NEVER GIVE UP. Kind of reminds me when I recently took the initiative in my own life and while I’m back to the drawing board I’m still glad I took a shot. I’m a relatively small NES streamer on Twitch who has been at it for about 5 years, I mostly do speedruns and while I’ll likely never be the hero in a Summoningsalt video I’ve been at this for years and am somewhat well known in the tight nit retro speedrunning community. I average around 20-60 viewers usually depending on the game and we’re kind of an extended family of sorts. I try to respond to everyone and answer every question about the game I’m playing the best I can.

One day while running a game I had a new viewer in chat ask me some really nuanced intelligent questions about my strategy and it turns out they’re just getting into speedrunning and since it was a favourite game growing up they decided it was a good place to start. I offered to hop on their stream the next week and offer some casual coaching if they wanted and they said that would be fantastic and they ended up subbing! After my stream was over I checked out their page and clicked on a Vod and instead of the usual 30-40 something schmo like me it was one of the most beautiful women I had ever laid eyes on in my life.

Won’t get too specific but she had incredibly kind eyes and kind of an alternative cyberpunky vibe yet very earthy and laid back. I thought I would just spend a minute or so fast forwarding through but ended up watching the whole vod and then the next one and before I knew it, it was 4 in the morning!

She ended up dm’ing me saying she was taking me up on the offer and if I was free the next day (OF COURSE!!!) and while I was incredibly nervous initially, since it it was a social situation where I was actually free to ramble about video games and get really into minutia instead of having to bother with “small talk” I was in my element, we had great chemistry off the bat and she genuinely laughed at my jokes and she’s a really quick learner and got way better at the game and was so thankful it was honestly one of the best experiences of my life.

I subbed to her channel and became one of her regulars in chat and unbelievably like me she only gets 30ish viewers a stream even though it should easily be thousands. While like me she’s really talkative with chat she’s also quite guarded as well, she basically never talked about her personal life, even what her IRL job was. The closest ever was when she streamed on Valentines day and made a lot of self deprecating jokes about how undateable she was, you guys are my valentines etc.

While I was incredulous and unattractive she seemingly saw herself I’m not going to lie that I could not have been more relieved to find out she wasn’t spoken for. With Covid and the lockdown I had endless free time and being admittadly somewhat obsessed with her by this point I decided to use my blackbelt in Google-fu to try to unravel the mystery that was “Sarah.”

She sometimes streamed WOW and said she’d been playing since she was a teenager and on a whim I searched her character names into google, got a few potential leads and using the wayback machine I was able to find archives her old blogs from the mid 2000’s that she had kept as a teenager.

Almost immediately I realized I had just found my Rosetta stone. She talked a lot about her nerdy obsessions, love of gaming etc. but also how apart that made her feel from everyone else and how she kind of used the internet and gaming as an escape. She wrote a lot about crushes she had but how he’d never in a million years notice her and how she wishes she could just be normal. She’d talk about what a fool she’d made of herself in class and would even come back to those “incidents” months later even though to me they always tended to be funny little slipups which probably no one else even noticed or remembered but her.

This led to her not trying anymore in school because she hated the attention doing well brought her, and a lot of kind of standard teenage acting out, which again she was way too hard on herself for.

Through all this I found myself thinking how much she could have used a mentor, if just one teacher had encouraged her and helped her to believe in herself how much happier she could have been. If only I could have helped her, if I could reach back in time….. She talked a lot about drawing in class instead of paying attention and I imagined myself as her classmate and noticing her drawing and telling her “wow, that’s really cool, you’re super talented!” and not letting her brush off praise and repeating how good she is and not selling herself short. Maybe I’m wearing a World of Warcraft shirt or some way of signalling my fellow nerd status and that makes her less guarded around me and we start up a friendship…

Well long story short, I ended up turning this into an “alternate timeline” blog of hers which started with her talking about this guy in class who was (blushes) kind of cute who noticed her drawings… and it gradually documents our friendship and yes… eventual relationship and the enormously positive effect it had on her. I’ve never had a girlfriend but am something of a hopeless romantic so it was really fun to think of cute romantic gestures and thoughtful little things I “did” to cheer her up, the inside jokes we developed together, our umm…. first time…. and uh other milestones lmfao. Don’t worry though, it wasn’t completely rosy and perfect. We have our fights and it becomes a running joke in our circle of friends that no one knows whether we’re on a break or not but we do end up going to the same university and getting married and in this timeline she’s a wildly popular streamer and “nerd influencer” on par with Felicia Day and I’m her doting husband who runs a cool indy gaming studio which of course has featured her voice acting talents and there may or may not be photoshopped pictures of our wedding and facebook posts with comments from our parents on how it was the most beautiful ceremony and…. well you get the picture.

Through all this I was a constant regular in her streams, had a few more coaching sessions and she was starting to get some recognition in the games niche community. She of course had no idea of my feelings for her, and even avoided jokingly flirting with her as many of the other male regs in chat often did.

Things were going great for awhile, but gradually I noticed a change in her, she joked less and would kind of zone out and not interact with chat for long stretches and through dm’s in her discord and Twitch whispers I knew the other guys were starting to worry as well. We ended up agreeing that the best thing we could do was just be there for her and not to pry and hope she turned around., and she’d open up if she needed help.

This ended up coming true in a big way on stream when after taking a death instead of insta resetting she just stared ahead and kind of held her forehead like she was having a headache before going “okay…” and she just started rambling about how stressed out she was with covid and quarantine and just all the issues she’s been having and how she kind of uses Twitch as an escape from everything and how she’s seeing all her old friends from highschool getting married and having kids and she hasn’t been on a date in years and she’s so sorry for putting this all on us but she feels in a weird way we’re one big dysfunctional family and she just kind of made a relieved sigh and laughed and said “okay back to the sub 15 minute grind!” and reset the NES and got back to gaming.

I could tell she was way more relaxed and carefree the rest of the stream but it still really bothered me to know she had all that stress and negativity towards herself still dominating her self image, and even though I couldn’t hop in a time machine to help her I would do anything I could in the present to let her know just how amazing she was and I let out a deep breath and hit “add to archive” on the folder with her alternate timeline blog and sent it to her in a DM on discord with the message “I’m just some random nerdy dude who barely knows you and this is the effect you’ve had on me. You have no idea how special you are, you contain the universe Sarah”

I was incredibly nervous but also shaking with happiness imagining her reactions and the range of emotions she must be feeling, wishing I could see her crack up with laughter and the inside jokes I created for us, just being amazed at the creativity she inspired and of course maybe rolling her eyes a bit at the melodrama of it all. I honestly didn’t know what to expect but then she wrote back rather quickly with “what in the fuck is all this? This is incredibly disturbing and obsessive” and I felt like I had just been punched in the stomach and realized I had ruined everything forever with her and felt the most negative wave of emotions possible once I realized how badly I had screwed up. I tried frantically messaging her back to apologize, trying to explain how it all happened and I realize now that I crossed a line…. But she basically just wrote to please leave her alone and then she tweeted that she needed to take a break from streaming and it’s been over a month and it’s been complete radio silence.

I realize now what an idiot was and just wish I could go back to the way things were but am worried I have scared her away forever and even worse I have taken away her Twitch Stream that meant so much to her. Even if I never communicate with her again I still wish she’d come back to streaming and that I’ll gladly leave her alone. Is there any way I can salvage things? I sent her a few quick whispers in the week after but no reply and I don’t want to freak her out further by leaving her dozens of increasingly apologetic messages.