Why I quit YouTube

A few years ago, I started a beauty YouTube channel.

I called it Summer Hen.

I called it Summer Hen because it was for women who were not actively young and drowning in their own collagen like a kitten in a pile of marshmallows. They’re not spring chickens anymore, so they’re… summer hens!

It was insanely fun and I devoted a stupid-ton of resources into it and then… I quit.

Here’s the story.

I had been stress-buying makeup. I didn’t know I had been stress-buying makeup at the time. I just thought I was getting reeeeeeeally into it. But it had been going on for a long time, and I was getting pretty good at it some days. My collection was… impressive.

At the same time, I missed blogging, and I had missed it for a while. But I missed the way it used to be. I missed the off-the-cuffness and the silliness and the being able to be myself. I was NOT a fan of the structured, thou-shalt-optimize-revenue-at-all-times-amen religion that blogs had become. I missed being able to run my mouth off and say stupid shit and just not care.

I started watching Tati – a popular beauty vlogger – and a few others. I liked her, but I didn’t much care for the other ones.

I started fantasizing about being just like her. I started fantasizing about it nearly all the time. Like, all. the. time.

(Unrelated public service announcement: This is also a key indicator of being bisexual or a lesbian. People who discovered they were lesbians later in life frequently reference these types of experiences happening a lot in their younger years. They thought it was admiration, the kind of thing we’d now call “girl crush”. Later they were like, “oh, it wasn’t a girl crush, it was a crush crush, and also, gee, wasn’t THAT a waste of 30 years?”)

And finally, I just wanted to think about something that wasn’t marketing. I was over it, and I’d been over it for a long time.

(Fun drinking game: Read what I wrote in the last three years of that career and do a shot every time I talked about marketing.)

(Spoiler: You’ll end the game so sober you’ll be legally allowed to drive anywhere in the world.)

(So actually, not a fun drinking game at all. Sorry.)

All of these things conspired to make Summer Hen.

I started making videos and editing videos and learning far more than any person ever wanted to know about marketing videos. That last part sucked, what with me being kinda over marketing and all. But it was cool and fun and thrilling to stretch myself to learn new things. It was fun to be a beginner again, and push to succeed at something.

(If you’re just tuning in, until early this year, I ran a marketing company. In 2012, it was featured in Chris Guillebeau’s The $100 Startup, which, um, sold a lot of copies. I didn’t really have to market after that, since 19 billion people read the book and quite a few of them went to my blog afterwards.)

Anyway, Summer Hen. I got to, like, 500 YouTube subscribers or something?

Then my parents went to Dublin. (I am personally related to every single person in the Republic of Ireland, including the children of recent immigrants, so this is a pilgrimage that is taken frequently.) So I moved out of my AirBNB to watch my parents’ house and dog. I packed up my little set that I’d built with animal print fabric and plastic tubing and rebuilt the whole thing in my parents’ guestroom. (Ask me how fun that was.)

One of the things my parents did in Ireland was go to the opening of a play that one of my cousins had written or directed or something. After the play, they went to a pub in Temple Bar, because that’s the law in Ireland. As they came out of the pub, my mother fell ass over teakettle into the gutter. Because it was Temple Bar at god-knows-what in the morning, the general consensus was that she had fallen down drunk, and the best thing to do would be to go home to bed.

Actually, she’d had a stroke. I found out while teaching a live class.

Making beauty videos in which I made up songs about luxury face masks was suddenly a LOT less fun.

The ensuing weeks were about what you’d expect. We stayed at my mom’s until she could safely fly. It was a while. A freezing spring turned to blazing summer in a beach town. The dog missed his parents.

My mom recovered, more or less. As she was recovering, my aunt was getting sick. She had been diagnosed with Something Horrid a while back. She got sicker, and then she got sicker.

Then she died, and I fell apart.

My YouTube channel came from Before.

Somehow, it just became the end of an era. My aunt dying pulled the last stabilizing Jenga block out of everything I had known. I couldn’t crack jokes while racing the clock to put on a full face of makeup in five minutes. I didn’t want to talk about eyeshadow that smelled like peaches. I wanted to hide under a duvet and never get out.

Summer Hen was the last thing that had happened Before - before the Jenga tower came down, and I couldn’t see it without becoming so sad I couldn’t stand it.

In the months that followed, I wondered if I’d made the right choice. I’d wondered if I should have still tried, pushed harder. I wondered if I was making too big of a deal about things. (Because that’s how grief works, right? Somebody’s dead, and you’re beating the shit out of yourself for “making too big of a deal”. As if not being alive anymore is, what… a small deal? A medium one?)

We were scheduled for our big trip that fall and I was looking forward to 100 days away from everything. And then one day, I found myself on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Russia and Japan. I found myself thinking, for the 20th time that day, “I can’t believe she’s still dead.”

And I tried to think if I could remember a day when I hadn’t thought that on at least 20 separate occasions. I couldn’t.

I had been so unmoored by grief that I had, every single day for months, honestly forgotten that death was permanent.

That’s when I knew I’d done the right thing. I needed to grieve, and in order to grieve, I needed to quit.