The Beginning

09/12/2021 

Where it all started.

December 29, 2019, I lost my best friend called Sam, He died due to suicide using pain medication Zapain which he was on to overdose. He was like a brother to me, I helped him on many occasions to deal with his depression and mental health. I once spent 2 days deep cleaning his bedroom. He spent most days in bed all day and night. Barely getting out of bed. There were times I would turn up at 2am after work to just take him to McDonald's to get him out of the house, he loved his McDonalds his favourite meal was a chicken legend with spicy mayo. We would some times spend evenings with me on the phone with an earpiece while I was working as a taxi driver to just keep him company. I was heartbroken when I found out on new Year eve at 23:45 2019 while I was working, his mother called me to tell me the bad news and that she had been trying to get hold of me for a couple of days. Sam loved Gaming and Twitch / YouTubers. I never understood game streamers. I was like why would you watch people play a game when you can play it yourself. I thought it was mainly about sharing funny clips on YouTube and showcasing new games etc. He mentioned about pc gaming etc so I built him a full 3 monitor pc set up so that he could game himself and experience it for himself. 



He still ended up sitting and watching Twitch and YouTube. He was addicted to watching vloggers and gamers, He once told me he spent £1,000 on one streamer in subcriptions. I still couldn't believe he had gone. Sam was suffering from a disability called fibromyalgia and felt that he was not socially accepted due to his sexuality. He thought being gay people would bully him and make him feel even more worthless. He was only 22. I was always there to support him in anything he was like a brother to me. 

I started a Facebook page called S.A.M to try to spread the awareness of mental health, no one should go through this. S.A.M - FB

I then decided to look into this twitch to try to understand it, to try to understand why Sam was so interested in it. I created an account and I found a Fortnite streamer and started chatting. I felt so welcome into the community, I got offered into their Discord, Now I never thought streamers used Discord, Discord was always used for coders, etc in my experience so was a different experience to see so many chatting, making me feel welcome. I got to know more streamers and heard their stories without talking about Sam. 

Months of planning and workings out. I started streaming myself to help spread awareness and share my story and try to help as many people as I can, using my voice to try to make a small difference. I would use my love for music doing guitar streams and was so close to Twitch Partner , People loved the music and messages I was trying to share. In the summer of 2020 I hit personal mental health struggles , Dealing with the loss of Sam and going through a split up caused a huge breakdown personally and then stopped being online for 3 months. Then I came back and wanted to make a difference. Help people use their voice , Use the power of gaming and content creation to spread awareness and bring people together to change the stigma on mental health and social anxiety.

I formed a community very quick, an amazing group from all over the world. Met loads of people online. Gamed together, talked until all hours of the day and night. 

One night we were all in a hangout Voice Channel, I said " how awesome would it be for us all to be able to get together, play games together, meet fellow streamers and content creators." Then it hit me. GSCON. A convention every year to bring all walks of life to one place to hang out, meet each other, network, build new relationships, collabs to learn different strategic approaches to streaming. I had to do this. My main mission is to always bring people together, to make friends and grow the community, for people to just be happy with no stress, to ESCAPEREALITY together. Fellow creators/ gamers under one roof. I heard they all wanted to do it but no one had the patience to do it, so much work and stress to put something together. So I took the challenge. GSCON was born. To begin with, was meant to be about 50 of us from the community, Then it grew outside of our community we were attracting people we never heard of so we decided let's make it big, let people from all over come and enjoy this. So we turned it into a full plan, hire the biggest venue, get people together. 

TBC.....

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