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SEEDS vs GlitterWhat’s the difference between something that shines and something that grows?In this deeply personal episode, I reflect on two defining professional moments:• The day my YouTube channel hit one million subscribers• And a quiet opportunity today that may change my life — slowly, softly, and without spectacleThis is a story about virality, algorithms, golden play buttons, glitter, burnout, and the long game of meaningful work.It’s about the difference between chasing attention and planting seeds.After building an audience in the fast-moving world of trending media, I’m asking a different question now:What does it mean to create something that actually lasts?If you’ve ever wondered whether numbers equal value — or felt the high of public success followed by a strange internal emptiness — this episode is for you.We talk about:• The psychology of viral growth• What really happens when you hit a million subscribers• The hidden cost of algorithm-driven content• Burnout in the creator economy• Why slow storytelling might be the antidote to internet fameGlitter sparkles.Seeds grow.Which one are you building?Written and recorded by Rebecca Felgate in Calgary, Alberta This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

Episode Title:Babezilla & Canada’s Tallest Man: A Tale of Two GiantsIn this week’s episode of Unsubscribe, Rebecca shares two surreal behind-the-scenes stories from her time working inside the world of viral YouTube content creation: stories that reveal how the internet distorts scale, identity, and even humanity itself.In Tale One, she becomes “Babezilla,” the accidental muse of a fan who digitally magnified her 5’2 frame into towering giant-girl fantasy art. In Tale Two, she meets Jerry Sokoloski, Canada’s Tallest Man, whose record-breaking height and hands become fodder for a trending clickbait video that racks up nearly a million views.This episode explores:The psychology of viral mediaInternet fame and identity distortionClickbait culture and trending algorithmsParasocial relationships and fan dynamicsThe commodification of the human body onlineLife inside a YouTube content machineThe strange comedy of early influencer cultureWhen everything is compressed into a thumbnail, what happens to scale? And more importantly...what happens to us?This is Unsubscribe: Notes from inside the machine, and the true cost of internet “fame.”Written and recorded by Rebecca Felgate in Calgary, Alberta. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

Six months after moving from London to Toronto and joining a rapidly growing YouTube channel, my life had transformed at electric speed. Journalism gave way to trending listicles, and subscriber counts climbed toward one million.And then I Googled my name.What I found wasn’t interest in my reporting, my writing, or my voice. Instead, I discovered an entire corner of the internet dedicated to rating, cataloguing, and obsessing over my feet. Yes, my feer. In this episode of Unsubscribe, I explore what early YouTube fame does to your sense of self, how online fetish culture intersects with digital celebrity, and what happens when your body becomes searchable content.This is a story about:Moving countries in pursuit of opportunityWorking inside the early attention economyThe psychological impact of going viralDiscovering Wikifeet and the commodification of women’s bodies onlineLosing control of your narrative, and fighting to reclaim itIn response to the algorithm’s gaze, I created Foot Opera In Space: a surreal, homemade video in which my feet became green-painted alien protagonists in a low-budget cosmic opera. It was absurd. It was unhinged. It was resistance.This essay and podcast episode examines internet fame, identity drift, parasocial culture, fetish communities, and creative rebellion in the age of searchable selves.Because sometimes reclaiming your voice means painting your toes neon green and staging a one-woman space opera.To be continued.Scripted and recorded by Rebecca Felgate in Calgary Alberta This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

