Exactly one year ago I returned to Mexico from my memorable trip to the UK. I haven't talked much about it in my videos, but I have indeed gone into detail through this blog a few times in the past. However, I don't think I have properly talked about it. To my readers and subscribers, I want to share this little story with you since I don't think I can explain it the same way as I would do in a video.
Around September, 2013, I was still a reseller and had my own small shop in a kiosk. I had three shortfilms published (you can watch them in my channel and probably my next post will be about that) and one book published. No success in either of them. Praise was there, so very present like a singing voice in my head, but alas, the idiocy and immaturity of youth made me realize that success was aeons apart from my life. People had liked my work and they were recommending it. Nevertheless, such recommendations never got far at all.
Robert Smith said: "the further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get." I listened to those words while in England and they rang through my ears until they bled with truth. I learned that I was a minuscule dot with very little success, but that little success was beyond what millions of people could ever imagine.
Ah, but like I said, I was young and unwise. I wanted to escape, I wanted to pursue success like all those characters from all those books and movies once did. I hated my country because I was convinced it was full of ignorant people. Non-readers. Nobody would ever appreciate my art as I deserved. Arrogance, yes, I was so full of it. And since I've always known that evil is born from ignorance, I concluded that I was going to literally die if I kept living here. So back then, 2013, I decided to sell out all my merchandise, return to living with my parents for a few months while I planned my trip to Canada.
I even wrote a book as a CV, you know? Terra Gaiden. Yes, the book I've been promoting in some of my posts and videos? That's the one. However, to get to Canada, back then the embassy required a visa for us, even as a tourist. My plan was to pretend that I was going to study English for three months while in reality I was going to look for a job and take my new book to publishers.
I don't want to get into that because this post would then be very, very long. For those who don't know it yet, my visa was denied and, therefore, my plans, my dreams, my hopes went straight to hell. Nonetheless, I never felt bad back then; I had come to a realization during the waiting process (waiting for my visa) in which I convinced myself that I first had to give my country a chance. I needed to publish more books and promote them, sell them, to give readers the opportunity to know my work because I knew there were people who would like it. Who would understand it and appreciate it here.
Visa denied, trip destroyed, I found my way through anime conventions and stayed here in my country. In Mexico. Regained my shop at the same kiosk in the same mall. I did a breakthrough; a great return to business. People began buying my books at conventions and soon, I realized that my visa had been denied by destiny for a very good reason.
Success evenually came to me as years went by, but I never felt satisfied. I wanted more. I wanted more readers, more money, more success. I got ambitious and over that intrincate ambition, I realized that, despite what little success I was having as a writer, it still wasn't enough to aim for a true goal. A goal in which I saw myself making a living out of my writing.
YouTube returned to my life after I had completely abandoned it. After I had stopped promoting my shortfilms. I was very knowledgeable in JRPGs so I thought I would start making video-reviews, funny reviews actually, in a poor attempt to imitate the Angry Video Game Nerd. My reviews were going to be in Spanish. So I made a few and they made my friends laugh, I continued on and took on good JRPGs instead of bad ones. So I became an original YouTuber. But that's another story for another time; one that will, too, consume lots of time and words. The truth is, I failed again... My most popular review barely reached 1000 views while most of the rest didn't even reach 100.
"Fuck my life", I thought. "Fuck this country." I needed to get out. I had been wrong all along; I wanted to be a Mexican author in my own country, supported by my own people. And even though lots of them supported me, it was never enough to find true success and achieve my goal. So that little stitch started scratching again. That little hidden desire called freedom, obscured by hatred, masking sadness. I realized I needed to go away, this time to a country where I believed I would have a reasonable chance: England.
My sister was making her PHD there so that was my way-in card; I needed no visa, anything except my passport and my excuse for visiting my sister. So, once again, I sold out all my merchandise, sold all my furniture, got rid of my beautiful dog and partner, Raika, giving her away to my uncle who had a big business near the highway. He had another german shephard, a male one, so I knew she was going to be happy without me. It broke my heart to leave her, to part ways, but also to sell half my JRPG collection, my furniture and everything that I had worked so damn hard to achieve. And I knew it. Yes; I knew what I had. I knew I had something big, worthy of fighting for, worthy of protecting. But my twisted anger, my hatred towards my own country and its ignorant, evil people, finally got the best of me.
I arrived at London, UK on January 9th, 2017. Over three years after my failed attempt to reach Canada. I then took a train to Nottingham, where my sister lived, and had one of the most frustrating, tiresome, anxious and horrible times of my life that I now see as a dorky adventure to tell other people. I couldn't live with my sister since she lived in a small, rented room, so I had to find my own room. I went from hotel to hotel, from place to place during two whole weeks, all this while doing some tiresome and cold tourism. Finally, an acquantaince of an acquaintance of my sister (true story), offered me a room inside one of those buildings with tons of rooms they rent to students. "Fuck me", I thought. "I'm gonna live with a bunch of fucking millennials." But I had no other choice; no one would rent a room to me, for a decent price, without a job... I was only "a tourist" looking for an opportunity in literature. So I moved in to that atrocious place that I will never, ever forget.
