I used to be a woman

Hey, so today I want to talk about my YouTube channel. Think of this as kind of like a history lesson if you're new to the channel. I've been doing YouTube for about 2 years now, and I feel like the channel has changed a lot. I feel like I've changed a lot since I started. I also want to

talk about how and why I started making videos on YouTube, and I also want to document some of the major events that have happened to this channel over the course of 2 years. So it all started back in the winter of 2014. I was in South Korea. I had just abandoned my Japanese girlfriend that I nearly married,

and I ran away to South Korea to get back together with my ex-Korean girlfriend. And I was staying with her at her apartment, and one day she went to the hospital to do something, and I was all by myself in her apartment. And at that time, I was watching a lot of YouTube, mainly PewDiePie, and I was

feeling kind of inspired, so I I decided to pick up my phone or my camera, and I tried taking a video of myself. This has always been something that's been very difficult for me because I used to hate the way my voice sounded. I used to hate the way I looked in videos because I was only used

to seeing myself in mirrors, and when you look at yourself in a mirror, you're only seeing a reversed, flipped image of yourself, which isn't what everyone else sees. But when you take a video of yourself, you're not seeing a flipped reverse image of yourself. You're seeing the true version of yourself, and it looks kind of strange because

no one has a completely symmetrical face, and if you flip your face, it kind of looks slightly different. So I walked around my ex-Korean girlfriend's apartment trying to take a video of myself just talking about random things, and it was so difficult. I felt so awkward, so embarrassed, and I hated the experience. I turned off my camera

and And I just gave up on the idea of becoming a YouTuber. I didn't try taking a video of myself again until around July in 2015. I was feeling kind of inspired by FunForLouis and Casey Neistat, and I decided that I wanted to try vlogging out again. In the beginning, I used to make videos of myself walking

around the garden, just pacing up and down, rambling about random things for about half an hour. I also used to make unboxing videos because I used to buy a lot of cameras. I used to be a huge camera nerd back then, and I was always buying new cameras and selling old cameras, and I found it very hard

to decide which camera to buy and keep, and I used to just talk about cameras in my videos for ages. I also used to do unboxing videos for things like laptops or tablets or smartphones. I also started to learn how to code, and I I bought a MacBook Pro and I decided to learn how to make iPhone

games, and I made several iPhone games. I also made tutorial videos on how to make iPhone games using Xcode and Objective-C. You can still see those videos, they're still up if you go all the way back to the beginning of my video library. Back then, my videos were very tame. I didn't talk about sexual things or gross

things or relationships. I was very careful not to offend people or to anger people. And it took me about 5 months to get my first 100 subscribers. In October of 2015, me and my ex-Korean girlfriend, we decided to meet up in Paris, and we also went to Norway, and she came back with me to the UK, and

I decided to vlog it. I wanted to make travel vlogs like FunForLouis, but I found it to be extremely difficult and stressful because I just felt so embarrassed talking to a camera. I felt kind of silly, kind of stupid, and I just felt extremely uncomfortable making videos in public in front of people. Last year, I was still

feeling very inspired by Casey Neistat, and I was doing daily vlogs. I was basically imitating him. I would have time lapses, I would have music, I would do jump cuts like he did. The thing is, I didn't have his personality or his energy or his charisma. In the summer of last year, I decided to go to Korea

and Japan, and I wanted to vlog it again. And I thought that if I vlogged my life in Japan, I would get more followers, more views, but that didn't work out. I only had about 250 subscribers last year in summer, and I was getting about 50 to 80 views per video. Things started okay when I was in

Korea. I was making vlogs outside. I felt fairly comfortable vlogging in public, but then I went to Japan and everything changed. I felt so depressed in Japan, and I think the reason for that was, um, I was in Korea with my ex-girlfriend and I felt so comfortable living with her and being together with her, and I went

from that to going to Japan and being completely isolated and by myself. I felt so alone, and I started to make really weird videos of me having mental breakdowns, basically, because I was feeling so lonely and depressed in Japan. Those videos are still up, so if you go back to about page 6 on my video library, you'll

see those strange videos in Japan that I made last year. I recommend the video called Everything Is Shit. That, that's a good one. I also tried experimenting with doing animated videos where I would draw like a cartoon of myself and then tell a story, and I made a few videos like that which are basically me ranting about

people that I hated in the guest house. And then I went to Taiwan and I started to make even stranger videos. I started to make videos talking about depression, loneliness, how frustrated I was being stuck in my Taiwanese friend's house and not being able to have sex with her. After that whole adventure came to an end, I

came back to the UK, I came back home, and I resumed doing my garden vlogs where I paced up and down for half an hour rambling about random things. But something had changed. I had changed. I had become more negative, more cynical. I felt kind of fed up that my YouTube channel wasn't growing. I also started to

stop caring about what people thought about me, what my viewers thought thought about me, and I started to talk about weird things like sexual experiences or depression or about things that I hated. After I came back from Taiwan in September last year, I had about 300 subscribers, and there were several people that were regular commenters, and I

still remember them. When I came back from Taiwan in September last year, I was getting close to around 400 subscribers, and There were several people who always commented, and I still remember them. Leave a comment if you used to watch my videos last year. I'm pretty sure there's none of you left. Well, there was this one person

who always used to comment called Jessica Toll. I thought this person was a girl, and I did a giveaway competition for my old smartphone, and I decided to give my smartphone to this person because I thought she was a girl. Turns out he was a guy. I was kind of disappointed about that. Don't you just hate it

when guys pretend to be girls online? There's also this other girl who I actually know was a girl because she also made videos. She was called Weirdo Girl, and she left her first comments on one of my videos titled Eating a Mooncake. And I checked out her channel, and she started making these hour-long videos where she would

talk about how depressed she was, and she would start crying in the video. And she was really cute. She was this Asian girl who was living in Canada. She also had a blog on Tumblr which I followed for a while, but then one day she just disappeared. Her YouTube channel got deleted— she must have deleted it herself—

and her blogs on Tumblr all disappeared as well. I was really upset. There was also this really irritating guy called Kyokushin Gaming, and I consider him to be my first hater. At first he was very supportive, he even donated me on Patreon, but then he started to become very judgmental and critical about everything I did. Every time

I made a video talking about something, he would be very against it. Even with the DNA test video, he would go, oh, are you sure you want to be doing that? Now you have your DNA stored by some shady company in America. They're going to use it to ruin your life. It was like he was super paranoid

about everything. Jessica Toll stopped commenting around March this year after my channel became extremely weird. Kyokushin Gaming stopped commenting after I came back from Japan and ended the relationship with the single mother. I'm pretty sure all of my subscribers and viewers from last year have either stopped watching or unsubscribed. I guess I scared them away with my

weirdness. In the beginning last year when I was making vlogs, I at least tried to come across as a normal person, but around March I just stopped caring and I embrace the weirdness. Okay, let's fast forward to January of this year. This was when everything changed, really. This was a huge event for the channel. r/Happas and Reddit.