Confessions of a Teenage YouTube Starlet
Part one of ???
It was 2010 when I first uploaded something onto YouTube. Thumbnails were brightly coloured and usually featured women in bikinis and extreme closeups of Hillary Clinton’s face. I watched a parody video of a Kesha song and didn’t understand anything I saw, but the prickly naughtiness of this content being so obviously ‘not for kids’ made these videos incredibly appealing. My parents had rightfully been very controlling of how many hours I spent on screens but were almost entirely ignorant of the actual content which took up my time.
Once the video ended, the 'video response’ button at the side of the window winked at me. At the time, YouTube encouraged people to record a video reaction to what they’d just seen. I opened PhotoBooth and filmed myself talking. I mumbled my way through 30 seconds. I hit upload. It got around ten views. I was hooked.
I wasn’t always a child who went out of her way for attention. My parents like to tell a fun anecdote about my fear of crowds in my earliest years of life: I had a habit of bursting into tears whenever a group sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. The same happened when a collection of adults started laughing all at once, or many people clapped suddenly. My friends laugh when they hear this. Maja? Phobic of attention? They turn to me and ask, “So what happened since then to make you…” (gesturing to my general configuration) “like this?”
I have a few answers: I grew up around actors and in theatres and learned how to speak the verbal and body language of performance; my family moved around a lot between the ages of four and eight, severing my early friendships; I was bullied at school in the vicious way only preteen girls are capable of, turning me into a people-pleasing dancing monkey who was terrified of rejection; I love making people laugh; I’m a Leo; I’m an ENFP; I’m a person; I’m good at it.1
During my active years of uploading, from around 2010 and 2020, I made roughly 300 YouTube videos, sometimes uploading two a week and sometimes going months without a peep. It works out to approximately one video every fortnight. I uploaded them onto a YouTube channel, which started out as missmaja98, but later matured into majaanushka, using my first and middle names as a sort of halfway house between my full legal identity and a stage name.
At the peak of my online activity, I had around 15,000 people following me across different platforms, 7,500 of which were in the currency most valued: YouTube subscribers.
I quietly and unofficially stopped making videos in 2021, but my love for it withered a slow and painful death, starting somewhere in 2015. Over the last few years, I have suffered under my inability to consolidate two opposites as blisteringly true: being on YouTube as a teenager was the worst and best thing that ever happened to me.
Back then, my dedication to self-documentation was a point of pride. YouTube was still in an era of obscurity, a new thing which adults didn’t understand. I watched Shane Dawson, Jenna Marbles, and charlieissocoollike. These were not shiny TV people or celebrities. They seemed regular. Normal people, funny and attractive, beamed into my child-lap. No longer were there tastemakers and editors standing in the way of who could create what, and which audience it would go to. It was a level playing field.
When it came time for me to start making my own videos, it felt like a momentous detonation of pure individualism. I was teenaged - my sense of self no more than a veil over my baby face. But YouTube provided an opportunity to show self-commitment and self-importance. A way to celebrate the small mundanity of my everyday.
It was also a valuable escape from real life. At the time, I had an addiction to self-harm which was running rampant. I would visit the school nurse every morning before lessons started so she could bandage up my entire forearm to stop the wounds from rubbing against the polyester of my school blazer. She’d look at me with pleading eyes but not say much, instead asking me about homework and telly. YouTube offered an ethereal third space where hurting myself wasn’t something I had to wrestle with on a daily basis.
I also had the other vital ingredient for content creation: time. I wasn’t popular (you can take the girl out of the obsessed-with-horses phase, but you can’t take the unsettling vibe out of the girl). I didn’t have loads of friends to spend time with after school, so I used it on the internet instead.
Having been on Tumblr since around the age of 10 (what a fucking can of worms that sentence is), a huge majority of the friends I did have were scattered across the globe, so part of my motivation to make videos was to communicate/talk at them more efficiently.
As my hobby developed and I became more comfortable bringing my camera with me outside of the safe confines of my room, I also learned that if I took note of every moment, I’d feel that I was being witnessed, and being witnessed (or spectated, observed, seen, noticed, announced) was the best way of fighting the creeping suspicion that all teenage girls become familiar with around the age of 14 on some otherwise unremarkable day: my existence was completely and utterly insignificant.
To combat this, I compulsively filmed moments. Moments alone, certainly, but as I grew up and successfully found my people, countless moments of happiness with my friends – small, silly, unimportant inside jokes and nonsense, but snapshots of a warm, happy, and ambitious group.
There are Secret Santas, Jonny and I manically laughing on our first night at uni, drunk giggling fits, hugs, dancing, singing, crying, and on and on and on. Whenever any of us feel like reminiscing, hundreds of these moments are waiting for us - tiny pockets of adolescence, fossilised online where older generations had no choice but to let them splinter into unreliable memories.
