Cozy Creators

The comments section under any post, picture, sound-byte, or video, is a wild place filled with varying levels of insanity. There are kind souls praising the ‘content’ and thanking the creators, and attention-seekers with divisive or inflammatory opinions. There are useless copies of ‘first!’ and memes that bring nothing to the conversation. There are doomers who take every opportunity to point out every negative – or conspiratorially *possible* negative – perceived throughout their supposed experience, whether they actually read, watched, or listened to the thing they’re commenting on or not.

Then there’s a special brand of comment which is both incredibly depressing and somehow uplifting at the same time – a type of comment I’ve generally considered to be attention-seeking and pointless among the typo’d masses. These comments are usually some kind of variation on this:

Thank you <creator> your videos helped me get through a very hard time. This year I <insert a long and winding story that shares too much personal information and often includes sensitive topics around depression, financial hardship, grief, breakups, and every other sad thing that might come to mind>

There’s no way of knowing if any of those comments are genuine, and they’re rarely acknowledged by the creators in question, so these comments come across as another form of attention-seeking spam. At least that’s what I thought.

But recently, I’ve almost left some similar comments myself.

I’ve made no secret in my blog that the past few years have been unkind. My health tanked, I lost people, I had to fight with my brain because it decided to be ill as well. I’ve made progress in recovering, but I’m not at the end of that road yet. I still have plenty of bad days where motivating myself to do literally anything other than laying in bed is an effort.

One would think that watching TV is a zero-effort activity, but one would be wrong. Maybe it was so back when people had cable and you just turned on a channel and left it, but in our modern age my primary video service is YouTube. I have to find something to watch. I have to be in the mood for it. 90% of my subscriptions up until recently were science feeds and sketch comedy, and sometimes that’s just not what I’m up for.

What am I up for when I’m sick? As it turns out, when I’m at my worst I can soothe anxiety and negative thoughts with ASMR from Gibi ASMR and Coromo Sara ASMR, When I’m feeling dull and bored I love to watch DIY videos from Evan And Katelyn or the silly improv from RageGamingVideos. When I go to these channels and put on a video it’s like I’ve pushed back dark clouds and I can just relax and enjoy something for a while without thinking too hard.

If I didn’t have these creators and their videos to lean on over the past year and a half, I’d have spent a lot more time in darker places, with more stress and anxiety and time wasted laying in bed to try to escape it all. These have been my ‘cozy creators’ lately, as I binged and rewatched their video libraries to keep myself afloat.

I still feel like leaving a comment on their videos would seem attention-seeking and somehow cringe. I don’t know if a blogpost is more cringe. I just know one person’s creativity has the power to carry others through the worst of their lives, whether they realize it or not.