PRESENT:
It has been a big week. Professionally speaking. The biggest, perhaps? But quietly. Without declaration. Without fanfare. Without over-assigning any grandiose meaning, or fantasizing high saturation futures, because the task is still very much at hand.
There have been no bottle pops, no showering confetti, just late nights of drafting documents and early mornings of sending emails. There have been no rainbow ribbons, no cards that warble “CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES” at me upon opening, just the metallic thud of keyboard buttons, and the rumbling of freight trains trundling by my house, making their way onward across a steel truss bridge over the Bow River.
Onward.
I hear it.
Onward, onward, onward.
I sit on the floor of my apartment, feeling the athletic ache of a long journey in my calves, but I understand that there is no time to stop. Not right now. Not in this second chance of a life I have built. The iron is hot, and the road keeps rolling out ahead of me. The walls keep thrum thrum thrumming, telling me to stay the course.
I know what it is like to celebrate too soon, and I won’t do that again. I can’t do that again. Besides, there is no vanity metric to assign to this moment. No number to bestow upon a cake, or to set the parameters for helium particles. All I have is my signature on a series of pages that grant me the gift of creating something lasting. I hope.
I’m older now, not that age is necessarily a signifier of our ability to hold things gently, but I think I can. I pray I can. I trust I can. This is different. It will take time. Planting a garden is a long game, and we’re doing this the good old-fashioned way; with forward planning and patience. Besides, I have good reason to distrust the crystal meth of Miracle-Gro.
PAST:
We were going to hit a million YouTube subscribers any day now. Monitors in the studio were abuzz with a real-time tally. Nobody was quite sure when exactly we’d snag the milestone; viral growth has a maddening element of volatility to it. There’s no measuring the magma.
It was all anybody talked about. WHEN we hit a million. Parties were planned. Film schedules were eyed up for a reaction video. WHEN WHEN WHEN. Exactitudes didn’t matter; our content machine was locked and loaded, ready to churn out as many videos as it took. There were no ifs, buts, or maybes… just mathematical certainties and blind faith in algorithms. We had the formula, and the sky was the limit, or so we were told.
A n y d a y n o w.
Attention was on the tally. Peepers to the prize. Retinas reaching beyond the figures to envision the surefire reward that would follow. And there would be a reward, right? A million assured entry to the promised land of internet fame, in which there must be something…more? Upon proudly assigning a number of such distinction to our names, things had to change. Didn’t they? We’d be…fuck…whatever the viral equivalent of exalted is?! All hail the newly emerged YouTube Gods and their esteemed trending listicle channel. MAKE WAY.
I’d hoped to be at the film studio when it happened, when the numbers finally flashed. I’d imagined we’d all watch as the ticker proffered a big, delicious 1 in the liminal space of expectation. I fancied us all cheering in unison as if we’d collectively won Gold at the Olympics. Like when sports networks cut to reactions from celebratory bars, I pictured our reaction LIVE: from the cutting-room floor of the video factory. Perhaps we’d all clock out for the day, declaring “to hell with the next upload!”, or “let’s make the algorithm our bitch!”, while in heady pursuit of an afternoon of celebratory drinking, whoops of delight trailing in our wake, victors of our own parade.
That is not, however, what happened.
I was picking at a sharing plate of nachos in a dive bar on College Street (FUCK, I MISS YOU, SNEAKY DEES!). After a hard day’s grind at the studio, a couple of us were slinging back Happy Hour Miller High Lifes, when the digital bean counter unexpectedly declared the time was nigh. The Boss was not here. Nor my co-host. Nor our producer. In fact, most of the team were elsewhere, at home or doing other things. We were just a rag tag group of accidental witnesses to a situation we were unprepared to hold.
Nigh, yes, but we hadn’t seen this coming. Not now. We had earmarked late afternoon in two days time for the potential asteroid strike, but thanks to a viral upload, we got there sooner. It happened. It just happened. A million. 1,000,000. We didn’t know what to do, except keep eating nachos.
Beyond the bar’s bay windows, a streetcar rumbled by. Traffic lights adhered to their rotations. Cars stopped and started. Shoes scraped over intersections. A waft of cigarette smoke danced toward our table as somebody new entered from the street. Life had the audacity to go on around us as if it were unaware of the update. A million. Here. Now. With no relevant backdrop from which to post the news on social media?
We raised a muted toast. Later, when I paid my bill, I found I had been anticipating some kind of immediate and divine financial intervention. A million subscribers, but I still had to worry about the balance in my chequing account? Odd. Later, when I walked home, I wondered how it was possible I was still… just Rebecca.
When I awoke the next morning, my spirits were born anew. Eager, I set out to trawl Dollarama, the only party-adjacent store open on my way into work, where surely jubulations would await. Desperate to mark the occasion, I scooped up all manner of celebratory riff-raff. For young Rebecca, this meant gathering up a metric fuck ton of glitter. At the time, I didn’t realize just how metaphorical this would be. When I got to the studio, the live tally had been turned off. Everyone was just…working.
Okay, so I guess we were saving the reaction just for the camera then?
Watching our million-subscriber video now, ten years into the future, is… personally jarring. The internet has changed, and so, of course, have I. Excited at best, and deeply fucking shrill at worst, I can see from the wild look in my eyes that I believed THIS WAS IT. Covered in fistfuls of glitter, the tiny, shiny, flat specks of plastic reflected back exactly what I wanted to see: something glistening, something sparkling, something I wanted so desperately to be magical, but was always an illusion. That’s glitter for you. I knew what kind of content we made, but I allowed myself to be tricked by the light. I allowed myself to believe that being the face of a channel with a golden play button to its name was somehow vindication of the unease I felt at the content we made. I let myself believe it was evidence that we were making something of value.
