_Myra_West_

, 30 min read

Get to Know Me || And Why I created this channel

YouTube

YouTube viewers

I'm going to tell you a little bit more about me because, even though I've been on YouTube for something like five or six years, maybe five, I am so frustrated with how videos are very one-dimensional. I've thought about it a lot the last few months as I've noticed most of my viewers make assumptions and fill in the blanks to try to make sense of me, my values, my beliefs, my background, everything. I'm going to try not to make this video about those people, but it made me realize that, as much as I've tried, the platform of YouTube, just how it works, it's almost impossible to try to show your viewers who you are unless you put in a lot of work to show the complexities of a human being.

For example, when I would post sad videos, a bunch of comments are saying, "Oh, she's always sad, she's always miserable, this is why she's always sad and always miserable, let's diagnose her," when what they're missing is me being happy half or most of the time. YouTube doesn't show the range of emotion that you're capable of, and I've also noticed that you can misspeak on YouTube. I've misspoken quite a lot and been embarrassed by some things I've said in the past, and it comes back to haunt you. You can re-watch old videos of yourself and be like, "I don't believe that anymore, I actually disagree with that version of me." But anyway, it all comes to, I would like to share a little bit more of me and help you fill in some of the blanks that you've probably just been filling in on your own incorrectly, and also just in an effort to be more authentic and to show who I am.

It's part of the mission of my channel. The mission of my channel is to share my story, to share everything about my story as much as I can, and to show the hopeful side.

Childhood: my father

So, as with all my stories that I share, I'm going to start at the very beginning because that's just easiest for me, and I'm going to try to share the important things.

I grew up in the middle of the countryside, very secluded from everyone, in a huge family, and I'm the second to youngest. The family was very heavily Christian, very, very, very conservative, pretty much the most conservative you can imagine. My dad was the patriarch, or I could say dictator. He made all the rules and expected full submission, and he got it from everyone. We, as children, feared him. I feared him. I was terrified of him. So, yeah, I have a lot of positive memories of growing up in the country. I basically have spent every day of my childhood, I was going to say life, but I spent every day of my childhood in the forest or in nature, walking around. Everything I did for fun and to play was outside in nature, so I feel very connected to nature, and it's just my happy place. I'm very much still like a country girl on the inside, even though I feel like I've grown in different ways. I can't say I'm like a wholehearted country girl anymore.

Let's see, I'm trying to think about more childhood stuff. The thing that I feel like I want to share, and I'm going to do a video on this at some point in the future, so I'll try not to talk about it too much, is the Christian upbringing. That's been a huge instrumental part of who I am and what makes me me, and my struggles and trauma and positives and negatives, and a lot of my mental framework, even though I have changed so much. I don't know where to begin. We weren't allowed to watch TV or movies. We weren't allowed to listen to any modern music apart from classical. Well, that's not modern, but yeah, we could only listen to classical or bluegrass music, not even Christian rock. I grew up wearing skirts and dresses, usually to my ankle, and loose shirts. I was tiny, and I would wear large or extra-large shirts. My sister and my mom wore head coverings because that's how conservative we were.

I grew up in the IBLP, which is the Institute of Basic Life Principles, and it was led by Bill Gothard. There's a documentary about it called "Shiny Happy People" that you should check out if you want to learn about my background, or just go on YouTube and do some research. I have found that to be mostly traumatizing. There's way too much in that, actually, but I think you should just do some research if you're curious. Do some research and learn about how people become messed up for life from it. It messed up my view of the world, my understanding of the world. It messed up my understanding of men, women, relationships, and dynamics. I was raised to be a good, submissive, meek, quiet wife and was told that that's what men want. There's so much to this, I'm not going to do it justice, but basically, growing up out of it after moving out at 19, I had to unlearn everything and then relearn it again, mostly as a young adult.

