So Much I Want to Tell You

by Anna Akana

  But just as I started to really find my footing, just as my jokes began to take shape, just when the lights became easier to look beyond…I started to hate doing stand-up.

  I honestly didn’t get it. I had loved stand-up when I started. But then that feeling began to wane, and soon anxiety crept in. I became irrationally afraid of the stage and the audience, despite the fact that I was no longer bombing the way I had when I first started out. I wasn’t necessarily great, but I definitely wasn’t terrible. I was fine. Forgettable, maybe, but cute and weird. I always got at least a few laughs. So why all the crazy anxiety and dread? Why now?

  If I had a show, I would obsess over how terrible it would go, and more often than not, I would cancel it altogether so that I could finally eat and sleep and breathe. I had only been doing stand-up for a year or so at this point, and I had no idea whether what I was experiencing was normal or not.

  Now, thankfully, I know that it is. Some comedians will give it up, come back, give it up, come back. It’s a hard craft. Even now, though I do stand-up, I don’t feel like I am a stand-up comic. Stand-up is a lifestyle. The greats are, I believe, born to do it. I don’t feel like I could ever claim that. That’s something else.

  My anxiety got so bad that I stopped working on my stand-up altogether. I thought about it nonstop, but I refused to get up onstage. I’d go to open-mic shows, write my name down, then quickly cross it off the list and watch the show instead. Sometimes I’d write my name down, then halfway through the open mic I would leave and drive the 150 miles back home.

  I tried telling myself that it would take time. I just needed more practice. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I was having stomach problems, and my hair was coming out in chunks. Not even my hypnotherapist’s positive affirmations could get me back onstage. (Yes, I had a hypnotherapist. It’s so weird to actually write that sentence. He gave me free sessions because he dealt specifically with survivors of suicide.)

  Looking back now, I can see that my anxiety stemmed from my desire to sabotage myself, to punish myself. My stage presence was getting better, my jokes were becoming more polished, and I was building a community of people who soon became friends. But I couldn’t help but find a way to undermine myself. A part of my brain would whisper to me: “You don’t deserve this. It’s not fair that you’re happy while Kristina’s ashes sit in your parents’ living room.” I wasn’t yet able to talk about Kristina’s death or my pain. I wasn’t able to find any light in all that darkness and it paralyzed me completely.

  But that’s when I found a wonderful savior, a solution for my stage fright: the Internet. Specifically, YouTube.

  My brother, Will, had introduced me to YouTube years ago. He’d make these weird videos, or he and Kristina would prank me with hidden cameras and he’d upload it to his Willzorh channel. He’d shown me Ryan Higa and cat fail videos and lonelygirl15. I never really thought much about it. YouTube just seemed like a random place where you could find random stuff. I’d never thought of it as a place where you could put random stuff.

  But in 2011, by the time I was ready to run away from the happiness that stand-up had brought me, YouTube had become way more of a thing. Ryan Higa now had millions of viewers. In fact, there were plenty of people with millions of views and subscribers. There were people who were making money from their views and subscribers. There were Web series like The Guild, which made Felicia Day the queen long before being geeky was cool. There were people who’d been discovered on YouTube, like Justin Bieber, people who were now famous.

  Yes, I thought. Yes, this is for me! Stand-up is all about lights, people, a microphone. Nightclubs and bars and drinks after the midnight show. But YouTube? YouTube’s got homebody written all over it: staying inside by yourself, not having to deal with anyone, editing and cringing at your face onscreen until you’re somewhat happy with the result. Never having to leave your house. Using your cat as a background element. Uploading your finished product to the Internet and never dealing with the reality of a live audience.

  The fact that I could now perform without a live audience set me on fire. I had so many ideas! I decided to hold myself to a schedule: no matter what, I would make at least one video every week.

  When I first started, videos came easily. There were so many things I wanted to talk about: How I’d always believed that when I turned sixteen I’d have a superpower, and how adulthood felt like a sham. How I wanted to kill the inner Internet troll inside of my head that was my worst enemy. My conflicted feelings about being a homebody. I reenacted fantasies I had when I was younger, like wanting to be a spy and practicing witchcraft in middle school.

  Making these videos was fun. I loved playing around with the most basic visual effects, buying props and doing set design, creating makeshift costumes out of what I had lying around the house. I’d spend a day writing a bunch of scripts, then film for the next day or two, and conclude the week with editing and any visual effect work. I was a one-woman show. I came to love the seemingly endless freedom that YouTube provided.

  Once I blew through the more superficial topics, though, I was forced to write more personal, deeper stories. I started talking about my social anxiety, my struggle with organized religion, and stories about random encounters in my life. That run-in with the guy on the elevator who wouldn’t move, the awkward confrontation with someone who hit my parked car and walked away. Anytime I experienced something relatively interesting or morally conflicting, I made a video about it. YouTube became my diary, and making videos became a form of catharsis. I would go to therapy to discuss my latest struggle, and then I’d go home and make a video to reinforce whatever advice my therapist offered that resonated with me. It became a way for me to document various chapters in my life, get closure on certain issues, and hold myself accountable.

