With benefit of hindsight, this is painful for me to watch · 7:33pm Jul 3rd, 2022
Sure, I don't have that bad of a drinking problem and I've never been to a psych ward, nor have I actually tried to kill myself (though I have certainly thought about it on an infrequent basis). But I can relate to Gary when he says his life never got better after the night he and his mates went on a post-graduation pub crawl.
After I had finished A-Levels, I thought for sure that despite its many trials and tribulations, I would just barely get the C grades necessary to pass. But I got a D and E for IT and Art respectively and they didn't even bother to grade my work for Welsh Baccalaureate (which is the only one of those subjects that is mandatory) because I "didn't complete it", which is a load of rubbish but I digress.
Despite that little setback, I never gave up hope. Roughly four months after I received my results, I joined this site. After all, gotta exercise my creative noodle in a more meaningful way besides being stuck in a cycle of drawing up ideas only to get bored with that idea and focus on a new one that I think is better. BTW, those ideas will never see the light of day because I think they're mediocre. And if there's one thing I will not do, it's fade into mediocrity. And if I learnt anything from this site, it's that the quickest and easiest way to get views, likes and followers is through writing short one-shots. A tactic that I later used to garner a small bit of success on my YouTube channel. I admit, the short one-shot tactic was kind of a mixed bag but my successes more than compensated for my failures. Especially 'My Tax Policy?' (which I took the liberty of tagging this blog post with because, let's be honest, it's the most successful story I've written on this site and I'd like to remind people of that. 
).
But where I succeeded in FiMFiction, I struggled when it came to YouTube. That is until I had the ingenious idea of a BLU Soldier from TF2 using Cappy from Super Mario Odyssey to possess Shantae. And for a while, those Half-Genie Soldier videos were doing extremely well. Then I took it up a notch and uploaded videos of Shantae getting her brain invaded and they also did well. But as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. Recent Half-Genie Soldier videos weren't gaining as many views as they used to. And I tried to give up making brain invasion vids after my baptism because...well...kinda hard to quit masturbating when you share the same kink with your audience. But the brain invasion vids are currently the only thing that is continuing to bring in thousands of views so...yeah. I am not happy with my current situation in life.
Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that I know what it's like to have all that promise and optimism and leaving school being the proper beginning of your life only for nothing of note to happen. And the worse thing is I could have just went to college if I really wanted a job in animation. The reason I took A-Levels is because I thought it would be slightly quicker than college in order to get the qualifications needed for an animation career. But upon recent inspection, I realized passing A-Levels simply means I'd get the qualifications necessary to take an animation course in university, which would have meant even more years of school in the long run. 
That said, while I have wondered to myself if I would be happier if I made different decisions in life, I do consider whatever bad decisions I made in life to be a blessing in disguise. Were it not for my determination going unrewarded, I probably wouldn't be as obsessed with Madoka Magica the way I am now. I would explain myself in better detail but that would lead into spoiler territory and a paragraph full of big black lines.
PS: Another reason why I've dealing with suicidal thoughts as of late is because I worked myself to exhaustion on TAWOTA and yet, expect for the last episode, it barely got any views. How is it that I get unrewarded for months of hard work and yet rewarded for pumping out something with little to no effort within a week? Where's the sense in that?
Hang in there, buddy. It'll get better.
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That's what I've been telling myself for the last five years.
But hey, I might not even need YouTube, FiMFiction or DeviantArt in the next two months and 19 days (give or take). Apparently, there's going to be a magnetic shift - solar flare...thing...that will result in communications (including WiFi) going down on the 21st September and those who wish to seek enlightenment will be enlightened. Oh, and all these greedy companies will lose lots and lots of money because of the WiFi going down. Or so I've been told by my mum watching these videos on YouTube, anyway.
If things improve after 21st September despite the Internet going down, great. If things don't improve and/or I feel like I've served my purpose in this world, I can always live without sin for an entire week before ending my own life and praying God will forgive me for that one last sin (provided I have served my purpose and He doesn't intend on me surviving). If the Internet is still up even after 21st September...well...I don't know what I'm going to do.