Hey, it's Azzy. I'll start with the big thing first so I don't waste your time. Recently I was made aware that in December of last year, an online far-right group attempted to gather the personal information of myself and my family with malicious intent. I will not name this group for obvious reasons, but reading through the public forum posts where the attack was planned gave me a pretty good idea of what they wanted. Along with attempting to track down my home address, they also looked for the where my father — a man who spent his entire adult life working to educate kids in underserved communities — was buried. They wanted to deface his gravestone to spite me after I realized I was trans during my gender journey livestreams. Thankfully me and my family are safe, but as you might imagine, that sentence can only end with two words: for now.

The distress caused by the potential and reality of online harassment in my life is something I haven't been very open about on this channel, and for good reason; there's no better way to feed the trolls than to tell them they're getting to you. That being said, you can imagine that hearing of this attempted attack was harrowing, even months after it was meant to take place. To be clear, this isn't the only case of harassment I've experienced during my career. Even before I discovered my own transness, I received plenty of exactly the kind of treatment you'd expect on the internet as an advocate and ally for the community I now recognize myself as a part of.

In fact, for those of you who were kind enough to have ordered my Azeal plushie a while back, you may have indirectly experienced the effects of this harassment — there have been significant delays in part due to the current system being me personally shipping each order, and the security risks involved with that process being so significant that I've had to find alternative solutions to keep my family safe. With that being said, I'd like to personally apologize to those of you who have had delays in their orders. I promise I'm doing my very best and I am incredibly thankful for your continued support.

So I guess the question is... what's next? Where do I go from here, and how do I live the rest of my life without the constant, haunting feeling brought on by the eyes of hateful and potentially violent people? Unfortunately you may not love the answer, and I won't say I do either.

For the sake of myself and my family's mental health and physical safety, over the past few months I have already started scaling back my presence in online spaces where interaction with bad actors is most likely to take place or be incited after the fact. To be clear, this isn't me "giving up" or "letting them win," but rather a necessary step in my aspirational journey to do good for the queer community and humanity as a whole. That goal is as centered as ever in my sights, but it's going to look a little different.

I intend to go back to college to study a blend of Trauma Psychology, Human Sexuality and Brain Computer Interface Engineering. These fields are of great interest to me as, from my perspective, they seem to converge on the future of the kind of work I do here on YouTube — creating interactive therapeutic experiences through interpersonal communication, assisted by the use virtual or augmented reality environment. This is a field of study that has fascinated me since middle school when virtual reality technology was finally breaking into the mainstream, but since creating my channel I've made connections in academia and industry that could allow me to genuinely change the world. And yeah, I'll be honest, that sounds a hell of a lot better than what life seems to have in store for me if I continue to be exclusively a content creator.

Obviously higher education isn't cheap, so if you want to help me work towards having the means required to get through college without crippling student debt at the precipice of a global economic recession, you can donate here. Every little bit helps, but please remember to put your own safety and wellbeing before your desire for generosity, especially if you are part of a marginalized community and need to account for your safety in uncertain times.

With that out of the way, wish I could give you a more clear answer on exactly what change you should expect to see, but honestly I don't really know myself what things are going to look like moving forward. I'm going to keep posting storytime videos when I have the confidence and motivation to do so since I have a lot of them already recorded over the last few years, but I'm not sure how much more I'll be doing new recordings in the near future. For those of you in Cherry Charm, don't worry too much since that community is well moderated and protected meaning I don't have to worry as much about harassment there.

I'll leave you with this: when the world seems to be against us, always remember — existence is resistance. Thank you for reading.