Letting go of 2024: A Rat Finds His Attic

It’s a little early for a 2024 retrospective, but with the American election in a couple days, this is the last practical window to reflect on personal journeys, before we’re all sucked into at least two more months of existential dread.

It’s been hard to get started with this because there are at least three essays I want to write about how my life has changed this year, and I realized that they’re all connected in some way. So the best way forward, I think, will be to pick a few topics that all expand on a theme:

2024 was the year of letting go.

2021 was a pivotal year for me, starting with me quitting my job of six years for what I thought was a much better position - that ended up being a toxic situation that ended after six months. By the end of the year, I was burned out in my career, needing to move to a different state, and - the pandemic having more or less shut down the tabletop gaming scene - looking for new hobbies.

At the end of the year I was in a hotel room while visiting family for the holidays, staring at the ceiling and trying to sieve through my mental soup in search of some morsel of direction. And in that moment, a stray thought flashed before me, one that would shift the course of my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined:

“I wonder what furries are doing on Twitch.”

I first got interested in the furry fandom in the mid-90s. In the many years since, I had racked up enough bad experiences that I decided it was better for me to observe from a distance. I’d always liked cartoon animals from comic strips and video games, but I never comfortably meshed with the fandom at large, for reasons I wouldn’t figure out until later (maybe more on that another day). Likewise, I had some interest in streaming on Twitch, having gotten interested in Heroes of the Storm and streamers of that game - before Blizzard in its most Blizzard-y way shoved it into the broom closet as punishment for not being a cash cow. Eventually I lost interest in streamers as well.

Whatever chemical reaction led to that fateful thought popping into the forefront of my brain, then compelled me to plunk “furry” into the Twitch search bar. I wasn’t familiar with VTubers at the time, so I wasn’t totally prepared to see what were essentially human-driven cartoons, accentuated by random objects being flung at them by chat members. Rather than cringing, I was immediately captivated by the possibilities. And so, I had my next epiphany:

“I want to do that.”

I’d fallen away from watching streamers, but I’d been an avid watcher of YouTube channels like Game Grumps and LGR. I had a little bit of radio experience from high school and college. I was already a professional programmer, and I’d been tooling around in Blender to make game tokens and such. I’d grown up with Nintendo, Bloom County, and MST3K, and I was hitting the point in my life where I could feel very real nostalgia for those things. Slowly the pieces were coming together; all I needed was a theme.

The attic, as I first imagined it, was simply a place that served as both storage for fun times gone by, and a quiet refuge from the steady roar of daily life. To an extent, it paralleled my experiences with college radio, spinning records in a dorm basement for four hours at a time, alone. It was a cozy space in my memory. Adding a rat-sized character gave the memory a new sense of scale; it turned a snug storage space into a cathedral for vintage gaming.

I don’t remember too much about my early attempts at streaming. I remember having butterflies, even with past experience. So much time in the post-pandemic days was spent without any significant socialization, and I’d been having doubts that I could ever do it again. I remember hating the feeling of streaming to no one; I remember quitting some streams halfway through because I just couldn’t take it. I remember wanting to give up. I think I must have been insufferable in wanting so badly to be accepted by my new streamer friends without outright saying it.

The biggest reason that I stuck through it all - perhaps the most revealing reason - is that deep down, I knew I could be good at this. I believed, given enough time, alongside a full-time job, I could find my niche in streaming and excel there. I’d made something out of nothing, and I wanted to keep making. I didn’t want to be huge; I just wanted a sense of permanence.

It’s March 2024. I’ve finished creating my own 3D model, after three months of franting learning, trial and error, and wondering if I’d made a huge mistake in the attempt. Of course, it turned out fine, and with that relief I could turn my attention to public coding projects, streaming tools that I’d be able to share with my newfound community.

It didn’t work out that way. I kicked off the year with being diagnosed with hereditary peripheral neuropathy, an annoyingly painful nerve condition for which there is modest treatment but no cure. This exacerbated my existing sleep issues and my anxiety in general, to the point that all that spare time I planned on using to do all the fun stuff quickly evaporated. A two-week summer vacation was good for my health, but I was alarmed and dismayed at how quickly all my old anxieties snapped back into place once I got back home.

The rest of the year to this point has consisted of working, streaming and managing pain. All in all, I’m in pretty good health, and work is getting less stressful.

But I’m not happy with the stream. I still have fun doing it, but it’s not the thing that I set out to make.

I was never going to stand out by trying to do the same things as the streamers I’d started out watching and was inspired by. I wanted to use my platform to make getting into the hobby easier, to show people how it’s done, and to share communities with each other. That’s how I was determined to “make it,” whatever that meant. When I wasn’t able to do that, a lot of the joy went with it. I streamed less for the fun of it than the feeling that I had to. Because not streaming meant risking starting from the beginning. Not knowing anyone. Wanting to quit but not being able to. That’s the pattern I was familiar with.

Coming to terms with this meant confronting a few realities. First, 2024 was a wash. I spent most of it feeling like a squirrel running up a greased bird feeder. I was tired and stressed constantly, and creatively I coasted through a lot of the year. And that’s okay. Better days are ahead.

Second, I have to decide whether I’m streaming for the enjoyment and value of it, or if I’m streaming just because I’m afraid of being left behind. If the answer is the latter, then it’s better that I don’t stream. I’ve made many good friends who aren’t going away just because I miss a stream for one day. My support is much better than it was three years ago.

Third, streaming is not like anything I’ve done before. I care about my stream in the same way I think an artist cares about their art; while it’s fun to hang out and game and laugh with friends, the stream is no less an extension of myself, my experiences, my fears and hopes.

What I expect all this means is that my streaming schedule will be dialed back next year, possibly down from three days a week to 2 or less, and that time will go back into the bigger stream goals or self-care. I’m also going to make a bigger effort to reach out to others for help; it’s been hard to trust my ideas with others, but now that a lot of my ideas have manifested, that fear has started to dissipate.

Will the stream get to a point where I feel like it’s “done?” I think so. The plan was always to build a good foundation so that changes could be made iteratively and wouldn’t take months at a time. Thanks to the constant work of artists and developers in the streaming and VTubing communities, that’s been made easier than ever. But I’m not against the clock here. It’ll be done when it’s done.

Growing up, I was told I was good at a lot of things. At the same time, I never felt like I was good at anything.

As those voices started disappearing from my life, I wondered if I would ever be able to shed that constant internal pressure to excel, and just live in the moment. But maybe that’s not right. Maybe we’re meant to struggle. Maybe we shouldn’t suppress that pressure but give it room to breathe. Give ourselves room to run and fall and get back up again.

2024 was the year of letting go of expectations.