March 20, 2025
3:00 AM
Good morning, my lovelies,
Welcome to my very first installment of the MentalBlah series. If I’m honest, writing this wasn’t planned at all. I’ve been in bed since 10:00 PM last night trying to sleep, and I failed. Mostly, I have been awake trying not to give in to my mildly anxious brain.
To give you a picture of where I am as I write this, let me go ahead and tell you the mental gymnastics my brain has been trying to work out. I can’t seem to secure a Sales Engineer job after six-plus months in the job market; the lease situation with my trifling ex-roommate/ex-friend is still dragging on; my parents are growing old, and the responsibilities that come with that; and lastly, personal finances as we speed towards a recession in the US. Funnily, these are all just my personal worries.
Don’t get me started on what is happening on a global scale every few days. I am overwhelmed with the news cycle at all times. Just to name a few that are consistently on my mind and on my news feed: the genocide of Palestinians, the famine in Congo, the rise of AI, the Nigerian economy, and Trump and his ICE task force. Since last year, I have had this strange feeling like we are slowly building towards another war or something. Honestly, in this day of nuclear warfare, do you ever think about how all it takes is just one government casting the first stone that breaks the proverbial glass house, and then we are off to the races? No?! Yeah… me either.
Oh, maybe you think about how across the world it feels like the cost of living everywhere is going up? Why are we all feeling strapped for basic needs, money, and resources? I know in the US that since COVID, people already began to recognize how little we are all being given in exchange for our labor, how the system keeps trying to pretend like it is not robbing us blind. That 1% is benefiting off of compliance and our continued acceptance of the status quo.
Oh? You don’t think about stuff like that as well? Well, I can’t pretend that my tiny little brain doesn’t experience an existential crisis every few weeks. She is always chewing through tough thoughts, which often regurgitate back up in the form of questions, confusion, and low-level anxiety. At the end of the day, it sometimes does feel like Mental Blah. You see where I got the name of this section from? Hehe.
Audacity
Anywhoooooo, you didn’t come here to hear me speak about my personal or existential worries. Well, maybe you did. Actually, I am not sure why you clicked on this post, but I’m glad you’re here. Now let’s pivot back to the topic at hand.
So, the title says it all. I, Tobi, want to learn how to have audacity. And just to make sure we are on the same page, I am pulling up the definition and clarifying that I want the first definition of ‘audacity’ that Google provided. I, Tobi, want to have “the willingness to take bold risks.”
I think about how I lack audacity the more I think about how to move with Tobi’s Room. I am still having trouble taking the idea of this blog seriously. The more I think, the more scary it is to realize that my end goal is to somehow create something that is more than a travel/lifestyle blog. My eventual goal seems to be to create a community or a platform that people can use as some sort of resource. I want to create a space where folks who think just a bit too much like me can congregate, build, share ideas, and experience connections. Whatever that means.
Somehow, I think we’ve lost the whole community goal in this weird age of social media. After working on one of the biggest advertising platforms in the world, I really came to understand that the big corporations really got my generation and the next addicted to the world wide web for the sake of… advertising! Oh yeah, I need to go into this in another post, but the day I was explained that advertising is the reason the internet is kept free, it all made sense.
But yeah, back to community. So I am now back on the apps, and yeah, I follow people, but to me, it feels like we are subject to the influencer agenda, which is: spark online engagement which they can use to gain real-world capital. I feel like people are no longer being “weird” for the sake of being “weird.” There seems to be a monetary gain to everything, which is fair. Everyone has gotta eat, right? Pero like, where did the genuine weirdos go? Not to be that person (read: I am that person), but does most of the internet feel… repetitive, soul-sucking, and unoriginal?
I’ve been chewing through these thoughts for hours, and I had stumbled across the memory of the wonder of YouTube when I started watching it back in like 2008. That was wayyyyy before YouTube became the capitalist mainstay that it is today.
I remember the OG YouTube when the description bar was referred to as the “Doobly-Doo” and the quality of folks who started making videos on the platform and how a lot of them were considered weird when they started. If you were raised by YouTube in the late 2000s and early 2010s like me, can you remember when YouTube was really just regular folks talking to a camera and sharing it online for their friends to see?
