Today marks 10 years on Newgrounds for me and a turning point in the trajectory of my life. Unfortunately half of that time spent has been the absolute worst years of my life; Newgrounds has thankfully been a light in the darkness for me. There's a reason I never left the community and the occasional meetups literally give me life. I'm an insomniac and an extrovert so I pretty much only have energy around others. 10 years is too big an anniversary to avoid and I been meaning to bump the PICO DAY NJ 2024 newspost off my main page so people would stop being confused by it having already happened. Although I'm writing this newspost with the knowledge I might delete this for being too depressing because writing it all down is more for me anyway.

I am miserable. I have no energy most days and the drive to create is minimal meanwhile my OCD physically prevents me from doing 90% of the activities I enjoy. I got really into wiki editing this year because it's one of the few tasks that give me an endorphin boost while still being done on this $120 budget laptop. From September to September I don't think I drew a single thing on tablet or on paper. I have no joy partly because there's only ~7 hours a week I have any sort of free time where I can touch my desktop computer and personal belongings. Some people who dont like me might celebrate my misery or chock it up to the way I act, the things I say or who I am inside, but really those are the things keeping me alive like a loose strand tethering me to life. My personality, behavior, and quirks you may find frustrating are not the cause of my problems(to my detractors dismay I'm sure). My problems are purely chemical(my brain juices) and emotional: only a handful of people alive on earth have any sort of influence that runs deep enough to impact my emotional stat. Chances are the only people reading this don't fit into that category of friend.

I used to recap each year, longer and longer each time with a posted publishing date later and later. It was a tradition that made sense with the timing of my account's creation date. Problem is I've run out of positives to say, I don't want to be an entirely negative presence in my friends' minds(who wants to spend time with that guy), and I truly wish there were no additional years of my story for me to recount. I wish I died a long time ago, at the very least before Bandit died would be nice. I died with Bandit in 2023, we're just waiting for my death to take effect on this walking corpse. I attempted to kill myself in the early hours of July 1st 2024(honestly wish I'd done it sooner), and I'm hesitant to say it, but 2025 is a contender for the worst year of my life(yes, I wanted to die long before losing my job and my repeated homelessness. Now it's all just icing on the shit cake while god keeps "Job-ing" me).

I possess an alphabet soup of acronyms and disorders, not the least of which is also classified as a disability, but 12 months deep I still cant get disability from the government, collect unemployment, or qualify for foodstamps to ease my financial situation. Severe OCD already takes up 80% of my waking hours, but that's just a fifth of what I have to deal with every day and speaks nothing to my budget(OCD cleaning supplies are expensive, for a year my food budget was $30/week because all my cleaning crap and hazardous chemicals was nearly $600/month). Of course the gofundme support was incredibly heartwarming even though that money barely covered half the expenses I was facing at the time and has been long-depleted for months now. I'm actively trying to be close my savings account due to insufficient funds because after I dropped below $400 USD they wanna hit me with fees til 400 turns to 0. I've literally never had less money than any other point in my life, even as a baby. Shoutout to @Droid and his family for literally increasing my net worth by 50% with the money they gave me in a christmas card.

Those of you who know me from hosting meetups like Pico Day 2024, the Summer Animation Jams, collabs, tankmas, and so many other things that people regularly forget I do... you may know that I really don't care about having or making money. The only reason I ever got a job back in highschool was to make enough scratch to go out to lunch with my friends. That's it, and honestly that's still true even to this day! Even if I should really be more concerned about acquiring money for @Droid's sake because I still eat food and need supplies to cope with my OCD, cleaning is expensive.

There is rarely ever a moment where I'm laughing, smiling, or crying that I would not rather be dead instead. At any given moment I choose death. Unless I'm behind the wheel, responsible for others' lives, I am ready to die at any moment. My therapist still has trouble wrapping his head around "I really wish I was dead right now" with a smile on my face. I yearn for nothingness, the blackness, total lack of an afterlife because baby I just wanna shut down entirely. I crave non-existence. I'm not interested in continuing life, but the two most important people in the world both made me promise to not kill myself, so we're still here, continuing to pray for the off-road semi-truck collision.

