In 2014, I decided that I wanted to have a YouTube channel. Looking back, I’m not sure what the exact reason behind it was, but I knew I loved beauty and fashion and wanted to share that with others. I already spent hours weekly watching YouTube videos and reading blogs, so why wouldn’t I join in?
Excuses were why I didn’t join in. Fear was why I didn’t join in. “I don’t have a nice camera,” I would tell myself. “What if no one watches,” I’d worry. Small as those thoughts feel now, they really held me back and kept me from doing something I so deeply desired. Still, I wanted to be a part of this community, and I wanted to build a community within that for strong people who shared my interests, fears, and thirst for growth. At some point, that thirst and desire for success was greater than my fear and excuses, and I found myself in 2015 in front of a camera that I got as part of a photography class I enrolled in, getting ready to film my first YouTube video. The issue of the camera was one that seemed so big but ended up being so easily solved when I started looking for solutions instead of worrying over the problems.
Two years later, my channel and blog have not grown in the way I envisioned. The numbers are still very low, and when they’ve grown, it’s been at a very slow rate. However, I’m not upset. I’m not upset because when I look over those two years, I see myself letting weeks and months go by without uploading or rather, throwing a video together for the sake of uploading. I see myself continuing to worry about whether or not my content will be supported and well-received. I see the numbers growing stagnant because I did. It’s another case of fear and excuses growing bigger than the desire for success.
If it is easy for fear to take over your thirst for achievement, then you weren’t thirsty enough in the first place. You didn’t have enough passion to withstand the storm of fear, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. It often means you need to reevaluate what you want and find what passion will push you through the fear. Maybe your excuses grow bigger than your desire for success because the future you had in mind simply isn’t what you want anymore. That is perfectly valid. People change, and over time, especially as young people, we learn about and hone our interests.
For me, I realized that I didn’t want a career strictly as an influencer. While growing up without much money, a future making hundreds of thousands of dollars posting on Instagram sounded beautiful. However, as I grew up, I realized I had other interests besides beauty and style that I wanted to pursue. I knew I loved mentorship and writing and art, so the idea of being an influencer posting to Instagram made me a little sad because I thought I would have to give up those other passions. As a result, my content lacked feeling because I wasn’t excited to put it together. I was sad and felt like I was sacrificing what I really wanted. I could set all the YouTube and blog goals I wanted, but without the passion behind them, I wasn’t inspired to reach them.
I have much more clarity surrounding what I want from my life and career, and my online platforms have benefitted from being realigned according to that. If a video or post doesn’t work out in the way I hoped, instead of wallowing in the low viewer count, my passion pushes me forward to keep trying. It helps me see where I could improve rather than question why other people didn’t like it. My passion gives me new ideas because I’m teeming with things to share. I don’t feel empty when I think about the future, and I’m excited to build a life around it. If I have a slow spell where others don’t seem interested, I still am, and it keeps me going. It is an insatiable hunger that I keep feeding, the same one that helped me to find a camera without money to buy one.
In the future, I’ll share what is entailed in that “clarity surrounding what I want from life and career” that I mentioned (stay tuned!), but in the meantime, I wanted to encourage all of you to push forward towards what you want. Obstacles are very real, but they often aren’t as scary as we believed. If something doesn’t seem worth it to you, think about why because maybe it really isn’t. I also wanted to thank everyone for being so supportive. This summer, I have seen more growth online than I could have imagined, and while a lot of that is due to the fact that I decided I was going to pursue passions, it also has a lot to do with all of you who continue to click these links and read these posts and watch my videos. Thank you.
Maya
