Acknowledging When You Need Help, or At Least When You Need to Change

I'm going to share some stuff today that I'm a bit uncomfortable about sharing, but attempting to deal with it in private hasn't been going so well, so I'm hoping that making things a bit more "public" might help me somehow.

I'm not sure how yet — perhaps simply making people aware of what I'm dealing with might make me feel a bit better about it, or perhaps I need some sort of support. Exactly what form that support might take, I have no idea, but… anyway, enough preamble, let me just get into it before I talk myself out of sharing this.

As those who have known me for a while will know, I have struggled for a long time with my weight. It has been on a steadily upward spiral for pretty much my entire adult life and, barring an extremely successful stint with Slimming World a few years back, I have had great difficulty shedding weight and keeping it off. This has been a particular problem during the COVID years, since just general activity was pretty much a no-go for quite some time.

This is a fairly significant problem, not just for the obvious reasons, but also because I have been suffering with an extremely painful hernia for the past few years — and the doctors refuse to do anything about it unless I lose some weight, because apparently if I get it fixed in the state I'm in right now, it's very likely to just come back. It doesn't help, of course, that I am terrified of hospitals in general and surgery especially, but I'm kind of sort of coming to terms with the fact that at some point it will be necessary to confront that. But not yet.

This is extremely difficult and embarrassing to admit, but I hope that sharing it might help some people to understand why I find some things a bit of a struggle — things that "normal" folks would likely take in their stride on a daily basis. Things like, say, walking down to the shops in a group at lunchtime to get a sandwich; I just can't keep up with people.

I entirely accept that the situation I'm in is my own fault, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing. If anything, it makes it more embarrassing.

I currently weigh over 28 stone. I do not like admitting this because it's utterly shameful, but I'm putting it out there just so you understand where I'm coming from.

This is obviously extremely unhealthy and I am perfectly aware of that. It disgusts me to see myself in the mirror. None of my clothes fit properly. And any time someone in the street insults me for my weight (which has happened rather more often than I'd like) I have a hard time accepting that they're being unreasonable and unpleasant; part of me feels like I "deserve" the abuse.

I am taking measures to attempt to reduce that — specifically, my wife Andie and I are following the WeightWatchers (or "WW" as they prefer to call it now) plan. This means that we track our food intake daily according to various items' "points" values and, in doing so, both learn to think about what we're putting in our mouth and control what we're eating.

Trouble is, of late we (and particularly I) have been struggling with motivation to such a degree that it's tough to make it through a whole week staying "on plan". WW has a certain amount of flexibility built into it in that you can earn points "back" by eating vegetables and doing exercise, but that doesn't exactly cancel out a day when you eat way too much of the things you shouldn't be eating.

My trouble is, I have what I'd probably describe as an addiction, having been in a position to care for and be with people who have had other types of addiction. My addiction is not to alcohol or drugs, though; it's to food.

Food is my coping mechanism. If I'm sad, I want to eat. If I'm anxious, I want to eat. And when I want to eat, I don't want to "grab a handful of salad" or "enjoy this healthy treat packed with veggies" — I want chocolate, cake, bread, crisps, sugary drinks, that sort of thing. And I often find the urge to eat those things completely irresistible — even if we have none of them in the house. Living near a Tesco Express will do that to you.

Unfortunately, this leads to something of a vicious cycle. I am sad and anxious and angry because of my weight. Because I'm sad and anxious and angry, I eat, which makes my weight problem worse. I feel guilty about screwing my own body up, which makes me feel sad and anxious and angry, which… you get the idea. It is unhealthy coping mechanisms and an unhealthy relationship with food that has got me into this position, but I am having a real tough time breaking out of it.

The reason why I'm feeling particularly anxious about it right now is because in combination with the symptoms of "long COVID", I feel a complete wreck on a daily basis. All my joints ache. It hurts to sit down for too long. It hurts to stand up for too long. If I lie on my side for too long in the night, the knee on the bottom ends up in excruciating pain for a few minutes. I'm perpetually tired, and no amount of sleep seems to fix that.

I know very well that fixing all this is going to be a long and slow process — but that it is possible. The one light at the far-off end of an extremely long tunnel is that I know I've had success with this before. I've never felt so good in my adult life as when I was successful at Slimming World — but unfortunately a variety of both personal and professional stresses caused me to well and truly fall off the wagon, putting me in a worse situation than I've ever been in my life.

I don't want to hurt any more. I don't want to be sad any more. And I don't want to die before my time. I don't really know if or how anyone reading this is able to help, but I just want to put it out there that I could do with some help — even if it's simply a bit of consideration and understanding for the situation I'm in, and the knowledge that there are people out there not judging me negatively and harshly for ending up in such a horrible (albeit self-inflicted) situation, but who will be there to support and encourage me as I attempt to rescue myself from it.

Thanks for your time.

The Missing Years

I suspect your experience with what I'm about to describe will probably vary quite a bit according to your own age — but speaking as a forty-one year old man, I have to say, I find it mildly disconcerting that a number of years just sort of seem to have gone missing.

