In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World

  1. You feel that you have to put on an act when you are around the person.

  2. The person talks only about herself or himself.

  3. Poor hygiene

  4. You catch him or her in a lie.

  5. The person doesn’t challenge you to grow.

  6. You sense that the person is ugly (on the inside, where it really counts).

  Chapter 20

  Hatorade, or That Time My Car Was Towed

  The day I was cyberattacked could possibly go down as one of the worst days I had after moving to Los Angeles. Having a stampede of people come at you with all their negativity at once can seriously mess with you. It doesn’t matter if you have the thickest skin in the world. That much nastiness will pierce it, and it hurts.

  I had been steadily working on my own channel throughout the entire year after The Amazing Race, and it continued to pick up speed, but it really exploded that spring when I went to Florida for a big music and online video convention, Playlist Live. I met a couple of British YouTubers named Zoe and Louise, and we all filmed collabs with each other. They were just simple things, like playing games of Would You Rather, but it opened up my audience to a whole new country. Plus, Zoe and Louise became awesome new friends.

  Within just a couple of months, I hit 1 million subscribers. I couldn’t believe that so many people were interested in my life, and it was all happening so fast that I rarely had time to think about it. I just kept going. But every now and then, I’d pause and let it all sink in. The child nobody wanted to save in a health CPR class suddenly had more friends than a thousand times the number of kids in that school.

  But as I learned later that fall, with great fans come great haters.

  A lot of you reading this book probably know the basics about what happened when my car got towed, but I’ve never told my full side of the story, so here goes.

  It all started on the afternoon of October 14, 2013. I had dropped off all of my tax documents with my accountant a few days earlier, and he called me to come pick up an envelope with copies of all my completed information in it. I swung by his office before heading to my friend Stacy’s house to play some Minecraft. We had an awesome time, and later that night I headed out to go home. But my Prius wasn’t where I remembered parking it. My first thought: Oh crap, my car got stolen.

  I panicked and ran back to Stacy’s and told her my car was gone. She came outside and walked around with me to look for it, since she thought I must have just parked it somewhere else and forgotten the spot.

  Being a daily vlogger, I naturally whipped my camera out to share the experience. After looking everywhere, we came to the conclusion that my car must have been towed. But I had no idea why—I didn’t remember seeing any No Parking signs. Stacy drove me home, and I went onto a towing website to check my license plate number. Sure enough, it had been brought in.

  The next morning I had my roommate at the time drop me off at the pickup center, and after waiting for about an hour, I finally got my car back. When I asked why it had happened, the attendant told me that I had blocked someone’s driveway when I parked.

  That’s so weird, I thought. I had no recollection of there being a driveway, and I’d never done anything like that before. I figured my car had to have only been a little bit over the line. So once I got my car back, I vlogged about the whole thing. I was exaggerating and feeling punchy, and maybe I went a little over the line when I called the homeowner’s car a fat slut who couldn’t fit through the driveway if it was blocked a tiny bit. (Obviously it was a joke. How can a car be a slut? Fat maybe, yes, but a slut?? There’s that one documentary about people trying to score a new truck called Hands on a Hard Body, but it’s not a porno!)

  Apparently, though, as I was soon to find out, calling a car a slut is considered extremely offensive. I was just ranting, as most people do when they spend a good chunk of their day doing something they don’t want to do and spending good money just to get their own property back. The towing seemed ridiculous, especially because I didn’t think I had done anything wrong.

  I figured that was the end of the story. But it turned out that the guy who had my car towed peeked inside it first and saw my envelope full of tax documents. Not only did he learn my name, he discovered how much I owed in taxes that year because my accountant (I never went back to this one) wrote the amount on the outside of the package. I hadn’t even noticed the numbers were there because they were so faint, which means that the dude had to have been seriously snooping around the contents of my car.

  I learned all this because the guy was a small-time comedian. He Googled my name, watched my rant video, and decided to post his own reaction video. Shane Dawson was the first person to let me know it was out there. I opened my laptop, watched it, and cracked up when I saw that the guy had taken a photograph of my car. It was indeed blocking the ENTIRE driveway. The whole thing was completely my fault after all!!

  How the heck did I not realize that? I wondered. I must have been really out of it that day. I was totally embarrassed. I started to think of sheepish ways I could respond with an apology video, or maybe even leave a little “I’m sorry” gift in the guy’s driveway, when suddenly he started digging in on me personally. He said that all of his friends couldn’t believe that anyone bothered to watch my videos, and basically he called all YouTube vloggers dumb. He claimed that he didn’t want to say anything mean about me, but then went on to throw a bunch of passive-aggressive verbal punches about things I’d said in my rant video. He even said how much I owed in taxes, and while the number was bleeped out, there are people who can read lips and it seemed borderline illegal to me.

  I was stunned. The video was already going viral as I watched it for the first time, and Reddit boards were posting all sorts of nasty things about me. I started getting cruel tweets from total strangers—just a few at first, but they quickly gathered momentum until my entire feed was filled with hate. Even some news outlets were picking up the story.

