I have so many amazing memories of film, and not just of watching movies. I’ve spent my life working in and around them, seeing them on big screens and little ones, working in movie theaters, studying film in college and writing about movies online. I always hoped I would eventually gain some kind of clout as a film critic, and, to be fair, I have. I’m Rotten Tomatoes certified, and I’ve been welcomed into several critics’ organizations. I can’t say that my entire existence as a blind film critic has been a complete and total wash. Still, there is something uniquely disarming and soul-crushing about finally meeting the requirements for YouTube monetization, submitting my channel for review and being rejected in less than a week. Monetization would have allowed me to create membership tiers so that, if anyone wanted to contribute even a dollar a month, it could help with the cost of maintaining this website, paying for streaming subscriptions or eventually hiring someone to help make my content more professional. After four years and more than 3,500 videos, the possibility that a little revenue could finally come my way felt like one of the most joyful moments of this entire journey. Then YouTube said no.

I knew I would have to submit my channel for approval, but based on the rules as I understood them and the advice I had received while trying to improve my search engine optimization, titles and thumbnails, I thought I had a solid chance. Over the summer, once I started consistently using thumbnails, my viewers and subscribers began increasing. I was inching closer to my goal, and at the very end of the summer, I finally crossed the line. The switch flipped. I could apply. YouTube then rejected me by pointing toward generic monetization guidelines that don’t seem to apply to what I actually do. I don’t use copyrighted footage because I don’t edit footage into my videos at all. I sit in front of a camera and talk about a movie or television show. I try to demonstrate that a blind film critic can occupy the same platform as sighted critics and offer the same kind of criticism, even without the fancy editing that has always eluded me. Unless YouTube simply doesn’t like my content or doesn’t believe I offer enough of a unique opinion, I genuinely don’t understand the rejection. If that’s the problem, however, it means they may never like my content, because those 3,500 videos are me sitting in front of a camera and talking. Even if I suddenly learned video editing or found someone to help me, would I have to rebuild my entire channel around what sighted people believe a YouTube channel should be? Would I need to erase four years of work and produce fresh reviews with flashy bells and whistles just to fit their mold?

The rejection feels like an enormous amount of failure arriving all at once. In the interest of honesty, I haven’t felt completely okay since I began losing my vision nine years ago. I live with heavy amounts of imposter syndrome and constantly expect the rug to be pulled out from underneath me. I’m deeply insecure, and I recognize that because I wasn’t this person before I lost my vision. I wasn’t taking antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication before I went blind. These are all compounding side effects of everything that happened to me. I don’t even feel like I’m particularly good at being blind, if being good at blindness is actually a thing. I don’t believe my cane training is up to par because I received it when I had more vision than I do now. At the time, I was at the counting-fingers stage. Now I’m down to hand movement. I’m not technically in total darkness because I can tell when someone waves a hand in front of my face, even though I couldn’t tell you how many fingers they’re holding up. I can see light emanating from a screen and occasionally notice when the amount of light changes, but I don’t see anything specific on that screen, including the enormous ones in movie theaters. For purposes of watching film and television, I am entirely reliant upon audio description.

My eyes are also incredibly sensitive to light, which is one reason I frequently wear glasses. I recently learned that I have advanced cataracts, and we may be looking at removing them this year. That brings an entirely different kind of stress because the outcome could go either way. I have advanced closed-angle glaucoma, and I don’t want to lose even the fraction of vision that remains. Hand movement may not sound useful, but it can occasionally keep you from walking directly into a wall. I clip corners constantly because I don’t have proper spatial recognition, but I have yet to walk straight into a door. That’s been nice to keep in my back pocket, although my cane does most of the heavy lifting. When you already live with imposter syndrome and a service like YouTube appears to validate the idea that you are, in fact, an imposter and that what you do isn’t good enough, every emotion you’ve tried to keep buried comes flooding back to the surface.

Labor Day was supposed to be productive. I didn’t have work, and I fully intended to catch up on reviews. To say that I developed writer’s block would be an understatement. It feels more like a writer’s boulder was hurled at me from Mount Olympus and completely crushed me. I don’t know how to crawl out from underneath it. Even this editorial is being created through dictation because I deal with repetitive stress in my hands from constantly using phones, keyboards and tablets. I alternate between typing and dictation so that I don’t develop full-blown carpal tunnel syndrome, and it has helped somewhat with the tremors in my hands. Still, that’s been my year so far. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy one. I think of years more like school years because I work at a college, and this is the final year for my boss, who is also my best friend. He is retiring after helping me tremendously throughout my vision loss. I’ve known him for 20 years and worked at my job for almost 17. I don’t know what that job will look like next year, who will replace him or whether that person will like me. We can talk about anti-discrimination protections all we want, but there has been an obvious backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion. I work in music, but I no longer read sheet music because I can’t see it and never learned Braille music. Once again, I feel inadequate.

