a few months ago I made this video which was the result of growing feelings I've
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been having about myself in that video I talked about how I have always felt very
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unintelligent and I cared more about becoming prettier than exploring ideas
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or learning new things I feel as though I've always had a really hard time
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retaining information I'm 26 and I can't do basic Ma I don't know my
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multiplication tables I don't know how to calculate percentages I still don't really know what fractions are I don't
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have a mass gcfc I never got one I I didn't pass it in school and I didn't attend my uh
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functional skills classes in college which are supposed to kind of supplement if you don't pass your gcse's um and I
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didn't do those so I performed pretty badly in school while I had an older SI
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that was just effortlessly smart my parents never gave me crap about bad
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results or anything but either way I came away from school feeling just
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incredibly lacking in mental ability and
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knowledge general knowledge I I felt very aware and and conscious of a yeah
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like a lack of mental ability that's how it felt I really did
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wonder many times if there was something else wrong with me because I just I just
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I couldn't remember things I just couldn't retain information that was given to me and I couldn't I couldn't
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engage with information and as an adult I continued to feel that way and it it
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just seemed like everyone else around me didn't have this problem like they just
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seemed to know things and I especially noticed this growing up um with my
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boyfriends um they they always seem to know things that I didn't and I got the
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impression that once they had read something or been told something it kind
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of just stayed there for example I was talking to my boyfriend recently um I
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just watched a video on the French Revolution and I had mentioned this guy
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and and he immediately was like oh yeah that person and was able to like recall
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his contributions to to the event and to that period of history and I had never
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heard this name before even though they seem to be a very Central character in
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like the the biggest Revolt in human history Maybe I learned about it in
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school and it just left my brain and maybe he learned about it in school and
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it stayed there if they were curious about something they didn't know about they would just Google it in that moment
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and this was a behavior I could never participate in because it's like my
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brain resisted knowledge and new information if I want to know something if I want to
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approach a piece of information I have to prepare myself I have to very
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consciously engage my mind I couldn't just casually Google something and read
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about it and have it be effective at all
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so I kind of developed this aversion to
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curiosity and looking for answers I had this impression that other people could
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just be exposed to a piece of information once once or twice and it
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just locked in for them and and they could rely on recalling that information
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they could Breeze past the information they could be in the general presence of
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the information and just soak it up literally like a sponge and I would
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compare myself to something more like a a nice smooth glass paper weight
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Pleasant and ornamental but completely
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nonporous it wasn't just the fact that I didn't know a lot of things it was about me not being able to take in and engage
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with knowledge and like I could read and read about things and within the next
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day within the next week I could not return to you anything that I had been
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reading about and this this just feels like the experience I've always had and maybe
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maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit but that's how it's felt that's really how
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it's felt um I've I've really struggled to learn
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new things so I hope that explains a bit more effectively how I've come to feel
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the way that I do and I'm not defending it I'm not that cruel to myself I don't look at myself in the mirror and say
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you're stupid or at least I don't now and that's why I wanted to make this
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video and start talking about this if you watch my other video you'll remember how I also talked about how relevant my
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poor body image was to my judgment and how my feelings about being a woman and
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being visually and sexually appealing took far greater priority
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than expanding my mind and developing my character being pretty took far greater
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importance than anything to illustrate it more practically I would spend hours
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every day looking at girls online and trying to figure out how to look like
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them what did I need to do I'd be researching hair and makeup and how it
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redefined your features I'd be looking up workouts to Target specific parts of
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my body uh cosmetic procedures and and how they work and how much they
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cost and I don't think there's anything wrong by the way with investing in in your
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appearance it's still something that I do and it's still something that I enjoy I love developing my my Aesthetics and
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my style I still devote my time to that but the issue was that it was virtually
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all that occupied my mind and I developed body dysmorphia and I got
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depressed and I neglected my spirit and it's taken me a really long time to
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really register the consequences of all of that and I can't emphasize with
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enough Justice how much effort it's taken to find acceptance with my
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appearance but but more than that take away some of that stock that I had been
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putting into my appearance for so many years and realizing that it's not as
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valuable as I thought it was and this very well may not be your experience as
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a woman I I do feel like there are women who were much more quickly wise to all
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of this that their outward appearance doesn't hold all of the value that they offer and maybe this honestly sounds
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quite pathetic um because it was I felt pathetic and I was incredibly misguided
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and I had to arduously restore my self-esteem so
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moving into the next part of this video I want to share with you some of the
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things I've been doing to try to my mind and learn new things I I want a better
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sense of general knowledge I don't want to feel so ignorant and I want to
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understand things that are happening in the world I've been making changes towards a daily life that has more
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casual access to knowledge I'm setting up conditions for an environment of
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learning and curiosity without being intimidated by it and this is what this
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looks like for me so I knew the first place I wanted to start was my social media accounts because I use them every
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day um Instagram especially I scroll on Instagram every day and it's important
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that the content on there is enriching and positive for me I just Googled
