Thread by @Gameonysus

How I went from teaching to games media (a thread until I write it for @GameInd_Guides)

I had already been writing, podcasting, & doing YouTube for about 2-3 years but I didn’t have anything set up tbh. I didn’t even have money saved. I just realized my plan wasn’t working.

https://twitter.com/clickstix/status/1502304791564894211

I wanted to grow my games career big enough to comfortably switch over but during my first year of FT teaching I realized I had no time to do the work I needed to do to grow my games career. I was also exhausted and frustrated.

Teaching is too important and hard to cut corners on so I had so little left to give to games media which sucked because I did realize games media was my north star. Not teaching. So I was like well wtf am I doing here? This plan isn’t working for me and I am unhappy.

I really felt like I was in a bad situation in the sense that I didn’t have games media $ to comfortably quit but that I wasn’t going to get that $ UNTIL I quit. It would’ve been smart to save for a year first but I was like Fuck it. I don’t care. And my credit score paid dearly.

weeks before my job ended I was still only making like $100 max a month (for several articles mind you). I got lucky & landed a gig writing news just before I quit for $500 a month (100 articles a month YIKES but at the time I just needed $ for work in my field & that was rent).

I put $0 aside for taxes that first year but hey I really wasn’t making much. By the time my freelance career went FT I was only making about $1,000 a month on a good month. I constantly owed my brother money from earlier months. My credit cards were maxed or closed.

Eventually I will do an article and this because there is a lot of nuance here, plenty of luck, a lot of crunch and exploitation, etc. I don’t outright recommend how I did what I did but it was my experience.

You may be asking yourself well what would you have done if IGN didn’t hire you: I guess we’ll never know. 😉

No but Tbh I did have a plan for that. The plan was to give it my all and keep my brother posted (we lived together) and when *he* felt like it was time to quit to get a “real job” I would. We based that on “I am dead broke and nothing can save me” NGL I wanted to quit.

I went to Edwin a few times with my finances like “surely this is time to quit. I am constantly short on rent. I can’t afford anything and work all day. It’s over” and he was always like “not yet.” He saw something I couldn’t and that was my biggest privilege.

Ps. When I say I wanted to quit I mean I wanted to get a regular job to help with my bills. I still wanted to do the content thing. But that would be adding another barrier to me getting what I really wanted so we were trying to avoid that as we already saw it didn’t work.

Also eventually when I actually do a blog post on this I’ll break down all the numbers for you. I did have my final check from teaching which I made go VERY far but also my finances are more warning that rec. I was an idiot w/ money until a few years ago and I’m still recovering.

When you take a reckless/uniformed college kid, graduate, add some bad luck, and then top things off with switching to pursue one of worst paying white collar industries you end up with 2/3 closed credit cards and a credit score in the 500s.