December, 2021. 

At this point in my life, I was 22 years old and had worked three jobs. Life to me felt empty. I wasn't pursuing creativity, I felt like a zombie going to my job at a tire shop during the week for over a year, and I consumed stories in a shallow, meaningless way just to distract myself from my depression. 

One day that December, I felt sick. With COVID-19 on the loose, I wanted to be sure if I had it or not. 

Sure enough, I tested positive for COVID.

I took a couple weeks from work until I wasn't contagious anymore, and then returned feeling just as healthy as I had always been... physically, anyway...

For months, I continued working at this tire shop job. My previous jobs at the car wash and zoo had already done their part in damaging my mental health, but I was not prepared for how low the tire shop would make me sink.

I've always had a hard time fitting in with people, even other nerds. I've always felt like an alien in this world. So for the vast majority of my time spent working or really just existing on this planet, I've felt like an outcast. And not for a lack of trying or even having good friends, it's just that I get so overstimulated and I end up being super lackadaisical even around people I like.

Working at the tire shop, I didn't really like anyone there. At best, I tolerated a few of them. But that was NOT an environment for someone like me. They had no regard for people's feelings and were just the grab-ass types that I've never gotten along with. I only worked at this job for as long as I did (almost exactly one year) because trying to find a job is so hard and I didn't want to disappoint my brother with whom I had been living with for two years up to that point, and I was terrified of how my co-workers and boss would react to me saying I was quitting. The thought of them giving me shit for it was terrifying, even if it meant getting away from them.

But it got to the point where I couldn't physically or mentally take working there anymore...

July, 2022.

One day, I was doing a flat repair on a tire that had been pierced by a nail, and I began feeling extremely nauseous out of nowhere. I went to the bathroom, figured it must have just been because of number two, returned to work, and began feeling somehow worse. I went to one of my seniors there and told him I needed a break. He told me five minutes.

I went to the break room to cool off (we worked in a hot environment), and did some breathing and drank some water. I knew I wasn't dehydrated, because I never don't have water on me even if I'm neck deep in work.

One of my co-workers came in, and he asked what I was doing. I told him I had been feeling awful and having trouble breathing, and all he had to say was "eh suck it up, you'll be fine."

I had to hear shit like that all the time working there. I was never taken seriously. It's not like I was a whiner, I usually kept my feelings to myself and just tried my best to fit in and talk shop with the guys and feel like I belonged, to little success.

I returned to work, and damn near passed out. I remember having to do just short of begging to get out of work for that day. Apparently being pale and nauseous weren't enough to send me home.

The next few weeks, I had similar days like this that eventually gotten to be worse and worse. I went to the emergency room one day, and all they said was I had anxiety and gave me an inhaler then kicked me out the door. Very helpful.

Still no sympathy from my co-workers and boss. They just looked at me like I was stupid and making shit up, when I was clearly not feeling well for weeks. But I forced myself to return to work every shift and suffer under a fast-paced work environment, because I was afraid. Afraid of how they'd react to me leaving.

One day, I said fuck it, and looked for a new job. I found one that involved going around competitor retail stores for clients to scan items for them. 

I texted my boss---I didn't wanna hear his reaction---and told him "My doctor told me I can't work anymore, so I'm putting in my two weeks."

And you know what his only response was?

"Seriously?"

And since then up to my last day there, he acted like I was a son of his he decided to disown.

This man KNEW how I had been feeling, but apparently I was just a body to him, a number. I was already long fed up with the amount of distrust I received from that job, despite how hard I worked, so I was done. Much to the dismay of my health, I worked for another two weeks there, and damn near killed myself (Voluntarily and from working too hard for my declining health).

I had points throughout my time of a year working there, where I broke down crying on the floor in my bedroom or bathroom because I didn't know who I was anymore and I hated going to work every week just to be treated like a joke. I wasn't treating myself much better either.

The two weeks was up, and I was free from that hell. This new job was far easier. It involved driving to whatever store I chose for the day, and bending, squatting and reaching whilst scanning hundreds of items to send to the techy people at the office for them to send to our clients.

Best of all, I had no co-workers for once! I had FINALLY found a job where I didn't have to deal with people! After so many years of trying to just find a nice lowkey job.

Of course, there were moments where customers would come to me and see me holding a scanner and assumed I was an employee at whatever store I was in that day, and ask me questions. To which I would say "sorry, I don't actually work here." But compared to the shit I had to deal with at my other jobs, this was nothing.

I began working there in August of 2022, and I never looked back.

Come March of 2023, something bad happened.

My health had gradually declined to a point where I couldn't even work this easy job without feeling like I was going to pass out.

