Why I Don't Have a "Face Reveal"/Transcript


 * Jaiden: This video has been in the back of my head for longer than it should have been and I think it's about time I talked about it and explain why things are the way they are. If you're here just to see what I look like, just hold on a bit longer. I have really important things to explain briefly. The first few reasons I don't show myself are because I don't want people to have an opinion of my content and who I am based on what I look like. We live in a society that almost revolves around appearance. People can become famous just for their looks. People use appearances in excuse not to like someone. I'm fine if you don't like me or what I do but if your only reason would be because you don't like what I look like, then what kind of argument is that? I'm very shy and prefer to keep to myself. I still want to have privacy but there's a main reason and I haven't told this story to anyone. The thing is I don't tell people my problems because I feel like I can handle them on my own and I don't want to drag people into my messes. I don't want to hurt anyone and if you knowing I'm hurt, hurts you then I don't want to tell you when I'm hurting if that makes any sense at all but here we go. Right, it's not a secret I don't think very highly of myself. I joke about it a lot and I'm pretty open about it. When I was young I actually had a lot of confidence. People gave me compliments and said nice things and I believe them and was proud of myself but as I got older I began having doubts. I started thinking that people were lying to me or they said things and didn't really mean it. Words can't affect you when you don't let them. People say that all the time but it's easy to forget. It goes the same way with positive words as negative. That led me to telling myself I wasn't good enough and I had to do better. My standards slowly started getting higher and higher without me realizing how bad it was getting. By the end of high school I felt like I wasn't good enough for anything even though people would be telling me, "Wow, you're doing so great! You're so talented." I would say "thank you" not to be rude but it was in one ear out the other. I didn't hear it. I went to college with the same mindset, not feeling like I was good enough for anything, standards for myself always getting higher and that's the problem. I push myself so hard to get better at everything and I do improve but it's still not enough for me. The bar keeps getting higher before I can grab it like climbing a staircase where the top keeps getting further away, and the ball and chain attached to your ankle's getting heavier and heavier but you keep trying. Eventually this branched out to more that just what I was doing. It started seeping into my self-image which wasn't high in the first place either. It wasn't only telling me what I was doing wasn't enough. It started telling me I wasn't enough and that's when I started wanting to fix it. I started eating less, trying to be happier with myself. I'm naturally very thin and I've never had issues with weight before but it was like a switch in my brain that all of a sudden, that wasn't good enough either. It became all I could think about. My whole day revolved around what I ate, what it was, when I ate, how many calories, every detail. I wanted complete control. I remember a specific day, all I let myself have was half an apple and 10 Cheerios and I felt happy about it. Look how in control I am but I wasn't. I was in this downward spiral. I built up fears and rules and my head got foggy and foggier every day. Lack of nourishment prevented me from being able to think clearly and I was making irrational decisions. I was telling myself this was what I had to do to be happy. Of course it was extremely painful, starving myself. Eventually I decided I would go the entire day eating as close to nothing as possible then eating a bunch at the end to stop the pain followed by erasing it. This whole awful cycle went on for several months. I don't even remember anything else I was doing in my life. It all just became a blur. The only thing I can truly remember looking back now was just being so tired and cold and sad all the time. I wasn't able to see I was getting thinner and thinner. Nothing was good enough. My brain didn't let me see how horrible it was getting. I don't know what happened but eventually I was able to break through and tell myself this wasn't what I wanted. I didn't want to live like this anymore and I had to get better. Now here's the thing people don't realize. Eating disorders are the easy part. The rough part is breaking it. You create these fears and rules for so long that when you want to escape the jail cell you've built around yourself, they beckon you to stay and try to drag you back in promising happiness and how they're only here to protect you. They let you feel like you're the one in control when you're not. You're the puppet on strings and when you try to cut yourself free, not only do you face your fears head-on but you live them. Here's some information about what happens to your body when it's starving. When it realizes it's not getting enough food to create energy for itself, it starts slowing down your metabolism which is the process of converting calories into energy. It slows down in order to conserve the energy it has left for important things like keeping your heart pumping and your organs working but the tricky part is when you start refeeding it, things don't just go back to normal right away. Your body doesn't trust that you'll keep feeding it again and it starts storing extra energy for the next starvation. If you don't realize what that means, basically it stores extra weight as energy predicting it won't have food again for a long time. Your metabolism is still slow and you face the nightmare that drove you to the disorder in the first place. It's not just in your head anymore. Before I go any further, I'd like to say that I believe people can be perfectly happy at any weight. I'm not saying these things in order to make anyone feel ashamed because weight shouldn't matter in general. It's about how you think of yourself and as long as you're relatively healthy and take care of yourself, I believe that's the most important thing but this isn't as simple as just getting thinner. There's so much more to it. I wish I could express you how toxic your mind becomes while dealing with something like this. It's not how your brain would normally function when it's clear. You know what you're doing to yourself is wrong but you just can't shake it. It has a death grip on you. So I was attempting recovery completely on my own, I'll remind you. I didn't tell anyone in my life what I was going through and it was indescribably difficult. