I persevere

I’m 47 now.

Or rather, I’ve been 47 for the past two days. I didn’t really want to post about it on my actual birthday, partially because I was super busy that day with two VRChat gigs (following immediately after the previous day’s choir show), but partially because I spent the first half of the day super depressed, particularly over the state of the world, but also over a bunch of interpersonal conflicts I’ve been having which seem to rhyme with one another, and also learning that a good friend of mine is in a really bad situation right now.

And how so many people I feel close to are hurting.

And how of course I share a birthday with a fucking tyrant who was using his birthday as an excuse for a jingoistic military parade, and how completely reasonable it would be that most of my friends would be out protesting that, rather than coming to see me perform silly songs about mental health in VRChat.

But my set at Vrelium went pretty good, and then my set at Trans Academy went even better (and ended up going longer than expected due to scheduling stuff), and I ended the day feeling pretty happy overall, at least for the little slice of joy I was able to extract from a pretty shitty day.

And then today I had a couple more sets at Trans Academy which went pretty decently and they were just casual fun and even though I messed a bunch of stuff up everyone was just in “holy shit two cakes!” mode and also it was in support of Trans Pride VR which went amazingly and we set so many community records in terms of attendance (at the peak we had 320 people watching the Twitch stream, 100 people in the instance, and a large queue of more people trying to get in!), and got so many outpourings of support and people learned a lot from our panels and there were no major problems with trolls or raids or the like.

And right now VRChat is doing a thing where if you gift others with a month of VRChat+, they’ll donate a portion of it to Trans Lifeline (who are also partnered with Trans Academy), and so many such donations happened, like, constantly.

It might feel like a big part of the world is against us right now but at least in the small segment of community I have I also just feel so much love and support from everyone around me, and I love being part of something bigger than myself.

But also, things feel like they’re getting a lot better for me, too. Furality gave my visibility a huge boost, and my YouTube and Spotify metrics are doing much better than they ever have. I’m getting so many more kind comments from people who are interested in my music. I might be getting some (Internet) radio play soon, thanks largely to my Vrelium set. I also have actual fans now, which feels super duper weird to me, but it’s a good kind of weird.

This next week is going to be a different kind of chaotic for me, mostly due to choir-related stuff, and my parents visiting for it. After that I can go back to a more usual cadence of working on music for clients during the week (I’m working on a soundtrack for a game! I’ve also proposed a project for Trans Academy that seems to be generating some interest!) and with the choir season wrapping up I can spend more time doing casual performances and open mics in VRChat, and maybe even in person too.

So, I think things are feeling pretty okay, all things considered.

I persevere.