I had been making an effort to get tests done to determine what was wrong with me, and to this day we still don't know, but more on that later.

Woefully, I quit that job and committed to Twitch streaming. I had tried streaming back in 2018 around the time I began the car wash job (only worked there for a few months), and went with it until 2020 and decided to get back into the workforce after a couple years of only streaming. The Twitch thing was going nowhere, so I got burnt out on it.

But skip ahead to 2023 and I had rediscovered my passion for streaming. Thanks to streamers like Tectone, Etika, Lacari, EsfandTV, Erobb221, Vinesauce, & many more, I regained that spark I had back in 2018.

Tectone in particular reminded me about the value of embracing your passions, regardless of how the world might judge you for it. So I went HARD into obsessing over fiction again, the first time in what had been almost a decade. I felt like I was finally awake after a long slumber.

Thanks as well to my friends in Tectone's amazing community for embracing me for who I truly was. The only time I had EVER felt truly accepted into a group. That community changed my life for the better, and I am forever grateful for what they did for me. But even that wasn't all sunshine and rainbows...

Now that I had committed to streaming, I had more time to spend with and focus on my friends. Unfortunately, my friends had such a positive impact on me that I grew to develop an unhealthy one-sided obsessive relationship with many of them. 

I would literally stare at Discord for hours, waiting for people to respond. I would spend so much time in voice chats that I would leave them open when I went to bed. I checked my phone for replies from friends while DRIVING. I never let these people go. I felt like they were all I had left in the world. Without them, I was nothing. I didn't want to think about what life would be like without them.

And then I fucked up. I became possessive.

For a few weeks, a certain group of us played on a private Minecraft server and there was one guy in particular who was somehow even more active in the group than I was. I couldn't stand this guy (I'm over it now), he was distracting my friends from spending more time with me. I saw him as an attention hog, and I hated how he always talked over me and my friends because I viewed him as someone who loved to hear himself talk. We'll call him Cameron, for the sake of anonymity.

There was palpable tension between Cameron and I, but we still played together because we were both so invested in this friend group. Neither of us were leaving anytime soon.

One day, I noticed in one of my friend's Discord statuses that they were playing Minecraft, many of them were, in fact. I figured they were on our server. I booted it up, but no one was there.

I couldn't believe it. They were playing without me? My memory is fuzzy on this part, but I either asked what they were doing and didn't get an answer, or asked them to join me soon because I was alone. Something like that.

They joined my call and I asked where they were, and they were being rather evasive on it. I overstepped, and asked things like "so you created a server without me? Even your own vc?" "What, did you guys make a ZealotPara hate group?" I tried to say it in a jokey, bantery way, but I could tell I made them uncomfortable.

This moment led to many of my friends distancing from me, to the point of just not responding to my messages.

This went on for MONTHS, and I had mental breakdowns and would make passive-aggressive tweets about them, talking about fake friends and whatnot.

Then after months of going crazy wondering why they abandoned me, I even messaged them directly and told them how I felt. I wasn't nice about it either.

And of course they responded telling me how they felt, ended up blocking me and ceasing to support my streams. Oh yeah, I was still streaming around this time, but just like with my other jobs, my health was affecting my ability to be consistent...

I was losing friends, losing my health, and losing my mind.

I was somehow at an even lower point than I was working the tire shop job.

I thought streaming and my friends were all I needed for the rest of my life, but they were slipping away, and so was I.

I lost so many friends I loved, I lost the ability to stream, and I wanted to die. I had nothing. 

My health became so bad that i was bedridden on and off for months on end sometimes. And I was struggling with shortness of breath, labored breathing, chronic pain, nausea, drowsiness, brain fog, slow thinking, and my overstimulation was turned up by eleven.

These were the tests I'd had done over the course of over a year:

A breathing test which even though I was having a hard time performing with, they said my lungs came back more than healthy which didn't make sense to me. I had a hard time pushing air out during the test, and was getting lightheaded and dehydrated when doing it. Lung x-ray, echocardiogram, treadmill, heart monitor, all came back normal except the cardiologist prescribed me with anxiety pills which I took for a couple months, all they did was make me drowsy and give me intense hallucinations. Blood test came back mostly fine aside from minor deficiencies.

Nothing was explaining my health issues, so you can probably imagine how that only made my mental state even worse. I began to wonder if I was making it up. A Chuck McGill sort of situation.

One of my close friends---who disappeared mid-2022---reminded me of meditation. I forgot about meditation for years, it fell out of my routine around the time I began the zoo job in 2020.

But now, meditation was all I had left. It was the only thing I could think to do, other than curl up and die.

Through months of meditation and increased self-aware, I discovered it...

