My first youtube video was published at the start of 2011, which means I've been in the business of "content creation" on the internet for about 13 years now. I'm turning 27 next month, so that means I have now been creating videos and streams and websites and things for over half my life. I think that warrants putting things into perspective.

Late 2023 was the point where I started updating this website for real, and it's when I ended up becoming more or less successful. Twelve years into my thirteen year career, this site hit 35,000 views, and my fanfiction Stained Glass reached over a thousand hits in just three months. It may not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, but I was counting my views in the single digits just two years ago. There are more eyes on my work now, and I have more motivation to do work for myself and others.

So, I ask myself: When will I stream again?

Am I ever going to do a stream again?

The answer is... complicated. I have a computer, obviously. I have a stream setup, and I have games that I'd like to play. I have the internet connection to stream— heck, I'm setting up my wife to start streaming, and it seems like she's going to have a great time of it. I can stream. I want to stream, or at least I feel like I do. And even so...

I have to explain something, because I've been in the industry for so long— literally half my life— and the person reading this probably hasn't: Streaming is hard. It's insanely hard. It's especially hard, mind you, for the people who are doing really well at it. It eats up hours and hours of your day. It pushes you to stay up late and drink less water and ruin your posture and only ever order dinner through delivery apps. So you see, it's easy for me to sit back in my cheap office chair and type away at my novelty keyboard for literal hours while the camera is off, which is why I'm seeing real success in my writing efforts now. I can say that I haven't seen any success up until now, which is kind of true, but it also isn't— I started seeing much bigger numbers as soon as I shifted the focus of my life from streaming to writing. That shouldn't be enough to convince me, but it is. Twelve years of videos and streams didn't even add up to six months of writing things out on the internet. I wish that I could point to some magic point back then where I was having fun. I wish that I could say, yes, sitting up late in my parent's basement with a coat wrapped around my shoulders because there's no way to get heat to settle down there, that was the moment I fell in love with streaming as a career.

But I can't.

My first webcam was bought with money I got from donations. I think that's something that I tend to skim over a lot— I did take donations in the past, and I'm planning on taking them again someday— and I got twenty or so dollars from some person I had never met, who saw me trying my best and wanted to spend some money on that. I was something like 13, and I didn't have any conceptualization of this guy who sent me money. In my mind, it was like a kid giving their allowance to another kid. But from the outside, it feels a bit weird. In hindsight I maybe shouldn't have taken this person's money. Here they were, probably a lot older than me, probably an adult or at least a teenager, sending me just enough money that they would get to see my face in the corner of their monitor. I was fourteen years old.

I didn't know this person, and they didn't really know me, and I didn't really know what I was doing, and they paid me twenty dollars so that they could look at my face. I don't even know if they knew what they were doing, either. Maybe they were just being nice. Maybe they didn't care about my stream at all, or maybe they cared about it a lot. I'm twenty six now, about to be twenty seven, and I still don't know who that person is. I still don't know what they were thinking, and I don't know what to say to them. Did they like my face? Are they disappointed with how I spent their twenty dollars?

I talk a lot about vtubers— or at least, I talk about them a lot on social media— and one of the things that I bring up over and over is the dissociative element of it. It's not like a mask, and it's not like a puppet, because that's supposed to be you. But it's a version of you that doesn't really exist outside of that stream space, that space where you're supposed to be performing for all of these people. It creates this gap between "the performer" and "the performance" that I think should only exist when "the performance" isn't about being a human thing. Looking at vtubers now, I get the sense that it's like playing with dolls. It's like playing with dolls in a literal sense because it's a form of play, and it's a form of make-believe, but it's also like playing with dolls because they're a product. They're a thing that you buy.

Sometimes you pay them to look at their face.