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educational Instagram accounts and I have to admit some of the results were a
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bit strange um there were like articles of like 10 top 10 educational Instagram
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accounts and a lot of them led to like pages with like maybe Millions like
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hundreds of thousands of followers and then like 1,000 likes on the post which
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which made me feel a bit dubious um and I actually didn't really find anything
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useful from the first few Google searches but what I did end up doing is
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maybe finding one or two accounts and then when you follow an account on Instagram it will drop down with similar
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recommended accounts and I just went through there I would just follow an
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account go straight to the recommended and see what uh felt relevant to me and
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how would have a look through on the page just to see if I felt like I could engage with it was it like easy enough
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for my mind to access it and because I use the harapon account the most that's
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where I decided to follow these new accounts you know there were like
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infographics Pages news resources journalists um little like fact
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slideshow Pages which I obviously don't even know at this point if if they're
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trustworthy um so I'll be taking this as an opportunity as well to practice my
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media literacy and verifying for misinformation I think it will encourage
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me to think about that a bit more next I did a similar thing with YouTube I
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subscribe to a bunch of educational and informative channels I'm trying to get
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into a habit of just clicking on something when I see it and if it looks interesting which it's hard for me as I
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explained earlier it's very hard for me to face new information and I think it
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must be some kind of fear of disappointment
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and a fear of like being confused and the the discomfort of exposing myself to
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something that I'm not going to be able to understand but it is a bit different for me when it comes to learning through
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video format because the the way I usually use YouTube is as kind of
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background videos um while I'm doing other things a lot of the things I watch
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is very kind of mindless watchable easy kind of
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entertainment and I usually have it on while I'm doing something else when I first started thinking about this I
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thought okay well I'll subscribe to these channels and I'll just put these videos on instead I'll kind of like
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replace one Comfort video with something
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useful but that turned out to be a completely unsuccessful system um it
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really did just turn into noise in the back of my ear it was it was ineffective
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because I wanted my comfort videos in that situation um that was their purpose
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that's what they were there for so I realized that I really need my full
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attention committed to videos so I created something I like to
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call Discovery hour and this is an hour immediately after I've woken up and
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taken care of myself um where I watch some of these videos for up to an hour
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in the mornings um and I can really focus on them and it's very important
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that it is early in the morning not like early in the morning but in the morning
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um I don't wake up super early but I I notice that I am just so much more
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receptive to information in the morning I want to engage with it I think it's
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because I like to know that I'm getting it done I just spend this time in the morning and then the rest of the day I
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can just enjoy other videos I also have this kind of specific system with
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Discovery hour where I'll watch the video once all the way through UND
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um and then I'll watch it again but take notes the second time recently I've been
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making my way through the videos on the oversimplified channel which animates uh
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events in history in a very oversimplified and
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easily digestible way and that's why it's so good for me so that's Discovery
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hour I've also been trying to read more books uh this might not come as a huge
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surprise to you but I have not been the biggest reader I exactly the person you might
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have heard describing reading the same paragraph over and over again because
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it's just not applying I would just become completely absent from the text
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in front of me and reading became this really frustrating and unsatisfying
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thing to do but the last year I've been trying so hard really actively trying to
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read more books and honestly it's getting a lot easier and I think I'm
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getting better at it and right now I am reading non-fiction because I'm wanting to use it as a tool for Learning and I'm
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also reading a lot more since I moved to London and I started studying um because
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I've got like a hour plus commute so I usually always read a book on the train
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I noticed that a book is a very enjoyable supplement for a phone because
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it still meets this like physiological composion to hold
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something in my hand and look at it you know but instead of consuming and
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infinite feed of memes and brain rot and
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trolls and women that are more beautiful and have bigger boobs than me is in
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place of that guilt-free civilized analog media and paper smells
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nice this is also why I have been investing in buying physical copies of
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books even though it can be expensive but I also wanted to use books to get away from my phone now I want to show
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you some of the things I've been reading uh and first I want to tell you how and
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why I bought these books because I did not know where to start I've got entire
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folders saved on Tik Tok of book recommendations you know book reviews
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and I was very anxious about choosing the right thing to read because I knew
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it was going to take me a very long time to read one book so I I felt a lot of
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pressure to make good choices and I've been thinking about this and I think
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people like me in my generation have maybe forgotten that there are physical
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stores you can go to where you can browse a limited selection of items I
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think because we've enjoyed the inexhaustible resources of the internet
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we feel like it's the only place we can go to for suggestions but what I found
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in my local uh water stones which is a big bookstore chain in the UK uh is that
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they have little notes and annotations of some of the things you're seeing some
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of the books and I assume it's written by the staff maybe it all comes from
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like the top and it's not personal at all I don't know how it works and in the
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genre specific areas of the store they've selected and separated
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particular books uh that they considered to be some of the best in that genre so
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I went straight to those featured book tables um and I just looked at what was
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there and what I felt I wanted to learn about and I would spend some time

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