I came to an epiphany about... everything.

The universe just is. There isn't some cosmic force out to get me, despite how much I had been convinced I was cursed for so many years. The meaning of life is that there is no meaning, and that's the best possible outcome. If life has no meaning, then that means it can mean whatever I want it to. It can mean something different to everyone.

I spent months on a deep, introspective spiritual journey.

I was still overly obsessed with my friends, I was still lost, but now I was making a conscious effort to get better.

I remember one day of breaking down crying- no, not just that. I was bawling and laughing like a maniac. I realized that I've never really gone anywhere with my life. I was sitting at home, playing video games, unemployed with no real skills to speak of and having lost all my friends.

I was nothing.

But I went on. I just let myself feel these overwhelming feelings of self-loathing and emptiness, and that was exactly what I needed. To allow myself to feel and process my feelings.

No more distracting myself with work, people, things. Just sitting with myself and letting those miserable feelings flow through me.

Imagine you're sitting by a river, and next to you there is a bowl, and above that bowl a stream of your emotions like water are filling it up. 

Imagine running away from that bowl because it terrifies you, and trying to swim through the river upstream to get away from it, because downstream is the unknown. But upstream is the familiar. Stagnant, but familiar.

Well, eventually I began to face the water in that bowl. I sat with it, and let it fill the bowl up. Then I came up with the idea of pouring the bowl into the river and letting it flow down.

What did that achieve? All those negative feelings that flowed down the river always came back. They're never gone for good. But when I allow them to flow, the river cleanses and processes them, so I can heal from them. When I ran away from them, all it did was cause the bowl to overflow and drown me in misery.

​One day, I thought to take it a step further...

Not just to allow my emotions to flow down the river, but myself as well. To descend into the unknown.

What I found on the other side was scary. So many things I kept bottled up for what must have been my whole life. It literally felt like I was being assaulted by demons and evil entities. It hurt, I was in anguish.

But I pushed through it. No, I flowed through it.

I couldn't shake the feeling that trudging through my darkness, through my personal hell would be eventually be worth it. There had to be something on the other side. There had to be.

And then I see it...

Many buffalo grazing in a vast open green valley, with mountains in the distance under a pure blue sky.

(I'm not just being flowery, this is literally what I saw.)

I felt like for the first time ever, I found the real world within my mind. One that was no longer clouded by despair and misery and self-loathing and doubt and fear and hatred.

For many more months, I continued to meditate, to discover my true self. It was all I could do. I had no friends to go to anymore, no job or hobbies to keep me busy, I had nothing... and I came to see the beauty in that. The beauty of having nothing, of being Nothing.

I discovered a Void within myself. A place where nothing mattered, no one could hurt me, judge me, love me, disappoint me. An empty, perfect place of nothingness. To this day I return to the Void to experience true beauty.

And just when I thought I'd seen it all, I found something else within my soul, 

a child.

During one guided meditation video, the narrator in the video prompted me to imagine a child, but not just any child. 

Me. Myself, back when I was a child.

I recalled a framed photo of myself that hung up in my parent's home. It was me no older than six years old wearing a black t-shirt with a picture of a dinosaur skeleton and I was blowing on a dandelion.

That was enough to send me to the verge of tears, but then the video prompted me to go up to my child self and give him a hug. Intense emotions welled up in me when I heard this, and I did just that. I went up to little Zealot and gave him a hug. And then I said something to him that was more powerful than any words I had ever heard or spoken in my entire life:

"It's okay. I'm here now."

We broke down crying together. 

And what made this moment all the more powerful and liberating was only moments later, the voice in the video told me to do exactly what I had already done, give my child-self words of comfort. Tell him what I know he needs to hear.

It was so empowering that I on my own had the wisdom to do something that someone else had already thought of. 

I did that, all on my own.

And my journey continues.

I still struggle, I still feel sadness and loss, I'm still physically disabled. But now I can face my life with so much more strength and power and gentleness and wisdom than I have ever done.

I realized I still had people who cared about me, I had just been ignoring them because my ego drove me to people who I WANTED, not who I needed.

I still had friends who were always there, I just wasn't noticing them. I still had family who cared for me, and actually I began to realize how much I was worrying them because of how closed off I had been.

I began to see the world, and the people and things within it for what they were. Without me in the picture. 

Realizing that the universe doesn't revolve around me, in a positive or negative way, it just is. Everything is just existing, and that's all it needs to do or will ever do, nothing can change that.

Now, I can appreciate life for what it really is. I can accept that I am Nothing, and that is exactly how it should be. There is no shame in that, because Nothing is Everything, Everything is Nothing.

Watch this video for another beautiful meditation experience I had: