Too Sweet

By Meenakshi Bhatt

A few years ago, I came across a YouTube channel that dealt with elegant dressing. I was trying to improve several aspects of my life and my dressing sense was one of those aspects. Though I watched several of the creator’s videos, I did not form a good impression of her. To me, her speech seemed too saccharine-sweet and her manner inauthentic. I followed her channel for a while but finally decided that I could not take her advice seriously. I stopped following the channel and ignored her videos if they ever came up in my YouTube feed. 

I continued to hear good things about her from other creators who made videos of a similar nature. I continued to ignore them.  

Recently, one of her videos popped up in my feed. It was short (always a good thing) and was closely related to some of the content I had recently been watching. I decided to give the channel another try. She still sounded the same and behaved in the same manner. However, neither of those facts bothered me now. Her speech and the way she carried herself were still completely foreign to me, but I was able to look beyond that and see that she was trying to provide quality content to her viewers. She was honest about the mistakes she had made in the past and the mistakes she continued to make. She was funny. She was highly organized. She was just vastly different from me, and vastly different from people I hang out with. 

I hadn’t ever commented adversely on her channel. My prejudice was not overt, but it was still harmful. It was harmful to me. I wasn’t able to go beyond appearances and avail myself of the knowledge she was imparting.

Now, I respect her effort and watch her videos attentively. She hadn’t changed, I had. In fact, she wasn’t the one who needed to change, it was I who needed to grow up. 

Meenakshi Bhatt lives in India. She writes a blog on Medium and likes writing poetry, short stories, and essays. Her writing has appeared in Reflections,  Cornice magazine, IHRAF Publishes, and We Have Food At Home. She has worked as part of the Carbon Almanac Network, a team of creatives and researchers that author Seth Godin created to prepare his latest almanac on environmental issues.