Finding Balance

Have you ever said you wanted to do something so badly, and then once you finally did, it really didn't make you feel as satisfied as you wanted it to?

From March 23rd-27th, I ran a five-day marathon on my stream of every single game I had ever speedrun; this was to celebrate my 10-year anniversary of speedrunning (my first submitted run was a Crash 2 No GO speedrun on March 27th, 2015). At the end of that marathon, I (through tears) announced that I was stepping away from speedrunning (I was very smart to NOT use the words retiring or quitting; I know perfectly well from other hobbies that you never truly quit).

I was burnt out. I was exhausted. I was tired of the frustration and rage that came with speedrunning. I felt like I was going nowhere with it, as I had accomplished everything that I felt like I could in the games I cared most about, and my stream analytics had been gradually falling with no sign of recovery. I wasn't good enough to make it as a speedrunner, and I had a gigantic backlog of casual games that I'd said for years I wanted to play, so maybe it was time to change direction.

Streaming casual games has been fun. I'm not going to pretend it hasn't. But it hasn't been to the extent that I was hoping it would be. When I can really get into a game, it's a blast; my playthrough of Super Mario 64 was wonderful. But all of the other games I've played casually, to some extent, felt phoned in. It's not that I wasn't enjoying the games; I just didn't have that inner fire to play them in the same way I did SM64, or speedrunning. My most recent casual game is Banjo-Kazooie, and it has been fun to play; but I chose to play it out of the necessity of needing a game to stream, and I think that's reflected in my general energy during it compared to SM64.

It also doesn't help that, outside of SM64 doing well enough, the other casual streams have been pretty pitiful in terms of viewer turnout. Both YGO games, BK, and even Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (which does pretty solidly whenever I speedrun 96 Tracks) have been struggling to scrape even 20 average viewers. I've spent the past year trying to convince myself that I don't care about the analytics drop, that my hyperfixation on the numbers caused me to lose my passion for speedrunning and streaming.

This was a lie, or at least partially. I DO believe that the hyperfixation impacted my passion for streaming, but to say that I don't care about the analytics is false. Beyond just the financial implications (it's no coincidence that the start of my financial struggles began with my decision to step back on the amount of Crash I played, which resulted in all of my numbers [ad revenue, subs, viewers] dropping), I am at my happiest when chat is active and we're just bantering and enjoying each other's company while I'm playing a game in the background. The low-viewer casual streams just don't carry that vibe. I remembered what it felt like during my last stream, when I decided to do a PC game shuffler of the N. Sane Trilogy. That was the most active chat had been in a long time (marathon aside), and it was a blast.

My decision to semi-retire from speedrunning was also in part born from the belief that I had failed as a content creator; my stream had fallen off hard, and YouTube is going in the same direction due to my decreased output in the past year. My finances are so badly in the red right now that I've resigned myself to the fact that I NEED a part time job (which I've been working on, but nothing squared away yet). If not for the money I inherited from my grandmother's will, I would have gone broke early last year. The additional finances of gender transition (HRT, laser hair removal, wardrobe, etc.) only added to my financial stress.

In my mind, I had failed, and I was ready to give up. Why did it matter if all my numbers were down if I'm going broke and need another job anyway?

But if there's anything I loathe, it's giving up, admitting I tried my best and didn't make it.

Especially when I didn't try my best.

When I chose to step away from speedrunning, I truly felt like I had done everything I wanted to, and there was nothing left to do. I was blinded by my frustration. Almost a month out from the marathon, I have a much clearer mind, and now it's obvious that this wasn't even close to true. There is SO much I wanted to do that I still haven't; just because I feel like I've reached my limit in the PS1 Crash trilogy doesn't mean that I'm anywhere close to what I'm capable of in other games.

Including Twinsanity.

The catalyst that started my 1.5-year long Crash burnout was the last Twinsanity grind I did back in Summer of 2023, when Gpro and I were racing to get the World Record in 100%. He beat me to it (in fact, he thrashed me quite handily), and the grind had frustrated me so much that I didn't even want to look at that game for a long time. This culminated into where I was at the start of this year; a general frustration with speedrunning as a whole, due to how much effort I put into it.

But in the back of my mind, I've never been happy about how I just threw in the towel way too early; I'm not anywhere close to achieving what I believe I'm capable of in Twinsanity, the game that by this point is quite clearly my main game, the one that I just click with.

It's not just Twinsanity though. There's plenty of other Crash games, and plenty of non-Crash games, that I still want to give a proper shot. The fire has been lit again for the first time in over a year, and maybe with the right balance I can keep it from going out again.

I do think that my old approach to speedrunning was very unhealthy and contributed to my burnout. But I also think that attempting to walk away from both Crash and speedrunning entirely was a massive overcorrection that in the end proved to also be unhealthy and sapped all of my motivation to stream instead of reinvigorating it. I think a proper balance of Crash and non-Crash, speedrun and casual, is the correct path forward.

Deep down I always knew I'd be back; I just thought it would be longer than three weeks lol. But those three weeks were still enough for me to be able to view things in a clearer lens, and figure things out.

Retirement is boring anyway.

~Kylie