I’m going to show you how to start that thing you’ve been wanting to do for a while and have just been too scared or anxious or overwhelmed to just do it.

Starting something new sounds simple. You take one step, then another, and presto, you’ve begun. But if it were so easy, how come I’ve spent the past five years trying to start a YouTube channel and never uploaded a single video?

I used to believe I just wasn’t motivated enough, or organized enough, or brave enough. I thought I wasn’t cut out for it, that successful YouTubers had this certain je ne sais quoi that I was just simply missing.

It wasn’t until recently when I was bingeing “just start because it’s worth it” videos (like this one) that I realized what the problem was. Turns out I was carrying something that was making it impossible to take that first step, or any step for that matter.

I was being weighed down with…wait for it…

BAGGAGE.

And I’m sure there’s a better, more preferred term for it now, but I’m keeping baggage because it’s an easy, if somewhat overused, metaphor to work with.

So anyway, I dug into my feels a little bit, sussed out what was going on, and I unearthed five types of baggage I was carrying. And as I looked at all of them, I realized they were the same five things that kept me from trying anything new, even outside of starting a YouTube channel, whether it was learning how to speak Spanish or paint or joining a book club. These five types of baggage weighed me down in all areas of my life.

I mean, they still do. They didn’t just disappear overnight. But I’m actively working on making them lighter now, and that has made all the difference.

Let’s compare ourselves to everyone ever

So the first type of baggage is Systemic Comparison. Sounds a little intimidatingly official, but it’s basically scarcity mindset mixed with grief. Let me explain a little background.

I was watching one of the previously mentioned Just Start It’ll Be Great videos the other day, and I found myself just getting really annoyed with the YouTuber talking about his journey, and how anxiety and overthinking had held him back, but he did scary things anyway and it was hard but it all turned out great. His video was pretty predictable. And it annoyed me. I could tell he was at least a generation younger than me, given his story timeline. So he was young, vaguely attractive, had an accent, and a calm demeanor. And I had this awful soundtrack in my head that told me that was why people watched him, people like looking at and listening to him. Starting a YouTube channel would’ve been way easier for him than it would be for me. He had it easy, and he had nothing to complain about, no reason he should have been held back by anxiety and overthinking in the beginning. And this soundtrack just kept going on and on, until I was able to see it was made entirely of envy. I was comparing every piece of myself to this guy, my age, my looks, my gender, even my mental quirks, hence the need for a term like systemic comparison. We’re used to seeing the word systemic paired with the word racism, meaning racism that affects a whole system, not just a part.

This comparison in my head that was me vs him was at a level where the whole system that is me was infected by it. And I realized this was what I had been doing every time I watched a video like this, or even just saw someone doing something I wanted to do. I was getting envious of them. And when I was talking this over with a friend later, I had this epiphany about it, about this envy that I had felt so strongly. And I realized it was actually grief, that envy is just one of the many faces of grief. Envy is a framework for the nervous system to express grief. Grief over what I wasn’t allowed to have, what I’ve lost, what I had to give up. When someone else has those things, what I really feel is grief. And I’ve spent my entire life calling that type of grief “envy.” And when I call it an ugly word like that, it becomes harder to heal, harder to look at and deal with. Envy has this social context that makes it sound evil and greedy. Whereas grief sounds like a more bougie affliction, classier, an earned condition that everyone respects.

So once I had this clarity, that envy is a wound of loss and deserves healing (just like every other pain), I was able to actually start working on this comparison mindset, replacing it with better soundtracks, being more aware of where my bitterness was coming from. Which, side tip, if you find yourself not liking someone and being super judgy and mean about them, ask yourself what rule you think they’re breaking and have a deep think about it. I might expand on this topic at later date because it’s so important.

It happened once upon a time…or like, a million times

On to the second type of baggage: historical baggage. In a nutshell, this one is all about trauma.

If you’ve had long stretches of instability, fear, illness, chaos, or constant adaptation, your nervous system doesn’t automatically interpret “starting something new” as exciting. It interprets it as uncertain. And uncertainty can feel unsafe.

When you’ve been wired for survival, you get really good at coping. Overthinking. Avoiding. Hyper-planning. Staying small. Reading the room. Preparing for worst-case scenarios. These aren’t random flaws. They’re strategies that worked.

The problem is, the same strategies that kept you safe can make it harder to begin.

Starting asks for visibility. For change. For risk. And if your body associates change with danger, it makes sense that you hesitate.

And yes, this kind of baggage deserves real support. Therapy is a word that gets thrown around a lot like it’s a cure-all, a cop out that says “well, if you just talked to someone about it, it wouldn’t bother you anymore.” And it makes me sad that that’s the way a lot of people see it. There are tons of ways to do therapy that don’t always have to involve talking to a random stranger about your issues. I will also be expanding on that topic at a later date!