Trigger warning: this chapter contains graphic hate speech.The Comments SectionI reflect on my years working on YouTube at the height of the platform’s most chaotic era, when anonymity, scale, and engagement collided to create a culture where cruelty was not only normalized, but rewarded. What began as a tool for community quickly became something darker: a digital space where distance eroded empathy, accountability dissolved, and harm could be delivered without consequence.We explore the psychological roots of bullying, why fear and group dynamics have always driven people to “other” one another, and how the internet amplified ancient human behaviors by removing friction, limits, and endpoints. From mobs and masks to modern moderation, this episode looks at why removing individuals or filtering words doesn’t solve systemic problems. This is a chapter about visibility, vulnerability, and what happens when connection is mediated through distance Topics Covered"The psychology of online bullyingAnonymity and accountability on the internetThe history of mobs, masks, and collective crueltyWhy comment sections feel different from face-to-face interactionEngagement culture and the monetization of outrageInternet moderation, censorship, and unintended consequencesGrowing up online vs logging offWhy cruelty thrives at scaleListener NoteThis episode is part of an ongoing series examining internet culture, attention, and what it means to live inside always-on systems. Later episodes will explore engagement incentives, algorithms, and why opting out isn’t as simple as it sounds.Written and recorded by Rebecca Felgate in Calgary Alberta This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

Baby’s First MillionUnsubscribe Episode 4Episode Description / Show NotesWhat does it actually feel like to go viral?In this episode, I unpack the moment everything changed: the first million views. The dopamine hit. The disbelief. The sudden, disorienting sense of scale. And the uncomfortable truth that the internet doesn’t reward depth — it rewards repetition, recognisability, and low cognitive load.I reflect on my first truly viral video, why it worked (despite being objectively bad), and how chasing numbers quietly reshaped my sense of worth, curiosity, and ambition. We talk about the seduction of instant fame, the flattening of thought in the attention economy, and why virality has no finish line — only an ever-steepening climb.This episode isn’t about blaming algorithms or audiences. It’s about what happens inside a person when a number becomes a benchmark for meaning — and why your “first million” might be the beginning of the chase, not the end of it.Because baby, there is no “there.”There is only your first million — and a life spent chasing infinity.Topics Covered:What virality actually feels like in the bodyThe psychological impact of your “first million”Why basic content so often goes viralHow numbers quietly recalibrate self-worthThe difference between visibility and valueWhy the internet has no endpoint — only momentumListener NoteThis episode is part of an ongoing exploration of internet culture, attention, and opting out. Future episodes will dig deeper into algorithms, incentives, and what it means to create without being consumed by the machine.Written and recorded by Rebecce Felgate. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

Episode 3 of the Unsubscribe Podcast.An unwitting social media star reflects on her journalism training in London, and wonders how it led her to creating YouTube videos with explicit thumbnails. Read by the author, Rebecca Felgate. Recorded in Calgary, Alberta. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

In 2015, I bought a one-way ticket to Toronto, Canada. All I had with me was 23lbs of luggage. That’s the short list, anyway. The long list actually goes: * 23lbs of luggage* A boyfriend* An arts degree* A post-graduate diploma in Journalismand, most notably* a slew of HOPES & DREAMSThe biggest of which would have gone something along the lines of: “make Toronto my bitch”.T O R O N T O. Fuck. What excitement. What jet fuel. Let me tell you what it is like to be 26 and disembarking a plane to start a new life in a new country: it feels like power. Pure, magnetic wildfire. What, pray tell, do you really have to lose when you’re in your mid-20s and jazzed up on adventure? I’d quit my writing job in London, England, after saving up enough to keep me in beer and poutine for at least 6 months. I was ready to make bold moves. When I saw the job listing for a YouTube host, I was living in the energy of “why the fuck not!?” I have a lot of answers to that question now, not that I would have wanted to hear any of them at 26 and on a rampage for LIFE.I had never considered YouTube as a career move before. I knew of big-time creators like Zoella and Pewdiepie, but I had never indulged the notion that it might be possible to work for what was being advertised as a “channel”. I didn’t even really know what a YouTube “channel” could be but, a week after sending out my resume and a crudely captured headshot, I was invited to find out.I found myself clad in my favourite outfit (a bold geometric skirt-suit still hanging in my closet today), standing in the foyer of a slightly run-down film studio in an industrial part of the city, an audition time slot fast approaching. Bright red hair, bright red lips, and just a few weeks out from first touching the tarmac at Toronto Pearson Airport. It was all moving so fast. I felt like Crash Bandicoot with a speed boost. I wouldn’t be stopped. I couldn’t be. This was it.