In my previous post, I briefly mentioned that there are things that I can’t talk about on my YouTube channel. I wanted to talk about why that is, because you might be wondering why I, a grown woman, would feel the need to censor myself.

It all goes back to the 2012 trip to Germany I went on with my younger brother and my aunt. I vlogged a bit, and wound up showing this video to my aunt because I thought she would like it. It’s still one of my favorite videos I’ve made, and she enjoyed it so much that she asked me for the link so she could watch it again later. Rather stupidly, I somehow never thought that she would watch my other videos, because while my family was aware that I did YouTube, no one had really shown an interest in it, and I was pretty close-mouthed and private about it, because I didn’t want them watching.

When my aunt watches YouTube she’ll do it when there’s downtime at work because she’s not that technologically inclined and doesn’t quite understand how to use her home computer even though she can use her work computer just fine for the most part. Another essential piece of background info for this story is that my mom and aunt work at the same business.

One day my mom came home and said she’d had a small fight with my aunt at work that day because of a little video I’d uploaded called “Virgin Territory.” This video was inspired by an MTV reality show of the same name that came out around that time and followed the lives of several different virgins who were in their early to mid-twenties. In it, I discuss my own virgin status, and some of the circumstances surrounding that. My aunt was rewatching the Germany video, and then picked this one out of the recommended videos on the sidebar.

My mom and aunt’s desks are close to each other, but still far enough apart that you have to raise your voice slightly to speak between them. My mom’s recollection of the argument opened with my aunt reacting to the video intro in which I tell my mother not to watch the video by calling to my mom and saying, “She doesn’t want you to watch this one!” My mom responded that she wouldn’t have wanted to watch it anyway. And then when my aunt got to the part of the video where I say that I’m a virgin, she yelled, “Oh! She’s a virgin!” across to my mom.

My mom then got into it with with my aunt about how you shouldn’t just shout things like that across the office because even though no one was really around the office at the time, the office is small and what if someone else had heard?

At this point in her recollections, my mom stopped to say to me, “I don’t even understand why you feel the need to talk about stuff like that online anyway.”

Because I want to. Because I can. Because telling all my uncomfortable and/or unusual stories could maybe help someone else, whether it’s by actually relating to what I’m saying and gleaning some advice from it, or even as a distraction from their own troubles by using me for entertainment.

In that moment, sitting there in a room loaded with my mother’s disapproval, I felt something inside of me close off.

I’m non-confrontational by nature, and in order to avoid possible future confrontation with my family, I decided that there are certain topics I could never address in video (not all of them sexual in nature, by the way). It’s a loss and a limitation that still annoys me, which I part of why I wanted and needed to start this blog.

And the next time my aunt decides she might want to rewatch one of my videos, I will burn her a DVD.