, and nobody was really interested or impressed in anything that I was trying to build, so I eventually shut it all down and fully moved just this website over to Ghost’s services proper. But I never really gave up the idea of building my own private “walled garden,” if you will, on the internet. The thought of a box physically set up here in my own home that’s harnessing and controlling my data instead of the corporate “broligarchy” dudes sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

    My nephew has also taken it upon himself, over the last few years, to slowly and painstakingly digitize our fairly massive film collection on DVD. Why? Because the DVD industry is rapidly dying due to the rise of streaming platforms and digital giants like Netflix and Disney+. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since they were physically mailing me DVD rentals (did I just date myself??)… Nobody loves the ability to do things without leaving my home more than me. But these big digital corporations are also the first to tell us that we own nothing. Did you know that when you digitally purchase a movie, TV show, album, video game, etc., you are actually purchasing the license to use it recreationally? You do NOT own that piece of media, and the license can be revoked at any time. And the streamers? They’re sometimes just playing an eternal game of roulette with one another as to which copyrights they’re holding each month, which results in movies and shows being here one minute and then either on a different service or completely gone the next.

    And what’s up with that, my dudes? I just wanna watch my little short-lived, sardonically creative and comical Wonderfalls in peace, but do you know where you can find it streaming? That’s right: NOWHERE!

    There’s also this point: Ever since this last presidential election, my father and I have been slowly turning into doomsday preppers. Which, admittedly, sounds bonkers. I also used to think people who spent a lot of time in their handmade bomb shelters were a little on edge, too, but the world has completely lost the plot. Can you blame me these days? Digitizing our collection so that the only requirement to enjoy them is electricity makes his portable hard drive worth its weight in gold during the apocalypse. It fits in nicely with our bug-out bags, solar panels, weather radios, and raised garden beds we’ve been making efforts to acquire.

    With his growing collection in mind, I knew that there were a few pretty popular pieces of free and open-source self-hosted software on the internet, the most interesting of which was Jellyfin. After it’s installed on your system, you can effectively create your own streaming platform similar to Netflix, but you also pretty much have to supply your own media to load into it. Thankfully, we just so happened to have someone who did have that piece of the puzzle. But Jellyfin didn’t work out on my VPS because, well… It’s sorta difficult to plug a physical hard drive into a virtual machine, right? But when I started getting the idea to turn my old PC into a physical server here at home, that wouldn’t be a problem! So off to work I went on my new side project for my whole “famn damily.” And this time, I was more cautious and had a slightly better grasp on how things needed to function.

    Now we’re getting to the techno mumbo-jumbo that I know many of you aren’t going to be super interested in. Feel free to skip ahead if you’d like. I’m not the boss of you!

    Video game character Toad dances to techno music.
    No, Toad, wrong kind of techno!

    I knew that I was going to need to wipe the entire hard drive of my old PC to get this project going. In fact, I was going to need a whole different operating system. We don’t want to mess with Windows. I knew that I wanted to use a containerized system, and since I was really only mildly familiar with Docker, that’s the one I decided to go with. Some cursory research indicated that there are two options for an OS that would execute Docker pretty easily: Proxmox or Ubuntu Server. Well, that “cursory research” wound up pretty much failing me, because neither of those operating systems wanted to boot on the old machine. In both cases, I flashed a USB stick with the image of the OS, managed to get GRUB to start booting, and then wound up on a completely black screen that did zilch. Nothing.

    I was already pretty defeated, and I was only at the first step of this whole thing. I think the old PC just sat, set up on a desk, and wasn’t touched for weeks because I got so frustrated thinking that Rufus (the flashing software, not my cat!) was somehow flashing corrupted images onto the USB stick, or maybe I was doing something wrong. I was reading horror stories on Google and Reddit, and saw some users suggest that some USB ports are better than others, and maybe you need to change the BIOS settings on your machine to read what’s on the stick before it boots what’s already on your hard drive, and so on and so on. Eventually, I stumbled across some information that suggested that I instead install something even simpler: Debian. “That makes sense,” I realized, pretty much as I was flashing my USB stick with it. After all, Proxmox is based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian. When in doubt, go to the source, I guess, because BAM!!! Debian 13 installed with zero issues. I also managed to get Docker installed and got Cockpit, Portainer, and Nginx Proxy Manager up and running so I could control everything remotely from my main computer! I finally started to feel a little tingle of technological prowess and, hey… Maybe even usefulness!