“So, you’re an actor, then?” a man dressed head-to-toe in black, and wearing sunglasses indoors, asked me.“Actually, I’m more of a journalist…a storyteller.”He said nothing. He just kind of stared at me. Or at least I presume that’s what was happening behind the mystery of his dark lenses.It’s funny the moments you remember years later. It seemed innocuous at the time, but this micro-exchange could have told me all I needed to know: this was probably not the place for me, or my love of deeply researched stories. But, again, 26, new city, new country, and a deep thirst for experience. Such were the early ingredients of this maelstrom.I’d be remiss not to report that I crushed my audition. Graciously, I received the assignment to script a “trending” video about Kylie Jenner’s “butt pads”, then present it to camera. Straight-faced. Lol, kay.It turned out “The Channel” was an umbrella term for a fast-growing network of YouTube platforms uploading pop-culture-driven infotainment pieces. It also turned out that, actually, I am an actress, because I was really good at pretending to care. I certainly wanted to care. I’d never call anything about my life in London hum-drum because it certainly wasn’t, but the thought of working at a film studio in Toronto, Canada, creating videos for an audience, and getting paid for it certainly seemed different. Appealing. Creative. New. Modern. Cool. Techy, in a lowkey kind of a sexy Indie way. I was trying on new identities, and this one seemed fascinating. It felt like I was living at the cutting edge of 2015.Suffice to say, I got the job. I actually squealed in my kitchen when I was told I was to be paid $14 an hour for a part-time role as a new face of one of Canada’s fastest-growing YouTube channels. YEAHBITCH. TAKE THAT: CITY!I arrived on my first day, fresh-faced, bright-eyed, sporting a new co-ord set (of the midnight blue varietal), and ready to host my very first video. Hello WORLD, it’s me, Rebecca, and gosh darn it, I have arrived!Kay, we need to take a moment of pause from the narrative as I introduce the cultural concept of Timbits. If you’re Canadian, or live in Canada, you will of course be au fait with the micro donut dots of assorted flavours, ranging from highly palatable big hitters such as honey cruller, sour cream glazed, and chocolate, taking a turn through bites that sound good but are actually super mid, like strawberry-filled and birthday cake, then arriving at the bottom of the barrel into the joyless pits of flavourless confection hell; the void that is old fashioned plain. Each to their own, of course, but I’ve yet to find a trustworthy face who enjoys raw-dogging a bland hunk of bread masquerading as a pastry.Timbits can be found lit up behind perspex, much like precious jewels in a shop window, inside the cultural institution that is Tim Hortons. Tim Hortons was established in the 1960s by THE TIM HORTON, whomst, in Canadian lore, has been firmly assigned national treasure status. I am not from here, so I take everyone’s word for it. Tim Hortons is less a coffee chain than it is the observable soft civic infrastructure of Canada itself, beloved by all, regardless of how discerning one’s palate. Circumnavigating the age of the curiously hot hipster barista and the $10 macchiato, “Tim’s” (or “Timmo’s” as I call it, much to the chagrin of my adopted countrymen), is the nation’s go-to spot for a warm cozy cup of Cannuck nostalgia, masquerading as kind-of-actively-bad-but-curiously-also-delicious coffee. If one is looking to fully culturally assimilate upon landing in Canada, the go-to order at a Tim’s counter is a “Double Double” (two creams, two sugars, thanks bud). And then there’s the Timbits, which are indeed singularly purchasable, but most people opt to take them away by the metric fuck-ton (boxes of 20, 40, or 50).‘Twas Timmo’s I turned to by way of a suitable friendship bribe on Day One at The Channel, swinging by a branch to pick up a modest 20 box, hoping it would win me favour at the film studio. In actuality, I walked into a dusty room with a grey, stained carpet, arranged with around ten computers, humans feverishly glued to screens they barely looked up from as I made my grand entrance. Okay, so not quite the Silicon Valley-esque backdrop I had imagined, but whatever. This didn’t quell my enthusiasm as I sat down at my designated spot, ready to script the shit out of my first segment:“BRITAIN’S SEXIEST GHOST IS HAUNTING PEOPLE”.Okie dokie. Right on. Put me to work. I slugged back my coffee and snapped to it.The way it worked for (I use this term lightly) “news” stories was that we were given a link or two of “source material”. In those days, it was often a gossy TMZ, Buzzfeed, or