PUCKER UP!

THANK YOU and moist inappropriate kisses to everyone who has subscribed already to the new channel. We honestly didn’t see that coming. We’ve already reached the subscriber milestone to get monetised – we just now need to make some actual content!

We’ll put up a short welcome video next week – once I stop the coughing – and get on with filming our first proper video.

And on top of that – we’ve had a few new Patreon sign-ups! Thank you, everyone. Welcome! Pull up a chair. Help yourself to a special sausage.

We’ll pencil in a Zoom call for Thursday evening next week – the one we’ve talked about for a while, where every tier’s invited - by way of a thank you. I should be better by then.

Doing this, changing the channel to OUR names, seeing so many of you – far more than we anticipated before actually getting any videos up on there – signing up in spite of knowing exactly the sort of content you’ll be getting - it finally, for the first time in close to 8 years, feels like we’ve reclaimed ownership of what we do.

We at last know that we've got a YouTube channel where people are there for us, rather than enduring us, or waiting for other people, or other sorts of content, to return.

Since Digitiser The Show, through the early Digi Minis, and then Sanja joining the channel properly, we’ve been unable to escape the sense that people were never really there to watch us. It always kind of felt we were being endured.

Case in point: a comment on Instagram literally yesterday from someone saying he misses Gannon! That sort of thing has been the background noise for ages now. Yet there were dozens more supportive comments from other people. I can't tell you how much we needed it.

Weirdly, and no promises, but I think it’s going to make it more likely we’ll do more of that sort of old-style stuff again on the main channel, because we’re no longer trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

But… there’s a bigger reason this is important for us. I’m going to talk about mental health and some heavy topics here, so check in with yourself before reading on. If that sort of thing isn’t for you… stop here.

SO…

I’ve alluded to having been struggling a bit these past few months. I often work through things in blog posts – usually more for the upper tiers – but I’ve been unusually vulnerable and wobbly this year. Aside from making our videos, it has been hard to feel motivated to do anything.

To the point that I haven’t really felt prepared to talk about it. I wanted to at least understand what I was going through before I spoke about it.

Plus, I never want to feel like I’m kind of “selling” my mental health, if that makes sense, or to talk about it to the degree that it becomes my identity. I’d rather try and hack away at the root causes, so I can at least discuss things with some degree of hindsight and reflection rather than while I’m still in the middle of it all.

One of those root causes has been this feeling that I simply didn’t matter anymore. Over the past five years so much as happened to me. You know some of it, and I think I knew at the time that when I got onto more even ground that I was going to have to deal with the fallout.

In short… I stopped mattering in the TV industry - so I didn’t feel I mattered as a writer - my kids all grew up and moved away - so it didn’t feel I mattered as a dad anymore - I pretty much existed to just kind of be there to help my parents – and my own needs didn’t really matter. Heck, even that fact I no longer earn much money kind of made it feel like I don’t matter as much to society.

And on top of all that… I was repeatedly receiving the message that I didn’t matter on my own YouTube channel – the thing I loved doing more than anything else – and that the kind of videos we wanted to make, that mattered to me, didn’t matter to our anyone else. Heck, even with BYAMPOD – another absolute labour of love – we got a very direct message from another podcast that our views on Marillion didn’t matter...!

And it all just compounded, with an extra sprinkling of delayed grief on top of that. I’ve reached the age where people around I grew up with are dying. I don’t just mean my dad and my mum’s dementia, but I’ve repeatedly received the message in recent years that our reward for all this struggle is… more struggle, then misery, then a full stop. Lots of people who were significant to one degree or another, have gone – often too soon, in pretty tragic ways.

Even before he’d died, my dad was very, very unhappy in his final years; I’d never seen him like that before, so brought low by life. Before she went bonkers, my mum was struggling. Then going and visiting her nursing home, and seeing how all these people – the other residents – are spending the final days of their lives in less-than-happy circumstances… it all built up in me.  

Obviously, it’s easy to counter all of the above on an intellectual level; my kids still love me even if most of them are living far away, I have a wonderful wife, I’ve changed how and who I work for, but I still matter to those clients, people still miss BYAMPOD, and I have a core of supporters on here who have been so, so, so brilliant, and stuck by us.

And, of course, you find your own reward in the journey, blah blah.

But it’s not how things are so much as about how they feel. Like I say, it’s been a rough old time, far more so than I’ve spoken about, and none of us are untouchable.

And that’s why this move with the new channel – though it’s a scary leap for us – is an important step in reclaiming myself.

It’s not really about growing our audience, it’s just about making sure that we’re okay, and that we're not doing anything that makes either of us feel worse. Even if our audience ends up being tiny compared to before, as I said on yesterday’s Bubblegun Extra for the upper tiers, I’d rather have a small channel that had a passionate audience and chance of growth than a medium-sized one that had stagnated with an apathetic audience.

And just to say, in case you’re worried, I think I’m coming out of the other side of how I’ve been feeling. I’m still having moments where everything feels like a struggle – it doesn’t take much to knock me off-kilter – but I’m getting there.

This is going to help. So thank you – from both of us – for supporting it.

And sorry for writing too many posts this week. Bye!

Paul