    I still wound up having to retool things a little bit, and eventually settled for using a little bit of a cheat code called YunoHost. Mostly because I kept getting frustrated at Docker, and I also quite simply felt challenged and maybe a little inspired by their name originating from the simple internet question of, “y u no host?” But everything started falling into place. I was going to build my family the best damn closed-circuit network they’d ever seen! It wasn’t just going to have an instance of Jellyfin! It’s going to have private communication apps, a wiki platform, collaboration and whiteboard solutions, and even a few games! Not to mention email at our own chosen domain! Have you ever known the thrill of having an email address that is just your name before the @ symbol?! Getting your own name in an email address carries the weight of being busy and important, okay? My family was going to be so glad they had someone as cool and smart as me in the gang! Simply just ignore the fact that I think I look a little like this meme to them:

    Charlie Day in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia looking sufficiently crazed.
    Not gonna lie, I can kinda see it.

    That was my thought process until I built it and gave them their credentials to access and log into it. A week later, and the server has seen exactly two of them log into it and then promptly forget about it. And though my dad and sister (who are incidentally also the only two family members that subscribe to this publication, hi dad and sisterface!) would maybe disagree to spare my feelings, none of them really care. And I’m making peace with the fact that that is okay.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s painful and frustrating to continually get these wild ideas to build spaces and communities, hoping that others will want to join in, only to be met with constant silence. I’ve been doing it for a long time. From my very first web pages all the way up to this website, along with my Twitch channel, content creation as a whole, social media, the AMA page on here, all of it… I’ve just been begging and hoping that maybe one day people will want to join me and think that all this “stuff” is as cool as I do. But I also need to understand that it isn’t personal.

    Meredith Grey (played by Ellen Pompeo) states, "It's not personal. It's just business."
    Meredith gets it.

    It honestly isn’t. To other people, all of this “stuff” is unnecessary. My 72-year-old father and my 33-year-old nephew alike don’t care about their super cool new email addresses. Neither one of them likely even cares about email overall. So the addresses that they’re already forced to use for everything else work just fine. My siblings are a-okay with relaying group communication through Discord, so why do they need yet another login to manage? It’s a little overkill for just the six of us. And that Jellyfin server? Eh, we’ll get that movie collection loaded into it some other day. These kinds of things, while cool to me to get to check out and get hands-on experience with, isn’t scratching the same kind of itch for them. And that’s fine. I should stop expecting it to. Even if it’s cool and technically better, people prefer to default to what’s familiar, what’s easier, and what they already know.

    And listen, I love my family. I think I’ve established that fact in multiple other posts. But why fix what isn’t broken for them, ya know? And if something does break, or if I can somehow offer a solution one day? They’ll know where to find me. In the meantime, I don’t need to keep subjecting them to never-ending digital journeys or whatever.

    So I’m scaling it back down a bit. I’m going to keep Jellyfin and the emails available, but the wiki, the message board, and the browser games are being jettisoned. They’re already stale and probably won’t be missed. I’m instead going to refocus the server space on things that are productive, fun, and convenient for me personally. Maybe build some projects of my own on it, who knows? And hey, sometimes things happen when you stop trying to force it. I want to believe that there are like-minded people out there who do care about what I’m building, what I’m streaming, what I’m making, and what my brain can accomplish.

    Maybe they just haven’t found me yet?

  • Do Your Best

    Fun fact: I used to be a vegetarian!

    Some of the time that I wasted on Facebook over the years was actually educational. As Americans, I think that we kinda knowingly turn a blind eye to where our food really comes from. While the words “pork” and “beef” are historical linguistic artifacts, isn’t it a little bit convenient that we have alternate words for a lot of animal products we consume? I mean, nobody really wants to think about sweet little Babe while they’re frying up their breakfast bacon, right? And after seeing some of the videos from activist groups on Facebook about some of the suffering and actual torture these poor animals face every single day from factory farming, I swore off eating meat. And I maintained it for two years.