I had a good time as much as a bad time in that building, don't take me wrong. Lots of positive things happened to me while I was there; cool experiences. I met some cool people. But all of them were millennials in the end. To date, I don't feel like I met the right people or made the right contacts. I did meet some other people outside the building, at bars and all sorts of places, but no one who could really connect me to the literature business. There was an old independent writer I was introduced to by a new friend I met at a pub, but he had it worse then I did. And THAT is what made me opened my eyes. It was a shocking revelation, for sure, but from that point onward, I realized that writers in England were in the exact same situation as me. By talking to new people, researching on the Internet and over-thinking things, I understood that I hadn't planned a true strategy for my trip. It all had been for nothing.
It was at my time there, a few months later after going through several failures which included me not being able to do any business (reselling videogames in Nottingham is useless), my bank card was banned, so eBay or Amazon were out of the question, my literature career was more stuck than ever, just like the one from all those independent writers in England, that I realized that I was lost. Finally, I resigned to search for a job...but it was to no avail; nobody needed help, and nobody wanted to hire a tourist. Or "couldn't". I tried my best and wasted all my savings by trying to come up with a better strategy, but I was only prolonging the inevitable; I was going to run out of money in no time and I was going to have to return to Mexico. To the place where all my dreams seemed so non-existent. So far away.
I ran out of money. I was a 31 year old man who had lived many successes and failures through his life, so accepting my harsh reality was no big deal. Of course, deppression came afterwards. I returned to my country with a big smile on my face, happy to see friends and family, to live with my parents once again, but broken on the inside.
Broken. Yes. A few days later upon my return, my dad called me to say that my uncle had called him...saying that Raika, my dog, had been killed in an accident. Now I was shattered. Shattered to pieces, with no future, with no career, with nothing at all. I tried coming back to the reselling business but nothing worked. I saved what little money I had left to buy merchandise and re-open another kiosk at the same mall I had worked in for so long. I did it and I was happy for a while, but time went on and a few months later I was broke. My shop had failed. Anime conventions were now just a few per year, since two big organizations had screwed up and were now sinking ships. Years before, there used to be 6 to 8 anime conventions per year. Now, there's only 2 in my city. I worked hard with a YouTube channel with one of my best friends, in Spanish of course, but that didn't work either. In the end, I was left with one single option and if that didn't work... I thought I was going to literally give up.
It sounds stupid to say this but YouTube saved me. I revived my old Erick Landon channel and this time I decided to do top 10s, in English, about JRPGs. It was a slow process but success was there; people began watching my videos, commenting on them, giving me feedback, supporting my channel. I started earning very little revenue out of it, but hey, it was something. I felt relieved. I felt that I did have another chance and that I had finally found my way after all that shitstorm I had gone through. I was, maybe, or temporarily, saved.
Today, I have 2,600 subscribers, some of my videos have over 20k views and some older top 10s from many years ago have between 300k and 750k views. I still have a long way to go before I can make truly a decent income, but for now I'm earning enough to help pay my bills and support my parents, paying my stay. I'm still a videogame reseller and I'm on the Internet for now, but two good proposals have been made to me for working again on a shop. I'm doing good.
As for my writing, I can't say the same thing, unfortunately, but I know that if I keep trying my best, eventually readers and subscribers will start trying my books and buy them. Hopefully, by the end of the year, I will be back to that strong, stable life I had before my hatred got the best of me, almost two years ago. I want my life back, not because I failed both in England and Mexico, not because I realized that I had lost something very important and hard to maintain, but because I need to start chasing my dreams again. I need a better strategy, a mature one this time, so I can one day pursue my career once again, this time without fear, without immaturity and without hatred.
I have to keep trying my best in order to achieve my dreams. That's what maybe the whole trip to England was about; not to find success, but to find reality. A reality that I had been running away since many years ago. You cannot, and let me stress it out, CANNOT pursue your dreams in a fantasy. You have to take the hard way, the long, hard road through hell, through reality, to achieve them. Sometimes, people are going to help you, but in the end it'll just be you and your victory over life.
I apologize if this story took too long, almost to write a whole damn book with it, but seriously, I just wanted you to read it to see for yourself what kind of dreams and hopes do you have, and how are you going to achieve them. Life is hard, so brutally hard, and even if everybody knows that, not everybody lives it. I have lived it and I have enjoyed it and suffered it. And boy, I still have a long way to go.
Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. Thank you for reading me. Thank you for supporting me. I will keep trying my best, doing videos, writing books and growing up as a human being. After all, that's what life is all about anyway.
See you next time.
