One Year on YouTube

How YouTube Changed My Life

I should have started earlier

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As is the case with many valuable endeavors, the sentiment of this week’s tagline often comes to mind. I can see how this YouTube journey that’s now a year old could have helped me in many areas of my life prior to now.

It’s been a year since I posted my first YouTube video and so much has changed for the better around this project that it’s hard to consolidate my thoughts into a post that conveys how much I’ve come to enjoy being a “YouTuber”. I wish I had listened to my friend Morgan sooner when he first proposed I record and post my adventures/interests in wild food, because I truly love what I’ve been doing this past year.

Finding My Voice

I’ve never really fit in academic spaces. In graduate school I struggled to find the box my interests fit into and changed advisors three times before settling on a dissertation project. After graduation I applied to lots of jobs and got rejection after rejection before landing a gig in a Geography department (my PhD is in ecology). I had to discontinue my research in India despite a promising grant from National Geographic, but was able to pivot to working with California condors using technological techniques. Fast forward a decade and things at West Virginia University had me on the job market again, only to land a gig in a Biology department at Eastern Michigan University. By the time I changed jobs I had found a mostly comfortable intellectual home in Geography and I’m currently working to integrate the different fields in my teaching and research moving forward.

All the while along this journey I’ve been navigating being the first, only, or one of a small handful of Black professionals in professional spaces. It continues to be exhausting, discouraging, frustrating, and depressing, but I’ve managed to carve out space for myself and hopefully others like me.

Working in geography allowed me the intellectual space to further think about my work in ecology from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Back in graduate school most of my colleagues thought about their study animals and/or environments without equal consideration of how human beings impacted said environments, but in geography that intersection was crucial to understand and theorize.

But the friction of how entrenched whiteness was in the field of geography was only lessened when I found Black geographers and the sub-discipline of Black geography. I had finally found people who could and would think and talking regularly about how race impacts everything and I began to theorize how that lens made sense of the field I was trained in.

Still, among Black geographers I didn’t quite fit as Black physical geographers — those of us trained in physical sciences like biology and ecology — are harder to find than Black social geographers. But a large part of that scarcity of community within Black geography is on me and the work I should be doing more of to cultivate that space.

Not Giving a F*ck

“They will never want you there, so there’s no point waiting for tenure to do what’s right.”

This paraphrased quote was said to me during one of many conversations with dear friends who are prominent scholars in Black geography (hey Sol-Glow collective!) and it completely changed my life.

I had been struggling with trying to find the right balance of speaking out about the racist and problematic culture of my department while not ruining my chances of earning tenure. I was trying to pick my battles and my friends’ words helped me realize that my existence in that and any academic space would also be a battle for my humanity and that choosing not to fight for said humanity was forfeiting a chance to make meaningful change.

I couldn’t fight all the time, but when I knew something was the right thing to do, I had a responsibility to speak out and try for change.

So I did.

And I paid for it.

The backlash was strong and ultimately led me to leave, but I’m proud of the fight I put up and some of the change I made and continue to make.

Most importantly, I learned to not give a f*ck about what my more senior colleagues said or thought in opposition to what I knew was right. I don’t claim to know the best path to positive change, but I damn sure learned how to better recognize those who would obstruct said path.

“It just has to exist”

“Bruh, there’s no one on the internet who looks like you doing these things. Just film what you’re doing. It just has to exist.” - my dear friend and big brother Morgan

We moved to Michigan in 2022 and when a goose was hit by a car and mortally wounded, I decided that that was the opportunity to finally make good on Morgan’s advice. Extripating myself from the hyper-toxic Geography department at West Virgnia University took it’s toll, but in a new home I finally had the space to imagine a future where I didn’t have to fight so hard for my humanity.

This wasn’t the first video I posted on my YouTube channel, but it was the first I recorded with a mind to build my voice on the Internet. The rabbit hole quickly deepened and before I knew it I had plans to start a business and had dreams of making money from my content.

What I didn’t expect was how bad and nervous I was at the outset. I’ll never take down my early videos, but I’d be lying if I said I expected to struggle with camera shyness in the beginning. I’m an only child and a professor who’s been talking to myself and presenting ideas to others my entire life. Why was I struggling so badly with this?!

Morgan’s refrain pulled me into and through a new battlefield as I leaned into my experience with patience, failure, and the goal of steady improvement with each video. I love many aspects of my academic career and treasure the wealth of experiences I’ve had, but creating content and working towards being an creator entrepreneur is what gets me up in the morning.

Owning My Content

Academic publishing sucks, especially for junior scholars. I don’t really have much in terms of personal fulfillment other than the feeling of accomplishing something that is very hard. Academic papers are incredibly valuable and important, but that particular medium of intellectual and creative expression is not my favorite.

I once spent over 30hrs and more than a dozen emails arguing with an editor of a prestigious journal to publish my research. I almost gave up, were it not for the advice of a colleague who said, “sometimes you have to fight for the work you believe in”. The editor’s argument, to me, was a series of increasingly incoherent rationalizations for them not particularly liking my study. I eventually wore them down and got the paper published, but the experience was utterly demoralizing.

