VidCon US 2019: The 3rd Annual Night of Awesome! (13 July 2019)

itasca00 · Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:40 am

For posterity, the reaction to this story in the main thread starts here.

itasca00 · Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:51 am

I have to say that I’m really impressed with Dan for telling this story. Symbolism seems to be particularly meaningful to Dan, and, taken at face value, this story represents a colossal symbolic failure. With these events being so recent, I’m surprised that Dan has so quickly been able to see them for what they truly are: a massive victory in terms of knowing your own limitations and making the hard choices that you know are right for yourself. I don’t know. I just feel really proud of him!

Here are my timestamps:

[0:53] Dan starts off by asking who’s out there in the audience. He calls out the single ladies, lesbians, confused straight boys, lowkey bisexuals, and furries.
[1:36] Dan talks about VidCon printing him a badge that says “danisnotonfire” in 2019, and he shows this tweet:
[2:03] Dan talks about how he’s now back from his break and how it turns out that he was a massive queer the whole time. This is really his first time “going out while being out.” It feels like he’s started a completely new life. He is baby (a reference to a meme).
[2:45] Dan says that it’s a special year for VidCon since it’s the tenth one. He then goes on a tangent about how he doesn’t understand why people are surprised that he’s actually awkward in person because his entire creative identity is just “missing high fives and having a sad resting face.” Dan says that the tenth anniversary of his inaugural upload to YouTube is this year. At [4:53], Dan says that he’s very impressed with himself for doing YouTube for ten years because he has commitment issues. He likes to rebel whenever someone tells him to do something.
[6:00] Dan talks about “Basically I’m Gay,” poking fun at aspects of the video that may be perceived to be flaws. He says that the video was so long, and he has no respect for anyone’s time. He says that he didn’t even give a good performance in the video because he didn’t cry, and he clearly has some emotional issues.
[6:47] Dan says that working on “Basically I’m Gay” isn’t the only thing he did in the first half of 2019. He reveals that he also signed up and trained to run in the London Marathon.
[8:20] Dan thought that him running a marathon would be a great idea for several reasons. First, if he trained to run a marathon, he would naturally become really fit and healthy, and good physical health helps your mental health. Also, if he had abs, he would probably be naked on Instagram all day. Second, the whole point of the London Marathon is to raise money and awareness for a charity. Not only would this make the world a better place, but it would also make him look really good. Third, it would make for a good story: a young person who’s publicly struggled with mental health overcoming all in an epic test of physical and mental endurance, symbolically stomping on “depression, anxiety, paranoia, various food addictions, gay trauma, etc.” with chunky running shoes.
[9:51] Given all this buildup, Dan bets people know where the story is going now. He says, “This is a past-tense story I’m telling right now.” He says that he trained in the wet, cold winter months. He was out there jogging in shorts a few times, and it was very hard. He was committed because he had signed up to run in the marathon, which is a formal, intimidating process, and he had told his family and friends that he was doing this because nothing motivates him more than guilt and shame, the fear of disappointing someone. He felt love and support from the people he told, but he didn’t feel confident enough to tell his audience what he was doing. The stakes were so high, and it would have been humiliating if he had fallen over halfway through the marathon.
[11:05] Dan says that he guesses the moral of this story is that “sometimes your best actually isn’t good enough.” He ended up pulling out of the race the night before it happened, after he had already carbo-loaded about 20,000 calories of sweet potatoes. In trying to overcome the mental health setbacks he’s experienced through his life, mental health ended up winning. He just didn’t feel ready in the end because his fitness level when he started training had been so low. Also, since he hadn’t told his audience, he felt that the opportunity to support a charity had basically been wasted.
[12:14] Dan says that the hardest thing (besides digesting all of the potatoes he had just eaten) was telling his family and friends that he had decided not to race. The hardest person to tell was his mom because she texted him a photo of her wearing a homemade shirt that said “Team Dan PROUD Mum” ([12:54]) right before he was about to tell her that he had decided to drop out. Dan says that everyone’s initial responses were nice and supportive, but the real truth came out later on. His mom eventually said, “To be honest, I thought it was a bad idea that you signed up,” and his friends said similar things. For him, this was like the paranoid thought you have that everyone’s being really nice but they don’t actually believe in you, except it was actually true.
[14:05] Dan talks about what he’s taken away from this experience. He says he increased his fitness level from zero to one. He got to explore London for the first time. Then he says:
D: But in a way, me saying “no” at the last minute was a victory in itself. Okay? Sometimes in life, we feel all this pressure to do things just ‘cause we feel like it’s the right thing to do, what other people are telling us to do, or what society wants. And, you know, to say, “I’m gonna be honest with myself: I can’t do that.” or just, “I actually don’t want to do that thing.” That’s the right decision.
He says that he learned to be okay with trying something out of his comfort zone and being totally comfortable with accepting defeat.
[14:57] Dan says that other than coming to terms with how gay he was and thinking about the rest of his career, training to run a marathon was what he was up to in the first half of 2019. He thinks it’s strange that sharing the stories and details from his life are so important to him and to his audience. Taking a break from uploading made him reflect on what he’s been doing in recent years and think about what he wants to keep doing in the future. This, in turn, made him think about what his life would have been like if he had decided that it wasn’t worth his time to upload “HELLO INTERNET.” ten years ago, and he thinks it would have been worse. He thinks his internet career is mostly a good thing, and he bets that he’d still have all the same problems if he finished law school and ended up as a weird barrister. He’d be just as awkward and sad and secretly gay. He also says that telling stories from his life and talking about the things that he’s struggled with (depression, authenticity, sexuality) helps him process and accept them, and he thinks it’s lovely if hearing these stories helps anyone in his audience.
[17:01] Dan asks if everyone wants to know what he has planned next for his career/life, and he says that he has no idea. He feels like he’s just entered this new chapter of his life, and he wants some time to reassess and reflect and decide what he wants to do instead of just jumping straight back into things.