Burnout & Dejection: My Downfall Toward Rock Bottom

Hey everyone. I have a lot I want to say, but I'm not 100% sure how I'm gonna say it all, so I'm kinda wingin' it here. But first I want to say thank you all so much for the years of support here on Patreon. I don't know where in my life I'd be without the kindness I've received on this platform, and I am genuinely so thankful for the opportunities given to me thanks to your generosity. Thank you. 

I'm not sure how to really say this, so I'm gonna just be frank about it. I need to step away from Majira, as well as from content creation. This was an extremely hard decision for me to make, but it was something I knew was coming for a while now, it just took me a long time to accept. If you'd like to read a more in-depth reason why I've made this choice, feel free to read the paragraphs below. If you want a TL;DR, I'll put one at the end. (this took me 3 hours to write, i poured my heart into this)

I've been making YouTube videos since I was 16, and I started doing it full-time when I was 20. Since I'm turning 26 this month, content creation has been a major part of my life for an entire decade now. I've been Majira Strawberry for the entirety of my adult life. And don't get me wrong, I love a lot of the videos I've created. I made lots of bangers in my opinion. I've accomplished a lot in the last 10 years. Thanks to YouTube, I've been the Guest of Honor at several conventions, I won an Andy Award at Anthro National Film Festival, I was a judge for the Furry Film Festival along side other amazing and admirable film makers, I got to interact with many larger creators I've looked up to for a long time, I made so many incredible friends, and I got to be at the center of an amazing community I was building around me. When I put it all like that, it sounds incredible. But there's so much more to it than that.

I've been watching YouTube videos since I was a kid. I always wanted to be a YouTuber for a living. When I started college, I studied film because I had dreams of learning how to be a better creator and moving to Los Angeles one day and making it big. This all changed when Majira's channel was the one to take off instead of my normal/non-furry channel. Suddenly, I had an opportunity to be a full-time furry. Me, being a naïve teenager that was absolutely infatuated with fursuits and anthropomorphic animals, of course jumped at the chance. I made this very Patreon page when I was just 19.

This was a genuine dream come true. I was able to have my dream job AND be a furry at the same time. What could go wrong? Well, fast forward to 2022, I've become a depressed, jaded, and anxious person that has made a lot of mistakes and can barely take care of himself. So how did this happen? There's so much more to this story, but I'll just skip ahead to what I consider my downfall to my rock bottom.

Watching my old YouTube videos is hard sometimes. Not many know this, but in my early 20s, I struggled with drinking. I drank a LOT of alcohol. I have numerous traumatic memories of things I did while under the influence that still haunt me to this day. There was a point in my life where I was drinking daily. Needed to film a YouTube video? I'll take a shot first. About to do a livestream? Let me mix a drink. Just woke up at a convention? My breakfast was vodka! When I watch some of my old videos, I can see it. I can tell I was drunk, because I genuinely thought it made me funnier. And maybe it did, I don't really know. But at some point, I just became so dependent on it. I needed to drink to feel like I could be entertaining, or just to exist. This was an on-and-off problem I had for years until COVID happened. I slowed down during the pandemic, and now-a-days, I RARELY drink. And if I do drink, I never let myself surpass being just a little tipsy.

The pandemic, I believe, is what really kick-started my downward spiral. I started having these thoughts of resentment toward Majira as a character. I was so jealous of other furries who loved their fursona and felt so connected with their own OCs. I didn't have that, at least I didn't have that anymore. I didn't fully understand why I didn't have that, but looking back now, I think a lot of it was because I felt that Majira was no longer mine. But instead, Majira was a character that I played. Like an actor playing a role for a movie, I was playing Majira for my YouTube channel. This eventually led to me having a breakdown in June of 2020 while sitting in Kiwis bed, I admitted that I felt like Majira was no longer mine. This led to me creating my new wolf fursona, Kyle, which is now of course my main fursona and a character I feel way more connected to than I ever did Majira. I made a whole video about this, so I won't go too much more into it. But I feel it was important to reiterate for this post.