But you don’t have to finish healing your entire history before you start something new. I’ve been in therapy now for two years, and it’s not the first time I’ve been in therapy, and I honestly don’t think I’ll ever be out of therapy. It’s just a part of my life, and it’s come to mean healing my thoughts, not talking about my problems. And even if I didn’t have the massive shitpile of trauma in my background, I’d probably still be in therapy anyway.

It wasn’t until recently when I was bingeing “just start because it’s worth it” videos that I realized what the problem was. Turns out I was carrying something that was making it impossible to take that first step, or any step for that matter. So anyway, I dug into my feels a little bit, sussed out what was going on, and I unearthed five types of baggage I was carrying. And as I looked at all of them, I realized they were the same five things that kept me from trying anything new, even outside of starting a YouTube channel, whether it was learning how to speak Spanish or paint or joining a book club. These five types of baggage weighed me down in all areas of my life.

Point is, I’ve learned the hard way already that not working on my head means I go nowhere. So brain healing it is.

Which, conveniently, makes this baggage type get lighter.

With that in mind, you can scale your start to match your nervous system. Not a leap. A step. Not a launch. An experiment.

You don’t need to be fully healed to begin. You just need a beginning that doesn’t feel so much like a threat.

The rules you don’t know you know

Alright, so the next baggage type: the Social Rulebook.

These are the limitations we place on ourselves because we’ve absorbed these invisible rules about who gets to do what, and when. It’s where that feeling of being “behind in life” comes from, among other things.

When I tried to start a YouTube channel all those times before, I kept running into these walls:

I’m too old. I’m too ugly. I’m too fat. I’m too dumb. I’m too single.

And I’ve known for a long time that those soundtracks were in my head. I’ve tried affirmations. I’ve tried convincing myself I’m beautiful and worthy. I’ve journaled about the people and experiences that warped my perception. I’ve done thought work. I’ve unpacked it.

But what actually shifted things wasn’t arguing with the voices. It was questioning the structure behind them.

A lot of frameworks in our society are built on binaries. Young or old. Beautiful or ugly. Successful or unsuccessful. Relevant or irrelevant. These categories feel solid because we repeat them constantly. But they’re not laws. They’re labels. They were created to organize a messy world into something that feels controllable.

And when you use those standardized labels to determine self-worth, you delete nuance. You erase the charcoal and ash and fog and metal — all the gray space that real people actually live in.

Even when we say “everything is a spectrum,” we’re still imagining two fixed ends, a binary. But real people don’t sit neatly on ends or in neat categories. We move. We contradict ourselves. We evolve.

The crazy thing is, most of these rules only feel real because they’re loud.

If the rule is “young creators succeed,” and you don’t feel young, you disqualify yourself. If the rule is “attractive people grow faster,” and you don’t see yourself that way, you shrink before you even begin. If the rule is “people like you don’t do this,” you don’t test whether that’s true.

And the more I examined it, the clearer it became: I was living inside a framework I never consciously agreed to.

These weren’t universal truths. They were absorbed assumptions.

And here’s the shift.

Instead of trying to destroy the rulebook, I started questioning it.

Who wrote this rule? Who benefits if I believe it? Would I apply this rule to someone I love? Is this actually a law…or just a loud opinion?

Most of the time, it’s the second one.

And when you realize that, the rulebook doesn’t disappear. But it loses authority.

You don’t have to wait until you qualify according to someone else’s criteria.

You’re allowed to start however you are.

Who you are is not something you perform

The fourth type of baggage is identity baggage.

This one is about what starting means about you.

Because starting anything — a YouTube channel, a new language, a fitness routine, a business, a hobby — can feel like submitting yourself for evaluation.

If I try and I’m not good at it… what does that say about me?

Suddenly the project isn’t just a project. It’s a test.

Views feel like scores. Feedback feels like judgment. Silence feels like failure.

And if somewhere along the way you learned that love, safety, or belonging were conditional, then trying something new doesn’t just feel risky. It feels like you’re putting your identity on the line.

For a long time, I tied my self-worth to whether I passed or failed something. If I wasn’t good at it, that must mean I was bad at it. Not inexperienced. Not learning. Just bad.

That’s a brutal equation.

Because then starting becomes dangerous. If I try and I’m not immediately competent, what does that say about who I am?

But here’s what I’ve slowly been practicing instead.

Self-worth isn’t the result of performance. It’s not something you unlock after enough proof. It exists because you exist. If you did not exist, you would not have worth. Simple as that.

Except not really. It’s a nice, fancy thought that I might someday believe, but it’s very hard to embody as I currently am.