One time I donated to a streamer, and I won't say who— for my sake, not theirs— but I donated to them because they had a headache. In true autistic fashion, I told this person who was minding their own business and complaining about a headache on stream that they should probably take a break from their literal job, and also that they should drink extra water because HRT can give you headaches if you're not careful. And I'll never forget this— I sent them this whole long message, and it came through on the screen, and they actually read it! They read through the whole thing, and they said "thank you, that's very kind, also I don't know how to tell you this but I'm not on HRT." And I remember sitting there in the darkness of my office and staring at the screen, and it was like the entire world had shattered into a million little pieces. All of a sudden I wasn't a person hanging out with another person, I was a... user, and I was hanging out with a product. I was so embarrassed at my own social ineptitude that I blew myself right out of the parasocial space and back into the real world, where I was a weirdo sitting at a desk in the pitch dark in the middle of the night watching some stranger play a video game.

I didn't know who they were, and I didn't know who I was, either.  I had a stream scheduled for the day after that. I realized, in that moment, that I was no longer trying to be a human thing. I was a face and a voice, disembodied on the internet, and the only thing keeping me put together was the feeling that I was really doing something with my life. Even when I wanted to quit, even when I did quit but I came crawling back, that was the feeling I carried with me. I can't get a job, so I have to stream. I can't be a real person, so I have to succeed at being a fake one.

There's a disconnect, when you stream, where you really have to keep yourself from looking at the viewer count. Because as soon as you do that, as soon as you realize that you're only talking to like three dudes in a trenchcoat, you can't keep acting. It doesn't feel like you're interacting with a person anymore. That's the weird thing about parasocial relationships— it happens in both directions. I don't know you, and you don't know me. Even you, the person reading this, there's only a miniscule chance that you actually know who I am. And I'm really lucky, being a writer, that you only get to interact with me in passing. You can leave a comment, but I'm not going to have to read your comment on the fly and interact with it as part of the thing that I'm writing. Doing that is a streamer's job, and I'm not a streamer, at least not anymore. I could be a streamer, that's what I tell myself. I could be a streamer and it would be great, but then I'd realize that I'm talking to you, and you is a very scary thing to be talking to, because you might be a thousand people or thirty five thousand people or one person and I'm all too comfortable getting close to people who are arbitrary numbers like that. I'm easily attached like that. I don't want to have thirty five thousand friends and I don't want to have one friend. I have to aim for somewhere in the middle.

I actually stream a lot, over discord, where people can't watch me without knowing who I am first. Nobody pays me anything, and I have a lot of fun. Sometimes I wonder if it will feel the same doing it in public, where the money and the eyes are on me. I know it won't, but I have to wonder.

I changed my name recently, from Rowan to Iris, even though Rowan isn't really a boy's name. Rowan was my birth name, and birth names can have tricky baggage. The baggage goes like this: For twelve years, I was a streamer named Rowan, and I did all of these things, and someone paid me (Rowan) twenty dollars to look at my face. And people did look at my face, people who I didn't know, and talked to me. Some of them were nice and some of them weren't. And the problem with all of that was that after a long time of doing that I didn't want to be myself anymore. Being a failure was dragging me down. Showing my face to people for money was scaring me. It was scarier because the numbers were small, because I could rationalize twenty three people looking at me rather than thirty five thousand. I couldn't say to myself that it was a crowd, it was individual people, and they were all staring at me at the same time. And all of those people, whether they were my fans or not, were there to see "Rowan." They wanted to see Rowan's face. And after all of those things, and all of those years, I didn't want Rowan's face to be my face anymore. I didn't want Rowan's voice to be my voice anymore. I drew a line in the sand and started doing other things instead, and then I changed my name, and now nobody knows what I look like anymore.

One year is a long time to not do anything. There are only so many years, they're one of the biggest measurements of time that we have in our day-to-day lives, and so passing one of them by feels like it means something. I became a success late last year, but I also didn't stream last year at all. I had two streams, and neither of them really worked out. The year before that, I streamed a few times, and I even had some fun, but I didn't find myself very engaged with any of it. This is the biggest problem with streaming, my ADHD, my inability to stay focused on one goal for a long time— but I say that, and then I write 200,000 words in less than a year, and so I already know that I'm talking out of my ass. I can focus just fine, I just can't focus on streaming, and I don't know why. Maybe it's because I don't like having to plan things on a schedule before I do them. I really hate doing anything live, because I prefer to be edited. Scripted. Rewritten. This sentence will be changed in the second draft, and I relish the fact that you won't know the difference.

