Shameless Sunday Plugs #4

Oh, hello. Long time no talk here on Sundays. As I said in my last post life has been coming at me in many different directions which is why I’ve had less blog content than normal. Luckily there’s more posts now officially coming including today’s Shameless Sunday Plug- which have been absent for a few weeks. I also have updates about things I’m not promoting today, but I’ll talk about that at the end of this post.

For today, the only thing I have to promote is my new video essay series via my Youtube channel, MTV’s The Challenge: A Historical Deep Dive. This may seem out of left field, depending on how you know me, so let me explain. I started watching The Real World behind my parents back as a young kid. I found these cool young adults living in hip cities fascinating. On the surface The Real World and all of its spinoffs seems like just another reality show, but not only was it the grandfather of reality TV but it served a social purpose. The Real World gave faces to social issues regarding race, politics, gender, sexuality, and tons of other micro subcultures, lifestyles, and personalities. If you never knew a gay person or a POC in real life, you now did thanks to the people who went on these Bunim Murray shows and showcased their lives. These shows informed a lot for my young self and naturally I kept following the lives of casemates as they spun off into various seasons of The Challenge.

In early 2022 I started a TikTok to cover and react to The Real World: Homecoming and The Challenge Allstars as they aired in real time at that moment (New Orelans and Allstars 3, respectively). People began following off the bat, including cast members(!) and I was having so much fun commenting on these pseudo big brothers and sisters I grew up watching with liked minded fans who followed me. However, there was a problem. A huge, huge, huge problem. About a month before I began this project I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD. What a lot of people may not know about CPTSD and much of what I will be discussing about it here on the blog is that it is a life changing diagnosis. While like anything it’s a spectrum, CPTSD technically qualifies you as neurodivergent because trauma has rewired your brain to see the world differently. Undertaking understanding what this means, while trying to heal, while trying to process everything that has not been in your favor in your life is not for the faint of heart. As any PTSD diagnosis is an anxiety based disorder I naturally had a lot of anxiety. As social media can be a nightmare for people with regulated nervous systems, I found social media proving to be too much at times for my nerves to take. Even if nothing negative happened I would find myself in avoidance mode and then would space out on how much time had passed, followed by a shame spiral because I would feel bad about it so I would continue to avoid social media. It’s not rational, but when anxiety and trauma hack your brain it’s hard to do better even if you know better. IYKYK.

While most commenters were cool as hell, a few were not. New Orleans Homecoming was wrought with Karen behaviors (thanks, Julie the former Mormon) and a mind-blowing amount of different personalities, dynamics, and old history plus new (and wildly unnecessary) dramas. I definitely called out those behaviors as they happened. However, I don’t really hate anyone in life. Nobody is a monolith or all good or all bad. I live in a grey area as I’ve loved a lot of complicated people because they were family members. Life and people are nuanced, and yet social media rarely is. I do believe TikTok is a better space for nuanced dialogue than say Twitter/X/Elon’s Dystopian Playground but a few people had opinions and let me know them. At the time, TikTok only allowed for 3 minute videos and I would show a clip and react to it. Some clips were longer as important and complicated things were happening and I’d need to show it for my reaction to be in the correct context. Sometimes I’d only have a minute to react to what was happening. So if I had already said the talking points that were well established about All Things Julie and didn’t rehash every grievance to avoid being redundant, some viewers would get mad that I didn’t call her out exactly the way they would have (despite that I often did, just in an earlier post that they didn’t see as -understandably- not everyone researches and watches all of your content). And if I had something nice or supportive to say about her, specifically highlighting that she went through religious trauma and religious trauma is no joke, people didn’t like that I didn’t tar and feather her endlessly. There’s space for many things to be true, like yes Julie was a nightmare on this show but she is also a human who has had to unpack a lot of harmful things she was conditioned to believe. It’s not excusing bad behaviors to say she’s a human with a full spectrum of experiences that informed her as well as hurt her. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t care about the comments, but given how heated this season was and how not okay my brain was handling any stress, this mostly fun channel of mine brought a lot of anxiety too.

As the spinoff nostalgia shows came to close, I went digging into past challenges (I think Gauntlet II and Inferno II, but I may be wrong) thinking it would be a more lighthearted adventure. Wrong. There’s tons of sexism, bullying, and a host of other heavy issues that happens in those early mid seasons. Adding more complications to the mix this time though was the fact that these shows were roughly 15 years old. Meaning, I was covering content from real individuals as their real selves from another time. These young twenty somethings were now middle aged and had probably changed a bunch from both the wisdom age grants and how the times have changed. Some cast members have stayed on our screens the entire time and some have glowed up from the inside. However, again, there’s only three minutes to show a clip and talk about it. I’m all for publicly recognizing the growth has occurred, but I don’t want to over-explain how much they’ve grown while reacting to an iconic clip. The assignment is to react to the clip for the most part. I think most viewers want that, but occasionally someone would come in kind of hot about it. I would try to on occasion mention that we don’t know these people personally, a lot could have been left on the editing room floor leaving many things out of context, and yes, people have since grown-but not in every clip. And because not everyone watches all of the clips some people probably really thought I didn’t know that those elements are important and would try to “school me.”

