Not Good—But Getting Better

I don't care much for social media, but it's easy for me to fall into a hole on YouTube. I remember one of the first videos I watched obsessively: a Swedish group of women wearing American Apparel-era fitness gear doing Busby Berkeley–type choreography while singing an a cappella version of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights.”

How I came to this video I do not know. I've been chasing that same feeling of accidental discovery ever since.

One of my current favorite channels is called Hello Erica, run by a young Latvian woman. I started watching her a few years back when she was living with her boyfriend in Germany. She had trouble finding a job and had a lot of time on her hands and very little money. As an outsider, she felt the cultural differences keenly and made fish-out-of-water videos. Many of them showed her exploring her new home in Trier.

Erica’s videos stood out for a few different reasons. First, it’s clear a lot of care goes into them. She scores them with music and sometimes includes title cards using a font of her own creation with colorful cut-out letters. She’s not just walking around showing you places; she's showing you what appeals to her quirky sensibility.

We see how she lights up when she spots a stray cat or scores the Lidl pastry she likes best (a pudding pretzel). She doesn't edit out her embarrassment at including herself in the footage, where she sometimes poses stiffly or pushes her glasses up her nose in a self-conscious way. This awkward self-consciousness becomes an appealing part of the narrative. Her videos are like little visual essays, where she’s struggling to understand some preoccupation or another and getting us interested in it, too.

Erica's channel has evolved along with her life. It began with exploring Germany, broadened into travel throughout Europe, and has become something closer to a record of self-discovery through art. Now she lives back home with her father in Latvia. Their apartment is one of those Soviet-era block buildings that always remind me of the setting of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog. While she looks for work as a graphic designer, she's designing a video game with her former boyfriend, sketching nearly every day, reading books about art, and teaching herself about color and perspective.

Lately, Erica seems to be casting about for her subject. With more than 100,000 subscribers, I imagine she's eking out a modest living from YouTube, and she probably feels some pressure to more fully define her niche. But what I like about her channel is its prickly individuality. We aren't watching someone who has smoothed her rough edges to conform to “her brand.” We're watching someone grow into their sense of self.

One of my favorite moments came in a recent video when Erica was recounting her development as an artist over the last two years. She pointed to one of her recent paintings and said, "And I think here was a pivotal moment of me realizing…that I'm not that good."

I loved this. It wasn't false modesty or her fishing for compliments. It felt completely spontaneous—a simple, honest assessment.

Watching Erica confirms that the quality I admire most in people is self-awareness.

Self-awareness is knowing how you really are, not just how you'd like to be perceived. If you're impatient, you don't expend energy trying to convince everyone you're easygoing. I've found that strong personalities are often easier to get along with than people who never express an opinion. Whether it's what's for dinner or the temperature in the room, they let you know what they want. Self-awareness is the differentiator here, what separates a force of nature from a jerk.

You don't have to agree with them, either—their directness invites you to be equally clear.

The people I struggle with, on the other hand, are often sending two different messages at once. My mother punctuates so much of what she says with laughter, as though she's always joking around. But if you were to read a transcript of her sentences, stripped of the laughter, you'd see how often she's actually complaining and criticizing.

I can see this quality so clearly in her because I'm the same way. It's partly temperament, partly upbringing, and partly my job. As a critic, I'm paid to look at things with a cool, appraising eye. But I don't want to just tear things apart. I want to understand why they are the way they are—and that means understanding why I feel that way about them.

I remember once, newly single, inviting a friend over for drinks. As I reached into the freezer, I said, "If there's no ice, I'm going to freak out."

I saw the look on my friend's face and burst out laughing.

If you live alone and you're out of ice, who is there to blame but yourself?

I think that was a turning point for me: recognizing the gap between the person I imagined myself to be (easy to live with) and the person I actually was (ready to blame the person I lived with for anything that was wrong).

Self-awareness hasn't made me more patient, less critical, or easier to live with. But it’s made me able to admit these things about myself. Like Erica, I’m not good—but I’m getting better.