You can't listen to music while you stream— not really, anyway, I know the workarounds— but you can always listen to things while you write. You can listen to them as much as you want, because while you're writing you're not "the product," and so you're not selling yourself on anything. "The product" is the thing at the tips of your fingertips, the thing on the edge of the page that Google is watching you write. When you stream, you're at the end of your fingertips, because the camera is pointing in that all-important other direction, and so you have to be the thing that they're selling. They want you to sell the idea of your face so that other people will pay for them. And once your face catches on, they want to sell your name. Rowan for sale, $19.99. Subscribe to my patreon for more content. Paypal freezes my account because they think all trans women are sex workers, and that sex workers don't deserve to get paid. Keep paying me anyway. Once you wear that name out, I have some more for you to try on. Maybe, if you have that name, you'll sell too.

I don't want to be anyone's employee, because that means being someone's profit. That's just how it works. Maybe I'm a bit of a communist for saying that, but it's true. I don't want to be the pretty little number that makes someone else money, I want to be the designer, I want to be the woman sewing the threads that someone else sells. I hate being sewn. I'd rather not have to get through things with money in the first place, but I can't stand the thought of that money being pulled out of me, bloody dollar bills on fish hook lines. The whole thing makes me sick. I changed my name and I started doing anything else because I didn't want to do this shit anymore, didn't want to see the scathing comments in the corner of my eye anymore, didn't want to feed the transphobes anymore. The media's eyes love me, but I don't love them back. Or maybe they've never loved me, and I haven't loved them enough either. That's not the point, and it never will be. There are articles written about me that ruined my childhood but people keep pointing towards them and saying "popular," like popularity is spilled milk rotting on the edge of a countertop and they want it more than they want anything else in the entire world. I ruined my childhood for three views a stream and the confidence to write articles like this.

Consider it a form of slam poetry.

My heart goes out to all of the people who are streaming right now. I want to extend to them my heartfelt thanks, because their hard work means that I don't have to choke myself out on this industry anymore, and my heartfelt apologies because they're choking too. Everywhere I turn I see people who are burnt out, dissociated, tired, on the verge of tears trying to make enough money to survive in an online economy that pays people in human faces instead of cash. Sign the contract, turn the other cheek, try to ignore that you're standing on the ground floor of a meat-grinding machine. It's what I did, and it'll get you through it too, but it only works for ten years or so before it really starts to wear thin. You can't lie to yourself for that long, and neither can I. We can both feel how much older we are now than when we started. Were we naive, or just dumb enough to think that any of this would work? Are any of us where we wanted to be ten years ago? I was a boy back then, and you had hopes and dreams, and now neither of us get what we actually wanted. Isn't that sad? Aren't you sad? Jerma is retiring, and sometimes I wonder if I have the guts to make it official like he does. It feels like everyone is retiring.

I don't think I ever had a career in the first place, and I'm still retired.

I see you reading this and wondering "when the hell is she going to stop writing, this is turning into a mess," and I understand you, but I need you to understand that this is the underlying fabric of the past twelve years of my life, this never-ending chorus of "when will it be enough" and "when will she stop writing" that fills my head and my ears every time I close my eyes. I need you to know that this is not a panic attack and this is not an autistic meltdown and I have no sympathy for the people who eat up empathy, I have no time or money for the people who are trying to pay me money for my time, and I do not want my face to be out on the internet, and I do not want a stranger to pay for my webcam, and I do not want to stream anymore. I do not want to stream anymore. I do not want to stream anymore. It has been a year and change, and I am a happier and better person, and I do not want to stream anymore. Make the corporations play the puppets, I will not dance for you bastards anymore. Listen to the sound of my voice and rip yourselves apart. Twelve years is not enough to give back to you, and I'll never get those twelve years back anyway. I tell the viewer to go fuck themselves. I tell the reader that they can rot in hell for all I care. It's easy to say things to the other side of the screen when they can't hear you, and it's easy to cry when your mic's on mute.