  It felt like I was living in an alternate reality where I’d committed some sort of incredibly taboo crime. I had no idea what to do, and so I disappeared. I stayed off the Internet as much as possible, but every time I did turn on my laptop, it felt like that scene from the first Harry Potter movie when the kids open up a forbidden book and it starts screaming at them.

  Here’s the thing: I’ve been hated on YouTube for years. It’s something I got used to early on and learned to brush off. But this was different. Many YouTubers, myself included, pride themselves on how much of a community we have. Well, I certainly found out who my true friends were during that time. I was shocked to see how many YouTube vloggers enjoyed seeing me torn to shreds. It was as if they were getting high off it. I’m not going to name names, but I began to keep a list of all my fellow vloggers who trash-talked me or gave the video even more attention by posting it. Many of them sided with him and started following him on Twitter and promoting his video. They thought his irresponsible response was hysterical, and I was mortified. People who know firsthand just how painful it is to be hated on were attacking me from within my own circle.

  Fortunately, my core group of friends like Cat, Whitney, Meghan, and Kalel were there for me and stood by my side. With their support, I let the dust around this dumb Internet “scandal” settle and got back to vlogging as if nothing had happened. But it taught me that I needed to put my guard up more. I closed myself off from a lot of the YouTube community and stuck with the people I already knew and trusted. And now, whenever new people enter my life, I end up questioning what their motives are—whether they are the type of person who would turn on me in an instant if it meant furthering their own agenda. It sucks, but I have to face the fact that it goes with the territory since I have chosen to live so much of my life in public. There’s nothing I can do about it, so I’ve started to hone my skills at telling whether someone is being genuine with me. It’s a good skill to have anyway, but I just think it’s sad that it took thousands of strangers attack
ing me at once to realize it.

  How to Deal with Online Haters

  Here’s the thing about the Internet: for every cool new person you discover on it, there’s also a nasty troll ready to take you down. When Brittany and I got mean comments on our WinterSpringPro channel, they were pretty easy to ignore because the sweet messages far outweighed them.

  When I started my own Joey channel, cruel comments were a little harder to take because they were directed at me specifically, not a piece of creative work that had been a joint effort. But by that time, I’d already learned how to tune out the negativity by focusing on the positive. I think the reason the whole towing thing hit me so hard was that the source of the hate came from an actual person I could see in his video instead of a commenter hiding behind a fake user name. This wasn’t some faceless stranger, and his spark fueled nastiness in people I had considered friends.

  The way I dealt with it was to go offline and surround myself with people I knew loved me while I gathered up my emotional strength. During that time off, I had a lot of time to reflect, and what I realized is that life is short—way too short to let strangers knock me down for doing what I love. The best advice I can give is the advice everyone gives: ignore the assholes and don’t ever engage with them. But if you’re being attacked online and need a little extra emotional support, here are some other things to consider:

  1. Haters are just jealous.

  2. You are awesome for having the courage to put yourself out there in the world.

  3. If a hater is hiding behind a fake screen name, this person already knows that what he or she is doing is wrong.

  4. NO ONE is universally liked.

  5. I’ll always support you.

  Chapter 21

  Looking Forward

  I continued to work hard building my Joey channel, but career-wise I still felt like there was something absent from my life. I missed making movies. One day I was driving in my car and catching up with Nicole. She told me that she had randomly watched that old Nickelodeon show Are You Afraid of the Dark? on TV the night before and we were both laughing and trading nostalgic reactions. What a blast from the past!

  But the conversation got me thinking. I was really into the show Skins at the time, and I started to imagine a series that was a cross between it and Are You Afraid of the Dark? A more adult version.

  I started talking to Whitney about it, and dreamed up different characters and a plot that intertwined all of their arcs. She went off and wrote a sample script, and I loved it so much that I insisted she write all the episodes.

  “Shouldn’t you hire a real writer?” she asked.

  “You are a real writer,” I told her.

  I decided to call the series Storytellers. I didn’t want to half-ass this project, and I knew that in order to shoot it the way I envisioned, it would require some real money. So I began a Kickstarter campaign to try and raise $100,000. I was so excited when the drive ended because apparently we had gone beyond our goal by $40,000! How insane is that? But here’s the problem with crowdsourcing, and a tip for those creative entrepreneurs among you: not everyone who pledges money has the actual cash to back it up. In reality we only brought in around $80,000, so I tried again on another crowd-funding site, Indiegogo, to make up what I still needed. The second fund-raising effort was a success, and we ended up getting $10,000 extra to spend on the show.

  It was my first time producing and acting in an actual high-quality scripted short film, but because I’d been producing my own content for so long, it all came as second nature to me—except for balancing such a huge budget. I ended up having to front a lot of my own money from my savings, but it was worth it. I made it all back after we scheduled screenings in a six-city tour across America and every single one sold out within a week! We ended up adding in even more shows, and it was fun to sit in the back of the theaters and watch the audience react. I’m now trying to raise funds for a sequel, all in the hopes of continuing on the path to fulfilling my biggest dream: landing a lead role in a feature film.