The point of sharing this is to share a little more of the darker parts of my story so that the lighter parts are hopeful, because I know that I'm not the only one who has had the same struggles and gone through the same things. I know that there are still people in the thick of it, in the thick of the struggle, who I would love to help. My mind always goes to young teenagers and especially young girls just like me.

My childhood was, all in all, pretty bad, pretty negative. It could have been worse, but it was pretty bad because my family life and family were bad. Your family is supposed to be, and your home is supposed to be, your safe place where you can escape from all the stress of the world. Your parents are supposed to be a safe place or people who you can turn to when you're struggling, ideally. I know most of us didn't have it ideal, but people also say, "Oh, it must be so nice to have so many siblings, it must have been so fun growing up, so many playmates," and all of that. In my experience, it was just a house of lots of bullies, lots of verbal and physical abuse, and more abuse. It was really dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest. You either got stronger or you got broken. I've slowly begun to realize that it was such a harsh and horrible environment, where everybody was turned against each other and fighting like dogs, very viciously. There was no love or care or safety. Those words were not in my home.

Parent's divorce

I'm realizing as an adult that it wasn't just that my siblings were the devil and horrible, because they were all children, but that's still not an excuse. I'm never going to excuse abuse because of that. A large part of it was connected to the fact that my dad was terrifying and emotionally just completely unavailable and cold. My mom and dad's marriage was extremely volatile, fiery, and explosive, and at times abusive in front of the kids. We all witnessed lots of screaming, crying, and just this horrible environment. I remember as a child, I viewed it very numbly, and I still have a lot of work to work through it. There was just a lot of drama there, and eventually, my parents divorced when I was seven. Because of the divorce, and then as the divorce was going on throughout my entire childhood, this lasted for a good seven years. They were fighting for like seven years in courts or something, fighting over the kids, fighting over everything. It was extremely messy, dramatic, and horrible. I was about to say they hated each other, but no, it was really my dad who hated my mom deeply. Again, as an adult, I realized it was because he was hurt and didn't know what to do with it. He didn't work on himself his entire life. He had so many issues because he had a hard childhood too, but he definitely passed down the trauma that was handed to him because he didn't stop it.

Both of my parents were very distracted throughout my entire childhood, fighting, and it just felt so neglectful to me. I mean, I'm the seventh of eight kids, so at this point, who can take care of that many kids? Because of abuse mainly from my siblings and nobody stopping it, nobody standing up for me, my parents not being there at all to care, I can't remember a single time where I went to either of my parents and told them, "Oh, so and so punched me again," or "They dragged me across the floor," or did this or that. I never went to my parents because they weren't there.

I was always, as a child, seeking my dad's approval. I absolutely adored him as a child because what child doesn't? I saw him as almost a godlike figure because he came across as if he knew everything about the world, about religion. He would do Bible studies with us every single morning, seven days a week, one chapter of the Bible. So we went through the Bible a few times in my childhood. I'm very familiar with it.

Because of all of that, altogether, I grew up and didn't understand why I was this way. As a teenager, and it's followed me through my 20s but has gotten so much better, I felt so much deep self-hatred, self-loathing. I can't even explain how much I hated myself.

I was so miserable.

Anxiety

Another huge part of this that I didn't even cover, which is more than half of it, I would say, was that I was struggling with anxiety, and my family didn't believe in mental health, so they never acknowledged what it was to me. They probably didn't even know. They just thought that I was weak or that I was pathetic or that I couldn't do things. That was one of the main reasons that I hated myself, because I was dealing with severe, severe, severe anxiety, like general anxiety and social anxiety that hit me like a truck and completely ruined... I mean, it just took away so many opportunities and so many chances.

I didn't know what it was. I didn't know anything about mental health at the time because, again, we didn't learn about it. I didn't have access to the internet except for at school, and that was huge. When I had anxiety, I still do, but when I was dealing with it, I thought that I was the only one. I thought it was just me. There was something wrong with me in the entire world, just me. Because of the anxiety, I felt really hopeless that my life would ever turn out well because, as I wrote in my journals, everything I wanted and everything I wanted to do, everything that was important to me, required bravery, and I wasn't brave. I was fearful and terrified, and I couldn't do anything. I felt like I was completely incapable of pursuing my dreams. When I was 18, I was completely debilitated, and I felt like I couldn't move out because I was too scared to try to get an apartment on my own. Everything was terrifying: buying a car on my own, getting a job on my own, doing interviews. All of it was just debilitating.

Understanding anxiety

Fast forward, I guess that's kind of my background. That's kind of why I made the channel, because of how deeply I was struggling with childhood wounds, anxiety, social anxiety, not knowing what anything was, negativity, self-hatred, horrible self-image, no confidence, all of that. Then to have found myself, I hate saying that, but slowly since 19 years old and gaining access to the internet is honestly a huge part of my story. Since researching anxiety and researching self-awareness and researching all the personal growth, self-awareness, all of that stuff, psychology, the more I learned about that and the more I looked inwards and tried to figure out all of my trauma and everything, the more I grew as a person. There are so many lessons that I learned along the way that I can never keep up sharing them. I've shared like two things a year here, when I'm learning things every day that are just mind-blowing, having epiphanies and connections, and things are making sense. I'm growing and blossoming and transforming as a person.

I wanted to honor that past self and to honor anybody who's where I was. I still struggle with lots of these things, so I'm still with you. I'm not saying, "Oh, I was that, I'm not anymore, I'm all great now." I'm still with you in it. I like to say, "in the trenches." I'm there with you. But to honor you and to honor me back then, I want to say that I was a very intelligent teenager, and I was extremely self-reflective and mature for my age. I was always thinking very deeply and always trying to figure out myself and the world. I was very, very, very self-reflective. So that wasn't the problem. The problem was you only know as much as you know when you are 14, 15, 16.

You only have a brain that's 14 years old. A brain that's 14 years old, it doesn't, it can't know more than it knows in those 14 years. When you're those ages, even at 20, you think, "I should have it figured out. I should know this. I should know how to solve this problem." But you don't, and that's okay. It's not shameful in the least because I believe strongly that you can be extremely intelligent and self-aware, and self-focused, not in a bad way. I'm like self-reflective, that's what I was trying to say. You can be all of those positive things, but at the same time, you can't know. Sometimes you just don't know how to solve the problems, and that's where it comes in to learn, to research, to listen to people who are older than you, to learn about psychology. It's the most important thing you can ever do. There are so many important things, there's just so much about me. To try to get people to understand where I'm coming from, there's so many things I just assumed that people would know, but there's no reason they would know that.

People-pleaser

I wanted to also say, and I'll go into this later, but because of my childhood and family, I developed this self-image because they put it on me. My self-image, I knew it was wrong and something was wrong with it, but they placed upon me that I was the black sheep. I became that way because you had to put on your armor or be destroyed. Anyone who's from an abusive, physically abusive environment or family, you know what that feels like. But I think other people don't know what this feels like, to completely build yourself into this alternate version of yourself that is not you at all. You just build these giant, giant walls, hard as stone, around you to protect yourself, but it turns you very spiky, and you don't like that person. But as I moved, like right when I moved out from my family, I didn't have to be that person anymore who was just surviving, fighting for survival. I could just try to be me. But the only problem was because of the Christian upbringing, the conservative Christian being drilled into me, spankings every night, and because of the abuse and that turning me into this hard-as-stone character, I didn't know who I was really. I had to discover it, I had to learn.

