Objectivity (Patreon)

I just got back from the Pitch & Putt.

Twenty degrees Celsius, overcast weather, not packed, ran into a few familiar faces, and completed with five under par, completed with a long walk home humming to Chelsea Wolfe albums; I'd say it was a pretty great morning.

The main-reason being the end result; five under, even at a Pitch and Putt, is not my average. It's a good result, and even if I was depressed, I couldn't say it was because I messed up on the course.

The scorecard doesn't lie.

The result can't be fought.

In contrast to what I dropped Golf early in life to pursue instead.

Normally, when I upload to Youtube, I wake up five minutes before going public with no alarm, anticipating and sometimes discovering a problem that needs to be solved, something that could instantly turn a successful release into a disaster, I'm sure we all have a personal example of witnessing this happen to a channel at some point.

Last week however… I couldn't sleep.

I tossed and turned 4-6 hours, lost in the thought that the combination of time-away, subject, title, thumbnail, expectations, framing, and execution, that I'd successfully dug a grave for my Career.

Finally, I fell asleep at 6am, the minute the video launched, I think because my brain finally went "well, the end has begun, no use staying awake now." My last hope before slipping into subconscious was to wake up to "Ranked 10th out of 10" with red arrows across the Youtube Studio App. That Youtube would use all of its data to tell me that I'm doing something wrong. That this isn't meeting expectations nor demand. I hoped for it, because I'd been so lost in the sea of choices and every thought attached to them, that I needed to see it happen for me to remember…

Nothing happened.

Nothing about my life changed.

I didn't lose y'all. I didn't lose my channel. I didn't lose my ability. I didn't lose my colleagues, my peers, or my friends…

I'd only become consumed in thought.

It feels like I’m drowning sometimes. Entire days have been spent sitting in chair, starting a process, sometimes as simple as starting the Kettle to boil water for a Cup of Tea, and never being able to complete the Task, always interrupted by fifty simultaneous trains of thought, all vying for attention, and most importantly… none of them having a clear answer.

The world I'm in is a world of choices, choosing every word, subject, sentence, emotion, person, critique, implication, cut, song, effect, program, time, tag, name, format, codec… about the thing I haven't thought about choosing is which website to upload on.

Last year, was me discovering things about myself, and this year, seems to be figuring out the reasons why. I was actually visiting the Pitch and Putt way more last year, almost daily during certain months, more than getting my value out of the $99 Monthly Pass, but I didn't really know why.

Part of its pride, sure. I don't want to be worse at something than I was when I was a literal child, but unlike that child, pride's much lower on the priority list.

I know now.

And it's simply that, much like how uploading Halo Combat Evolved… 14 Years Later, was refreshing in a life made up of a minimum wage nine to five, no savings, and sleeping on a couch that damaged my bones; a life made up of choices, endless choices, and judgements of those choices, it's really refreshing to write on a scorecard…

Whether I improved from last time or I didn't, neither is ever a lie.