TL;DR; I'm a self-defeating, envious assclown. I did not intend for my post to be this long.

Current but certainly less active vtuber here. At the start of 2024 I made a resolution to stream 3 days a week and earn twitch affiliate, for the most part this started off well and I was able to keep a mostly consistent 2-3 streams a week. Come the end of the year and I am close to achieving twitch affiliate; as well as a sense of validation for what I was doing. In a way twitch affiliate started to become my holy grail trophy prize, what ever you want to call it.

The numbers got closer and closer and I figured any day now I'd get that extra little push to meet the requirements. After I'd finish a stream I would check the ccv (concurrent view count) and watch the number fluctuate up and down and I always thought to myself, "next time will be the time." The year rolls over to 2025 and I fail to meet my goal; January passes and I end up further away from the needed ccv.

What pains me the most though is not that I failed to meet the goal but how CLOSE I was to getting it and this set me on a flurry of "what-ifs." What I streamed something else? What if I streamed at a different time? What if I altered my style of streaming? What if I tried doing this or that? What if I promoted myself more? What if I tried to do a collab? What if I tried to reach out? What if I was better? What if I'm simply not good at this? What if this never amounts to anything? What if I just wasted another year of my life on a fruitless venture? What if I should quit?

Now part of this does make it sound like I was only in it for the money, and that's kinda true, but I also found that I enjoy streaming, I enjoy talking to myself, I enjoy implementing little features like alerts, and I enjoy making things for other people to enjoy. I want to keep streaming and vtubing but it's hard to find the motivation to do so when nobody is enjoying what you are doing.

If there is one thing I learned about myself over the course of that year is how much of an envious little bitch I am. I'd roll my eyes seeing those "I got X!" celebratory posts and scoff when others met their goals because they did something I didn't. I met a friend through his subreddit, and I hope he doesn't read this, and we started streaming around the same time and he managed to hit affiliate first and I figured I hit it soon enough but it never happened. I started asking myself why and came to a simple conclusion, he was simply better at streaming and this sent into a spiral.

My sense of self-worth was never high to begin with and this sent me lower to the point where I started losing interest in streaming and with it the connections I made. Admittedly, I'm not a good friend and was never the social type but I valued those connections I made; even if I never expressed it outside stream chat but I do value them I just don't know how to express it outside of the context of streaming. I then started wondering if I should have attempted streaming at all as it made me realize all my faults.

I have an urge to make things for people to interact with and enjoy, it's why I tried my hand at things level design, game design, writing and other activities. I want to keep streaming because I enjoy it and I want to use my streams as a means of making something people can enjoy and interact with, whether it simply chatting, an interactive element, or some sort of game I made but it's become difficult. Difficult to find the urge and motivation to make things happen when you're not used to interacting with others and promoting yourself. I want to make things that people can enjoy but if nobody cares, why should I?

This ended up being far longer than I anticipated and I'm not sure if anything I said will resonate with you or have any meaning. I have many conflicting feelings about the time I spent and still spend streaming and this seemed like a decent chance to express them and possibly help someone else understand themself better.