To be fair, I don’t do my best thinking at 2am.

This morning, tossing and turning and trying to get back to sleep, my mind started to wander. Sometimes I get up at this time and read a book before sleep overcomes me again. Other times I lay there thinking.

I noticed my thinking at these early times is deep but not necessarily, helpful to me.

Let me explain.

At this witching hour, all thoughts tend towards the dark, the sad, the fearful. Maybe there’s an academic study into this stuff but at this time, thoughts seem a lot more ominous. It may be because that’s when we are at our most vulnerable – in our own heads and under the covers, in a dark, silent house.

At this time, anxieties seem to double, grow and morph into big fears (until you switch on the light and miraculously, they all disappear instantly).

Knowing this, I let the thoughts wander knowing that in the morning, I’d have a completely different outlook.

At 2am, I pondered about my YouTube channel probably as a result when I checked the numbers last night and saw that my subscribers had jumped to about 1250.

WTF? When did that happen?

It gave me a bit of a shock because my first thought was, “I have this pressure now to perform!”

So I started to think:

• Why do I even bother sharing videos on it?
• How are these videos even any help to anyone?
• What do I get out of this?
• Do I even like doing these or are they more of a chore?
• What’s the point of having a YouTube channel?
• What’s next into the ‘abyss’ (that’s what I’m calling my next phase in life).

Then I tossed and turned in angst trying to come up with an answer to these questions.

So as you can see, I started thinking about what my intention is with sharing these videos. I started the YouTube channel as my own online video platform to house all my videos of everything I was learning, working on and reading about. It was never something to be used for a business and I never cared for subscriber numbers and likes and some such.

However, an increase in numbers makes it feel like there’s pressure on me and I don’t think I’m prepared for that.

I moderate the comments too because sometimes there’s some nasty comments in there but luckily, they don’t happen often and I delete them immediately. I don’t let them hurt me – I find the moderation more annoying than the actual comments truth be told.

It’s yet another thing I need to do for the channel whose purpose is unknown to say the least.

I began to think that I need to explore if I can make the channel private – that the only person who has access to it is me – or who I open it up to with a password of sorts.

Alternatively, I wondered if I could save these videos on my own blog space here. However, I have over 500 videos over the years that are sitting there on YouTube (many of the playlists have been made private) so it’s not worth my time and effort to download and save them elsewhere again.

Oh what a bother!

I think one of the tasks I will need to do when I finish work formally (on the 11th October), is that I will explore looking to make either my channel private OR only having my most recent book reviews up there public while the majority can all be private. I can still share the videos here on my blog but provide my readers with the code to view the video.

Of course, once I do this, you can further ask the question, “Why even bother having a YouTube channel at all if your intention is for no one to see it?”

Fair question.

Truth is, I have been reaching to similar conclusions for many things in my life in recent times as I shed my ‘old self’ and ‘old thinking’ and try to create space for the new.

I have said goodbye to many things recently:

✅ Removed toxic people and relationships out of my life

✅ Permanently deleted social media

✅ Re-organised my affairs to be available offline/off cloud

✅ Removed all unnecessary apps off my phone

✅ Reduced my screen time to about 1 hour and 15 minutes per day (and trying to get it down even further)

✅ Resigned from work upon the realisation that my work around community, collaborative and social learning does not align around for-profit business models

In some way, I’m clearing the way to make more space into my life so that I can enjoy it much more without the noise.

To jump into the “abyss”.

At times, my YouTube channel, I feel, adds noise to others as I’m using the space for my own reflections as opposed to teaching.

For my own reflections, I don’t need to be critiqued by strangers.

But aye, there’s the rub. If you’re ‘out there’ online expect this to happen.

At 2am, that’s when it hit me as to why I was doing everything I was doing to start afresh, to start anew, to make space for something completely new to come into my life and to put the ‘old’ me and my ‘old’ thinking and ‘old’ world behind.

Maybe I had reached the point where I didn’t want to be critiqued or judged anymore. No more mansplaining, no more egos. No more being told how to do something, how to think or that my way was wrong.

Maybe what started all this out came out of this realisation and a way to do that – was to bow out of the places where this was happening.

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