Right now my little YouTube channel has 44 subs or so. I think part of my problem is that I don’t have a niche. I talk about book reviews and religion and homemaking and I tell funny stuff, and bible journaling and do camera unboxings. That might just be too much. People who are interested in book reviews might not give a crap about cameras. Catholics don’t necessarily love books. People who love photography might not be homemakers. You get the idea. Like most people, I am a multifaceted human being, but that just might not translate to YouTube very well.
Plus my current camera presence is not very confident or lively. In person, I’m a pretty lively and outspoken woman, and I have a sarcastic sense of humor. That vivaciousness does not always come through on video. Part of it is that I’m uncomfortable. Being on video has always made me nervous. Part of it is definitely that I fear being judged because of my weight right now, but even when I was skinny, I wasn’t super comfortable in front of cameras. That makes me think that maybe I shouldn’t even be doing a YouTube channel. Yet, I feel compelled to because I want to run a dog rescue when my husband retires, and it’s the best way I can think of to make money from home (if I could build the channel) that would still leave me with plenty of time to actually run the rescue and I would have some of my own money coming in to support the dogs rather than being solely reliant on donations. Donations can be hard to come by in hard times, and times are hard and they’re getting even harder. Right now, when I help to network dogs and find them rescues on Instagram, it’s hard enough to get people to pledge because so many people are worried about how they’re going to pay their bills, which is totally understandable. So I feel like having some sort of income stream is important, but I really love being at home, so I don’t want to work outside the home. And furthermore, with my constant mood instability and the brain effects of ECT treatment, I can’t really see holding down a job as being something I would excel at for a long period of time. Plus, all the work I have experienced doing gets low pay, and my husband thankfully makes more than that. But that means our tax bracket is higher, and I feel like I would lose everything to taxes. It’s like when women insist ongoing back to work when all of their paycheck is going to go to paying for daycare – it just seems pointless. If all my money is going to go to the government, why work? It’s bad enough they’re stealing from my husband, but I don’t need them stealing from me too. I understand I would have to pay taxes on a YouTube revenue stream, but at least it’s something I enjoy and not something I had to get up and go to an office and be miserable to do. As a wise priest has pointed out, even God doesn’t ask you for more than ten percent, but the federal government has the audacity to take thirty to fifty. Why the hell should the federal government of America or any other country be entitled to more money than God himself? And you can’t even get some friggin’ health care out of it. This is what the Bible speaks of when it says that the rulers are defrauding the workers of their wages. The end is coming, but I digress.
Anyway, the point of this post is not to rail against my crappy government for their theft, but to brainstorm what to do with my YouTube. I am thinking I may need to split everything into two channels. One will be for books. The other will be for Bible Journaling, art, photography or maybe even something else. But I lean toward Bible journaling for the second channel. I definitely will not be covering all of these topics in a second channel. I need to pick two lanes, which is more than enough, and stay in them.
Looking at my options, it is hard to decide. I would love to have a channel about instant photography, but I don’t really know how much I have to say about it except how much I love it and I love sharing pictures. I’m not sure that alone is enough to make a channel. And I already listened to a channel I really love that covers a lot of the kinds of photography and cameras I enjoy. I don’t want my channel to be a copy of his, but he pretty much talks about all the things I’m interested in, and says a lot of what I have to say.
Art as therapeutic practice could be a subject for a channel. I just hesitate on that front because while some of my art looks really cool, some of it looks really awful. And I feel like even if I had an art channel, I would need to pick some kind of niche. So would I pick abstracts, or would I pick collage? There are already a couple of good collage channels, but honestly, they could use some more. Maybe, since I sometimes put Bible verses on my collages for digital faith journaling, I could combine that with regular Bible journaling, so that my second channel is creative, but also scriptural. I could cover the journaling, I do in my scripture, journals, as well as my illustrated faith, bible, journaling journal, and I could include some of my digital work as well. This could also encourage me to stay on my journey of being creatively consecrated to God.
I could make videos about homemaking and femininity and submitting to your husband. I had an Instagram where I talked about that stuff. But honestly, all of that material draws outrage, and I’m not really looking for my channel to be a source of stress. It’s stressful enough to deal with making videos without having to deal with tons of angry comments every day and people reporting my channel because they don’t like what I have to say. Plus it’s very hard to talk about submitting to your husband and being a good wife in the traditional space, because while some of your viewers will be women who are looking for advice and genuinely find it helpful in their marriages, some of your viewers are men who don’t like women. They may be abusing their wives behind the scenes and they use this stuff as a cudgel against them to get them to submit. I once had a man write to me for marriage advice comparing women to dogs and asking how to train his wife to be more submissive. Ridiculous, offensive crap like that makes my blood writhe and boil. I don’t wanna make some poor abused woman’s life more miserable by giving her husband ammunition to use against her. Submission is only submission if it is a gift freely given. If it is coerced, it is not submission at all. It is oppression. Women have intrinsic value and dignity, and while some of my male followers were wonderful guys I’m sure, some of them definitely did not think that women were deserving of dignity and care. That’s why I left the space. That and the fact the protestants are destroying it with fringe groups supporting polygamy and really crazy things like that. Some people think I’m crazy because I think women shouldn’t be able to vote. But I’ll tell you, that’s downright tame compared to what some of these people have to say.
All that to say, if I don’t want a controversial channel, I need to stay away from that stuff. And honestly, I’m a traditional Catholic now, so I would fit into the tradcath space, but most of the traditional scene seems to be very protestant. And honestly, I don’t want to deal with it. No hate to protestant friends. I myself was a Protestant until a few months ago, but Protestantism has some serious issues, and fringe groups and denominations are running wild with various crack pot biblical interpretations with no basis in reality that they can use to justify their particular desires or sins. Whether it’s the leftist churches flying gay flags to justify their proclivities, or far right nutjobs who justify polygamy because they don’t want to be chaste like their Savior, or power hungry people wanting to develop a cult of personality and make a whole lot of money, Protestantism is falling apart. No thank you.
So I guess now that I’ve written all this out and sorted my thoughts, it seems best to make the second channel about bible journaling – both digital and paper maybe. The first channel will be about my first love – books! Maybe I’ll have Bible Journal With Mes. Show my supplies. Talk about what I’m learning. Perhaps that will help me keep up with my potential Third Order style vow I’m trying to design.
Cherished Rainbow 