Shortly before I got sober in 2018, I had one of my hair-brained ideas and decided to start a comedy gaming YouTube channel. Amidst my excessive drunken consumption of Jordan Peterson videos, I had also been watching a lot of gaming and comedy content, namely Million Dollar Extreme, Sad World, Connor O’Malley, Eric Andre, Pewdiepie, Filthy Frank, MaxMoeFoe, etc.
I sent some short videos of me reviewing new video games to my cousin, who had always enjoyed filming me for how immediately performative I became when he trained a camera or camera phone on me.
He has videos dating back to about 2007 of me just running and jumping around and saying “zany” things. These videos should make me cringe to watch back, but they don’t. I don’t have a great deal of shame concerning the “silly” stuff from my past.
The one thing that strikes me about the footage from 2007 is how happy and healthy I look. My heavy drinking started around 2010, and it took years for it to start having a negative effect on my mind and body. In the 2007 footage, I just look like a happy guy in his early twenties. I guess in some regards, I was.
The footage I sent to my cousin in early 2018 he loved, and he immediately set about editing it into a full video. He loved editing and playing around with stuff like this, so it became a collaborative effort.
The videos were fun to make, and our friends and a wider audience online really enjoyed them. It was a combination of jokes written by my cousin and more improvisational material made up on the spot by myself, although a lot of the closer-to-the-edge stuff I said on camera ended up being cut out, to keep the channel apolitical and not violate any of YouTube’s quite strict usage terms.
A few of my harsher ideas were nixed in the name of keeping the channel up online and staying out of trouble. I really wanted to wear a hangman’s noose around my neck in one video, in another I wanted to have a girl in her underwear tied up in the background.
This was a time when “edgier” creators were being aggressively deplatformed by YouTube. It was shortly after PewDiePie’s big controversy, and the whole platform was in a fairly heavily monitored and censored state. It was a bit of a tightrope walk, even as a smaller channel.
We filmed the videos on location in the countryside by our hometown, and I dressed up as random characters or just in stupid clothes. I dressed as Nosferatu for one, which was the first time I shaved my head with a razor, clean to the scalp.
Because I was still drinking at that time, I had a friend shave my head for me, as I didn’t trust myself to do it. It was actually the friend from the bar job from the previous post/chapter. I was in fits of laughter as he carefully shaved my entire head over a bathtub. When I put on the white make-up and fake teeth, I was the spitting image of the original Nosferatu from the silent movies. It was uncanny and we could not stop laughing.
In one video, I dressed as a Ninja Turtle. In another, I dressed as Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid. In another, I was shirtless, drunk, screaming along to a Death Grips song. This one was my idea and scared a lot of people we knew.
In the end of one of the videos, I was drunk on whiskey sat with my arms and head on my desk. My cousin put slow ambient electronic music over the top of it, it was so jarringly brutal as an end to a comedy YouTube video, I loved it. When I last watched the videos back, I wish we had done more artier moments like that.
The videos were fun to film, for the most part, but it did start to drain me, the performance aspect of it all.
I got sober about halfway through the project, at about the tenth video of around twenty total, which changed the dynamic between me and my cousin dramatically. I realised that singing in bands, and now performing in YouTube videos, actually went against my true nature, which is one of shyness and privacy, one that desires a quiet life.
I started to question why I did all these creative projects, which very often offered very little benefit to me, and also cost a lot of my mental energy, mental energy which, in the case of this YouTube channel, now needed to be focused on the act of staying sober, which required every bit of willpower I could summon.
The breaking point for me and the YouTube channel came in the second half of 2019. We were filming a video for a review of the video game Death Stranding, and I was dressed in a Milhouse from The Simpsons outfit: red shorts, purple t-shirt, red glasses, hair sprayed blue, and my arms and legs covered with yellow body paint.
It was absolutely freezing, and I had to wear shorts and a t-shirt for the Milhouse outfit. There was no reason for me to be dressed as Milhouse, it had no relation to anything to do with the video game Death Stranding. It was just a random idea I had, irreverent humour, I suppose is what you would call it.
My cousin was instructing me: do this, do that, skateboard down here, wave your arms around, stand in the middle of this hedgerow. And I just flipped. I saw myself in third person, dressed as Milhouse Van Houten, being “directed” by my cousin in the middle of the freezing cold English countryside. The yellow body paint had made my skin flare up in a rash, so as well as being freezing cold, I was also in stinging pain all over my arms and legs.
My personality flipped from subservient, friendly guy to twisted Hollywood demon. I told him how terrible the idea was for the whole video, how much I hated dressing as stupid characters, how I was freezing cold, how the channel made no money, how it was all awful, pointless, and annoying. I was sick of it.
I don’t know that he had any idea of this prior to my outburst, but he was certainly aware of it once I had lost my temper like I did.
And this is what sobriety does, that they don’t really tell you very directly in Alcoholics Anonymous. It pulls back the veil on you, and everything else in your life. If you currently regularly do something that you don’t really want to do, or don’t enjoy, you will soon realise quite how much you don’t enjoy it, once your main vice/numbing agent is removed from the equation.
I’ve heard of more extreme examples than this, the worst ones being people who get sober and realise they hate their significant other, even when kids are involved, and end up getting divorced and starting afresh.
Sobriety shows you who you really are, and it also tells you what you really want, as well as what you don’t want, in no uncertain terms.
There’s a profound line they ask in Alcoholics Anonymous, which really sums this fact up. They ask you if you are “Ready to become who you are.” It echoes the Nietzsche line encouraging you to “Become who you are,” but it builds on it, okay, you’re going to do this, but are you ready for what it entails? It’s like a follow-up line to the Nietzsche line.
These are the things I was considering at this time in my life. I burnt so many bridges that I had spent a lifetime building. It turned out. to get sober, you have to burn your whole life down.
It sickens me to type this, but I think the vast majority of the creative endeavours I have had in my life have been to please and court the affection of other people. I don’t think that any of them have been truly simply of my own volition and own desire to do, except for my writing. I think the part of me that performs is the same part of me that is desperate to be liked, maybe even loved by other people.
When I was a very young kid, I was once left with my dad, and we went for a walk in the countryside. I was nervous, as I rarely spent a great deal of time with him on my own, so I nervously gave all the flowers and plants human names, making up a story about how they spoke to each other when we weren’t around, implying there was a secret world of talking plants that spoke to each other when humans weren’t present.
It was an elaborate creative effort to mask my nervousness and anxiety at being on my own with my father. I don’t remember my father’s reaction, but I know that it wouldn’t have been encouraging.
I wonder now whether every “performance” I’ve ever performed in my adult life is in some way a repeat of this scared, nervous child trying to impress someone they can’t understand.
These are the sort of things I should be telling a therapist, but instead, I’m sat here telling you.
Good read. I’ve been sober for like 7 years or so and one thing I learned from all of it is that it’s easy to find other surrogate activities that work the same as drinking even in sobriety. For me, politics sort of served as an ad hoc identity since my entire previous identity had been built around my boozing. Raw dogging life in sobriety is tough but as some point it forces honesty out of you.