The first video I ever filmed, I deleted immediately. Then I filmed it again. Deleted it again. Filmed it a third time, watched it back with my hand physically covering my eyes, and then — for reasons I still can’t fully explain — posted it anyway.
That was about eighteen months ago. I’ve been talking to the camera ever since.
I didn’t start because I had some grand vision for a content strategy or a brand or whatever. I started because I had things I wanted to say and writing felt too slow. I think in spoken sentences. I process out loud. Writing is great, but it’s a second language for me — something I have to translate into. Talking is my first language.
So I pointed my phone at myself, pressed record, and started talking.
What I wasn’t prepared for
I wasn’t prepared for how uncomfortable it would be to watch myself.
Not in a vanity way — though yes, also a little in a vanity way, I’m only human — but in a deeper way. When you watch yourself talk, you hear things you don’t notice in the moment. The way you qualify everything. The way you start sentences and then immediately walk them back. The “I mean, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but…” before every single opinion, as if apologizing for having a thought.
Watching the videos back became this strange form of self-study. I started noticing patterns in how I communicated — where I was confident, where I hedged, where I was genuinely saying something and where I was kind of just filling space with noise.
It’s uncomfortable to see yourself clearly. It’s also incredibly useful.
The thing about talking to no one
Here’s something I didn’t expect: talking to a camera when no one is watching is one of the strangest and most freeing things I’ve ever done.
There’s no feedback. No facial expressions to read. No one nodding or looking bored or checking their phone. It’s just you and the lens. And at first that’s terrifying. And then, slowly, it becomes something else.
It becomes practice for saying exactly what you mean.
In normal conversation, we’re constantly calibrating. Reading the room. Adjusting based on how people react. Which is fine — that’s part of being a decent human. But it also means we sometimes edit ourselves before we’ve even said anything. We self-censor in real time, and often we don’t even notice we’re doing it.
The camera doesn’t give you any of that feedback, so you can’t perform for it. You just have to say the thing. The actual thing you think. And then watch it back and decide if that’s really what you meant.
More often than I expected, it was.
What honesty actually looks like
I used to think honesty was about facts. Telling the truth about what happened, what was said, what occurred.
But making videos taught me that there’s another kind of honesty — the kind about what you actually think and feel, as opposed to the more polished version of your thoughts that you’ve pre-approved for public consumption.
Most of us walk around with a curated version of our opinions ready to go. Safe takes. Things we know won’t make anyone uncomfortable. And then the real thoughts — the messier, less certain, more interesting ones — stay in our heads.
I started trying to say those thoughts out loud. On camera. Just to see what happened.
Some of them turned out to be half-formed nonsense. Some of them turned out to be things other people immediately recognized in themselves. The response I got most often was: I’ve never heard anyone say that out loud, but I’ve thought it.
That’s become my favourite thing to hear.
What I’d tell anyone thinking about starting
You’re going to cringe at yourself. That’s not a warning — it’s just true. You’ll watch yourself back and find three things you want to change immediately. Do it anyway.
Because the discomfort of seeing yourself clearly is, I promise, worth it. Not because you’ll suddenly become perfect or polished or totally at ease on camera — I’m still working on all of those — but because it changes how you move through the world.
When you practice saying what you actually mean, even when it’s just to your phone in your bedroom, you get a little better at saying what you actually mean everywhere else too.
And that, I’ve found, makes most things better.