My Proudest Podcast Moment
Last year I had the opportunity to interview one of my personal idols B. Dave Walters. Before he DMed the cast of Stranger Things or became the first ever GM of a nationally television RPG on G4’s Invitation to Party, he was the undisputed Baron of LA. It took open communication on my part, some persistence, and a little luck to get the lead designer of the Into the Mother Lands RPG on my show. A year later, I’m still awestruck that this bona fide TV star gave up two hours of his exceedingly busy schedule to hang out with me. I respect him even more because of why he did it. B. Dave Walters came on RantCast because he’s a man with unparalleled integrity.
When other RPG professionals are wondering how they can get away with exploiting the passion of the community, he’s elevating all the little folks out their with big dreams like he once was. Little folks here being metaphoric of course, B. Dave is 8′ tall IRL and can shoot scintillating entropic beams from his eyes to evaporate his enemies. Okay, so multiple only sources say he’s only 6’9″ but I can’t help a little embellishment from time to time. The beam thing is true though.
Sincerely and without hyperbole, RantCast 132 was my proudest moment as a podcaster. It wasn’t just a great interview but a fantastic conversation that touched on topics from equality in the gaming industry to cryptids and so much in between. I’d say I’m not likely to top it but I know things like that only fill me with a catharsis that makes me want to reach even higher.
Shortly after the B. Dave Walters interview, I took a mental health hiatus from the streaming and content creation game. Anyone who follows me on Twitch, Twitter, or frequents Chat Gang’s Discord knows the details of my break. For the sake of mental health visibility and de-stigmatization, I’ll be candid. In the winter of 2021, I was diagnosed with severe combined type ADHD, Bipolar Disorder Type II, and CPTSD. My stance on mental health visibility was around long before the diagnosis as was my understanding that I struggled with depression and trauma from my youth. Being diagnosed hit on a different level though.
With Rantathon III already in motion for July 2022, I didn’t feel I had the option to “take a break” so I powered through. Powered through to the tune of $12,357.69 raised for the mental health charity Take This. After Rantathon finished, I felt I had to complete a victory lap to make sure the mental health awareness side of things was elevated. My guests for RantCast are usually booked a month or two out, so naturally I couldn’t cancel on any of them and had to finish those shows. Oh, and of course I had to end my Vampire: the Masquerade Actual Play, Milwaukee by Night: Endless Elegy with a compelling season finale to set up another season.
Remember what I said earlier about always wanting to reach higher? It was an understatement. More accurately, I am a chronic overachiever who can’t stand letting people down and refuses to go back on his commitments. By the time I did everything that, in my mind, I had to do it was Thanksgiving. I knew at the beginning of 2022 I needed a break and I put everything else first to make sure my absence landed at a time that wouldn’t inconvenience anyone.
It’s now September 2023 and I’ve only recently returned from sabbatical. The maintenance mode I went into for several months was necessary and wholistically better. I’ve also stoked the fires of a lot of my ambitions and plan to recommit to chasing my dreams. But I’m going to do it with some of the lessons I learned last year. Most importantly, I’m in therapy and getting the treatment I didn’t know I needed for a couple decades. As a mental health visibility streamer, I coulda used a little of my own advice much sooner, haha! If there isn’t a better testament to how challenging it can be to take care of our minds, I don’t know what is.
Headline: Streamer Raises Tens of Thousands of Dollars for Mental Health Charities, Compromises Mental Health. World in Shock He Doesn’t Take Better Care of Own Mental Health!
Aaaanyway back to the video I shared. It may not track logically why sharing my excitement about B. Dave Walters led to talking about my mental health. Allow me to elucidate a bit. In addition to being one of my proudest moments, it also made me feel like a failure. I had landed the biggest guest I ever had and gave a great interview using my years of experience in live broadcast and tapping into my college education in journalism and interviews. My voice and perspective were unique, the humor was there, and did I mention this was B. Dave Walters?! The robots, however, disagreed with me. Random podcasts I’ve done about Pizza or Yoga Pants have done better in the algorithm on my YouTube and Twitch channels.