I know I’m supposed to be proud of everything I’ve accomplished. I’m told that people read my work and that audio-description companies read it, even if they don’t always admit it or have time to respond. This isn’t an attempt to trigger a flood of sympathy, although I’ve certainly written posts like this before because I’m deeply insecure and this is my blog. I don’t know where else these thoughts are supposed to go. I don’t know what I’m supposed to create for a platform that apparently regards what I do as irrelevant or unnecessary. YouTube doesn’t tell you exactly what’s wrong. It gives you a generic response that feels like, “Sorry, you’re not good enough. See you later.” I may have another opportunity to make my case or reapply, but if they didn’t like my content now, what will make them like it later? What about me could change so dramatically that they would suddenly reverse course? They’re still going to examine my most-viewed videos. I can’t realistically repopulate an entire channel so that every video they encounter is new, aggressively edited and loaded with whatever flashy elements they wanted to see. To make matters worse, I was also recently rejected by the Critics Choice Association and told that I could reapply next year. That was disappointing, but at least I thought I had YouTube to look forward to. I believed, as others did, that my channel was a slam dunk. It ended up being a hell no.

I love what I do, but I also love movies and television. When work and fun collide, they enter into this bizarre Frankenstein relationship in which they’re stitched together even though they probably shouldn’t be. When the work you’re trying to do is suddenly treated as immaterial or useless, it becomes difficult to enjoy the thing you originally loved. I didn’t think anything I wrote after receiving that email would make a damn bit of sense or become a review I could upload to Rotten Tomatoes. I couldn’t imagine discussing the audio description for anything. I even had trouble watching shows I liked and things I wouldn’t necessarily review. It was as if I had suddenly developed attention deficit disorder and couldn’t focus. I watched Lanterns, episodes of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and Ghosts before reading the email, but afterward I struggled to pay attention to the second episode of The Shards and couldn’t confidently tell you what happened. I won’t comment on audio description if I wasn’t fully present for it. Everyone falls asleep during things, including me, but that doesn’t make the result suitable for a review or even one of my Small Screen Diaries. If I deliberately turn something off because it’s terrible, I might mention that in a diary. I still wouldn’t turn it into a full Rotten Tomatoes review.

Pretending this boulder doesn’t exist would only lead to lazy, half-assed content or something like this, where I meander through a stream of consciousness about where I am in life. Still, I am proud of a lot of the work I’ve done. I’m working to ensure that content created for children receives the best audio description possible. Someone recently contacted me about helping to bring more audio description into sports. Sports aren’t something I generally cover, so I’ve been trying to connect that effort with people who are genuinely knowledgeable and passionate about them. Advocacy is strongest when it comes from people who love and understand the subject. I could pretend to be an advocate for sports, but someone would quickly discover that I know next to nothing about them. Beyond my belief that everything should be accessible, I can’t honestly claim personal outrage over inaccessible sports broadcasts when I don’t watch sports. Unfortunately, we’re living through a time when companies are reevaluating whether being inclusive or diverse will make them targets. I think that makes some of them less inclined to listen to conversations about accessibility. It may also help explain the rise of synthetic audio description, because this apparently feels like the ideal moment to ignore objections, cut an expense and eliminate jobs held by people who have spent years advocating for our access.

I stand with human narrators, even though I listen to synthetic audio description when that’s what a title offers. I also review movies that don’t have description at all. I review everything because my perspective is always that of a blind viewer. If someone puts a film in front of me, I have to be honest about that experience, whether I receive human narration, synthetic narration or no audio description whatsoever. Any of those circumstances can affect my ability to understand or enjoy the production. Part of me wants to say screw it, stop trying to appeal broadly and focus exclusively on audio description. I could refuse to review anything that doesn’t have it and stop worrying about maintaining the widest possible perspective. Clearly, that perspective didn’t matter to YouTube. There are no advertisements on this website, and I don’t charge anyone to subscribe. My life as a blind film critic has generated zero income. In the interest of full transparency, I did make money from entertainment writing when I was sighted. I was paid to live-blog several reality shows, including American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance, along with awards broadcasts such as the Emmys and Oscars. I have been paid for this work, just not since I became blind. I hoped that somewhere down the road I might at least break even. I know that sounds like a crazy ambition, but I wasn’t exactly expecting millions.

