Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH.
I know the blog was scheduled to come back in August for a month long blog series that I’ve been prepping behind the scenes, but I felt the need to come on here and write after watching Bunny, or Grav3yardgirl’s, new video she posted today entitled, “We Need to Talk”.
For the past year, I’ve been following Bunny’s YouTube channel and I was extremely upset I didn’t come across it sooner. Bunny is very different from other YouTubers of her status; she’s extremely down-to-earth, relatable, funny, and a joy to watch because she was authentic. As I started to follow her, I began to realize that in the recent months, she hasn’t been completely herself, and I’m assuming her subscribers realized that as well, and soon after, Bunny began to lose subscribers.
In May, another famous YouTuber, Shane Dawson, went to Bunny’s hometown to help her out on her YouTube channel and figure out different ways she could improve and express more of herself on camera. She expressed during this mini-series between her and Shane that her mental health has been taking a toll on her for the last year, and she finds herself grasping onto this image of 2014 being the best year of her life.
It’s been about two months since that series, and Bunny posted this recent video about her thoughts and where she’s mentally been in the last two months. While we want to see this video as her being happy and taking care of herself and finding new and interesting ways to engage with her audience, we soon realized that she’s still very much battling with herself in her head. She’s tried too hard to make herself happy again, and she feels like it hasn’t changed how she’s felt for the last year.
That’s possibly the most honest thing I’ve watched in a really long time, and I commend Bunny for being openly honest with her audience.
Bunny isn’t saying anything about her views or number of subscribers and how up and down they’ve been this last year. As a matter of fact, she’s explaining the anxiety of upkeep of her YouTube channel and how she loves what she does because it saved her life the first time she was in a dark place. She is simply saying she is trying to figure out how to get out of it this time around, and how difficult it’s been when millions of people are watching your every move.
Now, I’m no famous YouTuber, but I very much relate to Bunny and her struggles of balancing happiness, passion, and your mental health all in one hand. I know how it feels to be passionate about something and still feel like it’s not good enough, I know how it feels to keep referring back to a time in life where you’re your happiest, and you try extremely hard to replicate that time again in real time, and I know how it feels when your mental health feels like it is out of your hands and you have no control over yourself. That’s currently my life as I write this, and it’s a reality that I believe a lot of us go through time and time, especially those who are going through a rough time in their lives.
I wish my life was 2016 again. I wish I was excited about something the way I was whenever I had acting class. I wish I felt the passion the way that I did while writing my portfolio for grad school. I wish I was strong and confident the way I was when I had a decent group of friends in college. There’s a lot that happened in 2016 that I wish I can get back, and I know it’s not possible because life happens and things change and that realization is sometimes hard to overcome.
Bunny’s message in her video is simply she is trying to force happiness on herself because she is tired of feeling the way she does. She mentions the little things people oversee are the things that make her proud and that make her feel like herself, but her audience is so fixated on this new “Grav3yardgirl 2.0” that she believes she has to live up to them and honestly, she’s saying she’s not ready.
And that’s the thing about recovery and mental health: things can’t change unless you’re personally ready to.
Happiness and good mental health do not happen overnight, and we have to stop believing that one good day solves everything in our lives. Things like that take time; there will be days where we feel like we haven’t made any progress. There will be days where we feel even sadder than we did before, but that doesn’t mean all the progress we made isn’t worth it.
I try to at least put real clothes on instead of staying in my pajamas on the day that I need to feel a bit productive. I try to write in my journals and so some TNTH writing to feel like I’m moving forward with my creative projects. I try to be aware of my behavior and the thoughts I have because if I just let them swim in my head all day, I’ll feel stuck and I will shut down. I try each and every day to get myself better, to feel like I’m in my element again, to be the person I know I’m meant to be, and the progress I made, whether big or small, is another step forward into bettering myself.
In Bunny’s position, sometimes you just have to do what you love and do it because you love it. Make those unboxing videos and makeup videos because they make you feel good. Make those tea vlogs in your car and talk about everything and anything because you feel better after venting. Everyone else is second to that.
As my friend, Tori, always says: you can’t fill someone else’s cup when yours is empty.
-Liz. (:
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Letters From Liz. 