On top of it, it was so strange. I was like this hard-as-stone person with my family, but with everyone else growing up, I was a huge, massive people-pleaser and terrified of rejection. So I just gave everybody what they wanted and tried to be the version that they wanted me to be. In terms of romantic relationships, which I just had one at that time, I just gave him everything. I just tried to be the perfect woman and gave him everything that I thought a man wants. So, so many versions, so much of me just trying to survive. Each of those personas were just me trying to survive. In school, I was a people-pleaser, or sorry, not people-pleaser, sorry, like for the teachers, I was such a teacher's pet, which I don't quite regret, because I really liked the teachers and I got along with them really well. But at the same time, I was trying so hard to be a perfect, straight-A, straight-laced student. It was interesting because I grew up in a household where my dad drilled it into me to be the perfect, straight-A person, the goody two-shoes, the straight-laced, morally perfect. So I thought that that's what society wanted me to be, and that's how you're liked and accepted. In school, it made me somewhat disliked because I came across as pretentious or better than you, but really it was just me going off of what I knew at the time.

Self-protection

So yeah, all of those personas I had to break through in my 20s, starting from 19, but in my early 20s. I did that by trying to break through the impenetrable walls and coldness and self-protection that I had, where I felt like vulnerability was total and complete weakness. I started in my early 20s opening up to people very, very slowly. It's like doing the exact thing that you are terrified to do. You're most afraid of showing yourself and being rejected and told that you are what you think you are: worthless and something's wrong with you. But I knew somewhere in me, and maybe it's from what I learned, that the only way through it was to become vulnerable and put down those walls. I can get into this so much more eloquently in a different video, but that was such a huge reason why I couldn't make friends. At the time that I recorded that video and had those struggles, I really expected that if somebody cared about me, they would care enough to slowly tear down those walls and that guardedness. But that's not anyone's responsibility. That's almost as if people are rescuing you. The only person responsible for doing that work is you. If you're super avoidant and you have those walls, you need to work on learning how to become more vulnerable, even though it's terrifying.

The way that I did it was I started sharing tiny little pieces of myself with people, my true self, the things that I kept hidden. But it wasn't like these massive, huge secrets or anything mind-blowing. It was just this tiny little fragment of me. When I shared it, every time there was positive reinforcement to it. People appreciated it. People appreciate vulnerability. They appreciate seeing the authentic you. People don't appreciate perfection. They don't appreciate fakeness. They appreciate flaws. People really like when you share your flaws and your weakness. It makes people feel close to you. So yeah, throughout the years, I've worked so hard, and I still do it constantly, sharing vulnerability with people because vulnerability is powerful and it's brave. It's the most brave thing you can do.

Then, to work on my people-pleaser-personality and the goody two-shoes personality, those were just cover-ups. That wasn't who I was. Again, I've just been working so hard the past many years to become more authentic, to first of all get in touch with who I am by figuring out what my opinions are, what my beliefs are, what my values are, what I value in the world, and also learning to accept myself where I am and not compare myself to anyone else.

To embrace who I am, to embrace my personality, all of those are just choices that you make. Through that and authenticity, I've been working on just... I mean, I feel like I'm pretty much... well, maybe I haven't completely tackled it, but I'm so much better with that people-pleasing nature. I think I'm still struggling a lot, trying to put boundaries in place with dating relationships, romantic relationships, basically just learning that everything we learned to survive in childhood was wrong. What we learned to survive in childhood does not help us in adult healthy relationships. So yeah, I'll just end that. I feel like if I listen to this again, I'm going to be disappointed in myself for not saying that eloquently enough or clear enough, but that's a lot of my background in why I share things vulnerably. I think people don't realize that it's so not me to do that. It's becoming more me, but it's so out of my comfort zone and so terrifying to do. But it's a challenge to myself, and it's facing fear.

That's another thing. As far as the anxiety, another thing that really bothers me like crazy is when people say things so out of touch about me, saying that I live according to fear and I'm terrified of everything and I let my anxiety control me and I don't challenge myself, etc. When the entire point of my channel and the entire point of my life and my goals in life are to constantly face fears and challenge myself and do the thing that I'm most afraid of. That's not difficult to do because I'm scared of everything. Luckily, the more you face it, the more you can teach your brain that it's not as scary as your brain thought it was. Your brain fears the unknown, so once you make it known, it's less scary. That's a huge nugget right there, take it. So I challenge myself constantly, and I've grown as a person. I face my fears all the time. I'm a very fearful person, but at the same time, I'm a very, very, very brave person. Every day I get more in touch with strength.