I don't mean that I've forgotten them or anything, or that I'm suffering some sort of debilitating brain injury (not to my knowledge, anyway, ayooo, etc.) but rather that there's a definite period of my life that feels like it just sort of passed by in a flurry without really very much to show for it.

Said period covers pretty much from the end of my time at university up until right now, which is a good twenty years or so. That's a not-insignificant amount of time to feel like you've just sort of "lost", which is why it occasionally weighs on my mind like this. Are there better ways I could have spent that last twenty years? Almost certainly, but at the same time that twenty years taught me a lot of helpful life lessons that have enabled me to just about survive to where I am now.

I think therein lies the core of why I feel like many of those years sort of "went missing" — the fact that I'm unconvinced of their value to my life as a whole.

Out of those twenty years, I spent several attempting to make a career out of teaching, before a nervous breakdown convinced me that probably wasn't a great idea.

Then I did some retail work with a mind to building up both my creative and technical skills in the computing field, which was going great until the management of the job I was working — and loving, up until that point, I should say — decided to ruin the lives and careers of several of us for no apparent reason.

Then terrible things happened in my personal life that I'm keen to forget and mostly have at this point. That took a good year or so, probably a little more, but as I was coming out of that I started developing what looked like a promising career in online games journalism. That eventually came to fruition… until the publication I was working on (and getting paid well for) closed down relatively without warning, leaving me adrift once again.

After that, I spent some time writing about mobile and social games, which was utterly soul-destroying but paid astronomically well for the amount of effort it took, so I wasn't going to complain too much about that. Then came USgamer, which was great until I was, once again, fucked over without any control of the situation. A brief stint working a "normal" job for energy company SSE, who — again — completely boned me to such a degree it had a severe impact on my mental health and, after a bit of a tense period… well, here we are.

So I guess that accounts for the last twenty years or so, just about. It's just strange how a lot of those years have just sort of all merged into one another; I can't remember a lot of specific details about many of them, at least partly because I probably don't want to. That would make sense.

It's just a little odd that I can still vividly remember, say, something like my mother happening to see me at playtime on the primary school field (aged about 7, probably) thinking that I was hitting a girl in my class with a stick when we were actually playing make-believe and having a thoroughly lovely time, and yet what should theoretically be more "important", defining periods in my life are becoming almost "lost" to me.

I guess you hold on to the memories that are actually important to you for one reason or another. And what your subconscious thinks is "important" doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense. Maybe it's not worth trying to understand it; just enjoy those memories that your mind has decided to hang on to!

The Ravages of Age

Andie and I are suffering from what appears to be colloquially known as "long COVID". That is to say, having had COVID earlier in the year, neither of our bodies have quite recovered from the experience, leaving us feeling way shittier than we really should be when we're otherwise "healthy". I use the term loosely because neither of us are exactly "healthy", but we're not actively afflicted with any illnesses, so far as I'm concerned.

According to the NHS, the symptoms of long COVID include being achey, tired all the time and generally feeling crap. I can confirm that all of those things are present and correct in my own body; the whole experience has left me feeling about thirty years older than I actually am, and I'm rather keen to leave this feeling behind now. I don't feel I should be feeling intense pain when sitting down for too long, or standing up for too long, or just generally existing at my age, but, well, I'm sure this is at least partly my own fault.

We're not doing nothing about it, mind; both of us are following WeightWatchers in an attempt to shed some excess baggage, because that will probably help the symptoms we're suffering. And while it's slow going — at least partly because with both OG COVID and long COVID we've found ourselves struggling with motivation, because the last thing you want to do when you feel like crap is diet — things are going relatively well. We just need to try and stick with it over the long term. Which is easier said than done, of course, particularly when you're feeling pretty exhausted and all you want to do is eat in the vain attempt that you might regain some energy and vigour.

After the last couple of years — and after the whole news over the "cost of living crisis" we're presently enduring here in the UK — it sort of feels like we need to resign ourselves to life being shitty in general, so what, really, is a bit of physical suffering to go along with feelings of existential crisis, a sense that you don't really belong in the modern world and a quite genuine feeling that the world is actually in the process of ending right now?

There's a cheery thought for your Thursday afternoon, now, isn't it? So I think I'm off to go and live my life in denial with either some Final Fantasy XIV, Tower of Fantasy or both. At least in those worlds I can do something about the things that are Wrong, both with myself and with the world at large!

Homecoming

A fine morning to you, everyone. I've decided to come back to this blog on an occasional basis, as writing here always used to provide good "therapy" when I really needed it — and after the last couple of years we've all had I don't think anyone in the world would deny the need for some sort of outlet for all the stresses we've been having to deal with.

I'm not going to make any bold commitments about posting every day or anything like that — largely because my day job over at Rice Digital means that I'm writing every day anyway, so the whole "keeping in practice" thing isn't really necessary. Instead, I'm just going to write here when I feel like it, just for the sake of expressing myself and perhaps sharing something of myself with those of you reading.

This might also be an opportunity to rekindle some friendships that kind of fell by the wayside when I moved away from posting regularly on this blog in favour of my other projects such as MoeGamer and my YouTube channel. So if you're seeing this in your inbox or feed reader for the first time in a while, be sure to say hi — it'd be lovely to hear from some of you.

