When I turned 30, someone told me that it wouldn’t feel nearly as transformative as 35. I wasn’t expecting that to be true. I have a resentment towards being told who I am or how things will go. I’ve never wanted to go to a psychic because if my future can be read, I’m not so sure I’d like to know it. I’m stubborn. I don’t fold easily. Too stubborn to admit that time has passed. 2025 was a year where a lot of things came into focus for me. It’s the year when I finally started to understand a lot of things about myself. I’ve had to admit to some hard truths and recognize some very real things about myself. It’s the year I started to really look in the mirror and realize that enough time has passed for me to be honest about the reality of certain things.
Time isn’t something I am very conscious of. To be completely honest, even though I’ve lived in LA for almost a decade now, it feels like I just got here. Intellectually, I know this isn’t true. I’ve seen many businesses open and close. I still remember going to Amoeba at the old location….but it’s like when the quarantine happened, I stopped aging. Time stood still and hasn’t moved forward for me in many ways. I feel like I’ve been consistently working and working and working and challenging myself to improve and grow, but I’ve lost sight of that time. I’ve lost sight of the fact that I moved to this city in my 20s and I’m half way through my 30s. I don’t feel like I am though. It’s a very odd feeling… but I’ve had to be honest about it. As I buried my parents, a lot of things came into focus for me. It’s cliché, but death really teaches you how final everything is. It kills me to know that I never called my mom as much as I should have. That I wasn’t able to speak to my father before he died. Its hard for me to recognize that I allowed time to pass in such a great way that in all reality, in the pursuit my career as a content creator, I’ve forgotten what’s important.
In retrospect, my ex wasn’t great, but I was sucked into my online content creator life so much that I can admit that I did neglect aspects of our relationship. The thing I’ve come to understand is that because of my upbringing, I have a very severe, almost automated survival instinct. I don’t let myself rest until I know I am financially secure. I started to feel insecure in that situation, so I hustled, and I hustled, and I hustled until I made more money than he did. When I really think of it, I’ve always used what I’ve had; and what I’ve always had is my creativity…and my body. I don’t like using my body. I don’t like selling it, measuring it, or categorizing it. I hate fitting it into a mold and selling it in whatever package sells best, often a package that feels so disconnected from me. But aren’t we all doing that? Aren’t we all acting and moving in ways where we are pretending and selling?
For about a year, I committed to wearing the same wig and shooting my videos the same way. In a way, it was really nice because it meant that I had cohesion. People clearly preferred the cheap pixie wig to my natural hair. I noticed I was getting more compliments on my appearance. Women would stop me in the airport bathroom and ask if I cut my own hair, and ask how. I always felt they were being shady, but at a certain point, I had to accept that, whether it was a genuine celebration or ridicule, it got attention, and that attention can be monetized. I’ve never liked attention. Not really.
I think most of my problems can be traced back to the fact that I am not a capitalist. I like making money, I like having enough to feed myself and to enjoy a few nice things here or there; but I’ve never loved money. Money just made me feel safe. Money meant I didn’t have to put up with men I didn’t want to, and it meant that I was able to not rely on my parents….if I’m being honest, what I realized this year was that I have been hustling for most of my life, which has made it really hard for me to be appreciative of what I have. But this was a year when I started to truly appreciate my life.
If you follow my YouTube channel, you’ll know that about two years ago, I decided to commit to uploading higher-quality content less frequently. This was a great decision. At the time, I was struggling to maintain my channel’s mainstay, True Tea. Initially, I started the series as something easy I could do every week. I’d film several different episodes in one night, and I still had plenty of time to live my life. When I first moved to LA, I was going to BDSM and Poly socials really regularly. I was making friends and meeting people. It was why I came to the city. It’s how I met Alexander, whom I love very much. I’m so glad that I was able to make the time to live and experience life… but when the pandemic hit, I found myself with too much time to overthink, and I think I forgot how to live my life in a way that’s becoming apparent to me as the year closes. Because I was trying to do more, I put most of my energy into creating video essays. These essays would perform much better than my previous content. People liked them. They wanted more of them. But only very recently have I done the numbers and realized that while I’d been working hard, I hadn’t really been working smart. I was investing more in my content than I was making.
It’s bizarre because, here’s the thing: while I’ve had worse months, I feel like the content I was creating for a while was my best content and content that performed the best. I felt good about what I was doing and how it was being received, for the most part. However, I had to be honest and recognize that I was feeling drained. I’ve been feeling drained for a while. My parents death has me thinking a lot about legacy and what I want to leave behind. It’s made me realize I really don’t want to look back on my life and say the thing I was best known for was my YouTube channel. For years and years, when people recognized me for my YouTube channel, I’ve cringed. Not because I don’t appreciate my followers, but I guess it’s always been something I could do but it was never the thing I really set out to be good at. The speech I used to give to students before Trump dismantled that path of income for me was always about accepting that maybe the job you excel at isn’t the job you were necessarily meant to work. For me, that was about how storytelling was always a talent of mine that I’ve never seen as one. Sometimes you have things you’re good at that you weren’t expecting to be good at and its important to embrace those things; especially for survival. However, the other side of that story is that Youtube was never my first choice.
