๐ Streaming (Something) As My Next Project with my Poor Mental Health
Last Updated: 3ย months, 2ย weeks ago
Probably The Writing Process
Early in the morning (for me, which with my current nocturnal-ish sleep cycle means 3PM) I stumbled upon an idea of my next ongoing project besides this blog.
I also became aware of some realisations that the obstacles I thought may exist, may in fact not exist, and it could just be the psychological phenomenon of my brain doing that thing to self-sabotage "needless" effort that I wrote about here.
These realisations are:
1. Content doesn't have to be Entertaining to be Real, Connecting and Relatable
Only four-and-a-half minutes into this video I already have so much on my mind and an idea I am hoping to run with.
Seriously, it's long. I'm only talking about the first 4:30 mins.
The exchange between Dr K and CoconutB starts off with CoconutB talking about bottling up his emotions and not wanting to talk to his chat about them because
"As a streamer, you want to entertain your chat. You don't want to burden them with your troubles."
It's about stuff that's real, even if the content isn't fun.
This resonated with me, as someone who wants to share my own past experiences as an autistic/ADHD not-cis survivor of cult and parental abuse living with CPTSD.
I want to share all of this, but am not sure if I have the mental health to do so, and also what format would be suitable for me.
Dr K's response made me consider something that had perhaps been in the back of my mind for a while - I could stream while writing about my trauma. Or stream something in a conversational format in general.
And maybe I actually don't have to think about how I'm going to structure it, keep it light - or punchy, like these neurotypicals somehow manage to do - but can just be me, and even be ok with rants that may to others seem to be tangents or belabouring the point but are actually related and also, necessary emotional processing, and perhaps highly relatable to other ADHD/ASD people that are similar to myself, the same way I find the speech patterns of many of similar neuroatypicals relatable and often more comprehensible than that of neurotypicals.
This fear of what others think also leads very neatly onto my next point:
2. Experimentation and Practice enable Learning, and Progress requires Doing
My mind has a surface-level solution which, I am proud to say, has lately become an easy go-to for me (so easy that I had to write an article on how to not burn out, see my above link): maybe I should Think about the "how" less and do more! Maybe I'm too afraid of failure and I just need to get out there!
Hear me out - I am an analyst who gets stuck in my head, and as we already know, someone who gets paralysed by analysis paralysis a.k.a perfectionism.
But this is a case of experimentation, not executing a precise strategy. More specifically, it's about practise, and the danger of not doing anything at all, because your brain tells you it's not perfect, hence my earlier-linked earlier-written article on perfectionism.
So planning is good, but at some point you actually have to get past the comfort of the back room and the illusion that you can plan your way through everything and that planning = progress and actually execute those plans, just like learning to swim actually involves getting in the water.
All the books on swimming can't give you the necessary experience, the feedback your mind and body needs to adjust your techniques and improve relative to you and your abilities, which are only measured by doing, and which only enhance through practise, and ultimately progress by doing.
Which I guess is also partly what this blog may be about (besides accountability to myself and a sense of having "completed" iterations of something, which is good for my ADHD brain).
3. You can "ask others' advice", but your content comes from You
Seeking Approval, Reassurance or Permission
However, this proposed solution which I all-too-easily jump to may not actually be my required solution. I only now realise that my thinking actually contains a fundamental assumption that belies a deeper problem: I conflate with the process of "thinking" and "planning": my asking others' "advice" which is actually seeking others' approval, or in fact permission, and my fear of not having it.
I am starting to realise that what I consider asking "advice" is sometimes just me wanting someone to reassure me that my ideas are good ones before I proceed with them, even if the other person is no less qualified than me to assess this!
It's a sort of false reassurance, false positive or false confidence, a false "confirmation" that I am on the right track, even though that person does not represent my entire potential audience.
I now realise that this comes from my cult upbringing, and past high-control upbringing environment in general.
Prominently, I may be conflating seeking approval with advice, and that is exactly the boundary my parents always crossed historically when I'd seek advice - they'd try to shut down or "strongly discourage" anything they didn't approve of for me if it wasn't in their roadmap, however benign the hobby was.
There's actually multiple factors at play here affecting my unhealthy relationship with others' input, and they are all negative associations I have learned through my high-control environment's upbringing with these poor (or nonexistent) boundaries in the past.
These associations are:
1. Feeling Alone but Visible
In reality, my telling people about things is seeking the comfort of their approval - a false confirmation that I'm doing something objectively right (like the accountability system in the cult).
This may also be the reason I get so frustrated at being misunderstood - it stems from a need to be approved in my ideas an actions - a feeling that I need permission or validation from someone who will back me up because I'm so used to feeling alone.
Which makes me ask myself: Where did this negative association of aloneness come from? Was I punished by being made to feel alone in my upbringing?
And now that I think about it, maybe that is exactly what happened, though it wasn't so overt as being abandoned. I think my Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria and fear of spectacle may actually be part of my CPTSD trauma response (plus, y'know, being ADHD/ASD).
The cult, and my parents, used spectacle, fear and shame and exaggerated shock responses and withdrawal as a way to keep us in line, and more importantly, silence any questions or confessions/accusations that might expose the cult to public scrutiny (it's kind of the evangelical playbook). Teachers calling me out in class when my ADHD brain let me down didn't help either.