I once inspired an entire special issue on wild foods in another journal after meeting with the editor of the journal and the organizer of the eventual special issue at a conference, only to have them publish six research papers from other authors without me. I wrote about this on Twitter and the editor of the journal, emailed me to complain about how I was out of line, misunderstood, and how I never responded to an email invitation they never sent.

Why was I putting in all this work to meet a standard of scholarly impact that excluded the people said work could most impact behind a paywall? Why was I giving all this time to people who, given the choice, would not seek their opinion on much of anything, let alone build relations with?

Most of what we junior scholars produce will be read by a small handful of people who have access to our work because our exclusionary institutions pay a king’s ransom to publishers. Academic culture incentivizes these gatekeepers to primarily praise work that directly benefits the gatekeepers’ egos and/or advances their own careers.

I couldn’t care less if a dozen mostly white, mostly men, are impressed by my intellectual curiosities, experiments, analyses, or conclusions. I cannot emphasize that point enough, now that I’m brave enough and self aware enough to understand it. The things I want to explore, learn about, teach, and build community around aren’t for the ivory tower, but if I want to share said work in academia it would no longer be primarily controlled by me, but by an anonymous group of my “peers” who are socialized to exclude anything contrary to the status quo.

YouTube (and this newsletter) has been a way to let what I value most in my head and with my voice and hands, to stand and live on its own terms, guided in the directions I want those ideas and practices to go. Moreover, on this platform I get to speak more directly to the people I want to be in community with to build the change in this world I find meaningful.

My shit. My people. My life. My future. Get in where you fit in or get the f*ck on!

A Year in Review

I posted my first YouTube video on July 18, 2023. Over the course of the year I published an additional 27 long-form (10min or more) videos for an average of roughly one video every other week.

I’ve gained 237 followers and had just over 14,000 views of my video library. I am about 25% of the way on subscribers and 17% of way on watch hours away from being able to monetize my YouTube content, which is one of the big goals I set out to accomplish from the get go.

In this past year I also started this newsletter and registered as a small business, OutThereJCH LLC. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about entrepreneurship over the past 12 months to the point that my thinking around content creation now would be completely unrecognizable to myself 12 months ago.

This journey has vastly improved my organizational skills, honesty with myself, patience with my goals, and confidence in who I am as a person.

I’ve finally found the trailhead to moving my dreams from my imagination to a reality.

And probably the most valuable aspect of this past year has been the deepening of relations with the humans, non-human relatives, ideas, and spaces that bring me joy. As an example, my content business has precipitated a plan to go on a yearly fishing trip with my father as a celebration of his life, his teachings, and the sense of adventure I’ve inherited from him.

Next Year

I began a YouTube channel to share the ideas and experiences unique to my life and to prove that I could establish and consistently post to my channel. I did that and I’m proud of myself.

This next year will be centered around increasing my output and improving the quality of my videos. Followers, views, and watch hours will come so long as I work on the two aspects of my channel that I have the most control over. Getting monetized will be an awesome accomplishment, but if that weren’t a reality, I’d still create and post content because I love do so.

I have a goal of financial independence from anything except self employment in the next 14 years. The only child and Aquarius in me longs to be in full control my financial horizons and I think YouTube is a key component of that goal.

So, by this time next year I want to have posted at least 52 additional long-form videos to my channel and hopefully the 79th video will be an order of magnitude better in quality than my 27th. If by that same time I’m able to monetize my content that’d be sweet too.

Making these videos has improved my life so much and hopefully they have added value yours. I’ll keep posting because I need this practice to keep me sane in a career that, while very rewarding and worthwhile, has provided several lifetimes of grief. I’d prefer not to be so dependent on what a relationship that takes more than it gives.

Thanks for reading, watching, and engaging with my work on YouTube, this newsletter, and OutThere! Here’s to another year of growth, discovery, and good relations!

Support My Work

New Content

Squirrel for Your Grill!

The dog days of summer have claimed ya boi’s productivity on my channel, but I’ve got the thumbnail done for the next episode. This was one of my favorite thus far, so I’m excited to share it with you in the next week or two. Stay tuned and thanks for your patience!

Lake Erie Walleye Part Deaux!

I’ve not been in the studio as much, but I have been out on the water getting after these fish. Another Lake Erie walleye episode is in the works and one of the meals I’m going to make is a collars and skeletons meal. I grew up eating fish skeletons and then learned the glory of a fish collar later in life.

So many people only eat the fillets of the fish, but there’s so much more to these relatives that goes to waste. Stay tuned!

Wild Food Update

Fishy Off-Cuts

These are the off-cuts I was talking about. So much tasty meat on these bones! Did you know chicken wings used to be considered trash food by some? Those who know (often times Black folks) know that there’s so much flavor in these “low-class” parts.

Recommendation

Mous is famous for their demo videos dropping expensive mobile devices from buildings and said devices remaining unscathed. And they’re not wrong. They make amazingly durable cases that do exactly what they say they will. If you’re in the market for a phone case, I cannot recommend Mous enough!

Business Update

I finally bit the bullet and ponied up for an all inclusive website as the hub of my business. I will still operate the newsletter on the existing site, but IF YOU’RE A PATREON MEMBER I’m going to be MOVING memberships and exclusive content to THIS NEW WEBSITE STARTING NEXT MONTH (August).

Take a look around and let me know what you think. It’s fairly basic for now, but I will be adding to it monthly.

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan

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