An Honest Update on Talking to the Camera Every Day

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to start posting one video a day talking directly to the camera.

Not because I had a proper plan. Not because I thought I’d suddenly become a confident content creator overnight. And definitely not because I thought every video was going to do well.

Honestly? I started because talking to a camera made me uncomfortable.

I’ve spent years posting photos, writing blog posts, creating illustrations, editing reels, and hiding comfortably behind aesthetics, captions, and carefully chosen angles. But actually sitting there and speaking as myself felt completely different.

So I decided to challenge myself.

At first, it felt painfully awkward.

I overthought everything. My voice. My face. What my hands were doing. Whether I sounded boring. Whether people would think I was cringe. Every time I pressed record, I suddenly forgot how to speak like a normal human being.

And the weirdest part is that I can talk absolutely fine in real life. I can chat to strangers, answer phones at work, speak to parents at school, even survive job interviews… but point a front-facing camera at me and suddenly I become hyper aware of my existence.

The first few videos stayed firmly in what TikTok creators lovingly call “200 view jail”. Which, honestly, was probably good for me because it meant I could practise without too many people seeing the awkwardness in real time.

Then one random video unexpectedly took off.

Not one of my carefully thought out talking videos, obviously. It was a trend video using an AI filter. Typical.

But weirdly, it still gave me confidence. Not because of the numbers, but because it made me realise that social media growth is genuinely unpredictable. You can spend ages planning content and then something random ends up being the thing people connect with.

So I kept posting.

Some videos still stay in the low hundreds. Some do a bit better. Some completely flop. But I’ve noticed something changing that has absolutely nothing to do with views.

I’m becoming less scared of being perceived.

That sounds dramatic, but I think a lot of people — especially women, especially mums, especially people who have spent years behind the camera instead of in front of it — will understand exactly what I mean.

You become so used to shrinking yourself. Editing yourself. Waiting until you look better, feel more confident, lose weight, have a cleaner house, wear nicer clothes, have better lighting, know exactly what your niche is…

And then suddenly years pass and you realise you’ve spent most of your life trying not to take up too much space.

Talking to the camera every day has forced me to stop hiding quite so much.

Not perfectly. I still cringe watching some of my videos back. I still nearly delete half of them before posting. I still ramble. I still restart sentences halfway through because I’ve forgotten what I was saying.

But I posted my first outdoor talking video recently while walking around the park playing Pokémon Go, and although I felt ridiculously awkward filming it, I still did it anyway.

That’s probably the biggest thing I’m learning from this whole experiment:

confidence doesn’t appear first.

You do the scary thing first, and confidence slowly catches up afterwards.

I don’t know whether I’ll continue this for 20 days, 28 days, 100 days, or longer. Originally, it was just supposed to help me feel less awkward talking online.

But somewhere along the way, it’s also become a reminder that I’m allowed to exist loudly and visibly without apologising for it.

Even if I do still feel a bit cringe sometimes.