Struggling with Motivation

I should've probably written this like... easily a month ago, at least, but I guess it's better late than never. I feel that I need to make an awkward apology/explanation regarding my recent mood and some loose ends regarding my stream that, for the most part, don't affect that many people very much, I think.

I have a very serious motivational problem. I've had it for a long time and I've never totally understood its causes. In school I often attributed it to a sort of "this isn't enjoyable or necessary for me, so I'll not bother with it" mentality, and while I think it was a factor I'm fairly certain there's something bigger going on under the wraps that puts me in a struggling position with my obligations. It's probably tied in some part to depression that I'm not able to keep a keen watch over -- at least I'd assume that's the case, since it generally follows a pretty similar timeline to how I've been feeling about streaming and YT/Discord etc. As those things have grown more difficult, I think my average mood has gotten worse and my motivation to do bigger, more significant projects has similarly plummeted. That in and of itself isn't that bad, but because I've been so unaware of its influence on me I had kept up the idea that "It's okay, I can sort these things out in a month or two and get back on track as per usual, no big deal."

While that might've been true the first few times I thought about it, it's absolutely not true now, and hasn't been for a while. I've been falling into this pitfall where I've been pushing the same workload that I was accomplishing at my best onto where I'm currently at -- arguably not very far from my worst. For every thing that I eventually did square away on my list of things to do, I had added one, two, or even more obligations of varying sizes. I've unknowingly and foolishly created a toxic environment for productivity, where my own sensationalized idea of giving back as much as I want to has completely overburdened my actual capacity to dish out new and interesting stuff. It took me until June -- which you could argue is as much as 8 months after this problem arose -- to finally call off my habit of adding to the list of things I need to get done.

So I have to apologize about all this. I'm not sure how frustrated or impacted most people are by my extremely slow-burning response to a lot of goals and projects I've worked on -- but whatever you do feel about it is valid, and I'm going to do what I can moving forward to prevent this issue from arising again. Cutting off the donation goals for June and July was the first step towards me dialing back my obligations to better reflect my motivation levels. I plan to keep this trend going and slash my mentality of trying to give back as much as I get out of streaming, because let's be honest for a second: I can't keep up with you guys, goodness gracious. Even despite my lackluster performance lately you've all been as crazy as ever about supporting me and what I do, and I promise that some day I'll be able to accept that with gratitude in a way that doesn't overburden me. I believe that by cutting back on how much I'm putting out, I'll be able to create and follow through on more important and impactful projects on a much more regular basis, even if it's less overall quantitatively.

I'd like to expressly apologize as well to the few people who often times directly fund a lot of the projects that I've promised to work on... you know who you are, and so does everybody else! I try not to focus on the monetary aspect of things much, but you've all been a huge part of my ability to stream full-time in the first place at all. I feel like I've let you down, and I'm hoping that by expressing how I've been feeling about all this that it'll become easier to get a grip on things again and make good on the promises I've kept. Hopefully in a few months I'll have things a lot more figured out, and will be happily doing cooking streams with pink hair and a cat snoozing on the table.

Thanks for giving my dumb insecurities the time of day. If you guys have any remedies to motivation that have worked for you then I'd honestly love to hear about them. I'm super inexperienced at tackling this issue, so any ideas would help.

Also sorry in advance that most of these posts will be kind of a downer! Hopefully I can find a space for more positive thinking on here at some point, I'm admittedly a bit nervous about posting at all still which is why it's been so long since I last wrote anything. Maybe I should open an ask.fm or something, idk.