Hey. My name isn't really Perri Rheyan. It's actually Amity Blight.
Just kidding. But I might as well not be. Because she and I are exactly the same.
Amity has perfectionism issues. Amity hears echoes of people telling her what to do and think they were just spoken. Amity works so hard to do well, and then hates the abomination she creates. Amity is scared of what she feels and how she feels.
Amity lets that get to her head when it doesn't actually exist. No one is demanding anything anymore. It's just echoes.
I am Amity Blight in every sense but literal. I made a Tumblr account. At first I wrote this essay/meta/analysis about how Amity and her crush/the main character, Luz, have the same motives but different ways of achieving them. Then I analyzed the lighting, and while it only has 600 notes, people keep bringing it up. I wrote about Luz and Amity's love languages and got 1000; and someone else rewrote/continued the analysis and got 2000 notes. Then I kept analyzing, and making memes, because I go from comic relief to introspective faster than Amity fell for Luz.
Now people know me. On that post that continued mine, someone tagged me because they knew that it was me who said that. People go into my ask box (like an anonymous mailbox) to update me on canon's interpretation of a cursed joke ship I made between Amity and the character I hate most. People are conspiring to get notes on a joke post that I thought wouldn't. 100 notes on a post is normal.
And people...they expect things from me. I have to post to YouTube at a certain time, or else no one cares. I have to post to Tumblr at a certain time, or else no one cares. I have to ride the wave but I can't be late to it or else I'll drown.
And now I'm late to it. There used to be one other Owl House Crack channel worth watching. Now there are so many. And I'm not one of them.
I don't know what to do. I want to rest. I want to stop. I want to lay in my bed and read Percy Jackson while listening to Julia Michaels all day tomorrow. I want to cry. I want to have a crush on someone unattainable. I want to draw for fun, not for something people want. I want my heart to beat slowly. I don't want to laugh. I want to look at something beautiful and pick out every little piece of tragedy and focus on it until the beauty fades.
But I can't.
I have projects to make. I have people to impress. I'm popular. I'm the queen bee in a cult of people. I'm the funniest and the prettiest and the smartest and the most social, all at once.
I don't know why anyone tries to be famous. No, I do. I've been there. People think that fame will make up for how misunderstood they are. But it doesn't. All that happens is that people notice you and ask you for things. People might say they enjoy your content but they don't enjoy you, not really.
And it's not like loyal fans make it better. If someone watches every video I post, it feels like cheating. Like yeah, that's a loyal fan. It doesn't reflect how well I did.
But strangers reflect how well I did. And it's always not good enough.
"Say you love me more than you did before." That's the demand. It's not enough to be loved. I need to be loved more. It needs to mean something. I give, so I get, right?
Fame is selfish. Fame is insecure. Fame brings out the worst in all of us and destroys the best. I don't understand why I can't just create, why there has to be this demanding and expecting and asking. I wish I could create, and people could enjoy, and there wasn't this pressure, this need for more.
I wish I couldn't count it. That there wasn't that video with 120,000 views, which I'll never achieve. That there wasn't that one fan who commented within seconds of me releasing a new video, who isn't there anymore.
I can't enjoy content like I used to. Before, it was just about sharing ideas. Now, I see people saying the same thing I did, and I question. Did that person read what I wrote and repost to another app? Did that person just beat me to it? Why is someone else saying the same thing I did? Did I mess up? Did they?
I'm like Amity because I'm insecure and use arbitrary numbers beyond my control to gauge my worth.
Also, Amity has Luz. Luz, who forgives her when she messes up. Even when Amity burned Willow's memories and destroyed her personality, Luz forgave her. She wasn't mad.
I blocked someone on Tumblr because they said something that made me cry. She reached out to me via her friend. Then she asked if I was okay. And she believed in me, even though the first thing I did was attack her. She forgave me. Even though I tried to make her my enemy, she tried to make me her friend.
There are so many people out there like Luz. And I forget that the majority of those people are the people who enjoy my art.
Anyways. I hate numbers, I hate fame, I hate attention, I hate demands, I hate all of this and I just want it to go away. I got 1000 followers on Tumblr and want to get rid of every last one of them.
And that's because I forget that they're just people, too.
