A New Leaf Has Been Turned

Hello bloggers:

As everyone is preparing for Easter this weekend and the festivities it involves, I hope we all have a great time and the Easter bunny brings us lots of treats. Tonight as I sit here writing this entry, I am very proud of myself because it is something that I wanted to write for the past 2 years now.

As some of you may know, I have a YouTube channel that I began 3 years ago. I started it off with gaming videos, animations, and fun challenges that I did with my boyfriend. But back in 2016, I lost the passion to continue on with my channel. When I first started my channel, I played the game “Five Nights at Freddy’s”, which was a horror survival game. I began making animations using the characters from that game. I got nearly 30,000 subscribers, over 13,000,000 views on all of those videos, and many fans. I would get fan art, people saying they want to meet me, and people saying I was their favorite YouTuber.

So what went wrong, you may ask?

I noticed that people didn’t really watch my videos for me. They didn’t like me; they weren’t a fan of me; they were a fan of the video game. They liked the animations, they liked the game plays, they liked the game itself. Whenever I would upload another video, say a challenge video or a story time, it would get as many dislikes as likes. It would get 100 views whereas my other videos had over 2 million views. Why was this happening? I asked myself for so long. Then the answer came: my channel became a channel for “Five Nights at Freddy’s”. I was no longer in control of my channel; it was in control of me. When I posted another type of video, comments would flock in saying I needed to go back to the other videos. So I did. I became miserable and resentful of YouTube.

At one point, it was amazing. It was fun, I had a lot of passion for it and it was wonderful. I was making a decent paycheck every month from the ad money I was receiving on my videos, and life was great. But as months went on, it got dull. I did not like where it was heading. I wanted to be in control of my channel again, to make things that I wanted to make. And I couldn’t.

For fear of the hate. For fear of the disapproval. For fear of the unsubscribers.

I stopped making videos. Biweekly videos turned into 2 videos per year. I envied YouTubers who had fun making their videos, got to be themselves and had an audience that respected them and followed them on their journey.

Something in me snapped at the beginning of March. I didn’t know what it was. It just snapped. I had a mini breakdown and I realized: This life is short. I want to make videos that I want to make. I no longer want to be constrained by the audience that only wants me to make videos that I no longer have any passion or interest in whatsoever. So I went to the store and bought a brand new camera. I planned out what I was going to say, sat down, and filmed it. I was so nervous it took me until now to finally upload it. The response was better than I imagined. Some people were disappointed, but the others understood. I was so afraid to take this initial step and say to my audience: “This is me. This is what I am doing now.” But I did, and I’ve never felt so happy.

At the end of the day, I am a super girly, super loud 20 year old girl. I have a blog, a book, a (surprisingly enough) Famous Birthdays profile and a brand that I adhere myself to. But search up my name in Google and there you have it: pictures of animated robotic chickens all over the place. How embarrassing! Not my image nor brand at all.

Collaborations were turned down because no one wanted to work with me. Not because my content wasn’t good, but I wanted to work with people whose videos were the type I wanted to make, but didn’t. Our channels were totally different. Go to my channel and see animations from “Five Nights at Freddy’s”, in which were pretty lame if I do say so myself . . . well, it wasn’t promising in this line of work. Even if I were to make a new video, like I said, my audience would thumb it down so quick I couldn’t even have time to think about what went wrong. Comments would desperately exclaim: “Go back to your old content!”

A new leaf has been turned over. This is finally me. Victoria Hecnar, making the videos I wanted to make from the very beginning. Blogging about what I wanted to blog about, from the very beginning.

Now that I am on my way to building a brand and image for myself that I can be proud of, you’re going to see a lot more than me! I’m going to be uploading weekly videos, writing weekly blog posts, and updating my Instagram a lot more than before (yup, no more photo per 6 months!) This year, starting now, is going to be about my passions and going forward, I am no longer doing things for the numbers or for the interests of others.

There are thousands of other animated videos out there, and my channel will no longer be one of them. It was an incredible journey, but this has to be done. I am doing this for me and for my well-being.

A new leaf has been turned.