This year, to date, I have gone live on my YouTube channel 17 times, and will hopefully do at least a couple more before the end of the year. I don’t have much of an audience, and in fact rarely have anyone watching live these days. It would be nice to have a bigger audience, but I don’t do these livestreams to build an audience or to try and get famous. I do them because it’s been a great way for me to connect with friends in different parts of the world.
I started livestreaming back in 2021, but I never talked about why or how that came about until it came up in the memoir I recently finished writing. The truth was, I was inspired by watching one of my exes, Lee, livestreaming, but he and I hadn’t been in communication for almost seven years at the time, so he had no clue I was watching them. I enjoyed watching what he put out, but I didn’t think he’d want to hear from me so I didn’t comment on any of them. Instead, in July of that year, I just decided to try my hand at livestreaming to a filtered audience on Facebook, because unlike my ex, I wasn’t brave enough to do it publicly yet. I started off on my own, sharing all the thoughts that had come up for me when I watched the Netflix series Sex/Life with a different ex when he came to visit me that month. The next stream I did started me off on my LEGO building streams. My livestreams were nothing like what what my ex produced; the inspiration was simply just the idea that I could try livestreaming.
After a couple of LEGO building streams, I wound up inviting friends to join me on camera as guests to chat with while I built, starting with a few who had watched the streams and commented on them live, since they had seemed invested in what I was doing.
About a month after I started livestreaming, I wound up sending an email to the ex that had inspired me, without mentioning that I’d been watching his livestreams because I worried it would come across as creepy behaviour, to see if he’d be open to reconnecting. He didn’t reply, so I moved on from thinking reconnecting was possible, and continued to livestream. By mid-October, I found the courage to start streaming publicly on multiple platforms.
I continued livestreaming various LEGO builds on and off as time went on, but I always preferred the sessions when I had one or two friends join me in conversation. It was a great way for me to connect with friends in different parts of the world, and I’ve most often been joined by my Malaysian friends. It was through rebuilding those friendships through those livestream conversations that helped me gather the courage I needed to return to Malaysia to visit them in person last year.
In the last couple of months, I’ve branched out a bit more with my livestreaming. I still want to do more LEGO streams, but it’s not all I want to do in that capacity any more.
When I started writing my memoir, I’d reached out to one of my regular streaming guests, Papi Zak, to ask him if he had any preferences for how I referred to him in my book. I was using pseudonyms for everyone and wanted to give him an opportunity to choose his own name or even see if he’d be fine with me using his real name (not something I offered to everyone I wrote about in my memoir; I just thought he might be open to me using his real name). When Papi wrote back, he asked if my memoir might be like Baby Reindeer, and at the time I told him I hadn’t watched it yet and didn’t want to watch it until I was done writing so I wouldn’t be influenced by it.
Then, when I was done writing my memoir, I started watching Baby Reindeer, and let Zak know. He told me he wanted to hear all my thoughts when I was done. The more I watched, the more thoughts I had, and I knew there were too many to text to him, so I proposed hosting a livestream conversation where we discussed the show. Therein the idea I could do a themed livestream conversation was born. I also invited our mutual friend Sim Tong, and hosted “Comedians Discuss Baby Reindeer.”
That stream became my most successful livestream, in terms of number of views, to date. It was still only 61 views (I told you, I don’t have much of an audience), but showed me maybe themed livestreams were a path forward for me.
So, I followed that up with Millennials Discuss 90s Teen Horror Films, joined by a new guest, Sharad (another one of my Malaysian friends), along with Papi Zak again. This was what I found myself needing to do to help me move on from a really rough second “break-up” (if you can call it that, considering it was a situationship rather than a full blown relationship) with Lee. If you didn’t read my previous blog posts about my reconnecting with him and the subsequent ending of that relationship again, before I put them behind a paywall, yes, I did eventually reconnect with him, but only for about four months (Sept 2023-Jan 2024).