Yeah, there's just so many things that I've learned that are so powerful and so helpful that I still need to share. I always think about all the YouTube videos I need to record, but there's so many, there's too many. I really want to record videos on building confidence, building self-love, building self-acceptance, building self-esteem, inferiority complex, self-hatred, misery, depression, negativity, positivity, all of that.

Self-improvement burn out

What else was I going to say? Oh yeah, in my early 20s, like at 20, 21, maybe 22, I went so hard into the self-improvement stuff. I was really into it: self-improvement, self-improvement, challenging myself, pushing myself, being productive. I got so burnt out, and I realized that it was so bad for me because it just makes you feel like crap all the time, makes you feel not good enough all the time. I realized also that it wasn't even what I wanted. I didn't want to be in a constant productivity mindset. I actually value peace more, and serenity, and slowness. So I got out of that, and actually that caused me a huge amount of depression when I was really into the self-improvement stuff. When I got out, I focused more on self-acceptance and self-love, meeting yourself where you are. You are good enough where you are. I made up this quote that I shared that I really liked, which is... sure, I'm just paraphrasing, I forgot what it was, but sure, you can become a better person using sheer self-hatred. You can use self-hatred as a motivator to improve, but if you use self-acceptance and self-love and embrace yourself where you are, you will bloom. There's such a huge difference between using negative motivators to change yourself into something that you think is worthy of love, and loving yourself as you are.

Yes, of course, there's a balance. Find the balance. Yes, self-improvement is needed, and for me, the most valuable thing for everybody, please everybody listen, the most important thing is self-awareness. Self-awareness and figuring out your trauma, your triggers, and what everything means internally. Figure out all of that internal crap. I also learned that people are not very self-aware. Lots of people, and this is constantly shocking to me, I feel like people don't know themselves. I love everybody who watches my videos and I appreciate them, but I do get comments from people in their 60s and 70s saying, "Wow, what you just said, I've never thought of that before, I've never heard that." That just makes me feel like people are not thinking enough about the important things. The important things are what's going on internally in yourself and in other people, what's going on beneath the surface of every single interaction.

Misogyny and gay people

Okay, so many little talks there, but I want to share a couple more things about me. I was very conservative growing up, and that made me just a follower, just accepting whatever was given to me, which was just complete and total indoctrination. I was very misogynistic. I hated women. I believed all women were below men and should submit to men. I was very Republican, even though I didn't know what much of it meant. Those two things slowly shifted as I got older. It's been so strange to pull out the internalized misogyny and hatred towards women, to pull that out and work through it and change. I've gotten to such a good place where I no longer hate women. I actually really love women. This is so crazy to say, but it's just been the last two years where I can genuinely, genuinely love and appreciate strong, powerful women and admire them and respect them and see them as like, "Wow, you're incredible, like goddess energy," all of that stuff. To really admire women when I was taught to look down on strong or powerful or independent women and to be disgusted by them, all of that has changed. I've worked through that.

That's kind of more of my background. Very conservative, very Republican, and then gradually shifting my thoughts and opinions and everything to be more what I consider rational and loving and normal, not to be on the fringes of craziness. I don't even associate myself with those old beliefs because I don't even think those were me. I think it was purely what was indoctrinated into me. I feel like the only thing I've done is just get in touch with who I've always been and what I've always believed. I've never really gotten into this because it's so uncomfortable for me, but I was taught to be very anti-gay.