I’ve never even tried to parlay this work into a career producing audio description. I don’t believe I’ve ever pulled anyone from an audio-description company aside and asked them for a job. I quality-checked one film for International Digital Center years ago, and that’s the full extent of my career in the industry. I’ve never narrated or written audio description, just as I’ve never made a film. I’m a consumer providing feedback, but somebody who consumes the same kind of product over and over eventually develops expertise. People say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. My Small Screen Diaries and thousands of reviews demonstrate that I’ve certainly spent at least 10,000 hours watching film and television. At this point, it’s entirely possible that I’ve also consumed 10,000 hours of audio-described content. If I haven’t reached that number yet, I’m damn close. Still, I don’t know how to move forward. I could focus on the website, connect my reviews to Rotten Tomatoes and abandon YouTube, but that feels like waving a white flag and saying, “You were right. I couldn’t do this. You win.” At the same time, I don’t know how to cheerfully record a video tomorrow and say, “Hey, welcome to my channel. Check this movie out. It’s lovely.” I don’t even know how to write tomorrow’s Small Screen Diaries.

In case you wandered onto this post without knowing who I am, I’m someone who is incredibly nostalgic. I remember my childhood so vividly that I feel like I could wake up in it tomorrow and pick up exactly where I left off without anybody noticing that I now have the brain of a forty-something. I remember Saturday morning cartoons, my VHS collection and trips to the movies. When I was very young, my mother clipped the little movie advertisements from the newspaper and placed them into photo albums alongside my ticket stubs. Later, I cut out the miniature posters, showtimes and descriptions myself. Movie theaters used to offer pamphlets advertising upcoming films, and I collected those too. I would cut them apart, pretend I was running my own theater and decide which movies played on which screens. Eventually, an online game called Movie Boss allowed me to do exactly that, rewarding players based on the actual weekend box office. Mr. Showbiz offered a summer box-office challenge, while sites such as Virtual Producer, Producer’s Chair and Hollywood: The Game allowed people to write, cast and release fake movies for an online community. When I was in middle school, I spent about two years writing for my local newspaper because my small town didn’t have a film critic. I volunteered to write for free simply for the chance to be published, which means I had legitimate newspaper credits before I was old enough to drive. Later, after an online critic decided he didn’t like me, I submitted reviews to his website under a pseudonym. He published them, proving that his problem was with me and not my writing. I tried building my own sites on free servers, but those kept disappearing. Rest in peace, GeoCities. Eventually, I bought my own domain, and I’ve been paying to keep this site alive for roughly 13 years.

I also spent more than a decade working in movie theaters, including B&B Theatres, AMC Theatres, Regal Cinemas and Premiere Theatres, along with Movie Gallery, where I became a store manager. I rose as high as operations coordinator at AMC and held management positions at Premiere and Regal. When the first theater I worked for opened, management asked who wanted to learn projection. I raised my hand and became the first person trained in that booth. I knew how to build and tear down prints, thread projectors and change lenses, all the things automation and digital projection have made increasingly irrelevant. God forbid you ask someone to thread a movie today. My favorite film rotates among several contenders, so I eventually settled on Jurassic Park because it’s a safe answer that doesn’t require an explanation. The longer list includes The American President, American Beauty, Mr. Holland’s Opus, The Dark Knight, Memento, X2: X-Men United, Goodfellas, WALL-E, Up, the first three Toy Story films, L.I.E., Mean Girls, The Devil Wears Prada, Home Alone, The Santa Clause, Aladdin, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, the Mighty Ducks trilogy, Heavyweights and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. I grew up on the Disney Afternoon, X-Men, Doug, Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Boy Meets World, Family Matters and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. That continued through SeaQuest, Friends, Frasier, Home Improvement, Roseanne, Dawson’s Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias, Lost, Boston Legal, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Mad Men, all the way to current favorites such as From and Silo. I’m also proud of my membership in GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. When I first applied, I admitted that blindness and accessibility were my primary focus. Queer films often don’t receive audio description because they emerge from their own underfunded niche. It’s a niche within a niche, and I live at the intersection of both.

Somehow, after all of those experiences shaped me, I can still be made to feel that I fall short. Once again, I’m trapped in a rut that I have to survive, move through and eventually leave behind so I can create something productive again, assuming what I do can still be considered productive. I don’t know exactly what I want anyone to take from this post. I don’t need a thousand people reflexively telling me how amazing I am, but I also don’t know how to write tomorrow, record tomorrow or move forward tomorrow. Writer’s block is real, and right now it is incredibly heavy. I’m surprised this nonsensical train of thought escaped at all, and I have no idea what kind of editorial monstrosity it became. Whatever happens next, I want to thank everyone who has bothered to read my work and especially anyone who has clicked on one of my videos, demonstrating to YouTube that I do have an audience, even if it’s apparently not an audience they care about. It has been one thing after another this year, and I’m trying to keep swimming or just survive somehow. Those are solid references to Finding Nemo and The Walking Dead, in case you missed them. I would absolutely slay Pop Culture Jeopardy! from my couch. My only real concern would be beating someone else to the buzzer. I wish I were better at this. I wish I were better at being blind. I wish I weren’t so insecure that something like this could simply roll off my shoulders, but I am. Despite my incredible ego and bravado, I am, for all intents and purposes, the most insecure person you know. Thank you for taking the time to read this stream of consciousness.