🦆 Letting Go

(very emotional)

If the name PlatinumGuard means anything to you, you may continue reading. Otherwise, I give you permission to skip this post. If you don’t already know that name but you’re still reading, here is some background information: PlatinumGuard was the name of my first YouTube channel which I quit about one year ago.

Kind of recently, I made a community post on PlatinumGuard, updating the now non-existent PlatinumGuard community about my whereabouts. In the post, I linked a new channel I was working on and also this newsletter, but I shortly deleted the post. I had quit and didn’t ever plan on returning, but somehow updating everybody not as PlatinumGuard, but as Gary, felt like finally putting away PlatinumGuard for good, and I felt uneasy about that.

I realized something that day: more than a year had passed, and I was still holding on to the persona of PlatinumGuard. It makes sense though, because for almost three years of my life, I lived on the internet, and on the internet, I was PlatinumGuard. There were days I’d practically skip my schoolwork altogether to play UHC and make videos. I can’t exactly pinpoint when it started happening, but during the ninth grade people found out about my YouTube channel. I do know who it was that first found out about my channel at high school, but there is no point of saying their names. Anyways, soon enough people started calling me PlatinumGuard or PlattyG on a regular basis and I haven’t been able to shake it off ever since.

I recall when not many people knew about the channel, I was walking down the crowded third floor hall transitioning from period C to D. Someone who I wasn’t really friends with yet shouted out, “PlattyG! PlattyG!” I was a lot of things in that moment; I was confused, embarrassed, and PlatinumGuard. Once again, not Gary. Somehow, not even a year into school, and a handful of people knew me as PlatinumGuard. That part of me I wanted to hide, managed to enter high school. Turns out, somebody had been sending my videos in a Discord server that was quite large. But soon after, I didn’t mind getting called by my internet name in real life. I thought it was funny, it was respect, or something. But all of this makes sense: I’m 16 years old, I did the channel for about three years, meaning basically 1/5 of my life has been spent being a chubby, green, pixelated duck. So of course I was used to people calling me PlatinumGuard. That’s just who people saw me as, at least I thought.

That day I made that community post, was the day I realized that it’d be best to fully let go of those three years of my life. I’ve changed all my usernames from PlatinumGuard. I’ve signed out of the account. I’ve stopped checking those comments asking where I am. To conclude, Next person to call me PlattyG or PlatinumGuard in real life is getting shot.