As a teenager, I just was, but I didn't understand anything about it. People - we didn't really talk about it. Nobody explained what it was like. We were just taught to do it, and as children who love their parents and think their parents know everything, that's just how it was. But I met a few people who were gay, who were our neighbors or people who helped us out or this or that. And I remember, even though my beliefs said one thing, I was like, 'This doesn't make any sense.' Like, this person seems like a really nice person, and I think I even remember telling my dad that. I was like, 'I don't understand it - they're really, they just seem like a really good person.' So those things weren't connecting, and it was literally just exposure to people that were different that helped me to understand. Then, of course, I've done my own research on it, and now I feel really good about my understanding, and of course I can get better, but totally changed on that obviously. I feel like lots of guilt and shame for my previous perspective, but I can't be too hard on myself because I never believed it - I was just... it was just forced down my throat as a child. People believe anything that is told to them from like infancy - your brains are very malleable and you're very... like you will believe whatever is told to you when you're a baby and growing up. That's just sadly how it is.

Animals

I love animals - love animals, and animals are very close to my heart, as well as anything nature and environment related. I need to think... I'm an artist. I feel like people don't know these things, but I'm an artist. That's my biggest strength - Art. I love music; music is so powerful to me. I'm very... I was going to say emotional, but that's not the word. I am not emotional, but I do feel emotions very deeply. I also feel like I'm like the perfect mix - to me, I really do. I hate saying that, but I do think I'm like a really good mix of about 50/50, where I have like 50% really strong powerful emotion that I can experience the world through, and then another 50% I'm very very rational and logical, and that keeps my emotions in check. That's what I mean, and I really appreciate that.

Thinking

Intellectual stuff - that made me sound super intelligent, but my favorite thing to do in life, my favorite thing about life, is to think. I love thinking. I love anything that is intellectual, anything learning and thinking about anything regarding the brain, psychology, mental health, relationships, anxiety, and religion. I study religion a lot, and by study, I just mean listen to a lot of experts on it. I spend so much of my time listening to intellectuals - all different kinds, all different perspectives - just trying to make sense of the world and learning as much as I can, figuring out my own perspective on the world.

I was taught growing up to be ashamed - this is kind of interesting - like they want you to be like a traditional woman and be like 'accept that you're a woman' and 'be a woman' and be feminine and submit and blah blah blah, but Christians forget something. Conservative Christians make being a woman feel like a curse. It feels horrible because you're like, 'Why do the boys get to do everything that I want to do and everything that is fun, and why do they have so much more freedom than me, and why is the only role of mine to be this specific way?' Like, I hate being a woman, I hate being feminine - femininity is weak, that's another thing they teach you. I was bullied by my brothers and other boys for being a girl and being feminine. I was bullied and shamed and made fun of like being a girl is bad, it's weak, it's pathetic - like 'you're just a girl, you're stupid because you're a girl.' So all of that...

So I was really ashamed of femininity, and can you tell that I've learned to embrace it? I don't even know what I was showing you - I was trying to show you my room. So that's another part of my journey: it's been accepting my femininity and embracing it and feeling the strength in it and admiring the femininity in other women. And I'm not at all shaming the masculinity in women because I think all of us are a mix, and I love different masculine things. That's always going to be a part of me. But yeah, really embracing like the very girly, very feminine part of me as well - that's been huge in my growth, like accepting the color pink. I have fully accepted pink because pink has always been my favorite color, but for about 10 years, I used to say my favorite color was green because I was ashamed of pink. But now I can say that pink is my favorite color and green is my second favorite color.

Also, like I'm going to get in hot water for saying 'feminine' and 'masculine' - just take those terms lightly. I actually have a very complex understanding of it that doesn't make sense, but I understand like the nuance of like you shouldn't call anything really feminine or masculine because what do those words mean? Like you can't just associate strength with masculinity because that infers that femininity isn't strong - like women are strong as well, so it's not just a masculine trait. So obviously there's a lot of complexity, but YouTube doesn't make any room for complexity. People just fill in the blanks.

Dry humor, acting, writing

I have a kind of a dark sense of humor. I really love dry humor - I love dry humor. The drier the better, as dry as possible - like you think the person is serious, that's my favorite kind of humor, and that's my sense of humor usually. I actually have a pretty good sense of humor and I love humor, but a specific kind. I love sarcasm as well, very sarcastic. I don't know why that's important to me.