Now, under the best of circumstances I can take it. But my mental health got a lot worse for nearly a full year before it began to improve. But that wasn’t the entire reason why I kept falling off the map and got inconsistent with posting. I was genuinely questioning if TikTok was the right avenue for this, or if I should even be commenting on how people live their lives. All I mean by that was this project felt bigger than three minute clips and as I explored my own life, faults, and abuses I’ve suffered I grew a deeper empathy for not only myself but for others. We’re all so flawed. We all do the best we can with the circumstances we have. We all have blindspots and ways we could grow. I don’t believe any of my content was punching down, but some of it felt blurry for me.

In January of 2023 there was FINALLY news about Allstars 4 so I was posting tons of stuff about the rumored cast lists. This got me a lot more traction with both followers and engagement- which was lovely, but a lot of the issues with the above stuff I mentioned came in but on steroids. January 2023 was a weird time for me. I had started to believe I was going to be okay, but wasn’t quite okay yet. And roughly a week after the casting videos, I got super sick and couldn’t eat for a week-which was bad because I was already underweight thanks to my nervous system being so dysregulated that I couldn’t feel my appetite for much of 2022. Around Halloween I had started working really hard to reprogram my eating habits, was doing okay with it for 3 months, and it all came crashing down by the first week of February. I lost all of the weight I gained back and then some. And then through a series of errors that’s neither here nor there, I kept losing weight until my best friend who’s in psychiatric nutrition intervened with me in mid-March and put me on a plan that likely saved my life. That said, if you aren’t eating and haven’t been for a while, you aren’t getting the right nutrients. And if you aren’t getting the right nutrients, your brain is not going to work right. This could led to heightened anxiety, being forgetful, saying the wrong words or mispronouncing things (like I said Care-ah Maria once instead of Car-ah Maria because I was tired and just got sloppy), and not having energy- all of which I was rocking at once. Simply put, I wasn’t up for making Challenge TikToks in early 2023.

So how/why did I come back and why the switch to YouTube? As I mentioned in a past Shameless Sunday plug, I genuinely believed I didn’t want to be a personality anymore but just a writer, actress, comedian, and puppeteer. I’m learning to set boundaries and show up for myself as I heal from CPTSD and something about being so exposed with various videos and podcasts talking as myself started to feel deeply uncomfortable to me. I was thinking maybe I should just let art speak for itself and not always be the face of whatever I was doing in such an open way. I ended the series Good Grief a while ago for this exact reason, and have been planning to end Creepy & Kooky Cali Vlog (which actually may not be ending now but I’ll talk about that in a moment). I kept remembering my Challenge TikTok and was sad I abandoned it, but still wasn’t sure what to do with it so, true to CPTSD form, I avoided it.

By the time August rolled around I was in peak I’m-Done-Being-A-Personality mode and almost announced on my challenge TikTok that I wasn’t really going to be active on there but may come back for Allstars 4 to finish what I started. I felt good with this but something prevented me from making the announcement. I don’t know why in my gut I wasn’t ready to call it but I’m thankful I didn’t because the first week of September, as I was falling asleep, I was struck with the realization that I have access to a Google Drive with all of the old shows. It’s super easy to download those videos and upload them onto my iMovie and record reactions and upload them to my YouTube. Duh. As much as that may sound like the same thing as doing them on TikTok, for me it feels like a better fit. I’m a deep dive kinda gal and not a concise short few minutes lady. It is what it is. If one video covered several episodes we could REALLY get into the things of the things, poke fun when needed, but also give a fair shake to nuances, what is clearly edited for drama, how people have changed, what was going on culturally when any given show was filmed, but still have silly fun. Within a week I filmed and uploaded the first episode of MTV’s The Challenge: A Historical Deep Dive.

I’m very at peace with this and excited about it. Yeah, I’m still figuring out some boundaries and how to feel safe now that I’m finally getting my footing in life. I think me genuinely believing that I never wanted to be a personality again was the pendulum swinging over too far. I’m not sure if it’s totally evened out yet, but it’s getting closer. I do have a fun and warm personality (if I may say so myself) and I think my written humor translates better if people know my tone of voice. I now realize eliminating all personality gigs is probably not a smart idea. I probably will never go back to talking about grief in a video essay series because I don’t like having “elevated” energy about sad topics (you need to be SUPER on when filming YouTube videos, which feels weird when talking about my dead parents) but I think for some topics it’s fine for me.

Which brings me to Creepy and Kooky…I guess it’s not ending as I planned. I’m filming a video on Wednesday and Sunday and have others being scheduled. I believe Monday October 9th will have the first video released, so if you’ve been missing them that’s what’s up. Since announcing I was ending the series some really cool opportunities have come up and one will be revealed soon. I only have a few cemeteries left to film in Los Angeles so it felt like a natural fit to end it, cool opportunities or not however… it turns out I’m hitting the road soon! I’m not ready to talk about all of the circumstances and may shroud a few details as to not dox myself but I’m going to be doing some traveling in the coming months to places with cool cemeteries. How could I possibly end the series now when there’s more cemeteries that will be at my finger tips? Not all will have famous internments but all will be cool or memorable cemeteries. Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans…

There you have it! After a few weeks off this is a pretty big update. The blog should be a bit more regular from here on out though it may be a few days a week until roughly mid-November as I have a ton on my plate currently and need to be prepping to hit the road. If you don’t want to miss a beat, cemeteries, Challenge, blogging, or my usual nonsense please follow me on social media (tabs are at the top or bottom of the page depending on your device) - it also helps me out a lot so I appreciate it in advance. Also, rumor has it I may be joining forces with another Challenge head who’s very immersed in that world…but that’s all I’ll say for now. Follow so you don’t miss out on any of these updates! Happy Sunday!