I’m kind of awesome.

I think ultimately the decision of whether to delete my channel and pretend it never happened comes down to a couple of things.*

First, I hate celebrity culture. I hate LA. I hate fame as a concept and I hate what it turns people into. I hate social media and the relentless shallowness of so much of modern social life, whether or not it’s online. I hate that I ever was even tempted to play the views game, and I hate that if I kept making videos, at some point I would have to. That it’s impossible not to, that it’s just a part of the medium itself.

But it’s more than just that. I enter every new relationship by announcing my flaws. I apologize before I do anything wrong just to make sure that I’m ahead of my own blunders. I assume that I will fail or make some catostrophic, unfixable error before I even start something and even after it’s done I worry that I’m missing some glaring fuck up that everyone else can see. I avoid looking in the mirror more than a few times a day because otherwise I’ll obsess about the thing that may or may not be obviously stupid about my appearance that day.

Basically, I start from the assumption that I either am doing something wrong, or soon will, and go from there. And with YouTube, the goal isn’t even clear which makes it a thousand times worse because according to someone, you’re ALWAYS doing something wrong.

For years I told myself I was incapable of doing anything well, that I was unskilled in anything that could pay the bills. And maybe that’s true, but my bills aren’t that high anyway. I don’t need a lot more than I already have, materially speaking.

But the truth is, maybe I was choosing to see myself as powerless because I didn’t want to also learn how to be responsible with power. And maybe I was choosing to see myself as worthless because a person who has value has to choose how to distribute that value. Maybe I’ve spent so long being afraid of my own voice that I forgot how to speak at all.

But fuck all of that. And fuck the belief that I can only be one kind of person, because I don’t see why I can’t allow myself to be both terrified and brave, both educational and silly, both overthinking and reckless, both a loner and a leader, both a deep thinker and an airhead, both dweeb and debaucherous.

I’m all that stuff, but I don’t have to prove any of that to anyone or worry that they’ll misinterpret the contradictions in who I am because that isn’t something that I can control. And I don’t want to waste my life letting the things I can’t control control me. That’s no way to live.

So maybe I’ll just have to accept that despite my flaws, I’m also kind of awesome. And maybe if other people agree, I should get out of my own way for a change and let them.

…

* also the humping thing and the shame and embarrassment things and all the other stuff but let’s ignore that stuff for the sake of, like, moving prose or whatever