New Chapter

Hey everyone: I'd like to share a little about recent events in my personal life. I've told a number of you about it, but there have been some changes to what we had planned.

Back in January, my wife and I decided that we were going to move to a new place. This meant leaving my job and starting a business elsewhere. Our original plan was to sell the house, start my wife's business, and I was going to *gasp* stream full-time. It was very exciting and I began streaming with the mindset that I was going to make the leap to full time.

First of all, I want to thank everyone for their support of me. The thought of going full time was terrifying, knowing I had a wife and child to take care of. We had set money aside so that we could pull this off for almost a year at my current take-home from Twitch. I'm usually pretty conservative when it comes to finances and security, but my wife (the saint that she is) pushed me to go after it anyway. We listed our house for sale at the end of March, and eagerly awaited a buyer. We were poised to make a decent profit on the house, even though we had only been there for 18 months. As most of you know, we were robbed on our open house. That was just an omen of what was to come. We still haven't sold the house 4 months later.

We also decided that it would be better longterm (although difficult) for my wife to move to our new location ahead of me. I was going to continue to work at my current job, and maintain the house for showings. She moved at the beginning of May. We both lived by ourselves for the last 3 months. I drove up every weekend to visit (this probably explains the stream schedule to you and that my wife was always in chat). Hours on the road every Friday and Sunday really wore on me, but I did it for my family. After about 2.5 months of doing this, I looked in the mirror and realized that I was missing out on too much. I was missing my daughter grow up and start to develop her personality. I wasn't able to support my wife through her opening her business. I had to deal with a lot by myself. I wasn't able to move since I still had the mortgage to pay for. I was stuck. I couldn't talk about this on stream since some of my co-workers watch my stream and I didn't want the rumors to get back to work. I essentially lived a double life, saying everything was fine when it really wasn't. I was able to talk to several close friends about the situation and I appreciate them listening to me and offering their support. I decided to apply for another software development job, and got an offer in less than 2 weeks. I was finally free of living alone, living the double life, and having to keep such a big secret from a bunch of different people.

While I had to put aside the dream of streaming full time, I recognize how much stress it would have put on myself and my family. I'm really thankful for the opportunity that streaming has brought to our family. I'm humbled by all the positive comments in chat and discord over the last several months. Even though I've had pretty good success while streaming for about 25 hours a week, I've realized that going full time wouldn't be worth it for me. It was hard to not be blinded by being able to run my own business and play video games for a living. As glamorous as it sounded, it just didn't make sense for the goals that our family wants to accomplish.

As of yesterday, I turned in my notice at my current company and start at my new job in 2 weeks. I'm really excited to move to our new home and get back to normal. Streaming will probably be less frequent, but I'll be in much better mental health moving forward. I'll probably have fewer gray hairs as well. Saturday Morning Speedruns will return too! This is what I'm most excited about in terms of streaming. I'm glad to have speedrunning/streaming as a hobby and will continue to do it for the considerable future. I still plan on accomplishing the goals I've set out and making new ones at some point. I love the community and couldn't have asked for anything more from you all.

Thanks for reading!