A Post-2020 Update.

I don’t have to tell anyone that the last 12months has been a hell of a bumpy ride, and the light at the end of the tunnel is likely still a distance away. So what became of TTGB in 2020? Why did I only upload 2 videos in the entire year? Where have I been? What have I been doing? Where did I leave the TV Remote?

I’ll start at the beginning, which for me takes us back to October 2019.

I took on a new role at work commencing on Halloween of that year, as many of you know I am not dependent on any form of income from YouTube and therefore I maintain regular employment. The job change was from a frontline “boots on the ground” Security Officer role, to a CCTV Control Room based role with the same employer, which has been great and something I’ve always wanted to do, however with the job role came a new work rota. My previous 4 shifts on, 4 shifts off rota was changed and I began a hellish combination of Early shifts, Day shifts, and Night shifts with very little time off in between and short shift changes, for example working a 6am start one day and a 10pm start the next, giving me less than 24hours to swap my sleep pattern from day shift to night shift. As you can imagine my circadian rhythm was little to non-existent, and equally this had a huge knock on effect on my work-life balance and ultimately my health. My opportunity to work on content was greatly reduced, I began suffering from migraines on a weekly basis, and I slowly turned in to a somewhat narcoleptic zombie, not necessarily alive, just generally existing, and sleeping too much or too little at all hours of the day and night. Naturally I immediately campaigned my management for a better work-life balance and an improved rota, but these requests fell mostly on death ears and were stubbornly rejected every time by management.

A month and a half later in December 2019, my partner and I moved house. This was an incredibly stressful period as anyone who’s moved home will know, and it was made all the more painful as I was doing the majority of the move alone. I spent weeks sorting through everything at my old home, disassembling and lugging furniture into the back of a van, driving 30miles, unloading, reassembling, driving 30miles back, and repeating several times. It wasn’t until mid-January 2020 when we felt properly settled in the new home, despite a lot of unpacking and tidying still left to do, and I was able to think about working on new content again, which I was especially excited about as I had been reminded of a subject that I had known about for some time but never truly investigated; The Mystery of the Ourang Medan. I immediately started work on the research for this video, and in the meantime I was just about able to finish and release, with the help of Jym Pagel (aka NightDocs), an episode of Fact/Fiction to tide the channel over until I had completed The Ourang Medan video; something I assumed would take me less than a month and I could move on to more subjects.

Oh, how wrong I was.

March 2020 arrived and Covid19 had finally hit the UK in a big way. On the 16th March 2020, due to an underlying health condition, I was furloughed from work indefinitely to allow me to shield, and shortly after, much like the rest of the world, the UK went in to total Lockdown. I didn’t leave my house again until August.

Looking on the bright side though I thought “Fantastic, all the time in the world to sit at home and work on new content for the channel, completely uninterrupted”. But the gravity of the worsening world health crisis, the governments mishandling of the situation, the reckless and irresponsible “Covid deniers”, the worsening political and social landscape within the world as a whole, and my unhealthy attachment to Social Media through it all weighed heavily on my mental health. I found myself constantly distracted and spent much of my time doom scrolling my days away on Twitter, never getting anything done, and staring at a blank page on my word processor every time I tried to work on The Ourang Medan video. I had no motivation or inspiration to do anything, and generally sunk into a pretty crappy place, and upon realising that the Ourang Medan mystery was a much bigger and deeper topic than I initially anticipated, I essentially gave up, and shelved the video altogether.

In June I celebrated my birthday, and not long after was overcome with a sudden rush of motivation. By this point I had done about as much work on the Ourang Medan video as I had in January, namely printed out a few old Newspapers and some CIA files that I had barely bothered to read which were now gathering dust on my desk, but with this sudden burst of energy work progressed quickly, eventually leading to the July release of the video. The feeling of achievement and relief at finally bringing this project to life after so much struggle was elating, and I was now free to work on other subjects, hoping the motivation from that final push on the previous video would last and spur me on further.

It did not last.

Without anything to focus on and finding no topics that interested me, and little to no contact both in person or online with friends, family, and colleagues, I once again went back to doom scrolling, and it was around September that I finally realised that this was the biggest drain on my motivation. The toxicity of Social Media. Endless negativity, extremist politics, dangerous conspiracies, and just some generally awful people within the various Twitter Paranormal and “Horror” communities were filling my tweet feed with nothing but venom and putting me in a state of mind where nothing seemed worth doing anymore because frankly the whole world was going to shit anyway, so why even bother.

In late August I decided that enough was enough, and whilst I would remain a presence on Social Media for the sake of the channel to let followers know about new content, I would no longer personally interact on Social Media or use it in any active daily form, and so I deleted my entire tweet history, placed nothing but links to my content on the profile, and deleted the app from my phone and PC completely, opting to use Hootsuite instead for the purpose of posting updates without seeing all the unnecessary junk. I can not recommend doing this enough.

Unfortunately around this time I also went back to work, and whilst I had purged myself of the evil of Social Media, I was back to that hellish work routine, so the initial improvement to my mental and physical health was minimal, but it did slowly improve now that I had more human interaction again, and there was even more hope when our management, after a year of our tireless campaigning, finally decided to change that awful rota, going back to the 4on/4off system to commence January 2021. And come Christmas 2020 I also finally sought proper medical assistance for my mental health, something I should have done a long time ago, and I also finally and somewhat blindly stumbled across a video topic that really tickled my fancy.

So now it is January 2021. The Pandemic doesn’t show much signs of ceasing anytime soon and society is frankly still in tatters, but I personally am in a much better headspace. I have a much heathier work-life balance again, and I am taking a lot more care of my mental health, and once again I’m finally in a position where I can look positively towards working on new content for the channel. My social media presence will still be minimal but I can say that I have had fun uploading the odd thing to Instagram lately, which is nowhere near as horrific a place as Twitter, so you may see me there.

And as for the new video topic that tickled my fancy; It’s a local story, and as such I had initially planned to record some of the video on location, but unfortunately the most recent Lockdown restrictions in the UK have put a blocker on that plan, so I’m toying with the idea of a typical video, or waiting until I can get out there and film something more interesting, but either way I’m working on the new video, at my own pace, taking my time, and enjoying doing it. I never wanted YouTube to become a chore or something I should feel pressured to do, and that is something I definitely forgot in 2020.

Looking to the future, I plan to soldier on at my own relaxed pace. I enjoy researching, and presenting topics to an audience, and whilst I may not have the production levels and media prowess of some of my peers, I am always striving to improve the overall quality, information content, and presentation of my videos which will hopefully feature less stock images and footage going forward in exchange for more original on location footage to bring the subject matters more to life. It’s an exciting prospect for me as it equally offers me the opportunity to be more creative, and also travel more around the UK in search of the strange when the pandemic eventually eases.

So that’s my post-2020 update. It has been an incredibly difficult year, and not just for myself, but for the entire world, and believe me I have summarised a lot of the events, but to conclude, I’m still here, I’m alive, I’m happy, I’m currently healthy, and I’m looking forward to bringing something new to you all soon.