  The first time I ever talked about Kristina on camera was hard. Editing the video was harder. Uploading it was the worst. I wasn’t sure what people were going to say. I worried about being judged for talking about something so private in public. But I’d gotten to a point where it was something I wanted to talk about. YouTube videos had become such a natural way of expressing myself that I wanted to dive deeper and talk about something that really mattered. Please Don’t Kill Yourself was a video that I made for those who are suicidal. If there’s anything that I knew, it was how broken suicide left the people who remained. And I wanted to make something that maybe if my sister had seen it, it would’ve changed her mind. The reception was mixed: some people thanked me for it, but others insisted that suicide is a personal choice. Either way, I felt a huge sense of relief over finally putting it out there. It was a relief to not just mention her suicide in passing but to really express how much her death had fucked up my family.

  —

  MY VIDEO-MAKING PROCESS HAS evolved a lot over the years, but by now I’ve landed on what really works for me. I always start with a topic: something I’m passionate about, or interested in exploring, or something that makes me angry or sad.

  Then I find a title. The perfect title is one that encapsulates what the video is about. There’s nothing worse than a clickbait title that has nothing to do with the content you’re watching. A title sets up your audience’s expectations. It’s your thesis statement, your logline, your promise about what you’re going to deliver. The best titles also imply that the audience is going to learn something, whether it’s a video like Who Is a Slut?, in which I conclude that the only person who can label someone as a slut is themselves (after analyzing their own sexual motivations), or a satirical comedy like How to Not Get Raped, where I explore the vast amount of information given to women about avoiding physical violence in comparison to the little time spent teaching men about consent.

  Next, I write a script. My videos are always structured as long monologues with cutaways to either (a) demonstrate or emphasize a point, (b) directly oppose it for the sake of a joke, or (c) answer a posed question.

  Two and a hal
f years into making Internet videos, I had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I would write furiously in my journal each day, eager to remember whatever emotional upset I was going through so I could turn it into my weekly video. I spent a lot of time self-reflecting, trying to psychoanalyze my own behavior. I mined my past experiences for ideas: the middle school mistake of cutting my own bangs, dealing with beauty image issues, how often I did the wrong thing in a relationship and tended to overreact to the smallest things.

  The more videos I made, the stronger my creative voice became. And as my self-knowledge grew, so did my confidence. I had a point of view. I had specific opinions on so many topics. I was a girl who loved cats and prop guns and who would offer advice on the Internet about love and friendship and self-discipline. That was me. After wandering around aimlessly for so many years, I’d felt like I’d found my voice—and myself.

  Once You’ve Found Your Voice, Let It Evolve

  I have a lot of respect for anyone who creates content on the regular. Even daily vloggers. Especially daily vloggers. If it were easy, everyone would do it. But it’s not. You get tired. You get burnt out. You realize it’s all way more work than you thought it would be—making sure you are always doing something new and interesting, sifting through footage, spending hours editing and animating text or visual effects. It’s hard. It starts to feel like you’re on a hamster wheel, that you must constantly produce new content or die of irrelevancy.

  By 2014, I’d made over 150 YouTube videos. I loved making them, but I was beginning to wonder if I had made my video topics too broad. I’d spend two and a half minutes distilling a complex topic down to something digestible and comedic, but that meant I’d blown through material. Entire topics of depression and anxiety had a single two-minute video devoted to them already. Making another felt like I was doubling back or duplicating material. I’d gone through topic after topic, and I found myself feeling empty, like I’d run out of things to say.

  Somewhere along the way, I decided to try my hand at creating short films and more sketch-based comedy. As much as I loved making my weekly comedic videos, my heart was always with narrative content. I was an actor first, but the world knew me only as the girl on YouTube. I realized I wanted to change that.

  By this time I had built my subscriber base to over a million. But when I started to explore new formats, my viewership began to decrease, and I frantically scrambled to produce more videos in the style I was best known for: videos in which I offered personal advice and acted out all the parts. I went back and forth like this for a year—wanting to please my audience, but also wanting to fulfill myself creatively. In the end, my creative needs won out.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. I’ve seen other YouTubers skyrocket past me, boasting seven million subscribers, with each of their videos raking in millions of views. I worry that my decision to move toward sketch comedy and short films rather than stick to vlogging cost me a lot of my viewers. I worry that taking on brand deals to pay for the six short films I did in 2014 took a bigger toll on my audience retention than I’d anticipated. People got bored; they left. This wasn’t what they signed up for. They wanted the girl with the cats and the clones and the guns, the girl who told stories and gave advice. That’s what I hear from a lot of young girls who come up to me: “I miss your old videos, where you gave advice.” Then, when they see the look of horror on my face, they quickly add, “The sketch stuff and short films are cool too.”

  But then I realize I didn’t make a mistake. Trying new things is the best thing I can do for myself as an artist. In fact, it’s the best thing any artist can do. It’s always hard. And you fail hard a lot of the time. But if you’re not failing, you’re not learning. Yes, perhaps changing things up meant losing some of my subscribers. But the lessons I learned about myself and my craft were invaluable. Ultimately, I did exactly what I had set out to do: I proved that I could do more than just make short videos about my own life. I had put myself through my own film school, and now I had a portfolio of directing and acting work that I could showcase.