You get what you get, what you get, what you get. Success is a hall of mirrors. A number so magnanimous had distorted my perception of what actually was. I play back the video and see myself tossing glitter into the air as if each particle will land, take root, and build me a legacy I cared about. But it was glitter, and not magic beans. It hadn’t hit me that, if that’s what I wanted, I would have to work a LOT harder.
The studio remained moderately sombre, but we had the parties. They were filmed. We cut the cake. It was filmed. There were balloons. They were captured. And, yes, there was indeed more glitter.
When we eventually received our golden Play-Button award from YouTube, it came with a letter:
“One mission. One channel. And one more thing…
One million subscribers.
Congratulations! You may have started with just a few viewers, but your voice, passion, and creativity have now touched the lives of people around the world. And the community you’ve built is enriched by the stories you’ve shared as you bring people together.
To honor this milestone, we’re proud to present you with the Gold Creator Award. We hope this special recognition will remind you how much you mean to so many.
Every day, you are redefining how content is created and watched, one voice and one video at a time. It’s a privilege to be part of your journey. We can’t wait to see what you do next.”
The award got hung up on a wall. I don’t know what happened to the letter. Perhaps they threw it out. But I never forgot it.
Enriched. Stories.
Voice. Passion. Creativity.
These were words I wanted to apply to my experience. These were words I wanted to assign to my career, but they were not accurate descriptors of my time at The Channel. When I saw them typed out and staring at me from a page, I wanted to ram them together like an ill-fitting jigsaw piece to fast-track my way to the big picture, but they just didn’t sit right. They didn’t feel right. I felt like we had gamified our way to big reach, without ever stopping to wonder what it was, exactly, that we were saying. We lived in response to the internet. Views were the focus, which live in the realms of immediacy. Creating to the beat of the algorithm, how could we ever find the heart, soul, time, care, and focus it took to build something of lasting meaning?
“We can’t wait to see what you do next.”
What did we do next? I may have had fanciful ideas that s o m e t h i n g would change, and in fairness, it did. We went from two uploads a day to three. We started eying up two million. Three. The videos had to keep coming. Faster, please. The numbers had to keep rising. If the Gold Award stood for anything, it felt like validation for the factory; it was working, so why not keep grinding? And so we did, with no end goal other than “more” in sight. And it ground my bones to powder.
I think about the glitter I bought for the video sometimes. It was quite the clean-up operation afterwards. My bad, truly. I imagine little specks of it probably still living in the cracks between floorboards at the studio for the rest of time. So it goes with glitter. Sown, but fruitless. Shiny, but never germinating. Its value is pretty, yes, entertaining, totally, but it is short-lived. Rather like trending media, after a while it just… exists to exist, to exist. And then what? At best, nothing. At worst, it becomes a micro-pollutant to our water sources. And I’m sorry. For the glitter, and for any of the churn I am personally responsible for.
Present
I have spent time cultivating healthy soil since walking away from the allure of the monocrop. If metaphors are not your thing: I work hard to tell meaningful stories now. From the outside, it might not look like much. My numbers are not dizzying, and my growth is very slow. These days, my work is intentional, not viral, and my hands are no longer filled with glitter, but clasped gently around seeds. I don’t throw them into the air just to douse myself with the shine of potential; I place them in the earth one by one. It’s hard to sit still when you have experienced the thrill of breakneck speed, but I try. I’m really trying. I have made a promise to all my stories that I will sit and wait to see what becomes of them. I’ll see them through…no matter how fast the river flows beside me, how many trains roll by, or how many people I used to know get golden buttons for their walls. It doesn’t matter. But *this* does.
Epilogue
A few months ago, I journeyed to Moose Jaw, of all places. Moose Jaw, could, to the unimaginative, be labelled “the middle of fucking nowhere”, but everywhere is a place worth visiting to me. Driven by the desire to explore the historic tunnels of Saskatchewan, I discovered I was just as enamoured with the land-that-time-forgot above ground too. Edwardian classical and Beaux Arts buildings lined streets that still felt like streets, rather than the overspill of glossy skyscraper lobbies. I found myself at the General Store, musing on how I L O V E an old town merchant, because you just never know what you might find inside. But, I suppose it’s less about what I found that day, but what found me. I like to think of it, patiently waiting for me to be in tune enough to spot the sign.
A 2026 edition of the Old Famer’s Almanac.
Paused on a dusty magazine stand, it winked at me, carrying with it an air of amusement. How funny that it would take the granddaughter of a farmer so long to realize this might all have something to do with her after all. The arrogance of youth freshly washed away, I realized I wasn’t born to pan for gold, but to care. Who cares more than a farmer? Who cares more than somebody who can exercise such long thinking, they can turn soil into sustenance?
The thing, the work thing? Or things, I should say. You might not know about them for years. I’ll admit that an early career in the quicksand of virality has left me a little twitchy when it comes to the declarations of things. If you don’t know that I’m DOING SOMETHING COOL RIGHT NOW, am I even relevant? What If I have to drop off the radar for a bit to bring this all to life? What happens when the world turns without me? Worse, what happens if I fuck it up? But then I think of the farmers, who know it’s their job to navigate the rise and fall of things, and who never once declared anything other than their yield.
So, I stay the course, and I sidestep the allure of glitter, because I know that seeds should only be entrusted into the hands of finishers. I’m doing this. I am a storyteller. The real kind, not the loud kind.
And I am going to do this until I die.
To be continued.
