Opinion | YouTube Gave Me Everything. Then I Grew Up.

YouTube soon became a game of “What’s the craziest thing you’d do for attention?”

My answer? Legally marry my sister’s boyfriend.   (It was meant to be a lighthearted joke. Our union has since been annulled.)

Nearly three million people have watched that video; by the numbers, I should consider it and others like it as successes. But t

Even so, I was also a teenager, making decisions based on the visibility that our culture teaches us to desire. I knew that my audience wanted to feel authenticity from me. To give that to them, I revealed pieces of myself that I might have been wiser to keep private.

I was entering adulthood and trying to live my childhood dream, but now, to be “authentic,” I had to be the product I had long been posting online, as opposed to the person I was growing up to be.

Online culture encourages young people to turn themselves into a product at an age when they’re only starting to discover who they are.   When an audience becomes emotionally invested in a version of you that you outgrow, keeping the product you’ve made aligned with yourself becomes an impossible   dilemma.