    There were good days and bad days during that stretch. Even though there are some truly awful “meat alternatives” on the market, I was pleasantly surprised by how many are also delicious! I once even took Beyond Burgers to a cookout, and they were a hit even among the meat-eating crowd. And don’t get me started on Gardein’s faux-chicken tenders… I found that they were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing! I probably spent a small fortune on those suckers while I was living the veggie lifestyle. I used to order a mac and cheese dish topped with them from Yard House whenever I felt like I needed to spring for lunch at the office that I used to work at in downtown Indy, and the scent of the Gardein tenders even fooled a co-worker into thinking I was a fraud!

    Sadly, though, after a little over two years, I did wind up falling off the wagon. Getting enough protein wasn’t the issue, although I know that concern does sometimes cause even some of the most militant vegans and vegetarians to go back to animal products. It honestly just got too hard to stay consistent. Being from the Midwest, a large part of socialization and our culture revolves around food made mostly from meat, cheese, corn, and potatoes, and my family is no different. As empathetic as they were towards me and my concerns about animal slaughtering and factory farming, I wasn’t going to convince them to change on my own. And honestly, being the only one who constantly has to find an alternative when we hit the drive-thru while honestly still having cravings for a damn cheeseburger was extremely hard.

    I learned something simple but valuable during those two years, however. It may have been the moment in my life that made me realize: Nobody is perfect. And that’s okay.

    Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sums things up perfectly in The Good Place.
    Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sums things up perfectly in The Good Place.

    I was discussing this with a fellow content creator recently, and she mentioned that it is amazing if you even care. That’s a lot more than most people in today’s age. With the planet and humanity practically deteriorating before our very eyes, the fact that you are even making an effort at times is enough. We’re never going to be perfect. Even the strictest vegan you could possibly imagine probably owns or has likely consumed something against their moral code or healthy lifestyle. And guess what? The world spins madly on. And I think we honestly forget that we’re all just kinda making it up as we go in life.

    Just do your best. That’s really all we can do. Nobody is the morality police, and nobody is perfect. Anyone who tells you otherwise or makes you feel judged or wants to start virtue signaling all over their socials in response shouldn’t be in your life anyway.

    I still hate where meat comes from, by the way. And I still stump for animal rights, as ironic as it may sound. I would be beyond heartbroken if someone were to hurt one of my cats, but honestly, what’s the difference between a cat’s life and a cow’s life? And then what’s the difference between a cow’s life and our lives? Don’t we all deserve to live them? I think that we do. But we can only do what we can do. I’m only one person. And I hope that my two years of vegetarianism and my ongoing efforts to still choose compassion when possible in other ways have made a difference.

    We’re all just doing our best. And if that best includes a little more compassion, even sometimes, that’s worth something.

  • Missing What Never Was

    Have you ever felt a sense of nostalgia for a life you never lived? If so, we share something in common, and it’s called anemoia.

    We’ve all experienced loneliness or felt homesick at some point. Those pangs or feelings of yearning for something from your past. The people, places, and things of it all. The right song can almost make your brain teleport through time, back to your younger years. But have you ever driven through a normal, quiet American suburb and noticed the different homes, one right after the other, and wondered to yourself: Who are the people that live in these homes? What are their lives like? What about the people who lived in that home before them? What did they do for work? Where were they from? Did children grow up here? What’s their story? And if they no longer live there, how did their story in this home end?

    These are the things I think about when a normal home that I’m passing somehow catches my attention. Maybe it’s because I think I’m a little more sentimental than the average human, but the spaces we take up can tell us a lot about the people in them. In a lot of circumstances, someone’s home is a character in the story of their life in its own right. It could also stem from my overactive imagination, or from the kid I used to be who constantly wished he was someone else. Craving a little insight into the lives of other people seems perfectly normal to me, though. But it goes well beyond that, too.

    Recently, I saw a photo somewhere on the internet, and I wish that I had remembered where it was so that I could show it to you now. But it was a simple photograph of a suburban neighborhood with normal homes. An orangey-pink glow in the sky that you sometimes see just before the sun goes down. The streets were wet from rain. And I had the feeling of missing the place in that photo. Even though it was a photo from a random stranger on the internet of a random neighborhood that I’ve very likely never even been. Then I started wondering about the why of it all.