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I had to be the doctor and that patient. I kept saying this is what will make you better. You're on the right path but the voice was still there. You're a disgrace. Look what you've done. Look what eating has done to you. This isn't what you want. Come back to me. I'm here for you. I didn't want to listen to it. I kept telling myself everything was fine. I'm doing the right thing. I just have to give it time over and over. I wanted to believe it so badly but the voice wouldn't go away. It's always there. I didn't want anyone to see me. I felt like I was a disappointment to everyone and didn't deserve to be in front of people. I could feel their judgement in my head. I didn't deserve food. I was unacceptable. I never wanted to leave my room and I probably wouldn't have but there is one thing: VidCon. I already planned to go before things got so bad because you have to plan so far in advance for it. I didn't want to let people down by breaking my promise to be there and I wanted to see all my friends and supporters but I was in such a terrible state. I didn't know what I was going to do. I was panicking. I wasn't ready. I wasn't back to normal yet but I was approaching so quickly and there wasn't any time to go back. I told myself this was my punishment. I did this to myself. So I put on a mask and pretended to be fine. I was trying to act like myself so much that I wasn't even me anymore. I became a stranger to who I actually am. Even though I was horribly uncomfortable, my weight was higher than my average from starving myself. My cheeks were swollen from making myself throw up every day for so many months. My mind was telling me I was a letdown to everyone. My self-image and esteem was at an all-time low. I tried my hardest to push through it. Every person I met, the voice inside me said you're such a disappointment. You're aren't good enough for them. I felt like I could feel every single person's discontent through their embrace but I didn't let the mask slip off and I kept truckin' through. I let people take pictures but I really wish I didn't. It was the lowest I've ever felt in my life and I felt like I was a lie to everyone. It was almost like I wasn't even there. I wasn't present. It was just a daze. After the convention was over, I was so mentally torn to shreds. I wasn't okay. I felt like all the progress I was trying to make to get better had just been ripped down. The voice was louder than ever drowning out the one that was telling me everything was going to be okay. I realized I couldn't let people on YouTube see me when I was in such a toxic horrible state. I message the person who was taking a lot of video footage and asked them if I could censor my face out. I'm not going to mention who this person is because that detail doesn't add anything to this story and I don't think it would benefit anyone if I did. They agreed so I spent the afternoon editing their video censoring my face. I wasn't myself in the video and I didn't want people to see the mask I put on for myself. When I finished and sent it over a few hours later, they told me they changed their mind and wanted to post the normal video. I was absolutely mortified and forced myself to explain to them the main reasons why I don't want to show myself hoping that if they knew the story behind it, it would help them change their mind again but it didn't. I've had disagreements with this person in the past and from what I understand, this person is very adamant when they have their mind of something. So of me having edited the video for them and explaining the story behind it wasn't enough, I came to the conclusion, I couldn't do anything to change their mind and let them post it. I thought I had experienced the worst already but this destroyed me. A nightmare where hundreds of thousands of people are wanting to see you and then when they finally do, it's at the lowest darkest point of your life and they don't even know it. When you don't show yourself, people develop expectations. I don't know what those expectations are and I feel like sometimes they don't even know what they are, but I believed with all my heart, I disappointed every single one. It's not just the fact I wasn't where I wanted to be appearance-wise. So many people saw me for the first time when I was at such an awful point mentally and I felt so much deeper into darkness I've ever been. I felt like I was drowning in my own emotions. Every time I tried to get back to the surface to breathe, another wave would crash down on me and pull me right back under again. I started having even darker thoughts and I knew I should have been scared of them but I wasn't and that's what scared me. The voice was echoing in my head almost completely muting out the other one. Every day I just wanted to feel happy again. I wanted to wake up and everything's just normal. Not one day passed without me hating myself. I couldn't find a reason to get out of bed. I felt broken and that no one could fix me. Black fog surrounded me everywhere. I went and I couldn't breathe. That was so stretched thin. I was trying so hard to swim but the waves kept coming. Each one stronger than the last, but I kept going. I don't know why. There wasn't a reason and I couldn't really find one. I just did and even though I didn't have a reason for myself not to give up pushing through everything, I wanted to be there for people. I want to be able to be there for people like me who felt like they couldn't go to anyone and are drowning and help them like how I wanted someone to reach out and help me. I want to exist for other people. I don't really care about myself. That may or may not be a good thing to say. I don't really know at this point right now but I'll mention one thing I've thought to myself that helped me. I consider myself a weak person. I can get knocked down relatively easily and I knock myself down a lot too. We always talk about how strong someone is but I feel like it doesn't have to matter how strong or weak you are. What matters is that you just keep getting back up. Something could knock down a weak person and not even affect a strong person but it doesn't matter how many times you're knocked down because as long as you keep getting back up, you can keep going. I don't want to live in the past and I'm not here to feel sorry for myself because I'm not one to do that. It doesn't get anyone anywhere. The past doesn't change. It happened whether you like it or not. Adapt and push forward. Even if you feel like you don't have a reason to, use those feelings to help push people who need it. If you can't help yourself, help others. Then eventually you might be able to learn how to help yourself too. If you're still here, I really appreciate it. I can't express how much it means to me that you care enough to listen to what some random person on the internet is saying, just telling their story. I tried to keep it as short as I could so it wasn't boring. I could write a novel about all the things I felt during that time but hopefully I got at least some points across in the right way and I don't know what else to say other than just....thanks. (breaks the censor bar, cue Jaiden's face reveal)