Where do I even start with this?

About two years ago I decided it would be a good idea to launch my own website. I was super excited for it because I thought it would make me “official.” At that point I was really IN THIS. So I dropped close to $120 for a domain and a squarespace and set everything up.

I spent the first couple months just uploading all my videos (none of which I could run ads on) and getting all the thumbnails and branding put together. I made a calendar of events so everyone could keep track of my uploads and appearances and whatnot. After all that was done I created a blog page on the site to write whatever I wanted but for some reason I never used it.

Nowadays I find this so strange because I feel my strength is in my writing. On my last couple videos, I spent 60% of my time on making sure the scripts were good. But because I’ve decided to dedicate so much more time on getting the scripts right, the amount of videos per month have declined sharply. So I write about less, but I’m writing a lot more, if that makes sense.

And for the most part, I’m content with that. Once you start to hone in on your strengths and what makes you love doing this in the first place, you start to really find freedom. If anything is conveyed in those last couple videos, it’s my confidence in my ability. I don’t really care what people think about my opinion, they are seeing the most fleshed out version of my opinion and are responding to it. That excites me.

So why didn’t I figure this out earlier? This was sort of the backbone of how my channel started. I took a couple strange diversions over the years, stopped using scripts, tried to make my channel more traditionally funny based on what my peers were doing on YouTube, but this very simple and very crucial element to me somehow continued to fall by the wayside. In a way, I want to blame YouTube and it’s climate for making more instead of better. Part of me wants to blame what everyone else was doing, ridiculing art for the sake of comedy, or trying to give a snippet of one’s overall feelings to quantify the experience of seeing a movie. But this is also misguided because I never needed to follow that model, matter of fact when I did follow that model my viewership greatly declined. I was unhappy, I was talking about things I really didn’t care about and I wasn’t presenting myself in the way that I felt was the most me.

But who was I? I had no idea. There’s a portion of everyone that seems to think they are just an amalgamation of all the media they absorb on a daily basis and in a way, I think that’s true. But if I’m just that, an amalgamation of what I consume, then I WAS YouTube. That’s a pretty clear way to lose one’s path, becoming the medium in which one is presenting themselves. There’s a David Foster Wallace quote that goes along the lines of “and at the end, they just become themselves.” I think that perfectly captures what’s gone on with me over the course of this time. At some point, you just shut off the internet and start thinking for yourself and make it about you and your experience. That’s when you start doing something valuable to yourself.

So back to my website. During this time of identity crisis, I created a blog and wrote nothing. No one read me, or watched me, on my website. It cost a lot of money and time to manage. I went through several different layout designs. I did everything I could but there was nothing I could really do, in the end. It died. It became an expensive mistake.

Why? Is it possible that, because of this central issue of identity, because I wasn’t writing I was suffering? Did the site die because I wasn’t writing, or did it die because it was just a bad idea?

To be completely honest with you, I don’t know. And I really don’t care.

My domain expired a couple weeks ago. The site has been offline for a few months and I don’t miss it really at all. But there was something about that email saying “nyxfears.com has expired,” stuck with me. With this new mindset about being ones self and being more writing focussed it cut me deepest because I realized the reason this happened, that my channel struggled for so long, that I felt like I wasn’t doing my best work, was because of me.

So were back to this question, where do I even start? I made a WordPress blog today, the thing that I neglected the most when I had a professional website. But now I really know who I am and what I want to do with it and I have an inner duty not to just let it die. It’s an expression of myself and one should take themselves very seriously.

So what am I going to do here? Well.

Explorations of movies and entertainment media I don’t cover on my channel.

Thoughts or opinions on things going on in the media climate.

Personal stuff that I feel the need to write about.

Updates on where I am with a movie or video.

And everything else I can think of.

I feel something like this has really become necessary. I write a lot of words about a lot less things with the exception of Twitter where I write short 140 character books over the course of the day regarding things I enjoy. People want more content, and I want to produce more content. I need a place to write things that I don’t intend to turn into a video. I need a place where I can express myself that isn’t on YouTube where the discussion is more geared around that day’s meme.

And if things come together in one of these articles that really needs to be turned into an expression of the visual media, then that may happen here too. I’m excited about this and what I can accomplish with it. I hope you join me on the journey. And who knows, maybe something good will come of it and I’ll grow as a writer.

^^ Nyx.