I’ve been a YouTuber since I was a teenager, and I don’t imagine a time in my life when I won’t be in some way. The reality is that among the hobbies I’ve had, blogging has always been my favorite. I was an early adopter. I was among the first of my kind, though few will ever acknowledge it. I didn’t start this for acknowledgement. I started it for the love of blogging. My blogs have taken so many forms over the years, but fast forward today, the reality of my life is that it is my current full time job. It’s a job I am actually happy to have. These days, I can feel how my situation has given me more comfort and security than most. This year, I learned to appreciate the fact that I am an artist and that I get to create full-time. I get to largely talk about anything I want and because I can, my job is fun. I’m excited to create something new and I love the cycle of publishing something and having it entertain people. But what I’m realizing is that I have allowed myself to completely lose sight of many things in my life because of how I’ve focused on Youtube.
It sounds odd, but even though I have several partners who love me, this was the year it really sank in: they actually mean it. My hustling has been bad for my relationships. I work too hard and too much. There are times when Alexander, a software engineer at a very large company, just wants to take me out and let loose after a stressful workday, but because I don’t have traditional hours, I still feel like I’m on the clock. Around the time I finish one video essay, I’m off to start the next, constantly trying to capitalize on a trend, which I’ve never really enjoyed. I’m not a trendy person. I don’t care for trends, but my job requires me to at least remain aware of them.
When Taylor Swift released her last album, I decided to mix things up. Instead of engaging deeply in the discourse and spending weeks upon weeks researching and writing some video about Taylor Swift that I’d barely care about, I just decided to sit down, do my nails and listen to the album while recording my reaction on my phone. I edited around the copyright, uploaded the video and put a nice thumbnail on it….and it made me more money than the past two video essays I had worked on that I had paid several editors to edit. I was able to pay my rent with a video that required, maybe 3 hours of my time. That was a turning point for me. I started doing live-streaming and I found that I can edit my livestreams into content; even better if I record high quality self footage while I do so. With a bit of pre-planning, I can EASILY edit that livestream into a video and depending on the topic, it’ll perform as well as a normal video essay. Live streaming also allows me to have a more direct connection with my audience and many of my followers have missed my livestreaming. I’m ending the year with earnings higher than they had been in the previous month simply because I have been uploading more content and doing more live-streaming. Sure, some of these videos aren’t performing well. Some of them sit at just under 40k views, which is a huge shift from the 100k my video essays were getting, but in terms of my earnings, it is turning out to be a much better thing for me to work a bit smarter.
What I can’t get past, however, is the feeling that this content is “trashy”. It feels trashy for me to upload content that isn’t well shot, often deeply researched and performed a certain way. But it feels like a good thing for me to continue doing and I find that even if the stream is just me relaxing and creating something while reacting to things, that can do something for me. I’ve managed to earn a decent amount on just the livestreams, which I wasn’t even thinking about. Livestreams are helpful because I’m able to a lot of what I’d do in post just live on a livestream. It feels like the right choice.
If you’ve followed me on Patreon for a while, you’ve heard me speak about struggling through a lot of this, but I feel like I’ve truly started to figure out what’s what. Ultimately, I have recognized that if I start live-streaming, I can upload content regularly to my page that will then perform decently enough to, bare minimum, tide folks over for the more substantial videos I’m working on. Last year, I lost a lot of time and resources towards experimenting, but I think what I have to do is use my Youtube channel to fund my more creative endeavors. I have so many things I want to do. So many creative projects I want to complete.
What I’m going to do in 2026 is commit to making creativity a mainstay of my Youtube channel. I want to do all of those projects that are rotting away in my apartment. I want to use my overlocker. I want to do something with that pile of leather I have in my apartment. And what I’ve realized is that I find myself being drawn back to my roots. I was once a DIY Youtuber content creator. That content didn’t get viewed, so I started talking about myself. People were more interested in that so I kept going. That led me to feminism and that led me to social justice, which ultimately let me to leftism. And in a way, I find all of these things coming together in this exact moment in time. And I’ve recognized that I am actually in a great position to do something big. I have the platform, the desire, the talent and the ability. I don’t want my channel to become what I would internalize as trashy, but I like the idea of doing a few livestreams a month and spending most of the month working on several creative somethings or others and putting together something huge.
Frankly, there are some projects I paused that I want to bring back…and collaborations I want to see in 2026. So I’m going into this year with a lot of excitement.
Happy New Years!
-Kathryn
Blaque In The City 
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