The Sun webpage, although sometimes it was simply a clickbait image sourced because the producers knew it would garner the views necessary to keep the whole operation in order. In the instance of BRITAIN’S SEXIEST GHOST, it was a short-form article on a trending news site about a ghostly likeness caught on camera at Devon’s Torquay Museum. The CCTV replay appeared to show a spectre with an ample cleavage lingering around a sycophagus. NEWS! Additionally, mysterious fingerprints were reported to have been found inside the tomb. That was it. That was the scoop. Ghost with notable tits. Now make a video!I took to the assignment with aplomb, such was the excitement of my first day. Before taping, I was introduced to a fellow long-standing host who convinced me to allow her to play the role of the ghost in my debut, by way of jiggling her tits in the background. Cool, cool, cool. She even convinced me it would be funny to make a blonde joke at her expense. I look back now at this 1-minute-and-22-second piece of pure internet fodder and deeply cringe, but have long since accepted that it will live on, forever, in the boughs of the machine.Midway through my first day, and with stories such as “Hot Model Walks Around Wearing Painted on Shirt” and “Man Pops Biggest Blister Known To Man” under my belt, I noted my mixed box of Timbits was empty, save, of course, for the cursory, singularly purchased old-fashioned plain haunting the expanse of the otherwise diminished cardboard. My friendship offering had been all but devoured, but I was yet to ensnare any friends. On-camera, hosts were full of the tit-jiggling joys of spring, but off-screen, it was a head down and crack on environment. However, I thought that my luck was about to change when I was asked to film a “double” with a long-standing male host.A double (not to be confused with the aforementioned and far tastier “double double”) was a clever way of making conjecture-based “content”, like, say, a reaction video, more engaging by filling it with two personalities. I hadn’t exactly been expecting a great meeting of minds, but I had anticipated a shred of meaningful back and forth, or at least an enjoyable yap with somebody new. Alas, it was not to be. Upon approaching my co-host to collaboratively script, he told me that his process was to simply “go with the vibes”. Kay kaaaay, cool no worries. This would have been fine if “the vibes” had not been mimicking my British accent back at me with an unreflective cockney twang, then melting in a pool of hysteria at my feet. How the editors turned this episode into something passable, even by infotainment standards, is truly miraculous.By the end of Day 1, old-fashioned Timbit now dry as the Sahara in its continued ostracization, my head was ringing from the whiplash of feeding the hungry mouth of the algorithm five videos, while having not carried out a meaningful conversation with anyone around me.Feeling as if I really ought to dispose of the donut box and its perpetual leper, I furtively stuffed the Timbit in my mouth before heading home, hoping it might provide a palate cleanser to the saccharine energy I was compelled to muster for the camera. Alas, it did not do the trick. With the dust of a mouthful of empty calories still coating my lips, I pulled up The Channel on my phone as I walked home. BRITAIN’S SEXIEST GHOST had aired to the tune of 18,000 views. This was astonishing to me, tantamount only to immediate fame, providing me with the dopamine hit I needed to feel pride in what had, admittedly, been a weird day. What I lacked in meaning, I made up for in metrics. I didn’t know yet how laughably small a number 18,000 was, and just how meaningless things could get.There’s that crosswalk again. The one down the road from the studio. The one that stopped me in my tracks as I made my getaway four years later… only on my first day, the lights were green, so I kept walking, eager to get wherever internet fame might take me. I didn’t think about ghosts a whole load back then, but I do now. Maybe that’s what happens when we get older. They’re everywhere. We can see all of the micro-decisions we made that spun us off into directions we could have never imagined, ingraining ourselves into the fabric of the places where we made them.I don’t think I ever truly made Toronto “my bitch”, but I can tell you all the places I still haunt, even now, from thousands of kilometres away. That crosswalk will always be one. Had I stopped that day, I may well have seen myself there, a premonition of the future, staring right back at me, pleading with me through time. I think about both of them now: Young and Younger Me, unified by traffic lights. What would I say to them? Would I actually speak up, knowing what I know now, to change what came next?I honestly don’t know the answer to that.To be continued. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