In December of 2020, I did the final 12 Days of Collabmas and I just felt so unmotivated, and I was so sad with the outcome of it. It bothered me so much that on New Years Day of 2021, I laid in my bed, and I cried because I felt like I failed. It really sunk in that I didn't enjoy making a single one of the Collabmas videos. All of the videos felt like a chore to make; I felt like I only did it because I had to for the views, for the money, for whatever. I realized that making videos felt like an obligation instead of something I wanted to do. This was a big shift for me, because as a teenager and even in my very early 20s, I LOVED making videos. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Making videos felt like a fantastic way for me to be funny and express myself. So why did it no longer feel that way? I couldn't figure out the answer, but I spent 3 weeks in my bedroom, withering away in my sheets engulfed with sadness because I didn't know why I no longer enjoyed my favorite hobby.

It wasn't all bad. I was really enjoying VRChat, and I was enjoying Twitch streaming, two things that were very new to me that I became much more interested in during the beginning of the pandemic. And those are probably the two things that got me back out of bed that January and back to work (well that and Kiwi). I started to experiment; I tried making different types of content that didn't involve a fursuit (because I also was struggling with feelings that some people only cared about me for my fursuit and not for the real me). I made new YouTube channels to try new things like gaming videos, vtuber commentaries, vrchat highlights, to name a few. It was different, it was fun, it was fresh; I liked it. So, I started to try to push all my Majira viewers over to my new YouTube channels.

Things were good. I was having fun on Twitch, I was making YouTube videos of me and my friends in VR, and Majira kind of took a backseat. And that was when I was offered an opportunity. A good friend of mine, 12, was moving to Seattle for a job, and he wanted roommates. He offered to help us move there if we would be his roommates. At first, I was very nervous about the idea, but Kiwi helped convince me that opportunities like this don't come around often, and if we don't do it, we will forever wonder what if. So, in June of 2021, we impulsively moved to Seattle.

Seattle was cool at first. It was new, it was far away from my family (who at the time I needed a bit of a break from), and it was a chance to start a new life. I was surrounded by lots of new furries and new friends, got invited to a lot of house parties and dinners, and I was having a good time trying to be social with a new crowd after a year and a half of no cons. 

It didn't take long for the novelty to ware off, though. I think the rose-colored glasses started to crack during the Fall for me. I was confused as to why I had no money in my bank account anymore. I started to get overwhelmed with bills and the cost of dinners and drinks at bars. That's when I started to realize that things in Seattle literally just cost more money. Actually, my cost of living nearly tripled. I was needing to spend 3 times the amount of money per month just living there, but of course, i wasn't making 3 times as much money. I was still making the same amount of money. I was making "Ohio Money" as I eventually started to dub it.

In August, I went to Florida to stay with family and also go to Megaplex. While I was there, I filmed every episode of Majira's Comfy Corner. I did this because I think I subconsciously knew that my motivation was already starting to fade from living in Seattle, and I thought that if I just filmed a ton of videos in one night, it would last me several months at least. I was right, considering its 10 months later and there are still episodes that haven't been edited. Don't know when I'll get to those at this point though, but I would consider the series a success in its intent, but a failure overall. I rushed all of those videos to the point where the only reason they're good is because I paid editors using Twitch donations to edit them for me and they made them good.

Anyway, that fall was rough. I found myself missing Ohio. I missed how much cheaper it was to exist there; I missed being able to drive places like Chicago, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Boston, anywhere I wanted in a single days worth of driving. I missed a time when I wasn't stressed about money and having to pay rent with my credit card. I spent so many sleepless nights regretting moving to Seattle, and feeling so depressed. I still had hopes I could make it work, but it was hard, and it felt harder and harder every day. I played Night in the Woods on stream during this time and goddamn, it hit me way harder than my first play-through.

That winter, I went home for 3 weeks for the holidays. Kiwi was not joining me, because the flight prices were legit absolutely unreasonable. Like $800 to fly home for Christmas. This is why I stayed for 3 weeks, I just booked the cheapest possible flights and they were just not at ideal times. So what was gonna be 1 week trip had to be 3. Anyway, going home to Ohio turned out to be one of the best feelings ever. I felt so much comfort and peace being home for the holidays. I saw my old friends out here, I drove to Virginia to visit more friends for Christmas Eve, and I drove to Pittsburgh to hang out with one of my best VRChat friends in real life. It was so incredibly refreshing to do that again. I love traveling so much, and I didn't realize that moving to Seattle would take that ability away from me. At least, it made it much much harder to do so simply due to its geography and cost of living. 

