Something I’ve always struggled with is figuring out who I am. I’ve always been the type of person who jumps from one interest to another, never really sticking to just one thing. But when I turned 22, something changed. I finally got some clarity. Out of nowhere, I decided to enroll in college, started coming up with business ideas I actually liked, and realized I was really into health and wellness. Like, I could talk about it for hours without getting bored.

Creativity has always been a big part of my life. Even when I was little, I loved making videos, taking pictures, and just being in front of the camera. I thought I was meant to be famous. No one could tell me otherwise, until school got in the way.

Baby Tay (2003)

I remember my first YouTube channel. I was posting singing videos because, obviously, I thought I was a star in the making. Then one day, in school, a group of kids started looking up people’s names on YouTube, and I realized I had made a huge mistake, I used my real name. I sat there, silently freaking out, hoping they wouldn’t find me. But of course, they did.

And then it happened. They played my video out loud in class. I wanted to disappear. The next day, they took it even further and played it on the big classroom smartboard for everyone to see. I was mortified. 

For weeks, my videos were being shared around Facebook, taking pictures of me when I wasn’t look and posting it, people were laughing at me, and I became the center of attention for all the wrong reasons. 

So, I did what any embarrassed 11-year-old would do, I spent months reporting my own videos until YouTube finally took them down.

Eventually, the online teasing stopped, but the bullying at school didn’t. Thankfully, I had a few great friends who helped me through it, but the damage was done. 

That’s when I decided to transfer schools, hoping for a fresh start. But even at the new school, people somehow found my videos on Musical.ly (the old version of TikTok). This time, they weren’t as mean about it, but I still felt embarrassed. That’s when I started feeling really uncomfortable posting anything online.

That experience is why I’ve hated Facebook for over a decade. Logging into that app still makes my anxiety spike. You’d think I’d be over it by now, but nope. It still reminds me of all that middle school drama.

High school wasn’t much better in terms of confidence. I wanted to start a YouTube channel again, but I was too scared. I didn’t want to go through that kind of embarrassment ever again.

Then, to make things worse, I lost a lot of my friends over a situation that was completely out of my control. I wasn’t allowed to explain what really happened, so I just shut down. I stopped talking to people, deleted my social media, and when I did come back online, I used a different name to keep my real identity hidden.

For a while, using an alias actually helped me meet some great people. Eventually, I felt comfortable enough to start using my real name again. 

Then, out of nowhere, I decided to give YouTube another shot, this time talking about manifestation, which I was really into at the time. To my surprise, my channel blew up. I gained over 56,000 subscribers in less than a year.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about social media, it never seems to work out for me long-term.

My channel got hacked, by someone I knew, which made it even worse. Then there was all this drama where people were spreading false information about me. 

By that point, I had built up a tolerance to online hate, so it didn’t really bother me, but the whole situation was exhausting. I tried to move on and created a new account, and thankfully, a lot of people supported me.

But after two years of talking about manifestation, I realized something: I didn’t actually like doing it anymore. I felt like I had outgrown that topic. So, I deleted everything… my channel, my social media, everything. And I decided to take a break from the internet.

And now here I am. Trying to figure things out again.

Right now, I have no social media accounts. I told myself I wouldn’t make any until at least 2026. But I did want to start this blog and website because if there’s one thing about me, I always find my way back to creating. Even if I take a few detours along the way.

So, who knows where this will go? I guess we’ll find out.