I woke up an hour before my alarm this morning for no particular reason. The world was quiet. My dreams had been full of imagery, editing timelines, a classroom of 1995 computers, a login screen where my name wasn't quite right. My brain filing away the last 24 hours in whatever strange archive it keeps.
It felt like a good morning to sit with some things I've been avoiding.
I spent all of yesterday working through the editing groundwork for a new show format, Voidwolf Talks. It was stressful in the way creative problem-solving always is, teething issues, decisions that compound, the pressure of a self-imposed deadline. But I enjoyed it too. Both things were true at once. The groundwork is done now and the episodes that follow will be easier for it.
What I wasn't prepared for was the silence after.
The best way I can describe it: I feel like a person who carefully lit a fuse on a firework, stepped back, and watched it fizzle out. Not explode. Not fail dramatically. Just... pfft. A quiet deflation. And then the particular feeling that follows that, hard to name, not catastrophic, just flat.
My brain, being the wonderfully anxious thing it is, immediately went into fix-it mode.
What if I tried moving into animation instead? What if I do a completely different format? What if I try everything at once?
That spiral isn't inspiration. It's anxiety wearing the costume of productivity. It's the sting of the fizzle looking for somewhere to go. I recognised it for what it was, which is the only reason I didn't act on it. That's not me. Throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks has never been how I work and I wasn't going to start just because I'm frustrated.
But the frustration is real.
I make things in a niche of a niche. VRChat, furry culture, social commentary, short films amd chaotic game night videos with friends. None of this is mainstream and I've never pretended otherwise. The people who find it tend to really get it. But getting found is the problem.
The honestly content isn't as valuable as it once was. Not because no ones watching, but because the signal-to-noise ratio has become almost impossible to deal with. It's not that my work is competing with better work, it's competing with volume. Slop is so cheap to produce. All the platforms (especially YouTube) are optimised for consumption, not curation. Genuine expression and authentic content is slower to make and slower to find its people, and the algorithm doesn't particularly favour it.
If this was 2017 YouTube things would probably be different. That window has mostly closed.
And I know the reach I have sits mostly within my friend group, people who care about me, who respond to everything through that lens. Which is wonderful and I'm grateful for it. I love those goobers, but it becomes an echo chamber sometimes, not out of malice but people not wanting to hurt your feelings when something sucks. It's not the same as a stranger stopping mid-scroll because something caught their eye and thought "hey this is cool".
I'm not writing this to fix anything or announce a pivot. I'm writing it because sometimes the fuse just fizzles and there's no lesson in it.
No reframe makes that feel better. No strategy or planning resolves the feeling. It just happened, and it stings a little, and it's a quiet Monday morning and I'm more awake than I want to be.
That's allowed, I think.
The firework is still there. I'll light it again.