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scarcelyodd · 5 years ago

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It’s funny how we hold on to things. I haven’t posted a YouTube video in 6 years, and yet I’ve been planning to make it my hobby again all that time - and stressed out about it at times to boot. But I realized today that I am no longer that person, and I haven’t been for quite some time. It’s a bittersweet recognition: necessary, but painful, with excitement about what’s to come. (I have no idea what’s to come.) I was journaling about this and really wanted to talk to someone about it, but I couldn’t figure out the right person to talk to. And then I thought “Tumblr. Tumblr would understand.”

You see, the idea of running a physics YouTube channel has been on my mind for a decade now. I got the idea at the end of my first year of grad school, which was 2011. And I specifically decided not to pursue it at the time because I was joining a lab and needed to focus on this grad school thing I’d signed up for. But the idea wouldn’t leave me alone, and ideas for videos would often pop into my head - often enough, in fact, that I started keeping a list for when I could make them. In my third year of grad school, the list was long enough and the excitement great enough that I had to act on it. And so The Physics Factor was born. And I enjoyed (and stressed) about making videos for it for somewhere between a year-and-a-half and two years. It was a heady time. I loved thinking about it, and there was such a high every time I posted a video - I’d have trouble sleeping. I went to VidCon twice. For a time, I thought that when I finished grad school (there was never any question in my mind that I wanted to finish), I might want to give being a YouTube creator a proper chance.

And then I needed to take a health leave of absence.

(Of course it wasn’t that abrupt.)

I deal with chronic depression, though I had not properly internalized this at the time. It got to the point that I was no longer able to care for myself, and I needed to take a year-long health leave of absence from my PhD to recover. (Yep. It did take a year, and even then it was more like I was functional than fully recovered.) When I was back in grad school, I had two years to go until I’d be done with my PhD, so naturally I was thinking about what I wanted to do afterwards. And I found that I didn’t want to make a career out of online video anymore, but I still wanted it to be my hobby - a hobby I knew I couldn’t sustain while I finished my PhD, but a hobby I could pick up again in the future.

And so I finished my PhD and was lucky enough to get the exact sort of job I wanted (9-month university lecturer = health leave built in every summer), and there was a video studio in the department too! I could start a group in the department to make physics videos - and I did, my second semester here at UF. UF PhysTube became my new physics YouTube project, but I’ve struggled to do what I want with it. (We have made some videos, but there are also videos I still need to post that we shot a year ago.) I just don’t have the drive I thought I would - I don’t want to regularly work the extra hours apart from my job to build it into what I know it could be. I’m still tired. Not super-depressed, but tired of trying to be...unique, I suppose. I shared with @smokeandsong once that there was a part of me that wanted to be famous on some level - not massively famous, but known at some scale beyond my family, friends, and coworkers. I don’t think I want that anymore. I’m content to do my job and do it well and take in the things other people create rather than be a Creator myself. (Capital “C” because I recognize that we all create things every day, and can do so without being well-known, but “Creator” has been an identity for me for the past decade, and I no longer want it. I’m ok being a Consumer.)

All of this is to say that I am only now emotionally letting go of a project that functionally ended 6 years ago. And that is hard. But it is also good because it is me acknowledging that I am a different person with different desires than I was in the middle of grad school. My health leave changed me. My illness changed me. Grad School changed me. And there are many things I am thankful for in all of those experiences, but in the words of the immortal Miley Cyrus, “It’s time to let it go.”

#UF PhysTube isn't going anywhere though #It's going to be a light outreach project #rather than a channel that consistently posts videos #I still think physics outreach videos are fun to make #just not to the point of being an avocation #the physics factor #uf phystube #youtube creators #growing up #transitions

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