It is my birthday, so I need to get all gushy again.

I have had more than half a bottle of prosecco. Also here is a photo of Professor Flapjacks with a little crown on.

It's always very hard to express what it means to me to be where I am now. So I'll try to wax lyrical a moment.

Since I was little, I wanted to entertain. I didn't really care if it was through acting, music, or artwork - I just wanted to do it. When I left college, I was full of a million ideas. Then I met and fell in "love" with the wrong person, and lost all my drive. He took it from me, he told me I was an attention-seeker. He would often scoff at the fact that I was doing a degree in Drama (which, by the way, is an utterly useless degree. I recently tried to apply to Spotlight, and they don't care if you have a BAhons in Drama. So that's loan money well spent.)

  In any case, my dreams were dead even after me and that person parted ways. I fell into SEO work, and I did really enjoy it to be honest. But I stopped enjoying it after about two years, following a traumatic event which absolutely floored me for a year. Hearing my workmates complain about me showing up late, probably still stinking of wine, hurt. But I couldn't tell them what had happened - and I couldn't tell them that I was not doing what I wanted to do with my life, because that tends not to go down well with employers and also I had bills. 

  I thought moving to London would sort me out. I LOVED my job there, I really did. But then yet another traumatic event hit me, a couple of months after I moved there. And I didn't address it, I just tried to forget it. Which meant that slowly, I started to get shit at my job. 

  It's one thing knowing what you are talking about; I had an encyclopedic knowledge about SEO. I knew exactly what to do, when to do it. I knew what data to compile, how to run a bunch of formulas in Excel. But knowing is one thing - doing it is another. 

  I remember spending an entire day at my desk doing absolutely nothing. My to-do list piled on and on. And I kept saying to myself "I just need a coffee, I just need to go have a cig, I'll go chat to my flatmate and then I'll knuckle down and get this done." But it never got done.

  Anxiety was what made me lose that job, but it was anxiety which came from the incidents in the previous years, plus the knowledge that I was getting older and had still not even brushed the entertainment industry I really wanted to step into.

  So I suppose the mental breakdown at work was kind of a blessing. I lost my career that I had worked so hard for, but I also put on stupid cat ears and filmed myself playing a shitty game. Just to have...something that was what I wanted to do, in-between all the job applications and the trying to convince my flatmate I wasn't going to top myself while she was at work.

  The road to where I am now has not been easy. I will be the first to admit that I take things to heart too much. There have been certain incidents while I have been Octavius which utterly fucked me up. To the point where, honestly, I thought I would never come back. But I don't really care that much about my subscriber count to be honest. What counts to me is that I have supporters who are genuinely invested in me - Octavius, and Sarah - and that is what keeps me going. 

  I was accepted onto a Masters course at Cambridge University this last month, and honestly - I would NEVER have even bothered applying if it weren't for you lot. I've spent about ten years thinking of applying, never believing I would even get past the first stage. You have changed my life.

  Well, here I am - feeling a bit old, and drunk, sat writing a gushy post on social media. And I'm not even mad. Don't get me wrong, if it weren't for Coronavirus I would be dancing in a pub right now - but this is nice. 

  Alright, you beautiful bastards. Here's to another year?

  Oh also, stay tuned - I'm making another non-retro gaming channel and you are going to be my guinea pigs for it, if that's okay. 

  I will be on Twitch today at 9.30pm (August 7th) doing a birthday stream, opening cards etc. Hope to see you there. If not, keep being a beautiful bastard, okay?

  Sarah xxx