    Properly speaking, the sensation is called anemoia. The name was coined by an American author named John Koenig in 2012 via his project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and is defined on Wiktionary as, quite literally, “Nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.” In my mind, though, I think it’s a longing for a specific feeling or kind of “magic” that seems to have dissipated in recent years. It left me with a melancholy feeling that said something like… This place is gone.

    And, in many ways, those places are gone. Sure, suburbs still exist all across America and beyond, but we live in a world where “normal” means something completely different than it used to. We’re all hyper-connected more than ever with our mobile devices and social media. Too many of us, myself included, tend to focus on all the distractions rather than what’s happening in front of our faces. People are concerned with the lives of celebrities and their 10-minute trips to outer space. We’re concerned about political scandals, seemingly one right after another in the current administration. We’re trying to figure out all the controversy surrounding the latest superstar athlete. We want to get our paws on the absurdly priced new dolls and gaming consoles. Everything is so larger-than-life now as we doom-scroll through our curated feeds and highlight reels. There are even “normal people” who have become mini-celebrities through social media. And did you know that, according to a Morning Consult survey, over half of the Gen Z members surveyed want to be social media influencers, and an even more surprising 41% of older adults do, too.

    With everything moving and changing at light-speed, I think I miss the normalcy. I miss the things that are almost boring. When life progressed slowly, and when things were unassuming. When we had local heroes and legends. When things could be mysterious and wonderful. I miss the people who could be described as “salt of the earth.” The people who aren’t broadcasting their every waking, performative move in hopes it’ll go viral. And I’m not even shunning progress or technological advancement. Y’all know that I love the internet as much as the next person. These are the digital streets that raised me. But there really is a quiet dignity and truth to just simply living. And it feels like it’s an increasing rarity to find.

    Jed Whedon, the younger brother of someone I used to admire and who shall no longer be named in this space, released an album in 2022 titled blue noise [blōō noiz] n. nostalgia for a life you never lived and previously had an album in 2010 called History of Forgotten Things. It made me really consider that maybe Jed also knew the call of anemoia, and his music has helped me understand the feeling a bit better. It seems to tap into my subconscious that’s yearning for a different world. A world that maybe I didn’t even live in. Maybe it’s a world that I just idealized in my mind, and it has always been this unmitigated flaming crap basket, and I just didn’t realize it. But surely everybody hears that whisper from another universe, right? That alternate timeline version of all of us that valued just being human. The next time you get that internal vibration when you see an old photo, someone else’s familiar furniture or wallpaper, the cracked cement by your parking spot at work, or the twinkle lights above an old café you never went to…

    You’ll know what I’m talking about…

  • The Warning Signs

    Hi! It’s been a minute. Life’s been hectic. So much so that I’ve got a cautionary tale to tell, which involves me getting hired at a new job, starting work, and quitting all in the last week!

    Some of you may recall that I’ve been looking for a new gig since April of last year. If you’re new or unfamiliar, you can read all about my trials and tribulations from around that point and onward in the “Retail Therapy” section on this post. I had spent the year (or more…) learning more about programming and coding, but also desperately applying for any job that came my way. Anything that I figured I’d be able to do, anyway. I’m a 40-year-old college dropout with very few in-demand skills (working on that, obviously!), so it’s not exactly an easy path in what is already a challenging job market. The icing on the cake is that I also now live in an area of the country that has practically zero jobs unless I want to return to retail. There’s also manufacturing and factory work, but I passed out working behind a customer service desk at a big box store in this town, so I’m not so sure manual labor is going to be on the table for me either.

    In late March, my sister, MissFiasco, emailed me a job listing for a work-from-home role with a healthcare company. The title was “Radiology Scheduler.” It mentioned how much it paid — not much, but more than what any retail job in the area was dishing out — and as the title suggests, would involve scheduling patients for medical imaging and diagnostic procedures. It did involve talking to patients on the phone, which I honestly despise, but it didn’t necessarily sound like a call center, either. So I figured it would probably be okay. Not only would I get to work from home in my pajamas and start earning some dough again, but it also sounded like I would play a role in genuinely helping people, which is always a nice feeling. So I gave it a shot and sent them my resume.

