Life Update 8/24/18

Hey guys. I've thought a lot about how I wanted to communicate this to you all, whether a 10-minute YouTube facecam video would suffice, or a wall of text with bulletpoints, or just to bring it up randomly in the middle of a stream. I never made up my mind, which led to a lot of silence on the matter. So instead I'm going with the Pastebin route, so you can read it at your lesiure, or reference it later as needed, or whatever.

Disclaimer: These are all good things for me. I am happy with where I am in life right now, which is far more than I have been able to say for a long time.

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A bit of backstory: In August 2012 I started a PhD program in math. In March 2015 I decided this was not what I had wanted to do with my life, and decided to drop out of the program and graduate instead with a master's in math. Between August 2015 and May 2016 I taught part-time at the same school. In May I moved back to my parents', and remained unemployed until February 2017, where I took a data entry job. I hated this job. I applied for teaching positions at various schools and got hired part-time at a state college, which I started August 2017, a year ago. In January 2018 I took a second part-time teaching position at a community college. This summer I taught one course at both schools, and at least for this fall semester I will still teach at both schools.

That's my work history for the past six years. Not mentioned is the depression I felt up until I took the first part-time teaching position a year ago. I've felt like I had had some levels of depression for most of my life; I can point back to when I was 13 and felt really unhappy with who I was and how no one really "got" me. Granted, I was 13, but those kinds of feelings persisted off-and-on for most of my life, in varying degrees of severity and importance. It wasn't until I "quit" grad school that I truly felt like I was full-on depressed. At the time I was involved with therapy in my school, and discussed these feelings with the school therapists. However, once my student status ended and my part-time teaching status started, I was no longer eligible for free school therapy, and so I went a bit without therapy. I temporarily signed on with someone in early 2016, but that ended when I moved back into my parents' house. With my unemployment status I didn't want to invest in therapy, or even a doctor's appointment for antidepressants, because money was a concern.

A lot of what I was feeling at the time was hopelessness. Even though I recognized that the math PhD did not seem like a good fit for me, I still felt like a failure for not having finished out the program and obtaining what to that point had been my life's dream. I had no dreams, no desires, no ambitions, no hopes; nothing. I felt empty. And, completely honestly, at times I did wonder what my life's value was and whether there was going to be an upside.

Then I got employed for data entry work. On paper, it was an opportunity to advance in a workplace environment, to make money while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, to have the opportunity to bide my time for a bit. In reality, my depression got worse. I hated my job. I did not feel fulfilled. This did not feel like the direction I wanted my life to go into. I was at the point of not wanting to wake up because that meant subjecting myself to my job for 8+ hours. I tried talking to my family about it, but they were all of the stance that having a job was more important than feeling good about my job. After working there for three months, they offered me the company's health insurance plan. I went home and cried for literally (seriously, literally; not exaggerating for emphasis) three hours. Three hours of crying made my eyes felt the most painfully dry they ever felt, and my chest was sore from the sobbing. I was extremely unhappy with my job, and this health insurance plan was what was cementing me into this job, for I no longer could rationally quit; quitting would not just mean losing an income, but losing a health plan that I had been lacking, and which had been preventing me from getting the help that I definitely needed.

In response to those three hours of crying, my mom recommended I make an appointment to see a doctor immediately for psychiatric aid. And so I scheduled an appointment with a physician at a family healthcare service, who prescribed me antidepressants. Shortly after, I received an email from the local state school about how they were interested in me for a part-time position and wanted to interview me...

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My life went through a transformation a year ago. A major part of it is certainly the medication I've been taking. They have helped alleviate the constant nagging anxiety I have felt for most of my life. I used to believe that "depressed" was my mind's natural state--it would take effort on someone's behalf to get me out of a depressed state, but eventually I would drop back to depressed if no work were done. Now, for the first time since I was a young child, I can comfortably say my default state is a more neutral stance--not bouncing off the walls happy, but not outright depressed and miserable. This is how I feel a default state should be, and it feels far more right than a default depressed state.

