I want to be a YouTuber too!

As soon as the internet first came out, like many excited about the new way to connect, I wanted to get on and post. We all first started with myspace and slowly went to other social media forms. One of the bigs was when YouTube came out and creators like FRED were able to gain traction for their silly videos. This made many people my age want to post too. I used to post videos and not really think anything more of it than I was sharing what I was up to.

It all became different when people started making fun of those who made videos. It was a way of showing yourself that others would pinpoint onto and start to bother you for. There was a group of girls that would constantly snicker or give a hate stare when they saw me. They would post mean comments on my videos and talk about me to anyone they could to get them onto the train of bothering me about it.

It made me uncomfortable, but I kept posting because I felt like I had to. There was this way now where if you were an artist of any kind, you had to share every moment of your journey with it all along the way. The internet in this way started conversations about bullying and stalking. The internet made it easier for people to figure out information about others, so a stalker could have a better time, especially looking from afar.

No longer did people have to come around you to get their information or ask someone who knew you, they could just figure out something about you by taking a look at what you post to keep getting more of you; especially in the rise of people talking more about personality disorders and the popularity of the hit show YOU. This makes posting online difficult, because the one way to not give a stalker their fuel is for them to see nothing of you and not be able to message or keep track of your life.

After a while on YouTube, my posting slid over to Tik Tok and after a while faded. I no longer wanted to fuel the stalkers and their agenda. Even though I had them blocked, I didn't know who they would get to keep track of me and continue the train. I wanted to give them nothing more to know about me or have any way to see what I am up to. My activity on social media has lessened and I now mostly just use some Facebook and write on Vocal.

The only way I figured out who was the leader of stalking me was when someone reached out to me to hang out and told me all they knew of the situation. They told me about how they were laughing that I was blocking them and found me to be ridiculous for doing so. What an interestitg victim blaming perspective they had. There was at least someone who told about what was happening and didn't stay silent. I tried to just think about the person as someone who was ill and struggling with obsession so that it didn’t feel as creepy.

Many people said they wanted to be on YouTube or influencer when the internet first started, but now I believe people only saw the romanticized version of this. It was so cool and you got to do what you wanted on your schedule as long as you could maintain followers. I have learned it is more to it than that. It felt like a nice way to build community and share, but the attention can turn negative. I am now working through being able to share and still feel comfortable and realizing it isn’t all rainbows and butterflies when your art is out there.