In 2015, I bought a one-way ticket to Toronto, Canada. All I had with me was 23lbs of luggage. That’s the short list, anyway. The long list actually goes: * 23lbs of luggage* A boyfriend* An arts degree* A post-graduate diploma in Journalismand, most notably* a slew of HOPES & DREAMSThe biggest of which would have gone something along the lines of: “make Toronto my bitch”.T O R O N T O. Fuck. What excitement. What jet fuel. Let me tell you what it is like to be 26 and disembarking a plane to start a new life in a new country: it feels like power. Pure, magnetic wildfire. What, pray tell, do you really have to lose when you’re in your mid-20s and jazzed up on adventure? I’d quit my writing job in London, England, after saving up enough to keep me in beer and poutine for at least 6 months. I was ready to make bold moves. When I saw the job listing for a YouTube host, I was living in the energy of “why the fuck not!?” I have a lot of answers to that question now, not that I would have wanted to hear any of them at 26 and on a rampage for LIFE.I had never considered YouTube as a career move before. I knew of big-time creators like Zoella and Pewdiepie, but I had never indulged the notion that it might be possible to work for what was being advertised as a “channel”. I didn’t even really know what a YouTube “channel” could be but, a week after sending out my resume and a crudely captured headshot, I was invited to find out.I found myself clad in my favourite outfit (a bold geometric skirt-suit still hanging in my closet today), standing in the foyer of a slightly run-down film studio in an industrial part of the city, an audition time slot fast approaching. Bright red hair, bright red lips, and just a few weeks out from first touching the tarmac at Toronto Pearson Airport. It was all moving so fast. I felt like Crash Bandicoot with a speed boost. I wouldn’t be stopped. I couldn’t be. This was it.“So, you’re an actor, then?” a man dressed head-to-toe in black, and wearing sunglasses indoors, asked me.“Actually, I’m more of a journalist…a storyteller.”He said nothing. He just kind of stared at me. Or at least I presume that’s what was happening behind the mystery of his dark lenses.It’s funny the moments you remember years later. It seemed innocuous at the time, but this micro-exchange could have told me all I needed to know: this was probably not the place for me, or my love of deeply researched stories. But, again, 26, new city, new country, and a deep thirst for experience. Such were the early ingredients of this maelstrom.I’d be remiss not to report that I crushed my audition. Graciously, I received the assignment to script a “trending” video about Kylie Jenner’s “butt pads”, then present it to camera. Straight-faced. Lol, kay.It turned out “The Channel” was an umbrella term for a fast-growing network of YouTube platforms uploading pop-culture-driven infotainment pieces. It also turned out that, actually, I am an actress, because I was really good at pretending to care. I certainly wanted to care. I’d never call anything about my life in London hum-drum because it certainly wasn’t, but the thought of working at a film studio in Toronto, Canada, creating videos for an audience, and getting paid for it certainly seemed different. Appealing. Creative. New. Modern. Cool. Techy, in a lowkey kind of a sexy Indie way. I was trying on new identities, and this one seemed fascinating. It felt like I was living at the cutting edge of 2015.Suffice to say, I got the job. I actually squealed in my kitchen when I was told I was to be paid $14 an hour for a part-time role as a new face of one of Canada’s fastest-growing YouTube channels. YEAHBITCH. TAKE THAT: CITY!I arrived on my first day, fresh-faced, bright-eyed, sporting a new co-ord set (of the midnight blue varietal), and ready to host my very first video. Hello WORLD, it’s me, Rebecca, and gosh darn it, I have arrived!Kay, we need to take a moment of pause from the narrative as I introduce the cultural concept of Timbits. If you’re Canadian, or live in Canada, you will of course be au fait with the micro donut dots of assorted flavours, ranging from highly palatable big hitters such as honey cruller, sour cream glazed, and chocolate, taking a turn through bites that sound good but are actually super mid, like strawberry-filled and birthday cake, then arriving at the bottom of the barrel into the joyless pits of flavourless confection hell; the void that is old fashioned plain. Each to their own, of course, but I’ve yet to find a trustworthy face who enjoys raw-dogging a bland hunk of bread masquerading as a pastry.Timbits can be found lit up behind perspex, much like precious jewels in a shop window, inside the cultural institution that is