Hello, my name is Marshall, more commonly online known as SirFlynn1 and this is my YouTube story. First off let me give you a little back story from my school days. From an early age, I was always a bigger guy which lead to being picked on by so many people. Over time it became so bad that by the time I was a teenager, I had developed Depression issues, Anxiety, and other mental health issues. The teasing got so bad that I have had issues with suicide attempts and have been emitted to a mental hospital on multiple occasions. And it seemed that the more upset I would get, the more enjoyment the people making fun of me got. It was very hard for me to deal with these issues, not having many friends all I had was video games to escape one reality into another. It was great but it didn't always fix my problems, but then I picked up my first instrument and my whole world changed for a while. More and more people were listening to me play and I started gaining more friends, but only temporarily. As time progressed I started to realize that not everyone was as cool as they seemed to be in front of me, but there were a few "good" friends that actually stuck around and supported what I did which helped with my mental issues, and it introduced me to the best feeling in the world, making people laugh. Whenever we would hang out, I would always make the group laugh and seeing everyone smile and be happy made me feel incredible, the feeling was indescribable. And from then on I tried all the time to make people smile and laugh, whether it was at work or with friends. Their happiness equaled my happiness. It helped so much with my depression and I rarely thought about suicide. I wanted to be alive and make people laugh, I wanted to make people happy, but like they say, all good things come to an end, and they did. As we got older, my friends all branched off into their lifestyle paths and we stopped talking as much and then eventually all together. Here I was again with no social circle and my depression and suicidal thoughts were as bad as ever. I still had my video games but it only helped so much, but then one day something interesting happened. I was in an Xbox live party playing Halo, and I was going on a goofy rant making everyone laugh and someone said, " Dude you should seriously make videos about this on YouTube". The year was 2008 and at the time I thought YouTube Gaming was used for Professionals like Machinima and other companies like that. Never did I consider that this could be an outlet to branch out to so many people to entertain and make them laugh, just like I had in school. So I bought a better computer and started making video game commentary videos on my very first channel. Now by all means they were not good videos at all but everyone who watched loved them and it boosted my confidence to keep going. By January 2016 I had grown to 500 subscribers and I had regulars that would always tell me how much I made them laugh and I knew everytime I was depressed or having bad thoughts, I could go to the community I had grown and read the comments to cheer me up, but then something terrible happend... again. When you grow on YouTube, you will gain followers and people that love your stuff, but you will also make enemies because you did something they didn't like or do something they wanted you to do. And someone went as far as to hack my account and delete my channel. I woke up and my entire channel, all my hard work, thousands of hours of editing, hundreds of videos, all of my comments, all of it was gone and there was no way of getting it back. Someone took one of my most prized passion projects and destroyed it. I was devastated, I went into a spiral that landed me back into the mental hospital. After I was released, I told my friends and followers who had my personal contact info about what happened and told them I was done, there is no way I could do YouTube again. But they would not let this happen, they spent days talking to me, telling me that I could still do it, they gave me the motivation to get back up and start over. If this was my passion and I wanted to be happy again, I couldn't let that one evil person win. So in March 2016 I started my new channel and now have 50 subs, 61 videos, and I am having more fun than ever. I recently Joined the Freedom network to join a community of people where I know its safe and full of people as motivated as I am. One day I hope to reach 500 subs again, but as long as one person is smiling, thats all that matters to me and it makes my day when I know I am doing that. Thank you so much for whoever read my story and I hope it helps motivate anyone who might have gone through a similar situation as me. Just remember everyone, keep your passions going and never give up no matter what anyone else says.
