Welcome to the new Pillow Fort!
My All-in-one place for keeping up to date on new content, grabbing some merch, and overall supporting Mr. Pillow Suit!

For those who want the TLDR:

•  This is the new spot I plan on growing my community, as well as giving perks to Pillow Pal members.

• Most of the usual content you've seen that probably got you here, I plan to post here as well, FOR FREE, as frequent as I do with all my ather social media platforms. Anyone who joins the free membership sign up will always have access to those.

• New shows and series, both short and long form, are in the works. They will take time to create and grow, and becoming a member will give those who join the paid teirs to support early access to them, as well as discounts and exclusive drops on certain merch!

That concludes the bullet point summary of what’s going on here. Now for those interested, here’s the deep dive (yeah it’s gonna get personal) :

First and foremost a big thank you to anyone and everyone who has ever seen my content and it had given you an escape from your struggles or has had it bring you some entertainment and joy. Over the past 5 years that I have been a full time content creator, I've been pretty passive about the type of content I have created. Making short form content came easy to me and I realized that a lot of the insecurities that I had from imposter syndrome.

I have been in a multitude of job positions in the entertainment industry over the past decade of my life, most of which were behind the camera, and every time I got to sets and studios I always second guessed if I deserved to be there. Some I left because I didn’t believe in myself. Some I left because I saw things that did not sit right with me on a personal level and didn’t want to continue to include myself in that atmosphere. I thought that some of those decisions would be where my entertainment career would end. I had dabbled in making youtube content and doing twitch streaming on the side, but I had to make ends meet with bills and had a partner relying on me at the time to help provide for our home, so consistency wasn’t very possible and most fell wayside overtime. Then someone made a remark about my talents, undermining my abilities and talents that I had set on the shelves to live a “normal life” doing jobs that made me sacrifice my creative passions. This was the January 1st 2019. From someone telling me that night that they could “teach me how to be comical” reignited a flame in me. A “how dare you” echoed in my mind and overpowered their comment to the point where I made a committed resolution that night to start putting myself in front of the camera on a consistent basis instead of doing work for others that I continued to be a replaceable asset to them and work on making my own content and community. TikTok was the platform that was not only growing the fastest, but also the one that the mainstream media and other established social media platforms was ridiculing the most at the time. If the history of the internet had taught me anything it was to not sleep on a platform that was the target of so many others that had to climb that same ladder of prejudice against it. So TikTok was my flagship for my new year resolution that year, and half a decade later, I couldn’t be happier that I stuck with it. 

I’m now half a decade into being a content creator. That is wild to me that its been that long, but it also has me giving myself a bit of a personal 5 year performance review. In full disclosure I’m making it public because I want to keep this in my community's eyes as well as my own so that moving forward I can hold myself accountable, along with having others be able to compare in the future how far we have come from this moment. This is not to vent but to look at my pros and cons and where I want to direct my energies and purpose. My Ikigai as its known in Japanese ( there’s no significance to that word, I just like its meaning).

Of my own constructive critique of myself, I have become passive and somewhat reclusive for at least 3 of the 5 years doing content. I could make excuses for it on a lot of things, but I’m using them here to provide myself and those reading with context of the high’s and low’s I dealt with. I was isolated the entire year of 2020. I literally only had human interaction with 6 people the entirety of that year and in that isolation I put my full energy into making content that entire year. 

When 2021 came around and reintroduced myself into being able to interact with people, burnout and a marginal bit of agoraphobia had set in. It really made a mess of my mental health in a way I had never felt in my life. 2021 turned into a recovery year to reclaim a personal identity outside of being a creator and I coasted on my finances from money I made from TikTok’s creator program. 

Going into 2022 I started to feel like myself again and so content was back! I was posting consistently again and started building my community on instagram as well. That gave me the ability to reclaim my confidence in being a creator again and I was doing well for a while. I didn’t feel like a flash in the pan and was on a roll all the way into 2023. 

Then my little fluffy companion Max passed away January 14th 2023. That sent me into a spiral. I get how that sounds trivial for some but he was my unofficial emotional support animal. His passing opened up a floodgate of emotions to the point where I dissociated and became pretty numb. It was because of a wonderful group of other creators that I didn’t know all that well at the beginning of 2023, who had open their doors to me to join them not only in making content, but also getting to know them personally and open each others lives up to struggles that most of the people that follow us will never know went on behind the scenes. That privacy and willingness to open up about it is a personal thing, as it is with anyone in life. So the fact they allowed me to be apart of that and a trust was formed with them allowed me to open up about my own personal hardships and I am forever grateful to them for doing so. It was a slow recovery from a low point for me to regain that creative spark again. 

I made some things in 2023 that I am very proud of. It did come with a distancing of myself from my community though. I needed the time to rebuild and to those who departed, I have absolutely nothing but understanding for doing so. I don’t see many people go through this many ups and downs without community loss so those who did stick around, you’re absolutely amazing and love you so much for believing in me.

Now we’re here in 2024 and I will admit a ball was dropped at the beginning of this year because when the anniversary of Max’s passing came around, depression and burnout enveloped me again. It’s not going to consume me though. Now that we got the problems addressed, it time for me to use them to build a foundation from the pieces to create my accountable solutions. 

Through those 5 years, there have been a lot of projects that I had a lot of passion in creating and challenging myself to make bigger and better productions and shows from. I have started working on and then left on the backburner because the emotional stability rug got pulled out from underneath of me from my own damn self. It really is the worst part of it. The only person I can blame is me! That’s why I’m making this statement. It is for public consumption, but mostly for a declaration of doing better and taking on the challenges instead of hiding from growth as a creator and an entertainer. With timing being what it is with the potential TikTok ban looming over the entire creator community, it makes the most sense to me to be making a strategy to consolidate my community as best as I can and branching out into bigger ventures. 

And that’s that! My personal performance review. To sum it up, I had missteps, but never did the passion of what I know I’m good at doing. Now I don’t want to just be good at it, I want to get great at it. 

With that out of the way, I am gonna be directing a lot of my community towards this way. I want to do this proper and keep this as consistent as I do with my other content. Although all my content will always be free, those who support will get early access to certain content, and will also be able to get some exclusive perks like limited merch drops, and access to contributing to voicing opinions on what content they would like to see and direct it in some sense. 

I want to do this right though. This is a marathon, not a sprint and I know it’ll take time, but for early supporters I will be leaning on you to sculpt what is to come next and I wont ever take that for granted. You will be the beacon for what is to come and I cant thank you all enough for helping me in this new path.

To those who read this and are not in a position right now to be able to support in one of the paid memberships, we have a free membership sign up as well, which you will get access to all my backlogged videos and content that has been unlisted from youtube, as well as video compilations of my older short form content that I will be putting up here for anyone who would like to see humble (and subjectively cringy) beginning content from my past. 

Big Hugs Till Ya Fart Pillow Pals. Welcome to the new Pillow Fort!