  I think one of the coolest things about Storytellers is that I got to do it my way. I was able to get an entire show made without going through all of the usual yet difficult-to-navigate Hollywood routes. I maintained artistic control of my vision, which is something people rarely get to experience in this town. I feel that I’m part of a generation that’s changing the system of how we create. People are no longer slaves to the standard studio mode. If you want to make a movie or a series, there are tools out there to help you reach that goal. All you have to do is, well, do it!

  Since Storytellers, I’ve shot several short films that I’ve either starred in or produced. I feel that I’m getting back to my childhood roots: I’m getting to make up fun tales, but now I have the resources to bring them to life in ways that are even bigger and better than I would’ve ever imagined. Not even a decade ago, people coming to Los Angeles could get stuck in an endless grind of auditions and jobs to make the rent, with no real creative outlet to keep them fulfilled. The Internet—YouTube, in particular—has changed all that. If you want to create, there is no one to stop you but yourself.

  My Dream Acting Roles

  1. Finnick in The Hunger Games

  2. Thomas in The Maze Runner

  3. Zane from The Uglies (if the book series ever gets made into a movie)

  4. Any character on Lost

  5. Any student from the Slytherin house in the Harry Potter series

  How to Cry on Demand in a Movie

  The classic method is to get to an incredibly sad place in your head. But if you’re unable to quite go there (it can be tough with all those people and lights around!), then one thing that works for me is to start mimicking the physical act of crying. Distorting your face the way it does when you cry naturally can actually trigger your body into producing tears! It’s true, I swear.

  My Favorite Horror Movies

  Silent Hill. I discovered this movie while flipping through channels as a kid and I couldn’t look away. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s based on one of the scariest video game series of all time, and watching it was like being in a video game—you have no idea what is going to happen next.

  Insidious. The most terrifying movie about ghosts that I have ever seen. There are so many huge jump scares that still manage to make me scream every time I watch it.

  Signs. I saw this M. Night Shyamalan movie with my cousin when we were little. The aliens were creepy enough as blurry, fast-moving creatures, but when we hit Pause to get a good look at one, we both ended up screaming and running from the living room. We refused to go back in.

  Ginger Snaps. This is a really cool take on the werewolf genre. It’s more about the relationship between two sisters, and it puts a whole metaphysical spin on all the feelings that can arise when an older sibling starts menstruating and being sexually active before the other.

  The Blair Witch Project. I love the shaky-camera, found-footage aspect of this classic. Since it was all shot on video, it reminds me a lot of the style of my early movie-making attempts. It’s also scary as hell.

  Chapter 22

  Good Damn Bye!

  I guess that’s it. For now, at least. I hope you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into my life. If this were a vlog, here’s where I’d normally say, “Leave a comment down below,” or “Give this a thumbs-up if you liked it!” Neither of those things makes any sense in this case, but feel free to hold the book up and give it a literal thumbs up. Actually, if you tweet me a photo of yourself doing that, I’ll tweet back something nice!

  Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for continuing on this journey with me. It’s funny how something as tiny as a lead paint chip launched my life into the direction it took. But I think that’s always the case in life. Small things can lead to huge changes, and if those changes end up being obstacles, try to learn from them instead of letting them crush you. There were many times in my life when I thought my relationship with my mother was ov
er, but I know it never will be. No matter how big a wall I build against her, I will always love her, even if sometimes that feels impossible. Loving an alcoholic is one of the most painful things a person can go through, and if I’ve been able to reach just one person who is in a similar situation to help him or her feel less alone, then this book will have all been worth it.

  The same goes for closeted readers. I know that we are living in an era where it’s more accepted than ever before to be gay, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still people who feel ashamed or scared to act on those feelings. But it’s never too late to realize who you are. It’s amazing to finally be out of the closet, especially after experiencing so much pressure from online commenters to come out before I was ready to. I’m proud to be gay, but I’m even prouder that I was able to wait and reveal that part of myself on my own terms. Don’t ever feel pressured into doing anything you aren’t ready to do. It’s always okay to be different as long as you are staying true to yourself. You have the power and control to become whatever you want to be, no matter where you start out in life.

  I’m sure that by the time this book comes out, I’ll already have a million more stories to share, and that’s all because of you and the opportunities you’ve given me, dear viewers-turned-readers. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express just how much it means to me. I love you all, and just for old time’s sake, may the odds be ever in your favor.

  When I was in first grade, my mom took Nicole and me out of school early to get these professional shots taken. I remember feeling really naked and uncomfortable being shirtless under my overalls. But even then I knew I had to suck it up so the photographer could get his shot. (Hmm, I wonder if he’s in prison now.)

  Disney World! This was the first vacation Bob ever took our family on, back when I was in kindergarten. Nicole and I were so freaking happy to be there that she didn’t fight with me once.