Okay.
Hey guys.
I'm shaking.
Hey guys, it's Sadie.
I don't know if you remember me. but I'm Sadie.
I was a lifestyle YouTuber here on the internet for around eight years.
I started in 2016 making lifestyle videos.
So here's kind of the story of why I took my break.
Basically all of my adolescent years I was making YouTube videos, so that was my full-time job.
You might have noticed that I haven't posted on my channel for around two years.
I think my last video was December of 2023.
So actually basically like two and a half years.
I'm gonna tell you what happened, why I took that break, because I feel like there's a lot of things I really really have wanted to explain to you guys for the past couple of years, but I didn't want to just come back and explain and then not fully keep posting.
Thank you so much for checking up on me and like even caring about me.
I still am blown away by how many DMs I got asking if I was okay and like where were my videos, and that you guys missed my videos.
I was just so surprised.
Like, I was like, why do you guys still care?
Why?
It's awesome.
Like, I literally feel so important.
Like, thanks.
I kind of wrote down some notes.
So that's why I keep like looking at my phone because I didn't want to like jabble.
I didn't want to like babble on for hours.
I absolutely loved being a content creator in the beginning.
It just felt so natural to me.
Like I was like, I want to make videos.
I want to turn my life into little mini movies, share them with other people and create like a community of people who like the same things as me.
Every video I was making was exactly what I wanted to make.
Everything I was genuinely interested in.
I would make videos that wouldn't even get monetized, because it would be all about my music playlists.
Comment down below music emoji if you watch those videos, because I made so many playlist videos and that's actually like a lot of the videos that blew up and made my channel as big as it is.
As time went on, this career has a way of pulling you into places that you didn't really want to go in the beginning.
And I didn't really know that I had to like protect myself from.
I was literally an adolescent.
Like I started this channel when I was 13.
Like the most important years where you kind of decide like who you're gonna be as a young adult, get your priorities straight and like what really matters to you and figuring out all of that.
Adolescent life was basically overshadowed by my channel.
So it was viewed through a lens of my channel.
Whether it's your content, your mental health, your personal life, it's really hard for those things not to get distorted.
When you are doing a lifestyle YouTube channel in high school.
I think I barely missed like a week of uploads.
I probably missed like maybe five weeks in the entire eight years I was doing YouTube.
Long story short, if you want to wrap it up in a little nutshell.
Keep in mind, YouTube was the only job I had ever had.
I don't know if you guys remember this, but I think I told the story on my channel about how I applied for working at Tim Hortons when I was 13.
And I wanted to work at Tim Hortons before I even started my YouTube channel.
Then I started my channel and I was like I kind of want to take a chance on my YouTube channel and not apply to Tim Hortons.
I took that leap and then obviously it worked out.
So I had never had a normal job aside from being a YouTuber, which I feel like just that in itself is kind of crazy and can mess you up a little bit in the mind.
I think it's a really good idea for everyone to have a job at this point, which i probably wouldn't have said that like earlier on in my youtube career, but now i'm like wow, you really do need that perspective.
What happened to me was basically what happened to every single youtuber who's been doing youtube for a long time things like identity issues, friendship issues, self-image and ego distortion issues anxiety, basing your whole life on how well a post does or just focusing on the numbers too much.
My inability to separate what I want out of my life versus what my viewers want out of my life, and also being sucked into comparison, because you can constantly see everything that's going on in every other creator's accounts and it's really hard to not compare.
After eight years of doing social media full-time, I decided I need to take a step back.
Like I probably should have taken a step back like three years before I actually did.
Not that I'm ashamed of any of the content that I was making, but I just think it was affecting my personal life so much that I didn't even have time to figure out like what I actually wanted in life because I was so focused on the video.
So I basically deleted everything but my YouTube videos.
I privated all of my TikToks, all of my Reels, my Instagram.
My TikTok were completely bare and I just left it alone.
It was really crazy.
Like I could talk about all of those things and those mental things that happened to me in that time of like, readjusting to life without social media, when you've literally grown up with it and it being your entire way that you view life.
The other thing is that it wasn't all negative.
