Why I Chose Blogging Over YouTube (For Now)

I have done it all, quite literally. Blog sites. YouTube channels. Podcasts. I built brands that meant the world to me, and then it all became too much to handle, and I shut everything down.

I’ve always said I did it “for my mental health.” That’s true, but it’s also the polite version. What actually happened was a bad depression episode. The kind where the thing you love the most turns into one more thing you can’t carry, and the easiest way to stop the weight is to put it all down at once. So I did. Every account, every site, every project. I wanted silence, and I got it.

It took me a long time to understand what I had actually done.

The brand I can’t get back

My first brand was The Everyday Career Girl.

I was deep in my self-improvement era at the time. I was reading Girl Code, I was reading every motivational and business book I could get my hands on, and something in me wanted to do more than absorb it. I wanted to go find the women who were already living it and let them talk. So that’s what the blog was. Once a month I featured one woman: a startup founder, an entrepreneur, someone quietly killing it in her own lane. A little series. It was gaining attraction, and I was so happy doing it.

Here’s the part that still gets me.

I don’t have it anymore. Not in the “I let it expire” way. I lost complete access to the host. I don’t know the login email, and when I reached out to the registrar they asked me to verify ownership with the credit card that was on file back then, or an old receipt, or the original email. I have none of those things. So the domain is still sitting out there on the internet, and it is not mine, and I can’t get it back.

That’s what happens when you burn something down while you’re not okay. Some of it stays burned.

Everything else I built and then closed

After the blog I jumped into YouTube, doing makeup and skincare. That channel is no longer live and that email is long gone too. It was growing. I had passed 1,000 subscribers and I was genuinely happy making it.

Then I got into podcasting, and girl, let me tell you how much fun I had doing that on my own. I interviewed people for it, too. I talked to a woman who was doing virtual interior design, redesigning people’s homes on the computer before they moved a single piece of furniture. I interviewed Vicky Justice back when she was running her subscription box and building her whole YouTube journey. I interviewed people from the Facebook community, which tells you exactly how long I’ve been doing this.

I loved it. And then I closed it.
That start-stop cycle is the pattern of my creative life, and I know it now in a way I didn’t know it then.

This time I didn’t shut anything down

Years later, I spiraled again. Same feeling, same pull.

But this time I didn’t burn anything. My channel is still live and still growing even though I haven’t posted there in two months. Nothing got deleted. Nothing got abandoned to a registrar I can’t log in to. That, to me, is growth, even though it doesn’t look like much from the outside.

What I did realize is that as much as I love YouTube, and as much as I love making real content that isn’t AI-generated, it isn’t for me right now. Not because I hate it. Because YouTube has changed so much, and I was still doing things the old-school way while everything around me moved. It’s a learning curve I’m honestly still climbing.

So I got down on my knees and prayed.

It was a Sunday morning at home. I’ve been getting closer with God lately, and I told Him to take the wheel, because this girl gave up. And something came to mind, clear as anything:

Go back to the basics, Naida

That’s when it hit me.

The basics are writing

I have always loved writing. Before the cameras, before the mics, before the analytics dashboards and the thumbnails and the algorithm. Writing is the thing I was doing first, and it’s the thing I never actually stopped wanting to do.

So I chose blogging. Not as a downgrade. As a return.

Blogging is where I can think out loud, work something out in real time, and hand it to whoever needs it that day. I don’t have to perform it. I just have to be honest about it.

I will get back to YouTube eventually, and I’d love to start a podcast again soon, because I miss it more than I expected to. But in the meantime, this is where I am.

Why The Velvet Girl exists

The Velvet Girl is the space I wish I’d had.

The mission is simple: live your life the way you want to live it.

That’s it. Whether you’re the sophisticated woman who has it all together. Whether you just opened your own business and you’re terrified. Whether you’re coming out of a depression and you’re trying to remember who you were before it. Whether you have absolutely no idea where to start and you’re reading this at 11pm wondering if it’s too late.

I want The Velvet Girl to be that one space for all of you. Not a place where I tell you what your life should look like. A place where you figure out what you want yours to look like, and then go build it.

Because I’ve been the woman with the thriving brand, and I’ve been the woman who deleted it all, and I’ve been the woman who lost the login and had to start over from nothing. Every version of me is welcome here, so every version of you is too.

What’s coming

One thing I’m planting a flag on: I want to bring the interviews back.

Featuring other women was the very first thing I ever did online, and it was the thing that made me happiest. So I’m bringing it here. Small business owners. Women running big operations. Women in the middle of building something nobody knows about yet. If you’ve got a story about what you’re making and what it cost you, I want to give you the space to say it out loud and be heard.