This will definitely be interesting to write. I'm not sure how many of my followers check my pyongs - or even care about what I push out on here - but if you're one of them that do, glad you've decided to join me. Just a quick little announcement.
Life has been, to put it mildly, shitty recently. My school called us back into the building five days a week, no in between - and, of course, that means I'm stuck with the homophobes and transphobes at my school, fresh on the heels of having come out as non binary. What makes it worse: I'm Latinx in a pretty much all-white town; I can practically list the amount of non-white kids in my grade - maybe in my school - without running out of fingers, even when I'm including my sister (who can pass for white, while I can't). So, obviously, as you'd expect, school's been taking its toll, even with me having recently been accepted into my dream college.
In other words, my mental health's taken a nosedive, with it going so far as something even as righteous to me as writing seeming almost like a job - granted, it might be because I push myself way too hard, which kinda brings us to the topic of this open letter (?). I've decided that I will most likely leave genius. I won't be that one guy who just disappears, but I'm definitely not going to be quite as active as I was, though it'll probably be surprising if I come on here more than once a week. It's not that I've lost my drive for the main thing I annotate on here, which is Tab and Tony and the queer subculture of Old Hollywood as a whole, because I'm still very much into them, but life's pulling me in a lot of directions right now - directions that are not pointing at genius.
I was talking to my incredible mentor, Peaker, in DMs the other day about how I'd initially planned to have 100k IQ be my "retirement," because, as I stated, "there needs to be an ending point." This was, essentially, nothing more than a hobby; I was never obligated to hop on here and create an account, never mind to become an editor and come as far as I like to think I have. And I plan to reach that goal of 100k, even if it should seem small in comparison to giants like ScopeY and Streetlights and Ewok, through finishing as much as I want to of Tab's artist archive, because goddammit I'm only 3,000 IQ away, but that's just me pushing myself again. It's not like I'm 100% doing this for pleasure anymore; as an editor, there seems to be a lot of obligations you have to be put through, and I was prepared for that in the beginning, but with the declining mental health, it's just felt like a lot of voices in my ear. I think it's also the idea that other people might not enjoy what I'm doing or thinking I'm annoying means less people are listening to what I have to say means that I'm essentially screaming into the void, and unless the damn Tab & Tony movie miraculously releases and their music becomes extremely popular or something, that interest - if there even was any - will just rapidly fall through. That just makes me think I'm being annoying again and it returns to the horrible mental health thing.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm (essentially) leaving genius. It's not one of those "hiatuses" where it's just a week or maybe a month and hey, I'm back! I've thought this through, written this out, and I'm serious about this. I've been here for nearly a year and I've met incredible people along the way, but mental health and burnout get to you and sometimes, it's just time to move on.