For my parents, snapshots of their youth are limited to fuzzy photographs, or misremembered stories, told in between gasps of laughter over wine, but for us, they were captured, edited, and saved in ever-clearer footage. A personal museum of intimacy carved into stone. We can look back on ourselves and smile and cry about the painful phenomena of time whenever we want.
I met friends through screens who will dance at my wedding and be called ‘Auntie’ and ‘Uncle’ by my kids. My attempts to tackle lofty topics like mental health, sexuality, and relationships, however naive, reached people across the world and made impacts everywhere. I started making videos right on the precipice of teenagehood, when most aspects of my personality, political views, and perspective on life were squishy and unformed. My horizons were broadened beyond what was ever possible for the generations before.
I learned how to express myself in a way that was understandable and meaningful, how to make myself heard, and how to foster connection. I learned how to tell stories and play with words. I worked out not only how to navigate the digital world, but also to take control of it – all things which would eventually give me a huge advantage when I started my career in digital journalism. I am reminded when I clock in, when I open the group chat, when I make a new friend, that I owe my life to my years online.
I categorically would not be the curious, creative, and successful person I am today without the internet.
But.
I was barely a teenager at the start, barely an adult by the end. I had no idea that making a few videos in my room would eventually lead to my own small slice of internet fame. I was never an internet celebrity by any stretch of the imagination (even if I had been, the milestones of online careers are perpetually expanding – at one time, having 10 thousand subscribers was considered a really big deal. Now, people surpass 1 million and are still considered smaller creators). But, even at my tiny scale, at the peak of my YouTube career, I experienced things that were extremely unusual for anyone, let alone a child.
I got invited to YouTube parties full of adults twice my age. I sipped beer with people who I’d been watching online for years: two-dimensional characters with slick lighting and quick edits suddenly rendered fleshy and awkward in front of me. I earned money through sponsorships and donations from viewers. I was a loyal attendee of Summer in The City, a YouTube convention, and was eventually a guest in 2017, a shiny Creator pass allowing me into the back veins of the conference I’d dreamed of for years.2
I comforted strangers who burst into tears at the sight of me, having developed a parasocial bond through which my image became a cosy Familiar to them, while they remained a complete Unknown to me. I was interviewed about my content by many outlets, received heaps of fan mail, and was recognised in public by people who watched my videos. It all felt very cool, very bigger-than-myself, and very exciting.
It went to my head at a dizzying speed.
I became entitled. I asked for things that I had no right to, and then felt like the victim when people told me I was being shallow and demanding. I had no sense of boundaries whatsoever. I brought a camera with me almost everywhere, exposing many personal moments to the public eye without thinking twice. Where Me ended and Everyone Else began was irrelevant. My thoughts and feelings were unimportant, so I forgot I had them. I based my entire self-worth and identity on the opinions of people who didn’t even know me.
Consistently putting my image onto the internet turned me into a monster of insecurity and perfectionism. I stared at my own face for hours on end while editing videos, hit ‘export’, and went straight to Instagram to scroll through photos of thin women in bikinis, and ads about Losing Fifteen Pounds Fast With This Weird Trick. The eating disorder that had been lurking in my psyche was well-fed for years. From ages 14 to 25, I’ve seen five different therapists, and the topics that have consistently come up are body image, needing to be perfect, and craving validation. I always end up telling them stories about YouTube.
I became extremely sensitive to any kind of criticism. I needed to be adored, especially by boys my age or older. I was hyper-sexual and fooled around with people. Whether I found them attractive or not was less important than the feeling of being wanted, so my own desire also took a backseat. When breaches of consent happened – various times, various men – my lack of autonomy meant I didn’t even realise it until months or years later.
I cheated on a long-term boyfriend while he was away travelling because I couldn’t deal with not having a constant stream of external physical validation. Being alone was a failure, but feeling unwanted was a death sentence. At a particularly low point, a friend told me not to get involved with her ex, who had recently broken her heart and shown a variety of red flags. Both of them were prominent figures in the ‘Small YouTube’ space. I promised her I wouldn’t, and two weeks later I got drunk and slept with him. It remains, to this day, the worst thing I’ve ever done.
You could argue these are just the types of mistakes that teenagers make, but my ego was entirely Internet-fueled. I felt like the rules didn’t apply to me. I was addicted to attention and validation.
There was also the seedy underside to the internet which I was inevitably exposed to. When I got braces, I made videos about the experience, in which I rambled and raved about how painful and embarrassing the whole situation was. They got a strange amount of attention and numerous comments from people I didn’t recognise. They were empathetic and friendly, but also asked me increasingly detailed questions about my new braces. I’m not sure when it was that it clicked that my videos had been found by and distributed within communities of men who had a fetish for girls with braces, but I was remarkably unphased. I was 15.
