The light was awful, it was late, and I knew perfectly well the sensible thing would be to leave it until tomorrow.
Record it properly. Find some decent light. Work out exactly what I wanted to say first instead of sitting there staring into my phone with a thought that had clearly decided it wasn’t going anywhere until I did something with it.
I recorded it anyway.
The thought was about these videos, and why I’m actually making them. I’ve been asked that before, in various forms. Why bother? What are you trying to achieve? Hardly anybody is watching. Aren’t you just sitting there talking to yourself and looking a bit daft?
There’s probably some truth in that last bit.
Talking to a camera is a strange thing to do. You sit alone in a room speaking as though another person is sitting opposite you, then upload it onto the internet and wait while a little number underneath tells you roughly how many people actually were.
Sometimes that number is not especially flattering.
Of course I notice.
I notice when something does better than usual. I notice when I’ve spent ages making something that disappears without a trace. I notice when something I threw together quickly gets more attention than the thing I thought was much better. I’m not going to pretend I’ve somehow risen above all of that and reached a state where views mean absolutely nothing to me.
They do mean something.
If I genuinely didn’t want anybody to watch, there would be no reason to upload anything. I could talk myself through whatever is bothering me, save the video to my phone and never show another person.
Publishing it means I want it to reach somebody.
I just don’t think how many people it reaches is the same question as whether it was worth saying.
That distinction has become more important the longer I’ve been doing this, because I’ve never made these videos from a position of having everything figured out. Quite often I’m making them for almost the opposite reason.
Sometimes I’m trying to talk myself through my own shit.
I’m trying to understand why something has bothered me as much as it has. Why I reacted badly. Why I keep falling into the same pattern. Why something I’ve believed for years suddenly doesn’t make as much sense as it used to. I start talking, follow the thought for a while and sometimes find something underneath it that I hadn’t properly understood before.
Other times I don’t.
Sometimes the thought turns out not to be finished yet. Sometimes I listen back and realise I’ve spent two minutes walking confidently towards absolutely nowhere. Sometimes what sounded incredibly profound in my head turns out, once spoken aloud, to be bollocks.
That’s part of it too.
I don’t have any interest in pretending otherwise. I’m not standing here as somebody who has reached the other side of life and come back with the instructions. I’m forty years old, I’ve got work, children, bills, plans that go wrong, habits I’m trying to change and parts of myself I’m still trying to understand.
Some things in my life are going well. Some are a work in progress. Some occasionally appear to be held together with string and bad language.
That makes me fairly ordinary.
And I think that might be the useful bit.
Because whatever I’m trying to understand about myself, there’s a reasonable chance I’m not the only human being who has ever felt it.
I’m probably not the only person who has finished work but needed a few quiet minutes before properly arriving home. I’m not the only person who has known something needs to change while simultaneously looking at the rest of the week and wondering where exactly that change is supposed to fit. I’m definitely not the only person who has reacted to something, heard myself doing it, and later wondered why something so small managed to get that much of me.
Those experiences can feel incredibly personal while you’re inside them.
Sometimes embarrassingly so.
You assume everyone else is handling things better. Their house is calmer. Their relationship is easier. They’re more disciplined, more patient, more organised. They don’t spend Sunday evening promising themselves that next week they’ll finally get their act together, only to reach Wednesday wondering where the bloody week went.
Then somebody says something that sounds familiar.
Not necessarily something clever. They don’t fix anything for you. They just describe an experience you thought belonged specifically to you, and for a moment something shifts.
Oh.
It’s not just me, then.
I think there’s value in that.
Not magical value. Not the internet version where the right thirty-second video suddenly changes your life and six months later you’re standing on a beach talking about mindset.
Recognition isn’t repair.
You can understand yourself better and still have to get up the next morning and live exactly the same Tuesday. The same job is there. The same school run needs doing. Whatever conversation you’ve been avoiding still needs having. Finding better words for a problem doesn’t make the problem politely disappear because you’ve finally understood it.
But understanding still matters.
There have been times when the most useful thing I could hear wasn’t advice. It was somebody describing something I recognised without making me feel stupid for experiencing it.
That doesn’t solve the next bit for you.
It just means you’re not beginning it while also wondering whether you’re the only person who has ever struggled with it.
And that is probably the real reason I keep putting these things out.
Not because I think everything that wanders through my head deserves an audience. Christ, no. Some thoughts absolutely should be allowed to die quietly without ever being given Wi-Fi.
And there’s another trap here that I don’t want to ignore. Helping people can become its own form of ego remarkably easily. You can start by saying you hope something helps, then gradually become very invested in being seen as the person who helps. Before long you’re no longer sharing something because it might be useful. You’re sharing it because you need somebody to tell you that you are useful.
I don’t want to build this around that either.
So I think the standard has to be simpler.
Have I actually experienced what I’m talking about? Am I being honest about how much I know and how much I don’t? Am I sharing something I’ve genuinely noticed, rather than borrowing somebody else’s certainty because it sounds good on camera?
And is there a chance another person might recognise themselves in it?
If there is, then I keep coming back to a question that is slightly uncomfortable because there’s some judgement in it.
If you have something that could genuinely help another person, what do you do with it?
I don’t mean everyone has to start a YouTube channel. Most people quite reasonably have better things to do with their evenings.
It might mean telling somebody what you wish someone had told you five years ago. Admitting something you normally joke away. Sending a message because you recognise what another person is going through. Saying the thing that makes somebody feel slightly less alone in an experience you already know well.
And maybe this is simply the standard I hold myself to, but if I’ve got something that might help and the main reason I’m keeping quiet is that I’m worried I’ll look stupid, I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason for me anymore.
That doesn’t mean every video needs to matter.
Some won’t.
It doesn’t mean everybody has to agree with me, or that every thought I put out will turn out to be right. I’d be slightly concerned if I could look back in a few years and discover I hadn’t changed my mind about anything.
It just means I’d rather be honest about where I am than pretend I’ve already arrived somewhere.
Which brings me back to tonight.
The light really was awful. I could see it on the screen before I even started. There were perfectly sensible reasons to wait until tomorrow and do the whole thing properly.
But the thought was there tonight.
So I pressed record.
Maybe hardly anybody will watch it.
Maybe one person will.
I’m increasingly comfortable with the idea that those are two very different ways of describing exactly the same number.
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