The death of MyShowbizName

Was a fairly melodramatic blog title but I think I got away with it.

A few days ago I had a bust up with somebody I considered to be one of my best friends, I don't have many friends so it mattered to me enormously. Ultimately I think foundations were being put in place to cut ties with me in the long term, I wont say anymore.

Living with social anxiety and being almost a recluse has lost me a lot of friendships over the years, people I thought I would be friends with my whole life. I take partial responsibility for losing them, After school/college, the friendships you make are never the same. You are no longer in a position where you see them everyday, what happens after is up to you both. Because I didn't go out, go to pubs/clubs/parties etc. I lost out in a big way, not on social life, I don't really care for those things however I lost out of friendships that meant the world to me. I hold resentment towards my former friends for abandoning me. Despite not seeing them, I would often call them, try to arrange maybe an afternoon at the pub, a few hours where we could just catch up, nothing extensive, maybe only for a few hours in a month however I never really got the same willingness back. People move on, find new friends and either forget or don't care about their old ones and for the life of me, I really can't understand why.

My friendships mean so much to me and I make few friends so that I can have close bonds with people. I've never really seen the appeal of having as many friends as possible, how on earth do you stay close? So anyway the events of a few days ago just knocked me sideways and I think I just wanted to disappear.

I have been low before and I have considered closing my youtube account on several occasions prior, I guess it took something as big as this to make me finally decide to do it. Youtube has been a curious experience for me. I first started making videos on another account in June 2007 under the account DomC234, the account has been closed for a while now, originally I made videos about my social anxiety, at that point I was completely alone, I didn't have a friend it the world and spent my whole life tucked away existing but certainly not living. It was not a positive thing for me to do, the people I met and followed were fellow sufferers and watching their videos just further depressed me to a point where I would cut myself, I had done this prior but not so extensively. I kinda hated the cliché of cutting myself, but I just didn't really care, I did it because in reality I wanted to cut my wrists and be gone, but I never had the guts. Is always tough when you don't want to be around any longer but likewise are scared to die.

Anyway eventually I stopped making videos and found stickam where inevitably I was ignored in Myles Dyer's chat room apart from by one person called Dale (The Gadget Dude) and I would never have imagined at that point that he would go on to be my best friend and the one person I would never doubt, he has always been my friend for over a year and a half, he has always showed a desire to want to speak to me and to have the feeling of reciprocation in a friendship is such a huge thing for me. We would go on to pm each other in stickam and eventually add each other on MSN, when we felt comfortable there, we moved on to skype about December 2007 and well we never stopped. In about October/November 2007, Dale told me about this guy on stickam called DaveyBoyz, we went on to frequent his room nightly where I first became friends Dave (Blue Skies) This was before either Dave's were featured and only had a couple of hundred subscribers each. That initial group of friends that went on to include Mhazz, Ginger Chris and John Cox would give me the courage to start the MyShowbizName channel, A channel which I decided to try to make funny videos and take over the world.

I had thought about making a channel for funny/entertaining videos and I never had the balls because being a noob I pretty much thought 'If I try and be funny, I'll most probably have the most subscribers of all time' This worried me because I had not long been at a place where I didn't want anyone to know me, in fact my first videos on the old account, I would put a ton of effects on to hide my face. My worry was, if I got famous, would I like being known? This was in the days where people thought having 5,000 subscribers was being famous. In the end I decided it would kinda be fun to be liked.

From then on I got 100 subscribers in a week and I thought, this is easy, It helped also to have "Celebrity fans" like Jimmy and Alex who kinda knew me a bit from VLR which was just before I started the channel. From there you do get pretty subscriber hungry and the more you get, the more you want, more so because you see the rate of growth in other people's channels, people who you know are not as good as you however have the distinct advantage of being vaguely attractive, it's certainly irritating when people get a couple of thousand subscribers in a month or two just for being attractive, especially when they are not attractive, I wont name names but people probably have their own ideas of who has subscribers they don't deserve.

I had to work pretty hard to gain my subscribers, people called it whoring myself out when I was in PJ and Alex's videos, but the truth is, people wouldn't give me a chance and the only way I could get a significant number of subscribers was to appear in popular youtubers videos. I don't feel guilty about this for several reasons, Firstly, I never relied on gaining subscribers just because of appearance, I always tried to write funny scripts so that people subbed to me based on my humour and not just because who I had made friends with. I was confident that people who were subscribing after those collaboration videos, had subscribed because they had liked me.

Despite this, I have found throughout my whole time on youtube that were it not for these videos I would currently probably have about 400 subscribers based on people who decided to subscribe because they look past me being an fat ugly git and decided that they liked me. That's a pretty low number based on a year and a half of effort. This is why in recent months I have lost heart and faith in youtube and when youtube decided to abolish the 'featured video' that was updated daily, I kinda thought, the chance to break through is no longer really there. These factors lead to thoughts of closing the channel and no longer being frustrated by not gaining any new subscribers. The biggest reason I decided not to in the past was just because I thought, if I ever wanted to make videos again, I'd kinda like to keep the username, I had established it and I'd always thought it was a pretty good name. Of course, not losing 1,100 subs that I'd worked for was also a factor but really only about 400 watched my videos so really it wasn't the biggest thing in the world.

To be perfectly honest I thought youtooners would help boost my profile, I really believe it was an exceptional idea and what we managed to put out was also brilliant, it's a shame that the second episode never got made because I think it is genuinely funnier than the first episode and was looking great, however I don't think from the start that certain people cared or particularly wanted to put the effort it involved in to making the episodes, it lead to friction and I take a lot of responsibility for that because I chose four people that I felt would work, maybe I should have made sure people wanted to really get stuck in to a project as large as it became. People lost interest and I didn't want to continue forcing people to make something they wasn't committed to. I'm happy that there are a few things out there that people can still watch and ultimately it was the only time I had a taste of being popular with the feature and such, despite this however, out of 5,000 early subscribers only 100 subscribed to me, I think I pretty much knew then that people wasn't interested in me.

So anyway, the events of a few days ago pushed me to do this, and I thought that I may as well get rid of twitter and dailybooth also because I am no longer MyShowbizName and those links have now ended, I am keeping the blog purely because I cba to change it, I like the blogger service and I have the domain so it's just easier for now.

I have made some good friends through youtube and more so stickam and I am not cutting ties with those people, At the moment I am just having a bit of time away, could be a week or maybe a few weeks, I feel better than I did and so maybe it'll be sooner rather than later but I enjoyed making videos, I wish I had gotten a bit more success and recognition but that's youtube for you. If I ever make videos again, I may just use blogger and upload the videos as a joint blog/vlog format. I don't know yet.

Points for those of you who read this through, I appreciate it :)