The nastiness of online spaces, now well-known, hit me square in the face for the first time on the 1st of January 2016. I made a video in December about feminism and it got picked up by a channel called Undoomed who responded and linked my original in the description. I woke up on New Year’s Day to thousands of comments from anti-feminist groups. I scrolled and read and understood through wet eyes that there were people in the world who hated me for what I felt.
Through these experiences, I comforted myself by repeating that these monsters were far outside of my circle. But internet stardom, like regular old celebrity, attracts and empowers predators and narcissists of all shapes and sizes.
When people ask me what it was like to be inside the YouTube community, I tell them to imagine a virtual high school filled with weird creative kids who think they’re god’s gift and have terribly important things to say (I am not excluded from this description). Then add in a popularity-by-numbers function by which the social hierarchy runs. Remove any adult supervision. Let them flirt, mingle, argue, and gossip and don’t forget about all the hormones and feelings! It was fucking carnage.3
Some of my most dysfunctional, tortuous, and toxic friendships were born out of YouTube relationships, which often walked the line between genuine, caring bonds to strategic alliances in a world built on buzz, cliques, and power.
Had I not dedicated myself to my online world, sacrificing anything that could threaten the little castle I’d constructed for myself there, I would never have befriended one particular creator. I idolised him immediately. He was older, more popular and well-known than me. When he sexually assaulted me, I told him about it. He apologised and swore it would never happen again, manipulating me into keeping silent as it was ‘just a mistake’. He would go on to do the same to multiple other people within the community.
It was this situation, which became public knowledge due to myself and other victims posting statements on Twitter, that would be the final nail in the coffin of my love for YouTube, though it took me many months to notice it. The realisation slithered in slowly: the space I had wanted to be safe and comforting was actually just as threatening and complicated as life outside of the internet.
To say my relationship with YouTube, and by wider extension the internet as a whole, is complicated is a measured understatement. Fortunately, I am now blessed with being completely cognitively severed from that period. Dyeing my hair from the signature pink I became recognised for to my natural brown in early 2022 set the cognitive dissonance in place. Within days, the visual distinction between myself Then and myself Now unlocked memories from the depths of my psyche. And for the first time, I had the distance to assess them more objectively.
I’ve already written about how the internet is changing our perception and lifestyle, and doing it insidiously. We’re in a fascinating, horrifying, mystifying era of collective consciousness and popular culture.
I feel the echoes of my own teenage experiences at the heart of the beast and am unsettled by it all: the filming of strangers being rude in public which leads to said strangers being fired from their jobs; the exposure of 18-year-olds, barely people yet, to OnlyFans; our feverish, joyful destruction of anyone the culture deems to be morally impure; our growing and always reductive obsession with identity which pushes us each into boxes; the ever-widening gap between Them and Us which makes it impossible to listen to each other; the focus on individual trauma and damage as the be-all and end-all of human experience and individuality; the exponential echo chamber-ification of any internet space due to finely tuned algorithms which care only about monetising our attention and couldn’t give two fucks about diversifying our content.
I think I have a lot to say about all of it. See you in part two.
In an entry in my baby book, my mum remarks that I am happiest around people. I was barely months old. So perhaps it’s all shit. Maybe I was always going to turn out this way.
A few years later, I messaged someone I knew who had connections to the inner workings of the convention, asking for a free ticket to SitC. My overly friendly tone did not sweeten the fact I was transparently trying to use them to get a free pass to an internet convention. When they tweeted my message, anonymised, to broadcast the very fair message of ‘don’t be an asshole and do this’, I scrolled through the of replies underneath, tearing me to shreds. Every one was passionately denouncing what I’d done. At least a third of them were YouTubers I admired. Oh, my poor teenage heart.
One of my favourite anecdotes: me and two others in the community made private Twitter accounts where we only followed each other to tweet our most deranged and mean-spirited thoughts about everyone else in a safe space. One day, I found that person A didn’t have their private Twitter anymore, so I messaged to ask if everything was okay. They told me they ‘needed to vent’ about me and had blocked me from the account which only me and person B followed. They could have messaged person B to vent, but instead, they did this. When I, naturally, went to my own private account to post about how upset I was that my friend was talking shit about me, I got angry messages from person A because person B had screenshot my tweets and sent them over. I ended up apologising for the whole thing.
really really interesting read (missed the end of true detective season one because I was so in the zone) especially as you were one of the YouTubers I looked up to in particular when I was still actively creating on there ! i feel like a lot of good came out of the peak of small YouTube but the worst aspects feel so gargantuan in my memories it kinda makes the good bits feel lesser ? sitc was predator city what even went on in that seedy underbelly but yeah the bit about the distinction between you and everyone else in the name of Content really resonated with me !
Loved this piece a lot. Such interesting, honest insight on a truly fascinating time in internet culture!!