Tim Hortons. Tim Hortons was established in the 1960s by THE TIM HORTON, whomst, in Canadian lore, has been firmly assigned national treasure status. I am not from here, so I take everyone’s word for it. Tim Hortons is less a coffee chain than it is the observable soft civic infrastructure of Canada itself, beloved by all, regardless of how discerning one’s palate. Circumnavigating the age of the curiously hot hipster barista and the $10 macchiato, “Tim’s” (or “Timmo’s” as I call it, much to the chagrin of my adopted countrymen), is the nation’s go-to spot for a warm cozy cup of Cannuck nostalgia, masquerading as kind-of-actively-bad-but-curiously-also-delicious coffee. If one is looking to fully culturally assimilate upon landing in Canada, the go-to order at a Tim’s counter is a “Double Double” (two creams, two sugars, thanks bud). And then there’s the Timbits, which are indeed singularly purchasable, but most people opt to take them away by the metric fuck-ton (boxes of 20, 40, or 50).‘Twas Timmo’s I turned to by way of a suitable friendship bribe on Day One at The Channel, swinging by a branch to pick up a modest 20 box, hoping it would win me favour at the film studio. In actuality, I walked into a dusty room with a grey, stained carpet, arranged with around ten computers, humans feverishly glued to screens they barely looked up from as I made my grand entrance. Okay, so not quite the Silicon Valley-esque backdrop I had imagined, but whatever. This didn’t quell my enthusiasm as I sat down at my designated spot, ready to script the shit out of my first segment:“BRITAIN’S SEXIEST GHOST IS HAUNTING PEOPLE”.Okie dokie. Right on. Put me to work. I slugged back my coffee and snapped to it.The way it worked for (I use this term lightly) “news” stories was that we were given a link or two of “source material”. In those days, it was often a gossy TMZ, Buzzfeed, or The Sun webpage, although sometimes it was simply a clickbait image sourced because the producers knew it would garner the views necessary to keep the whole operation in order. In the instance of BRITAIN’S SEXIEST GHOST, it was a short-form article on a trending news site about a ghostly likeness caught on camera at Devon’s Torquay Museum. The CCTV replay appeared to show a spectre with an ample cleavage lingering around a sycophagus. NEWS! Additionally, mysterious fingerprints were reported to have been found inside the tomb. That was it. That was the scoop. Ghost with notable tits. Now make a video!I took to the assignment with aplomb, such was the excitement of my first day. Before taping, I was introduced to a fellow long-standing host who convinced me to allow her to play the role of the ghost in my debut, by way of jiggling her tits in the background. Cool, cool, cool. She even convinced me it would be funny to make a blonde joke at her expense. I look back now at this 1-minute-and-22-second piece of pure internet fodder and deeply cringe, but have long since accepted that it will live on, forever, in the boughs of the machine.Midway through my first day, and with stories such as “Hot Model Walks Around Wearing Painted on Shirt” and “Man Pops Biggest Blister Known To Man” under my belt, I noted my mixed box of Timbits was empty, save, of course, for the cursory, singularly purchased old-fashioned plain haunting the expanse of the otherwise diminished cardboard. My friendship offering had been all but devoured, but I was yet to ensnare any friends. On-camera, hosts were full of the tit-jiggling joys of spring, but off-screen, it was a head down and crack on environment. However, I thought that my luck was about to change when I was asked to film a “double” with a long-standing male host.A double (not to be confused with the aforementioned and far tastier “double double”) was a clever way of making conjecture-based “content”, like, say, a reaction video, more engaging by filling it with two personalities. I hadn’t exactly been expecting a great meeting of minds, but I had anticipated a shred of meaningful back and forth, or at least an enjoyable yap with somebody new. Alas, it was not to be. Upon approaching my co-host to collaboratively script, he told me that his process was to simply “go with the vibes”. Kay kaaaay, cool no worries. This would have been fine if “the vibes” had not been mimicking my British accent back at me with an unreflective cockney twang, then melting in a pool of hysteria at my feet. How the editors turned this episode into something passable, even by infotainment standards, is truly miraculous.By the end of Day 1, old-fashioned Timbit now dry as the Sahara in its continued ostracization, my head was ringing from the whiplash of feeding the hungry mouth of the algorithm five videos, while having not carried out a meaningful conversation with anyone around me.Feeling as