“I love what that video has
sparked; not just all the tons of, ‘Charlie we love you!’ stuff. That I expected. What I didn’t expect is the
way so many YouTube creators would watch your video and go ‘That’s me! That’s
me!’ … ‘I’m terrified, I’m terrified’… Your video was like YouTube’s coming out
day… suddenly everybody can talk about [being terrified].” mickeleh
Charlie,
I hope you're feeling better. Rather than give you any quotes, or personal opinions about what I think you are scared, how normative it is, etc. I'd like to quote a few facts and figures to you. You have 1.6 Million subscribers on your YouTube Channel with over 263,324,503 video views, but you knew that. You might also readily know that you have currently 163 video responses to your video "I'm scared." These videos have an average length of 4 minutes, which is almost 11 hours of video material. They span creators of different nationalities, gender, race, class and disability. On tumblr there are well over a million unique items tagged with things related to you, and people in support of you have made .gifs, .jpgs, .pngs, songs, mashups, videos, letters, graphics, campaigns, webpages, reblogs, tweets, retweets, etc. in support of you.
You're doing just fine.
I decided to write this today because I've been wanting, for a while now, to start sharing in a very public way my thoughts concerning today's language and how it is used and abused in society to effect the way people think about themselves, others, and the world at large. I feature you hear because you have not only done a spot-on job of portraying yourself (using your language throughout the years to construct yourself as a YouTube celeb) but also because of how people use you, your image, your idea, your words and songs to help co-create themselves. There are literally fields of study dedicated to this stuff of identity synthesis in the changing media scheme, and it's influential users like you that have the largest impact on the changing social climate of Western Civilization. (Sorry to get heavy there, but it's the truth).
You have been such an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of people and have played a crucial part in helping them come to understand bits and pieces of who they are. We like you, who wants to look up to or be someone who isn't producing quality, who isn't critical yet humble, who isn't funny or otherwise charming, (need I also say cool?). In your video you said "I am here, as one regular human being to another, because I am not happy
right now; I am not happy with myself and I need to talk to someone about it" but then went on later to hope your fears were "just what it's like to be human." I'm glad to see that you sorted that one out before you even mentioned it. "I spend almost every day you being anxious about what my peers think of
me ... And do they even talk about me at all ... do they even care enough to discuss me?" Hopefully in posting this you saw much of what a good deal of your peers globally, and across many lines of diversity think of you, and found it to be reassuring. You said yourself, "every person deep down, whether they are willing to admit it or not,
just…they want other people to like them;" and so many of these everyday people who have watched you, choose you to be part of what they show to the world, in the hopes people will like them. I wouldn't venture it's too much a hazard to guess that many of them could just have easily said "I started to feel better about myself than I ever have in my entire life" because they found something in you that they connected with and then weren't so alone or lost.
"All I want to do with my life is make and do things that make other
people happy. I can't think of a better way to spend my time on this planet, but
right now I—I just have to hope, I guess, that I have the capacity within
myself to be that person that I would be." How can that utterance come out of your mouth at such a raw an honest time yet you still worry whether or not people will like you or what you do. Regardless of what you have posted in the past, you're in "the personality business" and I don't think the products out there get much better than that.
So I'm adding myself to the long list of names who have gone public in support of you. I thank you for finally being the support/ spark I needed to get this blog started. It's something that I've been wanting to do for a while now, and I'm going to follow some of your special "quali-tea" measures to insure that I can be proud of what I publish. I'm making the promise to post something to a blog once a week every week. At least to get into the swing so I can start feeling out what this is all about.
I've been with you for five years now. You were there with me through the entirety of Uni. This isn't the first time I've wrote you, nor do I think it will be the last. Stay in there Charlie, cheer up and keep a stiff upper lip because
"The people that mind don't matter, and the people that matter don't mind" -- Charlie McDonnell
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