Last month, I was able to drill down into understanding what it was I missed about not having Lee in my life again. One of those things was having someone I could geek out on movies with, and in particular movies from my teen years. But then it occurred to me that I knew other people who also liked movies so surely I could just reach out to them and see if they wanted to chat movies with me. I’d already been on a 90s teen horror movie binge because it was Halloween month, so that’s where it started. I picked Sharad as my first guest for this because when we met in Malaysia, he told me he was a screenwriter, and in the last year or so, he’s been sharing reels with me on Instagram, so he’d clearly shown me interest in engaging more with me. I’ve been trying to focus my attention more on those who show me they are invested in our friendship in some way, rather than chasing people like my ex Lee, who don’t bother responding when I try to reach out and connect.
I followed that up with thinking about the other thing I missed most about my friendship with Lee (uh, my friendship with him always mattered more to me than what other kind of relationship we had) – the ability to have deep, vulnerable conversations. Again, I didn’t need Lee to have such conversations, and certainly I couldn’t when he’d closed himself off to me in that capacity. With the US election results, I also thought a lot about how that likely came about in part because people feel so disconnected from each other these days, because it’s so common to be afraid of having deep and vulnerable conversations with people. Everyone’s so afraid of being rejected, so many relationships are surface level. I wanted to change that.
Back in July this year, I went to a Skip the Small Talk event, where I got to have conversations like that with complete strangers. They had a deck of question cards laid out around the room to help inspire those conversations. I wound up ordering a deck of the cards later on with the intention of using them with friends. So, why not now use them with friends on a livestream?
And that’s how “Let’s Get Vulnerable with Dominica May” was born.
I’ve done two episodes now. Sharad has joined me for both of them. One of my first ever livestream guests from 2021, Mike Brown, joined me for the first episode, and Papi Zak joined me for the second one. Having male guests join me kind of feels like I’m shattering the perception that men can’t open up and be vulnerable, and I’m also showing that male/female friendships can exist in this capacity without there being any desire for sexual connection from one or both parties. I actually talked about this a little in episode two, because having a lot of interests in male-dominated spaces, I’ve developed a lot of friendships with men over the years where I’m pretty sure we both only ever had platonic interest in each other. For whatever reason, I’ve usually found it easier to open up and share my vulnerable experiences with men.
Having said that, I’m not against having women join me as guests on this new livestream, and I have already invited a female friend who commented on one of my posts talking about this show, so we’ll see what happens going forward.
Even though I’m not doing these specifically to build an audience, it would be nice to have some audience join to watch and/or listen in the future. So if any of the types of livestreams I’ve mentioned sound interesting to you, hop on over to my YouTube channel to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you can be notified when I go live. I don’t always announce in advance when I’m planning to do a livestream because sometimes they’re planned on short notice. They’re also dependent on my guests’ and my own availability, so I haven’t set a specific schedule to host them. If I do publicly announce a livestream in advance, you’ll be able to see those announcements on my Instagram.
I am so eternally grateful that I have friends who are willing to take a few hours out of their lives to join me for lively conversation in this capacity, and that they keep agreeing to return because they enjoy them too. Quality time is one of my top two love languages, and this kind of conversation is the epitome of quality time to me. So, on this year’s American Thanksgiving, that is what I am thankful for. The friends who show up for me and help me see the light in my life.
Even my dad has been watching my recent streams and getting a lot out of them. It’s a little awkward for me considering some of the conversation centres around certain bedroom activities, but he seems fine with it and I am, after all, an adult. I mean, I turn 41 tomorrow…
Oh, and I do plan on starting a new LEGO build livestream soon too. The next set I plan to build on stream is the X Mansion.
I may also do some video game streams again. The first time I tried video game streaming, I did Super Mario World. Then I tried out Kena: Bridge of Spirits a couple of times until I got stuck and didn’t go back. I’ve been playing Demon Slayer: Hinokami Chronicles recently though, and I thought it might be fun to stream playing some versus battles against the CPU as my favourite characters.
Since I’ve had a few people ask me about the equipment I use for my livestreaming recently, I’ll talk about that in a blog post soon.
