Comradeship // Freechat

We now just want to be essentially self-employed influencers on the Internet (Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, etc.) at best.

When you have no choice... Can you imagine what people who are less than tech literate go through to start a channel and learn recording/streaming, editing, backgrounds, plus the ins and outs of the platform requirements, not to mention self-consciousness, and wrestling with how far they'll go to monetize or not, and figuring out donations, tax paperwork, etc etc. I'm not talking about people who can pay people to do these things and are already full of themselves.

I won't dunk on people who do YouTube or whatever to share a hobby and make ends meet, the trouble is, money and any degree of "fame" goes to our heads and we become full of... ourselves, without regularly doing the work to stay real, stay grounded, and not entirely sell out. Especially because I wanted to do a few political and hobby videos but never took the time to learn the things I mentioned because I struggle to understand the tutorials, and bills are real.

So the job I got left me washed out so now I need to figure out where to go from here. I can't say much at this time. But there's a lot of chores to be caught up, I'm basically living in squalor at this point, but I'm also sure, assuming I still have a job, I'll have to manage both, among pet care and helping out in the community may take a back seat for a little while (you're not the only one who rambles).

Why don't we dream of careers? Society largely doesn't have them anymore, and of the few that exist, you're still disposable, can't make ends meet, retirement is savings and cut-throat, legalized gambling that makes our masters richer, rather than well funded pensions, and so is crazily expensive health care, also tied to a job, usually (not always) for some tyrant, petty or otherwise, and rather than coming home, doing chores, then getting busy with the work of healing ourselves, studying theory, we're exhausted and mentally check out, usually through substances, sex, porn, doomscroll, complain and rage online, and other dissociation. And brother, I'm guilty!

I'm working on it, though, and real healing isn't easy or linear. It's messy and painful AF, but if we want to get better, we find ways, means, time... somehow.

I had dreams of career and family, as a child. By the 80s I was pissed TF off, by the 90s I wanted to settle down and had neither tools nor guidance and wasted a lot of years fucking all the way up. By the time circumstances gave me a very long timeout to sit with myself, I'd squandered time, energy, and resources (including physical and mental health, positive relationships and influences) going from one thing to another to stay busy, not feel, try to survive, blah blah yada yada.

At any rate, I had another long time of a few years and got busy doing the work of looking at myself hard, accepting my part of the responsibility for where I am, and that my abusers, while as fucked up as I was, probably did the best with the limited resources and guidance they had (and look at the values Western society practices, rather than what we say we have), and got even busier, forgiving (it really is for us, not them, but if they benefit in a constructive way, great), sometimes the same people, multiple times, even if I hadn't seen them for years, developing compassion, learning to set appropriate boundaries and keep them (it's a doozy, I'm still working on it), and understanding that while forgiveness and compassion are unconditional, access to me and interfering in my life in unhealthy or destructive ways are not unconditional, nor always without appropriate consequences, but that's a whole other post.

Anyway, that's why I harp on mental health and shadow work. I know most people will reject and rail against it without giving it a fair try, which is probably a year or more of consistently testing and applying principles (it's not one size fits all); but I do hope something I share is helpful to someone desperate or clever enough to do the work.

Sorry for the rant.