I suppose I associate being alone but visible as being vulnerable. I suppose a better word would be "unsupported". Hence I have to check if someone "has my back", and unfortunately, with my parents, that meant getting their buy-in, approval, and, let's call it what it was, permission (even as an adult) of what I wanted in my life before they'd support me.
2. The "Luxury" of Privacy
But there's also the luxury of privacy I'm now getting used to in not having to talk about things I don't want to, or seek advice for. "It's my own life, nobody gets to tell me how to live it" is still something of a novelty for me.
Hence it is something I feel is an important boundary to remind myself of by exercising it and being conscious about when I do and do not open the doorway for people to input into my life, even though, paradoxically, keeping myself open to feedback is very important to me, and so this gets overturned more often than I would like.
3. The Fawn Response
But finally, there's also my fawn response, which gives me pause.
Maybe I should think about my ideas for a bit BEFORE telling people things because I have a tendency to subconsciously reform my ideas into what others find more palatable - leftover from abuse/fawn response.
It's OK to do what You want to do - even if Others don't Approve
So theoretically, technically, I shouldn't have to feel like I can't seek advice for something I want to do. Whether I choose to seek advice on a particular thing or not depends on whether I want assistance, or the wisdom of someone who may be able to make things easier through their experience, or not. I am an adult, and this is my choice. I have agency to heed or not heed, to listen or not listen, but even to invite criticism or not invite criticism. This is my right. And that is something I need to internalise. And sometimes one does want to make one's own mistakes and own them, because then they are one's own life experiences.
Maybe it's not an unwillingness to learn from others or accept criticism (a phrase my parents weaponised against me whenever I pushed back on what they said even when I had thoroughly considered their perspective), but a willingness to, as Dr K once put it in the opening of this video (which I also include in my article on getting started despite perfectionism "devote [myself] to the purity of [my] action, [because] that is what makes human creativity so amazing!"
And maybe it's ok. Maybe for once I could just do something without asking anyone how, and learn to fall and get back up.
4. Finding a Better Path through the Ability to Make Mistakes
I am reminded of this scene from Madoka Magica, where her mother tells her daughter, who has never made a mistake, that perhaps she should make some mistakes.
The greater significance of this scene is that later, when stopped by her mother about a dangerous and consequential choice Madoka is about to make, this conversation is what she references back to her, and ultimately what lets her mother decide to make her own choices and ultimately, change the world around her.
Some will argue that from what happens after that later confrontation, Madoka should not have been allowed to make the decision she did, that it was too adult for her and that she should have been protected as she did not know what she was doing.
My interpretation when I first watched this show differed, in thinking that this showed Madoka had truly thought about all aspects of the sacrificial decision she was going to make before making it, and whether it was worth it, given all the wisdom her mother had imparted on her and through being able to hold back on her final decision until the end and make what some raised in self-sacrificial culture - including me up till the reveal at the final episode where Madoka's powerful "wish" was revealed - would initially think was a mistake in not intervening earlier.
To me, Madoka's apparent "mistake" from the perspective of the first-time watcher was in delaying this intervention, which enabled her to make the right (and powerful) choice later, when she had figured out all the facts from her own observations and taking into account all the wisdom and motives of those around her. Then in the final episode, her "mistake" is shown to be both a calculated and compassionate decision, the "right" or the best decision.
Perhaps I was biased in attributing too much agency and adult maturity to Madoka instead of seeing her sacrifice the way some would see it -as a tragedy. The expectation that self-sacrifice and attaining the perfect solution (two things I seem to link together and should probably explore in a further article), was so assumed to be the right thing because I was raised in conservatism.
I am now all too aware of how female-raised children "mature" due to the trauma of having to protect themselves from predatory males within purity culture, combined with how they are parentified in their tweens and early teens, especially the older or first-born daughters, to act older than they are. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Madoka is the older child and a girl in her early teens.
Context (and anime interpretations of what choices she had and the outcomes of them) aside, this scene still always stuck with me because it was the first time I'd heard of and actually considered the mistakes actually being a good thing.
Somehow hearing about it as a child at school, that "you learn from mistakes" I never internalised it the same way as seeing it in a medium aimed at older viewers. That maybe mistakes weren't just about learning what not to do, but about something even more, like personal growth or wisdom or just necessary life experience. Or just, part of life, and thus part of what makes life a rich experience, worthy of living.
I have to remind myself that, as a cult survivor raised in a high control environment and parentified, I did not have the opportunity to make mistakes and grow with support the way so many people do.
I have to accept that in some ways, I am not an adult the way other people are - I did not have the same experiences and develop the same maturity from them. I think this is the first time I'm acknowledging this.
I guess it's important to remind myself that it's ok to make mistakes as I parent myself, mistakes both as the child and as the parent to that child.
I initially named this section "Finding My Path through the Ability to Make Mistakes". I renamed it because I am starting to believe there is no one right path. I need to unlearn that evangelical upbringing of striving for nothing but performative perfection, it's true.
There is no "right" path, there are just good paths and better paths. I think that is what my musings of the past two days have led me to, as you will notice in these articles. I think this is growth. And this foregrounds the point that mistakes are ok. We have not missed out on "the right path". We are simply working to find a better path, on and on. And to be honest, this is actually a less pressured way to live.
And I think I will be ok.
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