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How vlogging brought me closer to myself

BY JIYA SINGH

ot to sound like a Boomer, but if there’s anything that teenagers from my generation have in common, it’s an addiction to our phones. But rather than the mobile games or iMessages that entranced everyone else (although Temple Run was goated), it was the high-quality, accessible camera that appealed to me. I spent my time in elementary school stealing my sisters’ 2004 Nikon camera to film videos of myself doing anything and everything.

I would shove the camera into my grandpa’s face every five seconds while on vacation to ask him “How do you feel?” or record myself reacting to food at restaurants — anything that felt even slightly important to me would be carefully filmed and kept to rewatch over and over again. Discovering the iMovie application on my mom’s iPhone in fifth grade was a game changer: I now had a way to put the scattered clips together and create short movies. Combining my dramatic flair with my that told a coherent story. longtime love of filmmaking, I would make my cousins and friends dress up in costumes and lip sync songs to later spend hours editing them together. I loved it.

fascinated by the feature of “Instagram stories.” As I began swiping through them every day, the fascination quickly turned to a feeling of isolation. Seeing others constantly record videos of themselves when hanging out with their friends both made me upset that I wasn’t invited, and sad I wasn’t “cool” or “interesting” like them.

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and with the authentic version of myself. I now felt comfortable again to record myself through vlogging my vacations and daily life.

Then for my 13th birthday, my parents gifted me with my own smartphone. Suddenly, I didn’t have to rely on anyone else with a camera to fuel my filmmaking addiction. I had an energetic personality and 64 GB to record my life.

While having my own phone was exciting, I soon learned that the expectation to create a social media profile came with it. Inspired by just about everyone else in my grade, I made an Instagram account. I was

Soon, Instagram’s toxic culture motivated me to invite my friends to hang out more, not with the intention of actually spending time together, but instead to create moments I could film and post to my Instagram story. As I began to shove my camera into people’s faces, not for fun, like it was with my grandpa, but rather to fulfill external pressures, I felt the joy of making videos slip away gradually.

One day, as I rewatched the seven consecutive Instagram stories I had posted, I heard my own voice and couldn’t recognize it. The girl recording the video had a higher, more animated voice than my own. As I watched, I realized — I didn’t want to be her. I wanted to be myself again.

After that, I decided that I needed to return to doing what made me the most happy — not showing off my life, but instead, putting pieces together to form a story. As I began offering to edit videos for different organizations, I found myself falling back in love with both the simple magic of iMovie

And in the beginning of my junior year, I created a YouTube channel — Jiya’s Giant Vlogs. This was my safe space to be myself, where I compiled videos, music and text in short vlogs to capture anything from AP exam week to my summer New York trip Jiya’s Giant Vlogs was natural — the perfect embodiment of my passions that came in a place without the pressure of an Instagram story yet with the motivation to make me pick up my camera again.. I truly think I am my vlog channel’s biggest fan. And even though my phone storage is constantly full as