However, my employment change, and getting back into teaching, is another powerful contributor. I am back in a teaching environment, which previously I had been in, but only at a "teaching assistant" capacity. I am more in charge of the classroom than I ever had been. It's a major responsibility, but one that I had definitely been trained and prepared in throughout my academic career. And, ultimately, it feels like a far better fit than data entry ever was. I really enjoy what I do. I look forward to it every day. I think back about various teaching moments, jokes made in the classroom, comments made by the students, statements written on tests that mimic things I've said or done in the classroom, and I feel really good about it all. This is definitely what I want to be doing with my life. I have hopes anew, of being able to be hired for a full-time position, of maybe writing a textbook on the subjects I've taught that could someday be useful to other people, of coming up with a new great way of teaching certain material that can greatly help with one's understanding. I am financially comfortable; I am still living with my parents, but more and more I think about how viable it could be to find a place of my own (and how a full-time teaching position could help with that).

Really, in the past year, I have turned from the undesirable, super depressed, "woe is me", hopeless sap, into the happier, more content, far more positive and optimistic, and exceptionally hopeful person that I had always wanted to be, and hope to continue being for as long as I can be.

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I bring this all forward as a bit of a life update, as I've certainly alluded to various parts as they happened, but I dunno that I ever gave a full picture of my situation. Certainly at this moment, I am very content with life and I'm not facing any major hardships. I feel badly when I see hardships faced by various friends of mine, or people I follow, or friends of friends, or whoever; I was myself in a terrible spot just a single year ago, and I don't want the general person to have to experience what I felt at the time. But, at this moment, I am doing very well and there is no cause for alarm from anyone. <3

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I now want to talk about what this means for me as a streaming figure. I first got involved in streaming toward the middle of my grad school career, a little before I felt grad school wasn't a good fit, but in the middle of my first attempt at getting therapy. Streaming, and in particular FF13 speedrunning, helped to set aside my grad school insecurities for the brief while, while I focused instead on a single video game. Surprisingly I got WR within a few months, and the suddenness of that is what propelled me a bit as a streaming figure. Undoubtedly I do have FF13 skillz, that much is certain; however, most of what I was doing was an attempt to hide from the anxiety of daily life. Now that I am in a much more comfortable life situation and happier with who I am, I've been feeling much less of a desire to stream. My limited streaming these days is partially due to how busy I've been with teaching, but also because I don't want to "subject" myself (not exactly the right word) to a stream when I get done with my responsibilities for the day. And honestly, I'm glad that this is how I feel right now. I don't want to be streaming for the wrong reasons; and distracting myself from life, while possibly necessary at the time, is not what I want to do right now.

This DOES NOT mean I am done streaming forever. However, my current stream pattern of infrequent, somewhat irregular streams will be continuing for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, at this point it is unlikely I will be focusing on FF13 speedrunning. I've wondered several times whether I want to get back on that grind, but every time I start working towards starting a run, I have this feeling that this isn't what I truly want to do right now; and so there is no point in forcing it if it isn't what I want to do.

I do love the FF13 "casual" thing I've been doing, as infrequent as it's been (that part is purely due to how busy I've been). I'll certainly continue and finish that until it's done. Afterwards, I might resume the Hope™ playthrough (play through all FF13 content with a forced Hope lead) and/or the randomized paradigms playthrough (after each fight, randomize a subset of the paradigms, thereby losing control of your paradigm deck); I might also continue the "casual" playthrough with FF13-2, so that the entire trilogy will have the "casual" Lewd experience (LR was done before RPGLB this year). Even though I don't intend on continuing with FF13 speedruns, I'm not done with showing FF13 content; there is far more to a video game than the fastest speedrun of that game.

"What are your RPG Limit Break 2019 plans?" you might be asking. I have no current intention of submitting a game to RPGLB2019. As fun as it has been to show off the entire FF13 trilogy there, I don't have anything new to show off there. Maybe if we can get a race of one of the games going and that would be interesting enough to showcase, I'd be willing. But I don't intend on submitting anything just for myself. I do still want to show up, though. I'll just be a pure audience figure next time. OR, if it isn't outrageously expensive, I might make an appearance at ESA2019... (RPGLB is more likely, though.)

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If you're still reading, thank you. I'm bad at keeping things concise. I hope this helps explain how things have been going, and you understand how positive my life is at the moment and how my streaming is a good indicator of that, regardless of its inactivity. Feel free to poke me or whatever if you want to talk about things; I won't bite.

Lewd