DIGITISER: A WARPED REFLECTION

Self-concept. We’ve all got one of those. Basically, it’s the beliefs we have about ourselves.

These include personal traits, values, our role in society, even the things we believe about our body… I’m a good/bad/strong/weak person… I’m fat/thin/ugly/beautiful… I’m clumsy/I’m a gamer/I’m not a racist/I’m kind and generous/I’m selfish and mean… those sort of things. 

Obviously, there’s a ton more to it than that – it’s tied up with self-esteem, your conditions or worth, etc etc. - but in a nutshell… that’s the basics.

When I did my counselling training, we spent a lot of time looking at our own self-concepts, so that we could understand how the self-concept works… so that we could help clients with theirs. 

Across the years of my training, we students would take turns challenging one another about our self-beliefs, so that we’d have a better, more accurate, sense of who we all were… we were encouraged to write reflectively about ourselves, we had therapy to talk about our self-concepts… I mean, it was a narcissist’s dream! 

And here I am doing it again. Oh-hoh! 

We grow up with so many people telling us what we are, at a time when our self-concept is still forming – You’re a brat! You’re a four-eyed freak! You’re too sensitive! Don't talk so much! – that we absorb those things into our self-concept, and carry them with us into adulthood. This is why so many self-concepts are warped distortions compared to how most other people see us, and why so many of us struggle. 

It’s baggage – scar tissue from our formative years, in only a rough approximation of who we are in reality.

I got pretty good at having an objective overview of who I am, and it’s a fantastic defence mechanism against criticism; if you know who you are, and you’re broadly alright with that, it doesn’t matter what anybody else says. 

I’ve still got a lot of those deeply engrained beliefs, but I’m better at being aware of them – and being able to work around them. I might tell myself something that’s not entirely accurate, or be too hard on myself… but I’ve also learned to challenge it, and ask whether a belief is true, or just self-concept baggage. 

What does any of this have to do with anything? Bear with me.

It might not have escaped your attention that I’ve been struggling a bit over the past month or so. Not in a massive way – certainly not in any sense that you’d need to worry – but I’ve been fighting a general sense of… well, I wasn’t sure what it was. I guess it’s a kind of low-level anxiety, which sort of magnified a bit when I got the news that 4 O’Clock Club was ending.

I’m a bugger if I ever get down, because I fight it. Instead of just letting myself feel it, and let it work its way through, I wrestle with it, try to fix the problem with brute force. I stuff it down, kick it into the shadows, and keep busy so that I never have to look at the monster under the bed… and so it tends to get stuck in place far longer than it needs to, ticking away in the background. 

Why? Well, part of my self-concept – which I’m at least aware of, though have never quite been able to shift - is this: I don’t get depressed.

Which is bollocks. I know it’s bollocks. Everyone gets depressed, but because of my self-concept, I instead fight it when I do get depressed, and grin through it. See that bit up there where I wrote about “a kind of low-level anxiety”? 

Don’t listen to the idiot who wrote that. There’s more to it than that. He’s fooling himself! Low-level anxiety?!? What guff.

But anyway… a big part of why I’ve been struggling is to do with Digitiser.

Frankly, I feel disappointed with it. The Digitiser2000 website never grew… Digitiser The Show views levelled out around 14,000 an ep… the weekly mini episodes get around 4,000 views… Patreon has been more or less the same since I launched it… and the subscriptions have been struggling to break 13,000 subscribers for the past month. 

Before you rush to comment and try to stick a plaster on all that… I know. On an intellectual level… I know that all of that is fine, and good. Do it because you love it, blah blah… Loads of YouTubers would love to get 4,000 views… almost-13,000 subscribers is incredible… tons of people love you… if you’re doing it for the views then you’re doing it for the wrong reason…

Yeah, thanks, everyone, but I already know all that on an intellectual level… but at an emotional level I still feel disappointed. I can’t help it. We feel what we feel, and that’s okay.

And it’s not just disappointment, but I’m kind of lost with it all, unsure how to grow it, bewildered that in the four-and-a-bit years since I came back as Mr Biffo that I never managed to re-engage with that old Digitiser audience. Not least because I think – I know – that the stuff we’re putting out, on both the website and the channel – is better than a lot of what’s out there.

What is interesting to me – and has proven key to unlocking all this – is that I didn’t feel that way with Found Footage. Like, at all. Not even slightly. 

I honestly didn’t care if just a couple of hundred people watched it; I’m just happy that I did it, and that it exists. It was like when I’d draw or make things as a kid; I could just let myself go nuts with it, and did it for my own pleasure. If the people who backed it loved it too… then that was a bonus.

And yet… when it comes to Digitiser, even if I’m making the sort of Digitiser content that’s entirely honest and true to me, even if I’m enjoying it in the moment… I now realise that it brings with it its own baggage, its own pressure and expectations.

In short, I have a sort of self-concept for Digi… and it’s this; Digitiser is massive.

Because Digitiser was massive. 

So today, when Digitiser is no longer massive, just some little, mid-level, me-too, niche retro gaming thing – along with your Top Hats and… and…

…Slight break in my flow there, because the cat just brought in a dead pigeon, and I needed to put it in the bin…

Where was I? 

Oh yeah… 

…So instead of what Digi was – the only daily games mag, read by millions – these days it’s one of hundreds of thousands of gaming sites/channels, read by a relative handful. I don’t mind being a nobody, but on some deep emotional level it feels wrong that Digitiser should be so obscure. 

It jars with my self-concept of it as massive and popular. There’s cognitive dissonance there, which causes discomfort… and that – I realised today – is what has been at the heart of a lot of what has been up with me recently. 

I mean, figuring it out does nothing to help with me being worried about work for next year,  but even that is tied to all these beliefs I had around Digitiser - how brilliant it would be, I would tell myself, if by the time I had one of my shows cancelled, Digi was my main job again, and I didn't need to do other stuff for other people... that my fate was in my own hands?

I believed, on a felt sense level, that once I brought back Digi it was only a matter of time until it was huge again. I don’t think I ever acknowledged that consciously – I told myself all that stuff about doing it because I love it (and that part is also, paradoxically, true) - but I’m trying to be honest with myself now, so that this knot of stuff in my guts and head doesn’t cause everything Digitiser to implode… 

I’ve been angry at the people I felt drove me away from doing anything online for six years… for robbing me of the momentum I had. I’ve been feeling powerless to promote the site and channel… frustrated at the lack of growth… I’ve been looking at other YouTube channels, and getting annoyed when videos that have seemingly been churned out with little care or effort get four times the views my ones do, which I’ve sweated blood over… 

But now, instead of looking outward… I’m trying to focus on what’s at the root of it all inside of me, so that I don’t do something daft and rash, like change what I do to try and bring in a bigger audience, or simply walk away from this. 

I don’t want any of that to happen - I love creating things, and I love Digi - but I do sort of wonder whether I did the wrong thing in bringing back the Digitiser brand. Maybe I should’ve called it something new, so that I didn’t feel I was competing constantly with my own past… that it was a fresh start, a level playing field. That any growth I had was earned, rather than handed to me on a plate, and I could just relax and be happy in the doing of it.

And as I write that… it sort of feels right, or at least one way around this whole issue. One that would mean that I wasn’t always in the shadow of my past achievements, and could just let go of my Digitiser self-concept, and leave it in the past.

I dunno. We'll see.

Anyhow, I'm not looking for advice or suggestions - the whole purpose of writing this was to try and work it all out for myself, in a linear way. But thank you for reading, if you made it this far, and indulging me.

Paul