YouTube was my hideaway from the world, a simulacrum of what actually existed, except that I had some kind of control over what I saw and did. Obviously I loved it, and I watched it all the time, not realizing that I was letting an algorithm throw content at the back of my screen and observed what I let stick. From whatever dumb searches I banged into the search bar, I got some pretty varied results: Roller Coaster Tycoon gameplay, phone reviews, city highway tours, a bunch of college-aged guys putting non-food items in a microwave, a now-cancelled sketch comedian, and pretty much anything else that seemed non-threatening to my eyes.
Thanks to my love of Frasier, YouTube had learned I liked sitcoms. Thanks to some other search factors, it also knew I loved foreign shit. So, it recommended me Top Gear, the BBC’s now-somewhat-disgraced car show that had a pretty dodgy grip on its chosen subject. Regardless, I loved it, and watched as much content as I could. Since that stuck, it started giving me other British TV; some actual sitcoms, probably some cooking shows, and The Graham Norton Show. Why those two things are related, I’ll never know, but I guess I might have outed myself to the algorithm when I searched for Lady Gaga’s VMA 2009 performance about 15 times in one day.
Either way, those two shows got me through the latter part of eighth grade, and were definitely reassuring, to me, as a source of content that wouldn’t soon dry up. So I watched in silence, and occasionally traipsed off to discover other things, but I never actively sought that stuff out. It just kinda happened.
Against that backdrop, ninth grade started. Having dropped the violin, I signed up for a keyboard class to knock out a high school fine arts credit, and it was the very first class I attended at good old Burges High. Before the end of the first week, I’d dropped out of it. But it wasn’t anything tragic. Rather, it was the first in a string of wonderful coincidences.
Burges ran on an eight-period day, and my last class of the day for my first semester was English, where my teacher, after introducing herself and asking a bit about each of us, told us that the journalism department was looking for students. They created the newspaper and yearbook for the school, and anyone who had experience writing was welcome to join their class. This is the first moment in my entire life as the second Nicholas where the younger Nicholas took over for something positive.
I had no real reason to wait until the bell rang outside the hallway on the second floor of the main building, and wait for a line of students to shuffle out of Room 203 past the lockers and down the stairs. I had no real reason to walk into the classroom that was full of computers, desks, and students buzzing about, all seemingly older and very busy. I had no real reason to pipe up my little voice and ask for someone named Ms. Monroe, and if I could talk to her.
I had no real reason to do any of those things as the second Nicholas. I didn’t love writing like the first Nicholas did, I had no place in that space. I was freaking out a little every second I was standing there like an oaf, but I stood firm; Nicholas stood firm for me. And he said to Ms. Monroe that I wanted to join the staff. No specific staff, I guess it didn’t matter, just one of them. I just wanted to write.
The next day, I brought an accordion folder full of writing samples I’d accumulated from before seventh grade. It included the poetry book, some school essays, and a fake magazine article I’d just happened to write when I was 11 about that year’s college football season, where seemingly every successful team was thwarted by an underdog competitor. There wasn’t any real reason for me to even write that, but I was so proud, I kept it in an essay folder, and stashed it with the rest of my things for safekeeping in the shelves of my bedroom closet. It came in handy now, as Ms. Monroe broke protocol for me, and let me join the staff of the newspaper without even completing her journalism class.
And just like that, I was a writer again. I’d flourish, learning other skills like graphic design, page layout, interviewing, and copyediting. I’d win awards at various levels, up to and including national-level awards. I’d eventually win scholarships on the back of the strength of my essays, and I’d eventually torpedo one of those aforementioned scholarships to pursue a design degree instead, setting me on a path that’d end up in Dallas, somehow. All of that was going to be amazing, and it would finally give me some kind of purpose. But the true gift it gave me was the gift to start down the hard path of bringing myself back to little Nicholas, all alone down there in the black hole, catatonic and laying in wait for something that might not ever come.
That act of courage from a teacher who didn’t even know me let me take the first step on an unknown journey that might not ever have an end. I could never be grateful enough for that chance to prove myself to her, because it let me prove to myself that I wasn’t so lost after all.
—
Now that I was writing, my performance as Nicholas got so much better. Journalistic writing was a perfect fit for me, I soon found out, since I just had to report on facts. I didn’t have to torment myself with the jealousy of little Nicholas’ now-lost imagination, nor did I have to tame his manic world-building or flimsy character studies. I just had to come onto the page, say what needed to be said, and wrap it up. It was perfect! Everyone in my life saw this as a turning point - myself included - but there was another point that was going to turn things around again. This time, I could keep it just for myself.