  One of the hardest things about being an artist is finding the balance between staying true to your voice and allowing yourself room to evolve. How do you push yourself out of your comfort zone while still trying to create art that feels commercially relevant? How do you balance learning new skills and trying new things with still keeping your core fan base happy?

  It’s a tricky balancing act, and I’m not sure if I’ve mastered it quite yet. I have a tendency to want to do too many things, often spreading my focus—and myself—too thin. I wonder where I’d be now if I’d stuck to doing just one thing. I’m such a multi-hyphenate that meetings can get confusing. People are always trying to figure me out: So you do stand-up? And you act? And you have a clothing line? And you do YouTube?

  These days, I don’t obsess over subscriber numbers like I used to. I’ll skim through the comments on the days I post videos, but I don’t try to read each one. Now I just try to make stuff that’s truthful. Stuff that I care about. And stuff that’s funny. I want to say something while making people laugh or think. That’s my voice. That’s my “brand.”

  The creative process is exactly that: a process. Every time you make something, you learn something. Most of what I’ve learned has come from the mistakes I’ve made—like when I’ve had to reshoot an entire clone scene or completely rewrite my monologue because the improvisation I did in the cutaways renders the whole thing nonsensical.

  Sometimes people ask me: “Are you ever worried you’ll run out of ideas?” Yes. The answer is always yes. I’ve made nearly three hundred monologue videos and I feel like I’ve articulated every opinion I have. Some weeks it’s a struggle to think of what else I possibly have to say. And then there are topics I desperately want to talk about but don’t necessarily feel qualified to. LGBTQ+, for example. Or Black Lives Matter. Or how hard it must be for Muslim Americans in this political climate. These are messages and causes I am passionate about but have no substantial life experience to speak from.

  Yes, I worry that I will run out of ideas every time I sit down to think of a new video. Every time I upload a new video, I worry it will be my last. But here’s the thing: you’ll only run out of ideas if you close yourself off to things—to new ideas, new experiences, new people. Don’t be afraid to change, to grow, and to learn—that’s the only way to keep yourself creatively vital.

  If You Want to Be the Star, Create the Show

  When I was twenty-one, I moved to Los Angeles to start my acting career.

  On my first night in LA, I bought a bottle of wine at the liquor store down the street from my new apartment and drank it alone in celebration. I had no idea what I was doing, but I still felt like I was living the dream.

  To be honest, I was a terrible actor when I first started. I’d done a few high school plays, but I had no formal training. Like many aspiring actors, I assumed I had a natural talent that would kick in once I got in front of a casting director. During my first audition for a play I quickly realized I was mistaken. I was shaking so hard that the paper rattling in my hands was making more noise than the lines coming out of my mouth.

  But my lack of talent didn’t deter me. After all, my father had always taught me that if you worked hard enough, it would pay off. I figured I needed to take every opportunity to act that I could. That was the only way I was going to get better.

  I took an acting class, which was a great starting place, but the workshop format meant only acting for about ten to twenty minutes and sitting in a chair for the next three and a half hours. I couldn’t afford to be in more than one acting class. I couldn’t control how many auditions I got. I grew frustrated with the countless self-submissions I did on online casting sites that led nowhere. How was I going to get better at acting if there were no opportunities to actually act? When the majority of your career is auditioning more than actually working, honing your craft feels impossible.

  At the time
I was working several jobs just to make ends meet. In the mornings I worked in a chiropractor’s office scheduling appointments and doing administrative work. After that I would head to a sushi restaurant, where I had a five-hour lunch shift. In the evenings I worked odd Craigslist jobs that never lasted long: a gig as a host in a Koreatown cocktail bar where married men came for company, a cocktail waitress in an underground poker club, a dog walker for a retired police officer who constantly asked me to stay for dinner. Then I’d go home to my three cats and three gay roommates. Ah, what a time.

  In 2012, a manager who had encouraged me early on to take acting classes left to become an agent and agreed to sign me. Soon I was auditioning for TV shows. I was twenty-two, but I looked like I was fourteen, so I mostly went in for roles on the Disney Channel and for high school shows on MTV. I booked my first gig on the show Awkward, a one-line part in which I yelled in Japanese about how big Ashley Rickards’s boobs were.

  Over the next two years I booked roles here and there. But the only parts I ever landed involved quick one-liners—and I usually booked these parts only because I misinterpreted the material, providing the casting directors with a refreshing take on something they’d heard a million times before. I was discouraged: I wanted bigger parts. I wanted to have an arc on something.

  While I was auditioning for roles and working my various odd jobs, I had also started my YouTube channel and my audience had grown significantly. In 2012, I was at half a million subscribers and counting. But back then the traditional entertainment industry looked down on digital influencers. They hadn’t yet recognized our built-in audiences as powerful marketing tools. Even after I reached a million subscribers and YouTubers began to get cast in digital company movies left and right, I still felt like I had little control over the parts I wanted to play. I was auditioning for the nerdy best friend who would be upset over a B-minus, the hacker or technologically savvy team player, or a hypersexualized accented foreigner.