I would love to be an actress - I would love to be an actress. It's still one of my goals. Like my dreams - my other dream is to be a YouTuber.

Oh, I'm a writer as well - that's something else people don't know. I'm a writer. I love to write short stories, and I would like to write a book. I've had book ideas in my head, like the same book idea since I was a teenager, and it's stayed with me this whole time, and I've written some of it, but I would really love to do that.

What is a feminist?

I think I'll just end it there. I feel like there's other things I've missed, but I just wanted to talk a little bit about childhood and background and try to add some complexity and some nuance and some understanding to my perspectives and to like... like show that when I say I'm a feminist, like what does that mean? It means something so different than what people assume. It comes from a place where having so much internalized hatred towards women and to myself, that to be a feminist and to like embrace that - all it is is saying like women can be proud to be women. We are strong, we are brave, we are everything powerful, we can be independent, we are as good as men. We are as good as men - that's it.

Then there's other things too, there's so much, but I mean... because the other thing I didn't even touch on is that... Who's here? Who's here right now? Has anybody made it? Comment 'flower' if you made it this far of me just babbling.

I really care about men as well, and I've never talked about this really either, but hopefully you can sometimes sense this because I have a lot of male viewers. But there's so much complexity to this as well. I really care about men's rights, I care about men's mental health. I really, really, really want to see a world where men can be free to show emotion and to cry and to show weakness without being rejected, to show vulnerability. I want men to hug each other and big bear hugs, and I want men to just really embrace that fullness of being a human with no shame. I hate all of the pressures that men feel to be a man, and I do think that a lot of it is put on them by other men, but I'm learning that also I guess women do put some pressure on men as well to act a certain way - but not me, and not all women, and not most people. I think most people really want to see a world where men are safer, which is such a weird thing to say, but like where men don't have to be so afraid to show themselves and fear rejection.

My little nephew

Yeah, there's a lot to that because I mean there's so much like men struggling with mental health, depression... like a lot of suicides are men, most I think, something like that. But all those things, and I think of... whenever I think of like men that I care about, I always think of my little nephew who's very young. My little nephew is so sweet and big-hearted and just the most precious golden boy - and like golden as in like the 'stay golden, ponyboy' - but he... I just... it breaks my heart and I'm so worried for him that he will be bullied and people will hurt him because he is sweet and wonderful and has emotion and is deep and intelligent, and like I'm so worried to see him close himself off and be told that he can't be himself.

Happyness

Anyway, that's that. That's a lot of rambling. Let's see how this goes - comment the secret word if you made it, okay? Oh sorry, sorry, just one more thing I want to say really quick: People accuse me of not being happy, but I just want you guys to hear that I was struggling so much and so deeply when I was a teenager. That's when I really needed help, and I was struggling so much, but I'm so much better. And I'm still struggling in a lot of ways, but I feel so much more capable than I did, and that's been through only a lot of personal work. It doesn't just happen - there's a lot of work that you have to do, but I feel more capable and I'm very well. And I post a lot of sad things or me struggling on bad days because I think it's important to share that so other people can relate to it, but also know that when I'm having good days and happy times and good memories, I actually just forget to press record because I'm so busy living my life and experiencing those happy feelings and good days and good memories and just living life that I just forget to record it and I forget to post it.

So I'm sorry, but just know that I'm happy like 65% of the time, maybe... maybe 85% of the time I'm doing pretty well. And then there's obviously dark times and there's so many struggles behind the scenes - like just know that people are so much more than their 15-minute YouTube video. Let's try not to assume - the assumptions are killing me!

Okay, that's it, bye! I hope you have a good night - I'm recording this at night so I'm going to say night. Have a good night, thanks for listening to me ramble. Yeah, I'll see you next time and I hope you got to know me a little bit more, and I hope very much that you found some sort of nugget from this, from all of this. Did you find any nuggets? Let me know, right? Bye!