Six months Streaming

 So on Wednesday, we celebrated a milestone in my streaming career, for the first time since I started streaming almost five years ago I have streamed every day for six whole months. It is a milestone that I never even dreamed of reaching, but yet here we are. So, let's talk about what has happened over the last six months. 

In the beginning, I didn’t really think about it as a goal, to hit a certain number of days. In all honesty, at the time I was struggling with getting my life in order. I had no routine, no structure, I simply existed. Six months ago I was a different person in many ways. My mental health was questionable at best, and I attributed this to my lack of structure in my life. 

So I decided to implement structure, to do what I need to do to make myself feel calmer and safer. But no matter what you try to do, to build a routine, you need an anchor. You need to find something that you build a routine around. For many people, this is work or education. I, unfortunately, don’t have that option. So I needed to be a little creative. I had been streaming for 4 years by this point, but much of the time it was streaming without a schedule. Simply streaming when I felt like I could/should. 

My schedule isn’t as fixed as I would like, over the months my streaming has varied in starting time. Depending on exactly what is going on each day, I usually start streaming between 13:00 and 15:00 each day. On Mondays, I go live late in the evenings as I spend the day with my brother, his wife and my young nieces. But no matter what is happening during the day, I find the time to go live. 

Over the last six months, I have seen a massive improvement in my mental health. It can be said that much of this improvement comes from changes that I have made over time. Starting with building a schedule. But it is not only that, I have also stopped drinking, given up nicotine, and started to dedicate myself to new things such as blogging. I'm looking forward to creating much more content over the coming months and years. 

Most recently my mum had a stroke, or so we thought. It turns out that she has a rare neurological condition called functional neurological disorder. Over the years my mum has had many struggles with her health. But this was the scariest situation I have been in. It was truly the first time I really felt like I could have lost my mum. 

There was also the time I was scammed by a viewer who turned out to be a career scammer. I don’t really want to go into too much detail here as I wrote a whole post dedicated to that, but TLDR is someone who was in my chat for some time and posed to be working on an app for mental health. They then asked me to test and they used that to hack me. Fun times, if you want to read the full post you can do so here. 

Shortly after I started this long campaign of streaming I decided it was time to quit nicotine. It went pretty well overall, I struggled in the beginning but I generally am not bothered by the lack of nic in my life. It came to light shortly after this that my liver was having a few problems due to my meds, so I decided to quit drinking exactly one month after I quit nicotine. I found this harder in some ways as drinking alcohol is so ingrained in our society. But in the end, I managed to keep off the booze and on Sunday I will be celebrating being 6 months nicotine free and 5 months alcohol-free. 

As a whole streaming has been going amazing, going from below 10 viewers a stream to seeing anywhere from 15-25 peaks and averaging high teens. Overall it could be said that we have been steadily growing, but over the last little while, we have hit a plateau. I don’t mind tbh as I’m still trying to get used to having this many viewers in the first place! I’m really happy to see how the streams have been progressing and I can’t way to see how we are doing when we hit 9 or even 12 months. 

One other issue that I have been facing over the last six months is the weight gain I have been seeing, much of this is down to the fact that I have started two new medications that make me gain weight via making me feeling hungry. It is something that I am looking to work on in the new year. So expect there to be some weight loss content at some point. 

If you would like to catch me live you can do so here, or you can watch the stream recordings on YouTube. 

But that's all for now folks, thanks for reading,

Spec.