    A couple of weeks into April, I received an email back from the company. They were interested in interviewing me! It was the first time anyone had even shown interest in me professionally since I went to talk to a temp agency in February with no success. Naturally, I booked the interview. And that’s when things started getting strange…

    My first interview was conducted by an AI chatbot. Yes, you read that correctly. My interview was basically conducted by ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever. It asked me some fairly standard questions and suggested that I be as thorough and detailed as possible because, if I passed this round, then I would be invited to interview again with a human representative. It was weird, but I kept going because… Well, because I needed a job. I did enough to impress Chad (a nickname MissFiasco and I gave to ChatGPT), so I progressed to the next interview. It was scheduled to be a 30-minute video chat, and I was advised that the dress would be business casual. I did my best to look presentable since I’m almost always dressed very casually, snapped a photo to my family’s group chat on Discord, and joined the Zoom meeting early and prepared.

    The selfie that jiggyflyjoe snapped before his interview!
    Photo of me looking my “best.” 🥴

    Much like the interview with Chad, the interview went well enough, but it still just felt odd. The woman that I was speaking to seemed highly indifferent throughout the entire conversation. On the other hand, I like to sprinkle in a little sarcasm or jokes here and there, so the contrast was a little jarring. I’m not one of those creepy dudebros who think that women always need to be warm and receiving, but man… She did not show even the slightest hint of a sense of humor. It was as if smiling were simply not allowed while on the clock. Regardless, the process continued afterward, and I was sent an offer letter by mid-May. An offer letter that invited me to accept the role of an “Engagement Specialist,” which I had not applied for. The shift that I had requested was also changed, and the compensation was a bit less than the radiology scheduling role. I emailed back the recruiter and inquired as to why I was being offered a position with hours and wages that I did not apply for. She simply stated that the Radiology Scheduler role was “no longer available.”

    This was my first major red flag.

    The interview with Chad and the subsequent recruiter were strange, but I brushed them off because I was desperate enough to get working. But this was the exact moment that I remember thinking, “I don’t know about this.” The vibes were off and, frankly, I felt that they had pulled a bait-and-switch on me. And in retrospect, I see now that this is when I should have declined the offer and dodged the bullet completely. But again, the siren song coming from incoming money was too strong. I signed the offer letter and, in return, they shipped me a computer with which to work from home. And the family rallied to help me prepare. To the point where my brother-in-law (aka MrFiasco) transformed a room in our home that had been serving as a storage room into a home office for me. Complete with an actual cubicle! I was getting nervous but excited, especially by my new workspace. I was no longer going to be crammed into a small corner of my bedroom, where my current desktop setup is! I was going to be an unstoppable workforce of one back here!

    An animated image of Brie Larson as Carol Danvers becoming the superhero Captain Marvel in the film of the same name.
    Okay, I’m not Captain Marvel unstoppable, but I felt pretty close.

    Last Thursday was my first day. I went through orientation and training on both Teams and Zoom, and learned that the company was effectively a healthcare call center. I cringe at those two words together because working for a call center is one of the last things I have ever had any desire to do. As I mentioned earlier, I despise speaking on the phone in the first place. But they informed us that we would only be making outbound phone calls to insurance members to try and convince them to schedule an in-home health assessment, which is where a nurse practitioner visits their home and reviews their overall health, medications, etc. My last office-based job that I had worked at for more than 8 years eventually threw me a phone and told me to play call center, but this company surprisingly had an entire automated phone system that included an actual script, and you were able to schedule the appointments in the same software! That seemed fairly easy and convenient. Maybe I could do this job! The trainers also seemed friendly and very knowledgeable. I won’t lie: The first three or four days were even kinda fun. I was digging it.

