TRANSCRIPT
The first thing is to just do it. To get started, to sit down, to turn on the camera, and go for it. And that for me is terrifying. I always get anxious. I always get very nervous. I find myself pacing before I sit down. I find myself ruminating on what I’m gonna say. I don’t prepare a script, and I think part of that ups my anxiety because what I end up doing is I have some ideas beforehand. Usually, I create some sort of outline in my head for bullet points that I want to say. And then as I go, I make sure I hit the bullet points, or I try to. Sometimes I forget one, but I try to hit the bullet points. And basically, I sort of read this mental teleprompter that goes in front of my head, in front of my vision. A lot of times also, I take my glasses off when I am talking, and I am basically blind without my glasses. I can’t focus at all. I’m extremely nearsighted, and I find sometimes that’s really helpful because then I can go within. My vision looks inward, and again for me, that’s where I think the value in what I have to say comes from. Because it’s coming from within me. It’s coming from my experience. It’s coming from my life history. It’s coming from what I’ve heard. It’s coming from my self-reflections. It’s coming from my intuition, from my creativity, from the spontaneous something that happens when the camera gets rolling and my ideas get rolling. And no matter how much I’ve prepared, and no matter how much I know what I want to say, and no matter how much I think I know what I want to say, it always goes a little bit differently.
And to get back to where I started, and by the way, I’m gonna put my glasses away because there really is no point in wearing them, to be honest. So, and also actually, there is one point. Sometimes when I wear my glasses, I feel like I can hide behind them, and you don’t see me as well. And that can give me a little bit of comfort. So this comes back to the point that I was going to say, that it is very stressful to turn on that camera. I was talking about it with a friend the other day, and I told her how anxious I get before I make videos. And she says, “I’ve seen a lot of your videos.” She goes, “You don’t seem anxious at all.” And I said, “Well, I actually am when I start, but usually after about 30 seconds, the anxiety dissipates. It goes away.” And I think the reason is, is because I get into the flow of making the video, and my mind starts working, and I connect with some other part of me. But at the very beginning, it’s like I’m not so connected, and I’m focused more on all my anxieties and my fears and how it’s gonna go wrong and how am I gonna start this and what is the tone of my voice gonna be and do I look okay? Is my hair all a mess? Is my collar in a strange place? Is the camera actually recording? That’s something that can be a little stressful too without my glasses because I can’t actually even see that the camera is recording. Is the microphone gonna work? All these things have gone wrong for me. I’ve done some great videos that I’ve made, and for whatever reason, I didn’t have the microphone turned on, or though it was turned down too low, or I couldn’t hear it.
But I think the main thing that makes me anxious when I start making a YouTube video is that I’m gonna get criticized, that I’m gonna get attacked. That I’m, well, and it’s a flipside. It’s like, is it that I’m gonna get attacked by a potential audience member out there, or is that it’s the internalized voices from my past, from the people who did criticize me, who have attacked me in the past, often in my childhood? And that I’ve internalized those, so they become self-critical voices. And that I sort of demand a kind of perfection from myself, and it’s very hard to face the unknown, to face an unknown camera, and to look at a camera and talk about ideas that are often painful and difficult and uncomfortable, and often for me very personal too. And to do it perfectly. As a kid, for me, there was a lot of pressure on me to be perfect. Basically, I was an extension of my parents, and mostly on an emotional level. There saw me as an extension of her, and she was very insecure. She was very unfulfilled. She was very unhappy. She was very traumatized. She’d been very abused in her life, misused. She was very confused and lost in a lot of ways. And she had me. She created me to be her salvation, and I tried to be what she wanted. And what she wanted was someone who would make her happy, someone who would give her purpose, someone who would give her the self-esteem that she was lacking, someone that would do great in the world in the ways that she wasn’t doing great in the world, someone who would succeed and be important and special in the ways that she wasn’t doing it. And this is when I was a very, very little kid.
And I resented it. I was angry. I rebelled against it. I was frustrated by it. But at the same time, it didn’t work very well when I rebelled because then she would reject me. She would abandon me, or she would just, the worst of all, was just lose interest in me. If I wasn’t great and perfect and making her happy and doing well in school and being socially successful, then she was disappointed in me, and/or just was resentful or nasty even sometimes about it, critical. And what I ended up with inside myself was a feeling that I had to be somebody who I wasn’t. And when I come here now to make these videos, to talk to a camera, to talk to an audience, to try to be helpful to people, to try to be an example of someone who’s real and honest, those old parts of me kick up. And the camera being on, a little red light flashing, that really is like a trigger. It like ramps up my feeling of needing to be perfect.
But the funny thing is, I’ve worked hard for a lot of years to be myself at great cost, at great sacrifice. I’m done and said a lot of things that were not acceptable to the place that I came, not acceptable to my parents, not acceptable to other authority figures, and I’ve been rejected a lot for it. But I did it because I needed to be me. At some point, I realized, you know, living to make my parents happy, living to satisfy them, living to satisfy their unmet childhood needs was not something that was going to be acceptable for me in my life. Basically, I was going to be an unhappy, unfulfilled, miserable person who was always trying to make other unhappy, miserable, unfulfilled people happy. And I realized I couldn’t do it. Why? And why did I realize that? Because my whole childhood, I failed anyways. No matter how good I was, no matter how perfect I was, I still failed. And that does live in my psyche somewhere. And I noticed, yeah, all that anxiety I feel when I start making a video does come up. But why does it go away so quickly? I think it goes away because of all of these years of my adult life of fighting for myself, of realizing I can do it.