When Things Change

Things have been... weird lately.

I hear it's not just me, but I can't verify how other people feel about their lives, I can only say for sure that I feel really weird.

I guess I just didn't know that growing up happened in such sudden chunks.

I've wanted to make YouTube videos since I was 11 years old, and my best friend and I would make little videos on her flip camera to post. It was fun, I loved stretching my creative muscles (even though they were incredibly tiny at the time), and I loved making my friend and myself laugh even if we didn't make anybody else laugh. It was a gratifying feeling.

I was a sensitive child, and one hate comment destroyed that channel. Which is honestly probably for the best at this point. We didn't think a lot of things through before posting them, and I'm sure one of us would have said something we regretted later on.

I tried again later. I got way into Let's Players like Markiplier and Jacksepticeye and they inspired me to try and make my own. I maintain that they were very fun to record, but the problem lied in three facts: one, that I was garbage at editing; two, that I didn't have any friends who could edit for me; and three, I was too poor to afford to pay somebody to edit for me.

Oh lord how I tried though. I put up a valiant effort for about five years, totaling 11 videos, before giving up just a few weeks ago.

Yeah, that recent.

I just had a realization though. That kind of "job" is extremely luck-based. You don't get paid for anything you do until you reach a certain threshold of views, subscribers, etc. And that only happens if you have shareable content, i.e., something that somebody will watch and then feel the need to tell their friends about.

Whether or not your content is shareable is a code and an algorithm that nobody has been able to crack. The answer lies somewhere within the mysteries of human nature, and I don't think anybody will be able to find it for that reason. Which I'm okay with really. I think knowing would take the fun out of it and then people wouldn't be making videos that they enjoy for fun anymore.

Anyway, the realization hit me, that there's such a slim chance of me being able to make YouTube into a career, that hanging my entire life on it is irresponsible. I don't want to live with my parents and work retail for my entire life. I want independence, I want autonomy, and I want to be a grown up at some point, like, relatively soon.

I want to be a teacher.

I want to be a first grade teacher; an age where the kids aren't smart enough to bully me, nor are they smart enough to know more than me about any subject I can teach. First grade kids are just old enough to be able to form coherent sentences, but inexperienced enough to not have had society tell them their amazingly creative ideas are dumb because they're impractical.

It's what I wish I could be.