    That was until Day #5. I don’t know if my trainer was just having a spectacularly bad day, but there were a few moments throughout the morning where her friendliness seemed as though it was starting to wane. At one particular point, I was essentially told to stop taking notes on a topic and to start doing a quiz about the same topic instead. And then, earlier in the day, we were directed to complete an activity that involved us recording ourselves doing a practice phone call with yet another AI chatbot. When the AI chatbot broke down for numerous people in the training class and stopped letting us progress, assistance was not exactly forthcoming. And when the assistance finally did show up, it was entirely useless. By the time we went on our lunch break yesterday, I started feeling pretty triggered. I’ve described the feeling to my family multiple times now as feeling like workplace PTSD. My eagerness to keep learning and to try and make things work for this job withered away and was instantly replaced by a sense of panic and dread in the middle of my stomach. My spidey sense was tingling. I’d been here before.

    And in a moment of clarity, I came to the entire reality of the situation. This was a call center, I was a salesperson (there was even commission!), my higher-ups were unwilling to help, and I was once again going to be expected to address questions for people that I did not know the answers to. Furthermore, my target demographic was vulnerable elderly people who were likely being taken advantage of by their insurance policies anyway. We were instructed that these health assessments were yearly benefits that they receive for free, but as my famously inappropriate father likes to say, “there ain’t no free lunch.” And sure, the calls were mostly scripted, but we were also advised to “manage resistance” when folks tried declining the assessment, which also felt scummy. I quickly realized that I wasn’t digging it, after all.

    Then I quit! I was that guy who went to lunch and never came back. After I signed off, I packed up their computer and immediately shipped it back out to them this morning in the very same box it arrived in.

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    Jiggy’s Journal now has an AMA (Ask Me Anything) page! You got 🔥burning questions🔥 for me? Maybe a comment or suggestion? Check out the page here and submit everything that’s on your mind. Afterwards, I’ll respond in a future post!

    Ask Me Anything!

    And while I’m absolutely certain this was the correct decision to make, I’m disappointed to say the very least. Nobody knows how much I wanted to be a productive member of society again. My family has been extremely supportive for the most part, but I know that I’m a drain on them financially, so I think they’re at least a little disappointed in me, too. I know that I’m also exceptionally privileged to have enough of a support system currently in place that I’m granted the option of even considering leaving a job when I’m mentally in distress. Not everyone can do that, so it wasn’t a decision that I made lightly. I did try my best. I took several pages of handwritten notes throughout training, did my best to fully understand the company’s campaign that I’d been hired for, and adjusted everything else in my orbit to rotate around my new work schedule. Despite my gut instinct frequently trying to communicate to my brain that this wasn’t going to work.

    So my unemployment journey continues. I’m still working on coding. Maybe even refocusing on it a little more since I started to slack off on that a bit. Hopefully, I can eventually develop that skill into something employable. I’m still making web content, like always, for the love of it and because it earns me a little pocket change here and there. (By the way, have you subscribed to this publication? What about my Twitch channel?? Or maybe you’d like to buy me a cup of coffee??? 👀) I’m still open and looking for any other jobs that might surprise me and somehow won’t be completely soul-crushing. And otherwise, I’m chillin’ with my silly little games and shows. (Yo, Severance, Silo, and Foundation have been rocking my world lately. Get you some Apple TV+!)

    Let this also serve as a reminder to listen to your internal monologue! Trust your gut instincts! I understand that they aren’t always right, and maybe we are just cucumbers with anxiety, but your feelings are valid, and there is a reason why they are making you feel that way. Don’t ignore the warning signs! Otherwise, you might just unwittingly find yourself in a call center.

    In the meantime, you know if anyone’s hiring? If they aren’t completely drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, shoot me an email! We’ll be besties forever. ❤️

  • Leave Out All the Rest

    “Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That’s all. The rest is confetti.”
    — Victoria Pedretti as Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan.

    In my very first entry here in Jiggy’s Journal, I wrapped things up by briefly touching on being a lonely kid who felt like nobody was interested in befriending. I think this might be my first memory where I felt a sense of social anxiety. My medical records state that I still currently suffer from a “generalized anxiety,” so the idea that it started manifesting as early as kindergarten kinda tracks.

