WE ARE SO BACK
I Was Living in a Nightmare but Now its Time to Wake Up.
Oh man, where do I even begin?
The last time I posted on Substack was in May of 2024. Back then I had just released my Christian Music is Frustrating video, the day I posted that last update I had 532 subscribers on Youtube. At the time I was working at a wonderful job and working on videos as close to full time as possible. It was also during this period where I basically abandoned the audio podcast side of DFT’S Dungeon entirely. This was mostly because I wasn’t receiving nearly as much traction on my episodes as the video versions were getting. Eventually Youtube views outmatched my podcast numbers 10/1. I also starting gearing my episodes more towards the visual audience. It was inevitable that I would one day switch completely over.
In June, I decided to cold turkey discontinue the use of tobacco and nicotine, an active addiction I had had for 12 years, I have not had a single relapse at all during that period and will be celebrating 1 year Nicotine free in June.
In September of 2024 my family and I geared up for a nice family vacation, it was a celebration of the fact that by September my Youtube subscribers had increased to 886! A mind boggling number! I had also secured a new job that month and would be starting mid September right after our vacation. Everything was gearing up for this to be yet another wonderful life upgrade. I was gonna meet new people, make more money and continue to grow my online video career. Unfortunately things never go quite as we plan………
On the first day of vacation I got horribly ill and spent most of the time holed up in a hotel room while my wife and kids went out and did fun vacation things. I returned home and started a brand new job the next day. The job was not anything like I was expecting. My co workers were unfriendly, unhelpful, and at times downright antagonistic. I received very little training for my new role. Every single day became a terrifying anxiety ridden experience for me. And just like that everything I had going on…………..ground to a halt. I traded in a satisfying job and a wonderful content creation career for a dead end job that I was afraid of losing every single day. In the past I relied heavily on Alcohol and Nicotine to help me regulate my emotions when I got stressed out, but since I had just quit using tobacco in June and had stopped drinking 3 years ago I no longer had any of my familiar coping mechanisms to deal with this level of stress. So instead I started over eating and quickly undoing all the weight loss progress I had made in the past 2 years. I was so stressed out that I just ceased video production entirely until one day in December I got a second wind and released 2 videos to end off the year, one about Zao and the other about Luti Kriss (Norma Jean) then I followed up with an Underoath video in January, but I was absolutely spent after that and I had to cease production once again. I was living in a nightmare. I applied for countless other jobs, but here in 2025 we are looking at one of the worst job markets I have ever experienced in my adult life. I did lots of interviews but didn’t get a lot of call backs. My self confidence was at an all time low.
Then in early March of 2025 I was sent to Ohio for work training for a full week. During those 7 days away from the rest of “my” world I was able to reflect and recalibrate everything that I was feeling, I started feeling my self confidence grow again, I started my more healthy diet again. By the end of the week I had started to feel like my old self again, classic DFT vibes. I drove home at the end of the week blasting Reborn by Living Sacrifice in my rental car. What I realized during that week is that I actually have an amazing family. Amazing Kids, Amazing Wife, and an amazing Youtube career. (because by March of 2025 that Youtube channel had grown to over 1200 subscribers! I was a monetized Youtuber! And I was so miserable when it happened that I didn’t even care.) I realized that I was letting the only bad aspect of my life control all of the good aspects of my life, and that is unbalanced. The only way I was gonna be able to move forward in life was to stop letting the bad influence the good. So as soon as I got home I sat down and started working on new video scripts, started scanning my music collection for albums to talk about. I started blocking out time on my calendar to start production work, and a few days ago I posted a short update video to the channel to let everyone know that I was back and feeling Reborn and more Empowered than I ever had before. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me! This is the beginning of something truly great I can feel it.
You can watch my update video here, and keep a look out for a new video dropping within the next week or two.