if I really ought to dispose of the donut box and its perpetual leper, I furtively stuffed the Timbit in my mouth before heading home, hoping it might provide a palate cleanser to the saccharine energy I was compelled to muster for the camera. Alas, it did not do the trick. With the dust of a mouthful of empty calories still coating my lips, I pulled up The Channel on my phone as I walked home. BRITAIN’S SEXIEST GHOST had aired to the tune of 18,000 views. This was astonishing to me, tantamount only to immediate fame, providing me with the dopamine hit I needed to feel pride in what had, admittedly, been a weird day. What I lacked in meaning, I made up for in metrics. I didn’t know yet how laughably small a number 18,000 was, and just how meaningless things could get.There’s that crosswalk again. The one down the road from the studio. The one that stopped me in my tracks as I made my getaway four years later… only on my first day, the lights were green, so I kept walking, eager to get wherever internet fame might take me. I didn’t think about ghosts a whole load back then, but I do now. Maybe that’s what happens when we get older. They’re everywhere. We can see all of the micro-decisions we made that spun us off into directions we could have never imagined, ingraining ourselves into the fabric of the places where we made them.I don’t think I ever truly made Toronto “my bitch”, but I can tell you all the places I still haunt, even now, from thousands of kilometres away. That crosswalk will always be one. Had I stopped that day, I may well have seen myself there, a premonition of the future, staring right back at me, pleading with me through time. I think about both of them now: Young and Younger Me, unified by traffic lights. What would I say to them? Would I actually speak up, knowing what I know now, to change what came next?I honestly don’t know the answer to that.To be continued.Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

After four high-octane years as the face of a YouTube channel watched by millions of people across the world, I finally plucked up the courage to quit. I say courage, but by that point, it was as much a reflex as it was the actions of a renegade. I physically could not make myself perform the gestures of duty any longer. It was do or die, and I couldn’t give another of the dwindling hours of my youth to a job that was compressing me. So, with every ounce of brazen I had left to muster, I strode out of the film studio doors one last time, determined not to look back over my shoulder at the dumpster fire that was, now, my career.One step. Two steps. Three. Four. Okay,fuck,we’rereallyactuallydoingthis.There’s this thing in the law of physics called “escape velocity”. It is the minimum speed an object needs to break free from a deep gravitational pull, like say from a moon, a planet, a black hole… or a highly successful YouTube channel you feared might actually be killing you. Working in service to the internet, chasing views, feeding the hungry mouth of the algorithm: it had become a void that threatened to gobble me up. For years, I watched myself inch closer and closer to the “event horizon”, the name given to the point of no return within a certain proximity to a black hole. Until that distance is crossed, there is a chance of escape if enough energy can be mustered. I felt myself being stretched, spaghettified. I knew if I did nothing, I would undergo a molecular alteration. In particle physics, we don’t yet know what happens to something when it enters a black hole, but the working theory is that it is crushed to a point of singularity from which it can never, ever, be restored. As I inched closer and closer to what I felt would be irrevocable change, the discomfort of being drawn to what was not right for me finally outweighed the discomfort of summoning the energy to fling myself off into the vast unknown. So, I took a deep breath, and I finally ejected myself. As in physics, I call these landmark and painfully pivotal moments in life “ reaching escape velocity.” And so there I was, flung into the streets of Toronto, Canada, 5000 earth kilometres away from “home”, $3,250 in the bank, no job, and absolutely nothing resembling a safety net to catch me in my free fall.F u c k.I wondered what Little Me would think of this turn of events? I was a starry-eyed child who longed to leave home, lick the moon, and play in the cosmos. Being a YouTuber wasn’t a “thing” to aspire to when I was young; we only got dial-up internet when I was 7. Who knew the world would take such a turn? Who knew we’d all one day have phones in our hands, feeding us a constant stream of infotainment to the point where we’re too overwhelmed to look away?The family lore is that I was born a storyteller. I just came on out reading and yapping. I was