I was really curious about what other experiences I could have in the world and what else was out there for me.
Career wise personal life wise being able to experience life without people watching you.
So what I actually ended up doing is starting my own freelance social media business, like social media strategy, a little bit of content creation and consulting for different clients.
And it was actually really cool.
Like I love being an entrepreneur.
I feel like that's one thing I've learned from this whole break is that I love being my own boss.
Not being your boss has difficult things and being your own boss has challenges.
So it's like, which hard do you want?
And I would rather this hard. right now, which might change, but yeah.
I don't know if I said this on my channel, but I dropped out of university.
I dropped out after second year because I noticed that I just wasn't gaining what I thought I was going to gain from being in university.
I knew that I could just get further on my own, like with my own freelance thing or just something outside of the realm of just going to university getting an internship and then getting a full-time job which I don't judge anyone who does do that path but I just knew it just wasn't for me stopped.
Then I started my freelance social media business.
Then from there I got a full time offer at a social media creative, digital marketing type of agency.
I was doing that for the last six months.
So I was working full time for someone else.
It didn't actually end up working out that I wanted to stay in that path, but I have so much peace of mind now knowing that that path or that specific company or just that wasn't for me.
And that's really cool that I got to experience that and know that that wasn't what I needed.
And somewhere along the path I realized that I really, really missed making videos, which further confirms to me that this is a very authentic decision, because I wasn't forcing it at all.
What really solidified it for me was actually re-watching my Greece vlogs.
I don't know if you guys watch those like four videos that I made about going to Greece.
I was like wow, those videos were not even anything special.
Like I look at them and I'm like, okay, cool.
Like they're aesthetic and they're just me basically talking to my camera and not making anything crazy.
But I knew that I just was so excited to like edit those videos and make it look the way that I wanted.
And that people were actually so supportive about that.
Watching those videos made me really, really miss making videos again.
Then I started rewatching all of my past videos and I was like wow, I really wanna jump back into it and keep making stuff.
I also feel like the way that I was doing YouTube before was just not the healthiest.
Like I didn't have any boundaries.
I never had a weekend to myself.
I didn't have any blocks of time of like okay, I'm gonna work for this amount of the day and then I'm gonna not work for this amount of the day.
Like it's just constantly ongoing and that was completely my fault.
You don't have to do that with YouTube.
It's just very easy to fall into that trap.
I feel like you need some type of maturing to realize that you can input boundaries and still get everything you want done.
But it was good to realize that it was up to me and I needed to take that step back from YouTube and kind of grow up a little bit.
I have a little bit more of a reason to put in boundaries because of the mental health things that I went through.
So now I have the ability to go about YouTube and social media in a different way and treat it as my job, but something that's still deeply meaningful and fulfilling to me.
Which is crazy, because the day that I decided that I was going to start making videos again, my channel got hacked.
It got deleted because of community guidelines.
I think it's because I reported it, my boyfriend reported it and I think some of you guys reported it.
So I think it got deleted because of that.
It was looking like I wasn't going to get it back.
I could not get in contact with any YouTube people because my Google account got hacked.
So all the recovery options were through my Google account.
There's also no contact email for YouTube or Google.
So I had to reach out to all of these contacts.
It was really helpful that I was in the company, that I was in with my full-time job, because a person there had a connection to Google and that's essentially how I got my channel back.
But without that there was a really high chance that I wasn't going to get it back.
So I'm just so thankful that I have it now, and it really made me a lot more grateful to still have this standing.
But yeah, so now I'm back.
If you guys are at all interested in the videos that I'm going to make.
I really just wanna start sharing my life again and making just very similar types of videos, things that I was creating before, all about life and mindset and health productivity tech, finances and obviously, making everything a little bit aesthetically pleasing.
Never hurt anyone.
I'm very nervous to see what your guys' reaction is and I hope that you don't hate me for disappearing.
So I hope that you guys can understand that I really really needed that for my development and my mental health.
Please comment down below what videos you want to see from me in these next couple weeks, because I'm going to be uploading weekly again.
And I'm also going to be posting on Instagram and TikTok and just getting to creating again.
Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you in my next video.
Bye.