I understand that doing longform shows comes at a price in potential viewership. I know that not sticking to one lane with my content is another disadvantage. I oddly take pride in knowing I’ve had a lot of success doing things the hard way and if I was given an opportunity to start again, I wouldn’t do it another way anyway.
I love what I do. I love the way I do it. I am, for better or worse, unapologetically, always myself. That’s the quality that got me my platform and audience to begin with. Proof was waiting for me when I returned from my hiatus. I just turned on my stream. Didn’t advertise I was coming back. Didn’t schedule a big return RantCast my best guests according to the algorithm like Vincy V or Heywoah. I simply turned on my camera to play Baldur’s Gate 3 and a dozen people showed up to welcome me back and tell me they were happy to see me stream again.
It’s an odd sort of conflict to feel great about a chosen path and live without regrets but also beat yourself up for not doing better. Odder still that as I was winding down toward the break I knew I need that I kept thinking about the B. Dave Walters episode of RantCast. I carried this ghost with me. Like I’d bought my dream house and decided to decorate the foyer with a haunted mirror. I could feel pride and elation with a disembodied whisper reminding me, “B. Dave deserved better.” Passion has always been my drive and I don’t need to tell Chat Gang that booking B. Dave Walter wasn’t clout chasing or hoping it was my moment. My pride wouldn’t let “my moment” be attached to someone else’s success. The thought that bothered me was that I didn’t do good enough for my hero.
B. Dave Walters spent his precious personal time talking to a niche internet celebrity when he’s the real deal. Again, he’s a badass. He understands the content creators journey and that the biggest projects start small. “Reputation is everything,” he told me during the interview. I think that’s the main reason he agreed to do my show. Reputation.
People are rarely so singular or simple so I bet he had other reasons too. He did say he saw something in before the show which honestly isn’t a humble brag. It’s just something I needed to remind myself of as I grapple with complex feelings as I write this. The point is that I bet if I asked him why he joined me on RantCast, amongst his list of reasons he wouldn’t say because he was doing me a favor – or getting a boon out of me to cash in later to use some VtM parlance. Don’t get me wrong, I will never forget that he slummed it with me and I have a little fantasy that one day I’ll break through the ceiling I’ve been struggling with for a while and get the chance to repay his kindness. But again, I doubt he thinks of it that way from the conversation we had before and during the interview.
Why then if there’s all these positives I can see do I feel like I failed even a year later? Well, a portion of it is my mental health. It goes beyond what a lot of content creators refer to as impostor syndrome. In my life, I have experienced so much trauma it is difficult for me to feel accomplished. Hard for me to take praise or achieve something without waiting for the other shoe to drop. Worse my brain is quite literally wired differently, complete with my DNA having different genetic markers than others for a condition that sinks me into the deepest depressive states a human can experience for long periods of time before launching me into the stratosphere where a fear of consequences don’t really register, my impulse control disappears, and I start to feel like I can fist fight the world. Bipolar Disorder isn’t a superpower bee-tee-dubs even if that description sounded a little cool. It’s fucking debilitating and I invented a bunch of subconscious copes and masks to deal with a lifetime of having it without a diagnosis that has left me maladjusted in significant ways. Oh, and then there’s my ADHD but honestly neurodiversity seems like the lesser part of my diagnosis. Hell, if you spend too much time on TikTok all the ADHD content creators are monetizing the shit outta it and making it seem like some exclusive club.
I guess what I’m saying is it’s been hard is all. It’ll keep being hard for me no matter how good I think I’m doing with my creative endeavors. It actually gets when I think I just made or did something amazing and then check my content metrics to see the numbers have actually gone down. That shit makes me feel legitimate panic. Like I’ve lost my handle on reality and am completely out of touch. What I thought happened is dramatically different from what robots have measured and what a collective community has enjoyed. I probably don’t need to explain to folks how scary it is to have Bipolar Disorder and worry that you just completely misinterpreted the world around you…
I didn’t set out to end on a somber note. That’s the unapologetically myself thing again, I suppose. On a long enough timeline everything in my head comes out and it seems I’ve rambled on to long because the flood gates of errant thoughts are opening up. Time to finish this post.
It’s been hard but I’m back. And intend to stick around a while because my absence filled me with a lot of ambition and unfinished business.
See y’all around in all the usual places, Chat Gang.