Coming back to Seattle after 3 weeks back home felt awful. I didn't want to go back. But I did miss Kiwi, and I missed a few of my friends out there, so that at least brought me a little comfort. But once I got back to Seattle in January of 2022, it was never the same. I resented being there. It was crowded, expensive, far away, and flights to leave the goddamn city cost $600+ minimum. I felt so uneasy that if anything were to happen to someone in my family, or a friend out east, and I needed to go back quickly, it would be exorbitant. I felt completely trapped. The rose colored glasses were now completely shattered and the broken glass of the lenses fell to the ground, cutting me along the way. 

Kiwi felt the same way. They were absolutely miserable in Seattle for similar reasons. We talked for months about what we should do, and we ultimately decided that there was only one option: we needed to leave. We spent the rest of our time there planning where we will go, what we will do, but moving is expensive, and I was already in so much debt just for merely existing in Seattle that we didn't know if we were going to be able make enough to move, or if we would be sleeping in our car for a few weeks. For months, I ate nothing but white rice, toast, chicken nuggets, whatever cheap food we could get (we got taco bell every once in a while tho which btw, taco bell's in seattle cost more money. they legit don't have a dollar menu, its like a $1.67+ menu. like wtf lmao). I started to cancel con plans, only doing cons that Kiwi's band had a gig at. It was genuinely a miserable way to live, but it was what we had to do.

Luckily, we were able to make everything work, and we left about a week ago, drove a U-Haul cross country to Ohio in 4 days, and unloaded all of our belongings into a cheap storage unit, and are currently crashing in my parents basement. This is the third time I've had to move into their basement. It sucks, but I'm incredibly thankful my family is there for me. I don't know where we will go from here, but we will be spending some time to figure it out this summer.

Living in Seattle left me broke, depressed, and burned out. These past 6 months, I haven't enjoyed making content at all. I was only doing it because it was my source of income. I needed the money to survive. I felt so fake on stream. Playing games for hours just praying to dog that I'd get some gift subs today. That sucked; I hated streaming with that intention, it felt horrible. I miss when I would stream because it was fun, not for the bits and tips. And YouTube was admittedly unprofitable, so eventually I just started making quick, easy to edit videos just so I could post literally anything. There was no love in those videos, I just needed a video for the week. That felt horrible too.

I have become so burned out and jaded toward content creation because of this. It's no longer that fun hobby I enjoyed, it was a job I grew tired of. That has been a huge blow to my mental health and also my sense of self-worth. Content creation was quite literally the most important thing in my life for the entirety of my adult life. And deep down, I still have a burning love for it. That is why I need to step away. I need time to regroup, make some money outside of creating, and learn how to be a functioning adult without being a creator. I need to do this so I can hopefully one day return to creating and enjoy it again as a hobby. 

I think I want to keep streaming part-time, but I don't want to do it full-time anymore; It's too stressful. I genuinely still do enjoy streaming, and I love my community on there, so I want to stick with it! But I want to be myself on there, not Majira. As for YouTube, I'm probably not gonna post a lot of videos for a while. I have a couple videos pre-filmed, a couple half-edited that I might post, but other than that, I am taking a hiatus. 

I know this will be hard for some people. I've had several people over the years tell me my videos saved their lives. And I am so afraid that by no longer uploading, I am turning my back on them. But now, I feel I need to temporarily stop making videos to save my own life. I need to figure my shit out, pay off my two maxed out credit cards, and just learn to be a functioning adult. And once I do that, I want to come back to creating stronger and happier.

Thanks for reading. I would love feedback on this post if you'd like to leave any comments. If not, that's ok too. I'm just kind of nervous how people will react this post. I'm posting it here on patreon first to kind of get a sense of how people will respond to this. I've just been anxious about this decision for a while now. I'm also not sure if I am over-sharing... But for real, thank you all again for everything you've done for me. I'll try my best to become my best self. Thanks for reading. Also feel free to ask me any questions you might have.

PS: I am considering pausing my Patreon from July onward. It'll still exist, but it won't be active and y'all won't be charged monthly. I'll still get rewards out when I can for what I owe. 

TLDR: I'm burned out and life got complicated af. I need to spend some time away to find things in life that make me feel happy again outside of creation, which has been my entire life for the past decade. Once I am feeling like a functioning adult again, I will return to creating better and stronger.