I’ve started a new YouTube channel, JohnLaceyTV. This isn’t the first additional YouTube channel I’ve started, infact it’s not even the first YouTube channel I’ve started to feature my real name. I wanted to take a moment to explain to you (and myself) why I have started it, why I am using it, and why I’ll continue to use my other account too.

I have JohnLacey.com and JohnLacey.net. This is slightly confusing, but there are reasons for this. Some of them relate purely to my own vanity (being frustrated to discover I’m one of a billion John Laceys on the planet and wanting to try to own the name online). Some of them were practical, logistical… I only registered JohnLacey.net initially because I was moving all my sites and wanted a new email address to use with all my online accounts. There is an element of link building involved too. And these things are all… well, they are what they are, I suppose. But they’re not really that important.

The real difference, in my eyes, is the function of the two sites. And the content. This is my personal blog. This is a dumping ground for random thoughts. I joke that I’d close down my ‘personal blog’ except “where would all my existential angst end up then?” And this is true. JohnLacey.com is obstensibly a professional site for someone who has shunned professional life. I voluntarily left the work force to explore some whims I have. But on that site I write about writing, about wanting to write, I write about creativity, I collect interesting quotes from people I admire. There is a creative focus there because I want to be a creative person. I’ve been trying to express this sentiment for a long time and every time I do the words ‘lofty’ and ‘ambitions’ come to mind. At times I can’t begin to imagine what an artist is or does, but I know I want to be one. I know this when I watch Sunday Arts in awe and with a degree of envy. I watch people make sculptures and paint and draw, and I think… ‘wow, this is amazing!’

And then there is JohnOfJordan.com… This is about YouTube and community. Not about ‘the community’ really, so much as about ‘my community.’ I interview my friends about their hopes and dreams and video technique. I include tips and thoughts and ocassionally a video of my own. The point I want to make is that I never had any desire to become a video maker. I wasn’t one of the drama kids in high school. I hadn’t done any acting since the primary school play Nowhere Boy (where I was given an important supporting role until the moody director, hell bent on living his dreams through school children, recast my role and made me an extra). My attraction to this site was all about people and not the ‘famous’ people waving down from their ivory towers, but the people who were just like me somewhere else in the world sharing their lives, sharing their world, sharing themselves. (And I suppose this is what people like Rohan and Christopher Mast mean when they talk about YouTube being a “social networking site.”) I’ve come to enjoy video production and be deeply fascinated by it, but it was always in service of connecting with people and people I cared about.

But still those ‘lofty ambitions’ hover. Still that artistic aspiration exists deep within me. JohnOfJordan is community directed, and that is what I love about it. But I guess I started JohnLaceyTV so I had a forum where I could be more self-directed. A place where I could be myself, under my own name, and perhaps shed some of the YouTubian concerns I had fostered with JohnOfJordan. It is oddly liberating to start again, to start from scratch. Working on a video that I’m proud of and putting it on a channel four people have heard of makes me think about the work, the art, more than the views… (I think viewers of either will appreciate content that is collected slightly thematically too.)

I always felt this great pressure to ‘be’ one thing and to be ‘the best’ of that one thing. I struggled with that idea for a really long time, because everyone is an ‘expert’ and everyone thinks you should be an ‘expert’ too. And not just an expert but ‘the’ expert. And for me the most rewarding thing has been not choosing between competing desires, but finding a way to explore as many of them as I can. It is about trying to honour all of the pieces of me.

I haven’t been blogging lately, or doing much of anything to be honest. This is very remiss of me. I’ll try better.

Today I’ve been musing over this song – Sophie B. Hawkins’ The One You Have Not Seen.

And of the dreams inside you, I am the one you have not seen

My thoughts have been preoccupied with the unseen lately. I’ve been strolling through this town looking for some strand of narrative thread that holds this town together, that makes it make some sense. Somehow. Or just looking for some inspiration. I want to create something. But what? That is the dilemma.

I’ve also been reading up at a website titled The Meanings Of Life. To me, in this moment, life has no clear rhyme or reason about it. Meanings where they exist are created (by individuals and traditions), not uncovered. I am without direction and without purpose. I wish there was some cosmic flashing neon sign in the sky telling me where to go and what to do. But that is just me being indecisive and shirking my responsibilities, I suppose. I watch Sunday Arts from time to time with a great sense of envy. I watch artists just have an impulse and they follow it down a rabbit hole of possibilities and just see where they end up. How I long to do that too. I want to be infatuated with a subject matter. I want to develop a discipline. I want to produce and showcase works of some description. I want to be an artist. Is that a lofty aspiration? Lots of people in my life have indicated it is. And yet I remain so desperately unhappy that it seems stupid not to at least try something that might resonate with me, even momentarily.