    Although the feeling of not making friends eventually went away, I still spent massive amounts of time as a teen and young adult feeling worried and concerned about what other people thought of me. Even though I am, without question, a nerd at heart, I wasted so many of my younger years trying to mold myself into whatever my version of being “likeable” was. I bought and wore the name-brand clothes, I listened to the music that was popular at the time, and I hung out with people who drank and smoked weed! (I’ll give you a minute to clutch your pearls and collect yourself now.) But I would come home from being out with my so-called friends, and instead of feeling the joy and exhilaration that friendship and a hoppin’ nightlife are supposed to provide, I would sometimes cry myself to sleep instead. I would wake up with massive headaches, not from hangovers, but from dehydration. I hated trying to keep everybody but myself happy. Then one day, I woke up with that dehydration headache from crying the night before, and it was literally like someone flipped a switch in my brain.

    I didn’t care anymore.

    Which isn’t to say that I didn’t care about my life or my friends and family anymore. I’m an introvert, but I have still always loved meeting new people, chatting and being social, and my close friends and family are the most important thing to me. But I think I was finally developing the tougher skin that I probably should have started out with. I was starting to believe that “quality is better than quantity.” I can’t please everyone I ever meet. There are going to be people who don’t like me. There will be people who are friendly but not your friend. There are going to be people who will both enter and exit your life. And the only person who can best take care of you and your needs is yourself. And that’s okay. I don’t want to go get turnt or do things for “the ‘Gram” and a billion followers anymore. I’ve even recently noticed that I’ve been having far more fun on my Twitch streams since I stopped stressing myself out over the numbers. Yes, social media and creating content on the web are essentially numbers games or popularity contests, but I don’t think fate or the universe or something is going to let it just happen for someone who wants it too bad. Relax. Just find your zen.

    Animated GIF image of Taylor Swift singing "You Need to Calm Down."
    Taylor knows what’s up.

    The problem I’ve been facing in recent years, however, is that I’ve let the “I-don’t-care-what-you-think-of-me” attitude snowball into letting myself match people’s energy. And frankly, that’s not a great way to handle your differences with people who might already be having a bad day. And look, I still don’t care what most strangers on this rock think of me. But I do care what the people I love think of me, and ultimately, getting labeled as “the mean one” was not on my bucket list. So I’ve been trying to remedy things by trying to filter my thoughts a little more, maybe make them sound a little less venomous. I’m trying to remember that kindness makes a world of difference. And that I still love them even when I want to punch them in the throat.

    I have made a lot of social posts regarding how fun my streams have been since I stopped obsessing over follower and viewer counts. Just a few hours ago, I wrote another one in which I paraphrased a quote from The Haunting of Hill House. That same quote about life’s moments just being confetti is prominently featured at the top of this post. I’m not sure what initially made me think of it and then use it, but after I did, I wanted to see if director/producer Mike Flanagan had explained what exactly it was that he meant when he wrote that line for Nell. And boy, did I luck out! Mike explained his entire thought process at length in a post over on his Tumblr blog. At the end of his post, he beautifully explains the following:

    “And it’s about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just… well, it’s fleeting. It’s colorful. It’s overwhelming. It’s blinding. It’s dancing. And, if we look at it right, it’s beautiful. But it’s also light. It’s tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it’s as light as air.

    The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

    It’s the love that stays.”
    — Mike Flanagan on his Tumblr blog.

    And it’s the truth. In the grand scheme of things, the people that I love are what matter the most. We always forget how influential our lives are to others. I still have habits that rubbed off on me from my mother, who has been gone for nearly 25 years now. In a way, her knowledge, her stories, her legacy, and her impact continue and live on through those of us who remember her. She was my mother. I love her completely, and she loved me the same. I can remember her hugging me close and apologizing for our trip to Disney World getting ruined by the torrential rain that had us completely soaked, I can remember the hand-drawn maps she made to guide her way through dungeons in the original Legend of Zelda video game, and I can remember the awesome muffins she used to bake from mixes she got at Sam’s Club. But that’s all the confetti. The brilliant and colorful but fleeting moments of my life that were shared with hers.

    As I get older, I just hope that my family will feel the same way about me. Sometimes I can get upset with them. But while I hope they’ll remember plenty of shiny and sparkly confetti that I’ve sprinkled all over their lives, I hope it’s the love that stays.