I'm not going to go straight into babbling on too much about the living nightmare that is life in 2022; we'll save that for another day. For today, I just wanted to say hello, remind you all that I exist — and let you know that you'll once again be seeing a bit of me around here now and again. That'll probably do for now — but expect more soon!

Calling it a day on Patreon

Hi folks. I've been thinking long and hard about this for some time, but I think it's probably time to hang up this Patreon account.

Frankly, it's just not really been working out for me the way it hoped; it's been near-impossible to attract new subscribers, even with regular mentions of it on socials, at the end of videos and in other such places, and in recent months I've been shedding subscribers. My income from Patreon this month is literally less than half of what it was last month.

My original intent for this account was to see if it was possible to turn MoeGamer (and, later, my video work) into something self-sustainable — particularly while I was struggling to find full-time employment. Now, I thankfully have full-time employment, so that "pressure" isn't there any more — and I just find myself responding to a lot of things about Patreon not with excitement, but with anxiety.

I don't like logging in to see people have left; it makes my heart sink and my mind feel like I've done something wrong. This isn't anyone's fault, I hasten to add; it's my own mental health talking. I know from my own experience of cancelling and moving pledges around that not everyone is able to stick around for all eternity, so of course it would be exactly the same for me, too. Still, it's hard not to feel like you've somehow "failed" when subscribers disappear.

And in some ways, I feel like I have failed to make good use of this account. I've never felt like I've been able to offer meaningful benefits to subscribers, and apparently "just supporting someone you enjoy the work of" isn't enough incentive to convince much of the Internet-going public into opening their wallets. It's hard enough to even get people to comment on stuff these days.

Fact is, though, I've never had the time or the resources to be able to plug into making Patron-exclusive stuff — had I managed to grow my membership beyond its peak (I never did quite crack $100 a month) I suspect I would have been able to make time for Patron-exclusive things, but as it stands it's never felt like something I could spend too much time on in good conscience.

And when you can't even get your own friends — either IRL or Internet — to chip in a dollar a month to help you out a bit… well, that's pretty demoralising.

So I'm going to hang it up and remove just one more stressor from my life. I may well do something like open up YouTube Memberships, as providing benefits like emojis and stickers are easy to do and actually meaningful to the platform on which the work people are supporting is hosted. But from today, I will be pausing Patreon memberships indefinitely, and likely not turning them back on again.

I would like to say a very, very sincere "thank you" to those of you who have supported me, whether you're a new member or someone who has stuck around for a very long time.

There are quite a few of you here in the members list who have stuck with me for literally years at this point, and believe me, your support has helped me survive some very tough times indeed — if not financially then most definitely through the knowledge that there are genuinely kind people out there. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the knowledge you were there helped keep me hanging on through some particularly difficult years.

Plus I'm legitimately grateful to those of you who have become friends as well as just Patreon supporters — I'd like to give a particular shout-out to Ken, who helped me get my hands on the Atari ST version of Rod Land that I so dearly wanted as a child, and to Digger Dan, whom hopefully many of you know the story of already! And, of course, my dear friend and podcasting partner-in-crime Chris.

So here's what's going to happen:

After I post this publicly, I'm going to pause all memberships, which means you will not be charged for any further months. Doing it this way rather than simply deleting my account means that you should still have access to any Patron-exclusive stuff you might care to look back on. Right now, I have no intention of unpausing, so don't feel you have to cancel; I may still post occasional things here, so remaining a paused member should mean you still get updates.

If you would like to continue to support me in some way after this Patreon gets paused, you can do so in a few ways:

Ko-Fi allows you to make one-time donations in a variety of ways. You can do that here. This is purely a "tip jar" if you want to flip me a couple of quid if you enjoyed something; I have no intention of posting anything exclusive there.

Alternatively, my YouTube channel now has access to Super Thanks, which appears in the form of a "Thanks" button in the same row of buttons as the Like/Dislike, Share and other buttons on a video. Using Super Thanks, you can flip me a one-off tip and leave a comment, which will be specially highlighted as a means of thanking you for your donation. Like Ko-Fi, there's no long-term commitment there and likewise no exclusive content; it is just, as the name suggests, a means of saying "thanks".

I will also look into YouTube Memberships, and if there's a means of implementing some sort of benefits that won't take too much time away from my actual work on the channel and the day job — like the aforementioned emoji and stickers — I'll turn those on as a means of offering recurring support. If I do this, there is of course no obligation to join up and there likely won't be any "members only" videos; it will simply be a means of showing your support directly on YouTube.

Once again, I'd like to say a very sincere thank you to all of you reading this who are both current or past supporters. It's been a fun journey, but I feel like it's ultimately for the best for my creative endeavours if I'm not feeling stressed over whether or not I'm providing for those kind enough to drop me some money each month!

Thank you for taking the time to read all this. If you'd like to follow me elsewhere online, you can find me on Twitter at @MoeGamer, and Discord at MoeGamerPete#2465. And don't forget to read my stuff every day over at Rice Digital! It's like MoeGamer, only I get paid for it and have a team of writers supporting me!