March is always a weird time of year for me. It’s the anniversary of the last time I tried to take my own life — and nearly succeeded. It’s also the anniversary of my being hospitalized for said suicide attempt, which was ultimately the catalyst for my getting off drugs and alcohol once and for all, after 16 years of being stuck in a crack-fueled trauma cycle I just could not break out of by myself.
That was 12 years ago this month, and in the 4,380 days since, I have found a way to center my entire life around love, healing, and forgiveness. I’ve fought for myself and built a career that I am super grateful for and proud of. I have food in my fridge and a beautiful roof over my head that I never take for granted for even one moment, after struggling with housing and basic safety for most of my teens and 20s. And I have found ways of belonging in the world alongside the friends and family who made space for me to become this person all those years ago.
Thank you for believing I could and for holding me close. I realize it’s hard for some people to picture me this way. I am unrecognizably well, and you really just had to be there…but if you weren’t, I’m glad.
And if you are struggling right now, please know you can always reach out. Life will change if you stick around. I promise. It’s what life does. You should be here for it. 🖤
As I approach the 12th anniversary of my being in recovery from cocaine and alcohol, I am genuinely feeling really happy to be here, and so excited about life.
This hasn’t always been the case, as anyone who has followed me for any length of time will already know. I was using drugs back then for a reason — many reasons, actually — and those reasons didn’t magically disappear just because I quit smoking crack and killing my body slowly with vodka. If anything, those reasons became clearer and felt worse as I was getting well.
I am forever thankful for my doctors, who allowed me to go on a journey of harm reduction instead of total abstinence at first. The reality is, this recovery would never have worked if I hadn’t been put on Naltrexone for cravings, or if I hadn’t been able to use medical marijuana during my transition from suicidal junkie to regular human person. Pot saved me for many years, and gave me the space and time I needed to become myself again after nearly two decades of orbiting the atmosphere alone.
A few months ago, the weed stopped helping like it once had, and I went back to the same team of docs who had saved me, to see what was up. I made the transition from medical marijuana to BusPar around that time and almost immediately felt that impending sense of doom I’ve had strapped to my back since childhood disappear completely.
This is all just to say, recovery looks different for everyone, and it changes over time. If medication assistance helps you, take the medicine. I certainly have, and I’m zero percent ashamed about it. If you are experiencing addiction but aren’t ready to go totally sober right at first, then just find ways of hurting yourself less. That all counts as recovery, too — and fuck anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.
If you had told me 12 years ago that this life I’ve been living would someday be mine to live, I would never have believed you…but here we are. Healthy, happy and loved. 100% sober. Alive, inspired, and grateful. This shit is a goddamn miracle. 🤘💛
Jan 19, 2020Comments Off on YouTube Has Blood On Its Hands And They Don’t Fucking Care
When I was a kid I felt I deserved to be mistreated because I was gay. This had a lot to do with me not seeing grown gay people standing up for themselves — and it wasn’t safe to.
So when you see me fighting now, it’s not about winning.
I’m reclaiming myself, and all the years.
After over a full year of this super intense, targeted harassment campaign against me by the since-banned Reddit trolls, every single tech company has intervened except for YouTube, which just this week let us know they will not be taking action to protect me on their platform.
The teams at YouTube have all the facts, covered extensively everywhere from People Magazine to gay blogs, to the official Reddit blog itself. This situation caused Reddit to change their entire harassment policy, yet YouTube would still rather get paid for the clicks than help. More on that setup HERE.
The safety team at Reddit, which had previously been the garbage fire of the internet, said it best in their post about why they intervened: “Ban evaders (and others up to no good) often work across platforms, and so it’s important for those of us in the industry to also share information when we spot these types of coordinated campaigns.”
Yet, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s teams at YouTube refuse to look at the big picture and have sided with the content creators (trolls) whose entire goal in mocking me for my past mental health struggles, discrediting my career, publishing lies about crimes I’ve never committed, and attempting to dangerously “out” people in my private life for being gay, is to drive me to suicide — something they have stated plainly throughout this process as their end goal in torturing me.
YouTube’s charming clickbait algorithm serves up these videos, intended to organize troll narratives and coordinate these attacks across platforms, while also allowing these troll YouTube creators to monetize the abuse, to anyone who watches my music videos or searches my name. None of it is true, and all of it is meant to diminish, intimidate, cyberstalk and harass me, as part of this larger targeted abuse campaign.
No one should have to endure what I have over the past 18 months since this latest wave of homophobic hate and attempts to destroy me, my career and my reputation, began. Wikipedia locked the Logan Lynn article down FOR THIS VERY REASON. Facebook jumped in to help and removed all of the fake profiles and instances where even these exact videos that YouTube refuses to remove were posted on their platform and on Instagram. Twitter Support jumped in and banned these users from harassing me or posting these videos on their platform, too.
It is ONLY YouTube who refuses to do anything about their piece of this mess, and it’s absolutely disgusting — especially in light of their recent announcements and the positive PR they’ve received for supposedly updating their harassment policies to also include public figures. The reality is, it’s all for show. They have no intention of actually making YouTube safer for anyone, because clicks are clicks and ad revenue is ad revenue.
To anyone who could possibly help me over at YouTube and Google: I am literally begging you to just be as decent as Reddit. That’s a VERY low bar, and one you should be trying to hit.
This right here is a twisted business model:
Removing a handful of comments encouraging me to commit suicide under the videos, but leaving the actual videos where the trolls are organizing and amplifying those exact narratives and comments as their larger online abuse strategy misses the mark of community safety completely.
The Logan Lynn Reddit page got banned and shut down because these YouTube users and their troll friends took it over — an exact directive from one of the many videos we have reported on YouTube over the past year, encouraging viewers to find me on other sites to bully and harass me.
As far as my team, attorney, and management is concerned, the careless, irresponsible Executive Team at YouTube is solely responsible for the torture at this point because you continue to protect and promote the abuse as “content”. This is ALL on you. What you’re doing is dangerous and wrong.