I'm hesitant to call 2025 the worst year of my life because nothing can compare to the death of Bandit, my boy. I won't disrespect him by saying anything else amounts to the same level of soul-crushing pain as his death brought me(I don't think I'll ever fully process my grief). I also don't want to make those who earnestly have been supporting me throughout this year feel dejected at their efforts. The strangers who message me more often than any actual "friends" do mean well, but I'm just beyond that level of help. My goal is not to make anyone feel bad for their efforts, those of which I treasure; I'm just chronically sad, I have manic depression, and I've never been interested in burying the truth under a smile. I'm too lazy for that kind of dishonesty.

I want to talk to my best friend more than anything. That title of "best friend" has changed hands several times throughout my life. I firmly believe "best" implies there can only be one at a time and eventually I always seem to be let down when it really counts(not in small way). She promised 100% honesty with me and she said she'd make an effort to reach out to me more. Considering how much she hates my childhood best friend, Kirk, for his continual absence in my life I really thought she'd be right about herself being different... I've never been more alone even in the presence of others.

The night/morning I was gonna kill myself by driving 90mph into a cement wall I was surrounded by newgrounders and friends that whole day, we had a great time, but every second I still needed to die. I wanted to leave the party, irish-goodbye like my boy @IvanAlmighty, but instead I'd get straight to dying "on my way home" from the office so that I'd never have to go home. The two people I value most, they both called me, stayed on call with me the whole 2.5 hour drive approaching 5am; they wouldn't let me go through with it and knew I wouldn't dare while they were on call with me. Whether I needed them or just wanted them there... all I can say for sure is that I truly love them both more than you can probably understand, in a way I don't have to pretend to understand. It's been one year and 12 days since I last saw @ellsketchlr in-person: that is solely why I'm tempted to call 2025 the worst year of my life. She's not in it.

I have trouble with some level of facial blindness: I haven't heard her voice in months and I struggle to picture her appearance in my head. Like I'm a stranger to my best friend(one time I didn't recognize Kirk calling out to me at our local grocery store simply because I hadn't seen him in a month and didn't recognize him). I know how small it all sounds, but that's a failure on my part. Words coming from me: no matter how many, no matter what language, I will never properly elicit the same depth of emotion that tethers me to this world, in writing. I'm a cocky writer, but I know my limits, so I'll have to leave it at that. You don't have to believe the world I live in exists for it to be reality. All you have to understand is that ell is my world and with 24 hours on the clock I will have soon managed to live the full year of 2025 outside of it.

The advice I'd give to suicidal friends in the past was always a message about starting over, found family vs. blood relatives, or restarting life somewhere else, or "death is the end, so please do anything but kill yourself". This doesn't work on someone like me because that nothingness is all I crave. Absence of consciousness. I wrote a suicide note in 2023 that's still remains evergreen even if I don't change a single word of it, which is something that I find incredibly sad.

Why share all of this? Same reason as always, total honesty all the time, it's just easier and it always has the chance to make one more person feel less alone. I should probably stop caring about all that junk if I'm looking for exit strategies, but I'm too unwavering in my stupid stringent principles. If you're worried about me as a stranger then you'll just have to trust I'm not going to kill myself for an equally unbelievable and stupidly stubborn reason: I made a promise to ell and cym.

I cant help myself, I enjoy helping others so much I accidentally started a small support campaign for newgrounds on twitter instead of writing this. I couldn't pull away the entire day just because it meant I'd be writing for myself, writing this.

Writing this? All I feel is guilt. Not for whining or oversharing or some other third thing, but because I spent time, maybe an hour, putting words to feelings instead of looking for a job, calling my lawyer about disability updates, applying to supportive housing programs, helping out with ODDCORE, or moderating the @NGZ, etc. Practical things that involves me lessening the burden on the lives of others. Talking about how I feel to the only person who'll listen, ...myself, is simply not important in the face of everything else I should be doing, however limited.

To those of you who met me in 2025... sorry you have to interact with this shell-of-a-corpse(if you were one of the ~60 portfolio reviews I did in November after @NGZ rejection emails I hope I came off peppy on call). Sorry you have to put up with a bootleg of the person I was before. I'd like to say "I'll be on my way" soon, but knowing my luck god won't be doing the act for me and I'm not allowed to do it myself anymore :/

It's just no way to live. Truth is I don't even wanna get better. I'm proudly a lazy person and just the supposition of "getting better" is climbing Everest to me. I'd very much like the fastpass to the soil instead please.

-brandon

(the most wonderful collage of art and memories by @ellsketchlr)