This was when viral was a thing, before YouTube money and mega superstars like the Mr. Beasts of the world existed. A lot of my favorite OG YouTubers I watched were kinda just folks who had a cool idea, filmed it, and then kept doing it for fun despite the connotations that filming yourself was weird back in 2008. Over time, it’s crazy to see how stuff like that has changed lives. More people beyond their friends found them, which led them to create more, build communities, and for some people, make whole careers out of this shit.
I think the reason I am conflicted is because building community means that if you want it, someone must take the first step. The proverbial first step of being the weirdo out in the open. The one who has the idea and just does it.
I liken the idea of building a community to this video of a guy dancing by himself at a festival while everyone else is sitting. When the video starts, we see our main character (Guy 1) doing some type of dance. To us on the outside, it doesn’t have rhyme (or much rhythm really) to us viewers. You also see folks sitting down on the grass turning their heads towards him to watch him go at it for a bit.
Then a second guy runs into the frame, stands by the first dude, and busts out his moves right beside the first guy. The two even join hands for a moment and start dancing together, enjoying the moment. Not too long after, a third guy joins in, doing his own dance by the first two. And for a moment, it’s just the three of them dancing with each other. Then two more people run into the frame. Then another three. And suddenly, folks flock in, and within a couple of seconds, the whole hillside that was just sitting down is having a dance party. They are now all dancing because one guy started it. In that moment, they are literally a community of people dancing on a hill.
To create a community, someone must be willing to dance on the hill. And that person may be dancing all alone on that hillside for a while. And that, class, is where my issue lies. I don’t want to be the weird girl dancing while everyone else watches. Because that takes what? Audacity!
If you watched the video, you see how folks were sitting down. That was the status quo of the moment. I have no doubt in my mind at least one person thought, “What is this weird guy doing?” Well, I know I would have thought it. Come on! He kind of looks silly/sad dancing by himself, no?
He is a spectacle because he is not following the status quo. He’s doing him. It’s not until the second person comes in that it kind of looks less sad, more coordinated but less lonely. But that leads to the third person rushing in to join in on the fun. Then more people show up, and quickly it actually becomes ‘a thing’. More people see that the three are having fun, then one by one more people join in, and boom, it’s now a dance party.
We may never know what the first guy was thinking in the moment. Maybe the song playing was his jam. Maybe he simply felt like moving his body. My guess is that they are at a festival, and he was thinking, “I spent too much money to not have fun.” At least that is what I think every time I have to pay to go to an event. Guy #1 was just being himself in the wild.
Well, I’m not too comfortable being myself in the wild… yet. If ever, really. If I am being honest, I’ve strategically avoided being seen as a weirdo for a good portion of my teenage into adult life. I do enough in public to be seen as interesting or charming, and then I go home. At home, in my room, in my own space, the weirdo is truly alive and well. I treat my inner weirdo like the fine china my mom would only bring out when it was time to entertain guests. Or you know how Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake only bring out Destiny’s Child and N*Sync respectively when they are really trying to shake up a performance. She is brought out for select uses only known by a trusted few.
However, I don’t know what happened in the last two years, but ever since my brain circuits connected at 25, I’ve been feeling this calling to bring the weirdo out more often. Ew. And then invite more people over to meet the inner weirdo. EWW. To welcome them to Tobi’s Room. Also, how do y’all feel about the name: Tobi’s Room? I worry that it sounds a bit kinky without context, but in that same vein is why I couldn’t use the first part of my full name. Welcome to Anu’s Room sounds a bit crazy if you ever accidentally forget the apostrophe.
My aversion to embracing the weirdo is why Tobi’s Room feels like a labor of love. I want the audacity to dance, but in reality, I’m comfortable sitting down. This is the fantastic result of 26 years of top-tier risk-averse conditioning and emotional avoidance.
To learn to embrace my authentic weirdo and let the world in, I’ve needed to start the process of de-conditioning my brain. I’ve been having to remind myself that I can do whatever the heck I want. No one is holding me back from anything, except for me. If building a community through Tobi’s Room is the goal, then I need to be willing to get up and pursue it actively, no matter how scary it seems.
Interestingly, I guess my first lesson in audacity simply requires me to do the audacious thing I’ve been avoiding. I have to begin dancing alone on the top of my proverbial internet hill and keep going for as long as it takes for person two, person three, and the rest of the gang to hop in.
-Sigh- Well, I might as well enjoy myself till they come.
“Alexa, play ‘Iskaba’ by Wande Coal.”
So guess I’ll see you.
Tobi
5:40 AM
