One of the best aspects about YouTube is the immediate connectedness you establish with your fan base. Your YouTube videos are there for them when the sun shines or the rain falls, and the tradeoff is that your fans are also there for you.
Meghan Tonjes could use some cheering up. Posting across her social media that she got disowned by her father on Father’s Day, Meghan has been keeping a stiff upper lip and making jokes. But this has to be one of the emotionally hardest moments to deal with in a life.
I can’t even pretend to imagine what it must be like. But therein lies the real beauty of YouTube for an outsider: thousands of voices give perspective on a whole world of emotions, realities, hardships and amazing moments that we can’t possibly experience personally.
I’ll never personally know many things — like how hard it is to be black in our white-dominated culture. But with YouTube, I’ve experienced babies being born, I’ve seen young people waste away into death, I’ve seen graduation celebrations, racial beatings, murderers attempt to explain their actions, birthdays, music, life, love, heartbreak and hamsters eating tiny tacos.
In a sense, YouTube allows us to become emotional tourists, for better or worse — that’s the power of the Information Age. And as far as stops on the tour go, Meghan’s current situation is emotionally overwhelming.
Posting a series of comments from her father, Meghan makes it clear both in her YouTube video and on Twitter that she wouldn’t let trolls talk to her like that, and the same goes for family.
Hopefully the situation resolves itself in the best way that it can. If that means she never talks to her father again, so be it. She’s got a great family in the form of her YouTube fans. And, of course, NMR sends our love.
Meghan plans on releasing a podcast about the issue at some point today. Knowing Tonjes and her often frank assessments of reality, it’s going to be educational.