Until then, instead of jumping right into believing I’m inherently worthy, maybe I can take the middle path.

Maybe my worth isn’t in how well I do something.

Maybe it’s in the fact that I try.

Maybe it’s in the intention. In the willingness. In the repetition.

And here’s the other piece: nervous systems don’t believe affirmations. They believe evidence.

If my body has learned that trying equals danger, it’s not going to calm down because I tell it I’m safe. It calms down when I show it, over and over again, that I can take small risks and survive them.

That’s what consistency really is.

Not proving something to the world.

Proving something to yourself.

Each small action becomes data. Each rep becomes proof. “I did this, and I was okay.”

And when starting becomes practice instead of performance, it stops being a referendum on who you are.

It becomes a skill you’re building.

And building doesn’t ask whether you’re good or bad. It asks whether you showed up.

Words hurt worse than sticks and stones

The last type of baggage is linguistic baggage.

And this one lies beneath all the others.

It’s not trauma. It’s not comparison. It’s not even the grading system directly.

It’s the words.

And it’s not just about whether you talk to yourself kindly, or talk gently or mean.

It’s about the actual vocabulary you use.

Because language doesn’t just describe your experience. It organizes it. It creates categories. It assigns value. It tells a story.

You’ve probably heard the advice: “Just start messy.”

And on the surface, that sounds freeing. It sounds rebellious. It sounds like permission.

But even that phrase assumes someone else started clean.

“Messy” only exists relative to “polished.”

It’s still part of a ranking system.

And once you notice that, you start seeing how often we sneak grading into our language without meaning to.

We say:

“This probably won’t be very good.” “I’m bad at this.” “I’m not an expert.” “Don’t judge me.”

These are self-deprecating disclaimers meant to protect self-worth. They’re attempts to lower expectations before anyone else can.

But they also frame the experience before it even begins.

Earlier in this video, I talked about how calling grief “envy” made it harder for me to look at. The word envy carried moral judgment. It made the feeling feel ugly. Greedy. Shameful.

When I renamed it as grief, something shifted. The emotion didn’t change. The label did. And that changed how I related to it.

The same thing happens when we label ourselves.

If I say I’m bad at something, that lands very differently in my body than if I say I’m a beginner.

Bad sounds like identity. Beginner sounds like position.

Bad feels fixed. Beginner implies movement.

Messy sounds careless. First sounds chronological.

See how different that feels?

It’s not about being kinder to yourself in a fluffy way.

It’s about precision.

Because your nervous system reacts to categories.

If you call something a failure, your body braces. If you call it data, your body relaxes.

If you call yourself incapable, your brain stops scanning for solutions. If you call yourself learning, your brain stays open.

Vocabulary shapes perception. Perception shapes behavior.

And when we’re starting something new, especially with all the other baggage we’ve talked about, the last thing we need is language that reinforces the old grading system.

So instead of saying:

“This is my messy start.”

What if it’s just:

“This is my first one.”

No ranking. No comparison. No apology.

Just accurate.

And linguistic accuracy is a powerful thing.

Takeaways

So what do we do with all of this?

First: you don’t start empty.

If you’ve been struggling to begin something, it’s probably not because you’re lazy or incapable. It might be because you’re carrying some baggage.

Second: you don’t have to drop the baggage to move.

You can question comparison without eliminating envy. You can start small without erasing your trauma. You can challenge social rules without dismantling society. You can separate your worth from your performance without fully believing it yet. You can adjust your language without becoming a positivity robot.

Awareness lightens weight.

Third: starting is not a personality trait. It’s a behavior.

It’s not something you either “have” or “don’t have.” It’s something you practice.

And practice is not a verdict.

Fourth: movement creates evidence.

Not evidence for the world. Evidence for your nervous system.

Each small action teaches your body that starting does not equal catastrophe.

And that changes everything.

And before we close, I want to say something directly to you.

You are allowed to start before you feel ready.

You are allowed to begin even if your story is complicated.

You are not behind.

You are not wrong.

You are not required to erase your past before you move forward.

You are not too late.

You are not too much.

You are allowed to learn in public.

You are allowed to be a beginner.

You are allowed to take small steps that don’t look impressive.

You are allowed to change your mind.

You are allowed to try something and decide it’s not for you.

You are allowed to build slowly.

You are allowed to protect your nervous system while still moving.

You are allowed to start without apology.

And if you’ve tied your worth to performance for a long time, I want you to hear this:

Your worth does not increase when you succeed.

Your worth does not decrease when you struggle.

And your worth is not something you have to perform.

It exists because you exist.

And even if that feels impossible to believe right now, you can borrow this belief until your nervous system catches up.

You do not need to qualify to begin.

You just need to take that first step.

So what are you waiting for? Go! Do!