always embodying some character or another, making up wild scenes from my imagination and staging them as plays for passers-by on stoops, steps, and walls in the street. Anything can be a stage with enough imagination. I would have been a fucking excellent town crier, or troubadour, or travelling bard, or something, but I was born the exact same year as the World Wide Web, so perhaps it was fated to claim me.When I was offered the opportunity to be the face of a YouTube channel and steer it toward growth, it was Little Rebecca who cheered the loudest. She was the one who dreamed of telling stories to anyone who would listen; it was she who thought that “being someone” would be the epitome of success. I guess, to her, having a platform would mean actually being seen. Oh, sweet baby girl, I’m sorry. We would both learn that there is such a thing as over-exposure. That there can be “wrong” eyeballs, and that “growth” doesn’t always happen in the right direction. I had no idea just how big things would get, and just how much the scrutiny of six million strangers would hurt me, worse, how much it would hurt Little Me. How could I have sprouted from such a dreamer, only to arrive at the point where I couldn’t remember the last time I dreamt of anything except quitting my horrible job?With the film studio suitably in the rearview, I slowed my pace from what had been nearing a run, my breath ragged while I grappled to hold my shit together. A red traffic light at a crossroads stopped me for long enough to see myself, as if from above. Thin. Too thin. Blonde. I was thirty years old and clutching my iPhone to my chest, as if it was going to save me from everything I had just ignited. I wondered then: how could I have become so different from the flame-haired, full-faced 26-year-old who had crossed this very same road on her way to an audition...the audition that would set in motion the events that shaped the next ten years of my life.I was angry. I was sad. I was scared. Really scared. I was lost. I was hopeful. I was confused. I was hungry. I was sick. I was determined. I was paralyzed. Yes, I may have escaped a close call with the void, but now I had entered the expanse, and that seemed just as debilitating. As the lights on the crosswalk flicked to green, I didn’t move. I kept standing. I allowed everything I had squirrelled away into a little pocket of my mind labelled “BABE DON’T OPEN” passage into my body. I let it wash over me and, yeah, I allowed myself to cry. Not just for the sadness, but for everything. Feeling e v e r y t h i n g was simply too much for one soft human body without invoking some kind of chemical reaction. I didn’t know how to cleanse myself of all the things I had embodied in the last four years. I didn’t know who I was going to be next.That evening, my friends threw me a party. They had strung up balloons spelling out “Freedom” across my wall and popped confetti in my face during joyous intervals, hugging me in congratulations, because they knew I’d just saved my own life. Or had I? I stood on chairs holding a wine glass aloft in my hand in victory, but found myself petrified of looking down at the floor.“So, Rebecca, what are you going to do now that you are free?”I gulped back my Cava.Freedom, it turns out, was going to be a long road. Seven years later, and I’m still walking that path. Still, it felt very good, in the small hours of the next morning, to stare down that big red button that had defined my worth for far too long. It felt so good to finally click “unsubscribe”.To be continued. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com

Unsubscribe : notes from within the machine from a girl who once lived. there.Episode 1: Escape Velocity / FreedomAn audio accompaniment to the Unsubscribe newsletter, read by the author, Rebecca Felgate.At age 26, journalism graduate Rebecca became the face of a YouTube channel that would quickly go viral. Exploding to six million subscribers in under four years, "The Channel" was, at one point, the fastest growing in Canada. However, with great visibility comes great consequence. Rebecca's journey into the perils of social media algorithms is, at times deeply amusing, and at others utterly terrifying. What seemed like a dream job would soon turn into a hard-learned lesson in the price of internet fame.By the time she turned 30, Rebecca experienced "creator burnout" at its most extreme. Deciding one day to up and quit her job with nothing lined up, and very little cash in the bank, Rebecca would begin a seven-year-long process of trying, and often failing, to untangle herself from the internet.Episode 1: Escape Velocity / Freedom places us in Rebecca's heels, just as she walks out of the door and away from her public career. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate.substack.com