While working on homework or writing pieces, I would generally have a YouTube window open on my laptop, so that I could mitigate as much of my untreated ADHD as possible. Generally, it was just Top Gear or Graham Norton replays, occasionally Frasier or something else, but I tried to keep myself on longer videos while doing things, so that I didn’t have to change the video all that often. As a result, the algorithm started throwing more of that at me, and kept doing so throughout the school year.
Towards the end of the school year, in June 2010, I’d been spending my weekend writing final essays and generally sticking to myself, as I always did. Performing grew tiresome, and I needed my alone time to recharge and shut the screens off for a while. That evening, I’d found out that Top Gear did a special episode where they travelled to Germany and gotten up to some of their usual antics: probably a track race with motorized dinghies or something. Regardless, I wanted to watch it, and so I typed in “Top Gear Germany” into YouTube’s search bar, and boom, results. Skipping over the first two links to ads, the video I wanted to click on was three results down, but my finger slipped and clicked on the second one.
I didn’t realize this, so I went back to looking at the other window I had open while the video buffered. Then, I heard something I didn’t expect, something other than the little jingle of the BBC ident. I looked back, and saw the words “Share the moment” spelled out in little pink and gold spheres against a black background. And then, a pop song started.
The video for “Satellite” by Lena Meyer-Landrut is pretty unassuming; the then-19 year old singer is just boppin around a TV set that’s been styled/edited to look vaguely like a space station, even though the song itself is space-related in titular metaphor only. It’s not something that would generally capture anyone’s attention, much less the attention of some random 14 year old from far west Texas who didn’t even want to end up on that video. But maybe it was the liminal quality of it all, maybe the song just got stuck in my head, maybe I just liked having something unexpected happen, but regardless, it hooked me.
That was the turn. Because only a week before a few pixels shifted and linked me to the “Satellite” video, it won the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest, and so YouTube’s algorithm was locked and loaded to keep me in orbit all the way around, from that moment on through to today.
Germany’s winning song was the first I heard, but I quickly found out that there were other countries with different songs. The evening quickly took on a more active atmosphere, as I started trawling through the different music on offer, all of it completely unknown to me before that night. And that was important, because my taste in music at the time was one predicated on what just happened to cross my path. I ended up seeing an Owl City song used in a video I was watching, so that’s how I ended up with two of his albums. One time, I heard “Viva la Vida” on the radio, so then I was a Coldplay fan.
Eurovision fell into my life according to the same pattern, but this time, it was only me who was exposed to it. It wasn’t being broadcast on the radio, or being used as background noise, or even had a chance of being that to anyone at the time in the US, it felt like it was my own little magic discovery. Something about that quality pulled it close to little Nicholas; it also helped it was foreign, since he loved learning about different countries, and would read atlases for fun. And so, my fate was sealed. Then I listened to the Danish entry from Eurovision 2010.
See, I wasn’t familiar with musical terminology or genres, beyond the most broad terms, so ABBA’s brand of Swedish pop music was completely out of grasp of my mind at the time. Consequently, so was Chanée & n’evergreen’s (that’s their formatting, not mine) “In a Moment Like This.” It opened with melodrama and just kept the tap open for the next three minutes, culminating in shots of glitter in the background while the two singers triumphantly held up their fists, having just performed well enough to finish fifth out of 25.
As an American kid growing up in the late-00s, the only performer who was doing theatrical performances who I knew of was Gaga, and I already alluded to how obsessed I was with her finest achievement of that era. This… obviously wasn’t as good as that, but it scratched the same itch. It brought out the same feelings of joy and glitter and performance and weirdness and devil may care attitude that the Gaga performance did, but it felt more correct, somehow. In time, I’d realize how central those feelings were to the queer experience, especially in terms of music and theater, but I couldn’t verbalize that yet. Nor did I need to. I just needed to enjoy it.
And that was only one of the other 37 songs that competed in that year’s contest. Twelve years on, I’m still a Eurovision fan. It’s probably the thing in my life that’s defined me more than anything else for more time than anything else. I’m happy about that. Growing up, I was possessive to an insane degree because I didn’t want anyone to threaten my love of the contest. I was scared that it was a “gay thing,” I was confused that people didn’t like it, I just wanted to be alone with it. Obviously, that was impossible, and it took time, but I found pride in it.
I’m inclined to call that attachment I experienced child-like, and to say that I grew out of it. But I didn’t, I grew down. I grew back down to meet Little Nicholas, to connect the pride in the queerness he knew he had to the visual language of Eurovision. I grew down to meet him where the music he liked met the music I liked. I grew down to take him to Europe in 2015 to see the grand final live, in person, and he got to ride on a train by himself for the first time.
If Ms. Monroe’s chance gave me a purpose for others, Eurovision’s chance encounter with my life gave me a purpose for Little Nicholas. And that’s all I would need.