Internet Fame Refugee

I was writing my bio for my new website, and this phrase flew out of my fingers faster than I could second guess it. I, of course, proceeded to second-guess it, judge it, doubt it, make it wrong, and consider deleting it and pretending it never crossed my keyboard.

However, I’m really practicing not lying to myself lately, and if I’m honest… I feel like I’ve escaped a war.

Back in 2007, I was in school for Digital Filmmaking at a tiny liberal arts college in Northern New Jersey. YouTube wasn’t much of a “thing” yet — it was mainly used for cat videos and schadenfreude. “Vlogging” was a new phenomenon, a novel idea. My roommate and BFF Grace Helbig and I had this CRAZY idea:

“we could use our webcams to make videos!”

A pronouncement that garnered us the same response from nearly everyone we shared it with: “What KIND of videos?” “Will you be clothed in these videos?”

Hah… I see what you did there. A reference to porn. That’s… clever.

So we had a fair amount to contend with from the start, but we were following our intuition. I had had a ton of passion for the work, and it was so much fun.

I also had no idea what I was getting myself into.

We started slowly. We made vlogs that were 2 minutes or less because that’s about how long our own attention spans were and we didn’t want to ask more of our viewers than we could personally handle. Mainly, we were trying to make each other laugh, and we were super successful at that goal.

The people who subscribed to our YouTube channel, “Grace n Michelle” were people we knew in real life.

I still remember the first time that someone we DIDN’T know subscribed to us on YouTube.

WE. FREAKED. OUT.

We sent a flurry of texts to one another, theorizing about who this mystery person could be. We clicked on their profile and tried desperately to figure out what they were playing at by subscribing to us. After all, who could possibly be interested in watching two 20 something girls sitting in front of a camera yapping about their lives FULLY CLOTHED?

See what I did there? Clever.

But this started to become a regular occurrence, this whole “people we don’t know subscribing to us” thing. We gained some real traction over the course of two years or so.

It wasn’t until around 2010, however, that we got a big break. A much larger channel featured us in a video, and we rocketed to 10k subscribers overnight.

Growth was exponential after that. So were the comments people had about what we were posting.

Now, I’m a sensitive person. I’ve been told that I don’t present as one, which is probably because I’m SO sensitive that I’ve had to build up a sturdy enough front to compensate.

But damn… YouTube comments were rough business for me, a I believe they are for most creative people.

Not the good ones, the good ones fed my ego. I didn’t know it at the time, but taking the good ones to heart only made the bad ones hurt more.

And the bad ones… they didn’t even have to be that bad for me to feel my stomach drop, my ears turn red and my heart begin to pound.

I put up a “I don’t care what people think” veneer, but I’m not sure how many people I even fooled with that. I was certainly fooling myself.

For me, this became a black hole. A never-ending source of upset, as well as a source of faux-happiness.

See, the thing about getting a lot of positive comments is that they can’t ever stop, or else you’re screwed. As long as I needed them, I was at the mercy of the world as far as my creative endeavors were concerned.

So I got out. I pulled way back over the years and have been seriously questioning having an internet presence at all.

But when I say that, I want to be super clear about something:

There is nothing wrong with the internet, or even with fame.

“Internet Fame Refugee” is a bit of a misnomer, but I liked the sound of it too much not to use it.

I didn’t need to “escape” fame.

I needed to escape the cycle of suffering I was using it for. I needed to escape a part of myself.

To put it in more grandiose terms:

I escaped the clutches of my own ego maniacal super villain.

I didn’t abandon her, she’s still with me.

What I see is next for us is to work together.

And I don’t exactly know HOW, so if you can relate and were hoping for pointers at this point, I’m happy to say I have none for you. Yet.

But I look forward to sharing what I discover from here on out, as I begin coming out to play online more and more in the coming years.

As I write this, I’m just coming off my first ever month of being off social media altogether. I’ve benefitted greatly from turning off my incessant life-sharing habit that I’ve had since 2007. I look forward to recreating what that means for me now. Over and over again.

First new step: launching this site even though it’s not done by any stretch. I’ll be migrating all of my coaching stuff here eventually. And I’m launching an online creative accountability program in January (one that I have been talking about doing for years. Ironic? ALWAYS! It’s time.)