You have time

You have the power to always start again and you have time. We learn lessons in our own time, we go through cycles of life and I guess I'm just watching trust and faith that I had put into a dream as a young person finally start to come to fruition like a decade later and that's something that it's long long-term gratification but it's this comforting feeling of, okay, even though maybe something that I'm working towards feels like it's not paying off in the moment or that I'm embarrassing myself, every single stage, creation, effort was put towards something and I feel like I'm finally at a stage of my life now where I'm faced with a new set of motivation and things that I'm working through and looking to sustain. A lot of things that I have always wanted have grown after a lot of time and after a lot of lessons and after a lot of doubt. Your effort is not in vain and you deciding that another reality is possible is not in vain and you following your inspiration, your instinct, even if you don't know exactly what the future holds, will lead you in the right direction. I just feel like I'm, I don't want to say closing a chapter but recently I felt like I'm beginning a new chapter, a new era. I started my YouTube channel when I was like 13 turning 14 now I'm 24. It's been, I think I got a notification from YouTube saying it's been 11 years since I started my YouTube channel. I just hit 300,000 subscribers. It feels indescribable in a way that I'm still letting simmer and process. I'm eternally grateful and excited that there is a community of you who see the world in a similar way that I do or appreciate what I have to offer you, whether that be a story or advice or an arrangement or a peaceful time or a motivational time or just fun, appreciating the beauty around us and the simple things, anything that this channel, my videos have provided you. Something that has just been building over time for a long time through so many different chapters and transitions and it's continuing to evolve and flower into new things, new spaces, new places. I am very excited to continue to take you guys on the journey with me. There's so much to look forward to. Hitting 300,000 subscribers and this phase of my life have been causing me to look back on and see how much has flowered over time. Every episode that I've put out is a lesson that I myself have learned, am learning, and to be able to share that with you guys and be going on this journey together is sacred and beautiful and fulfilling, so thank you for being here and thank you for 300,000 subscribers. I am so, so grateful for you. I just want to continue to create things that bring you guys closer to that feeling and feel aligned with me and where I'm at in my journey. If you don't know, if this is your first video of mine that you're watching, hello. I'm Inaya and I have been making videos for a long time of my life, the world around me, my flower arrangements. I have these conversations where I provide advice, philosophize, and introspect on the topics that I write about in my diary that I move through in this life in order to stay happy, fulfilled, motivated, creatively inspired. I started this sort of format of videos where I'm flower arranging and providing a episode, if you will, of advice about two or three years ago. I stopped posting for a while when I was a teenager and 18 and trying to figure out my life after high school. I creatively shut down for a long time and it was some very confusing, difficult years and about three years ago when I was 21, I got back to creating on my YouTube channel and then a little bit after that, Flowering Philosophies, this style of video was formed. As I've been thinking about all the dreams that have come to fruition in this past decade of creation, all the ups and downs, when I first started this show in this format, I was in a place that I was struggling. I had to, out of survival, really learn and extract these lessons from life and break it down in a way that made sense to me. That was me at 21, 22 and I know that, you know, just a few years, whatever, but now I'm going to be 25 and I feel like I am approaching a different stage of life and lessons have looked different or I'm in the process of understanding things, of learning things, of taking them in and digesting them fully so that I can articulate something back out into the world. And I think I've beat myself up a lot and put myself through shame of not being able to put out an episode of my podcast every single week. The internet moves and the way that content creation, podcasts, episodes, everything is fast, fast, go, go, be consistent. And I found myself battling my own worth, really, being like, why can't you create fast enough? Why are you not satisfied with this? How can you delegate these things to become more of a machine and move faster? And I've realized it's because the foundation of this show, of this YouTube channel that I am watching come to a new chapter of growth now. It has always been based on loving what I'm creating and sharing with you. That is a love in my heart that can't necessarily be capitalized off of in a way that I've watched the world, society, the internet, everything that I've grown up with, the way that I've watched it become so fast and churning. Marketing and brand deals and taking advantage of opportunities, it's been a learning lesson for me of how much I'm willing to capitalize off of myself or an audience. And I don't think it's all inherently negative and bad to have a career in social media and being seen in your internet creations. No, I think it's a privilege and a blessing and it's a really cool part of our modern universe that we're living in and creating. You know, humans are crazy and I do not take any opportunities that have been given to me from the internet for granted. I hope to continue to find ways to use the internet to tell stories and to connect with people, but I've also seen the way that it has made me feel, I guess, in the recent past and how I've changed the past two years and how I really want to move into my life as an artist and the person I am who's sharing with you on this channel and beyond. What is it that I'm trying to say and have I said what I needed to say? I feel like I have said a lot of what I know and what I've needed to say and it doesn't mean that I don't have more to say. I really do and I think I always will. Life is constantly evolving and ever-flowing with lessons and I don't ever want to regurgitate things that I have created before. I think for a long time I was feeling shameful about that, like I wasn't producing enough and putting enough out into the world. I don't want to muddy the message, you know? These episodes and these arrangements and these conversations are something that I put a lot of intention and time to. I don't feel as though I can really give you authentic time and intention if I have not taken my time learning what I need to learn, what I can share with you. I still feel like I'm learning all the lessons that we have discussed in the past, but I feel like I'm learning a new set of them moving forward now and it is exhilarating, it's scary, it's great, but it also it takes time and that's what I'm appreciating and looking at back on this chapter of life that I feel like started when I started my YouTube channel, you know? Things take time to become the person, the artist, the business owner, the dream version of ourselves that we wish to be. It sometimes takes time to come to the conclusions we must come to, to realize our worth or to come to terms with how to nurture our passions, you know? These are things that don't always just come to us immediately or that we're not handed to us. Sometimes we have to seek these things out and discover and build these things and it is so gratifying to watch them come to fruition. It's going to evolve and change as I continue to evolve and change and as we all continue to evolve and change on this journey, you know? We have a different set of blue cabinets here with us now than we did before when I first started making all these videos and to have so many new people here is so exciting and a new chapter is here. I truly do feel like I'm on a new wave and cusp of life and I don't know necessarily how much of that is going to show on the outside but I know that I feel it within my relationship with the internet. I want to keep that something that is a powerful, it's very powerful, you know? It's a powerful tool and I want to nourish and honor my relationship with sharing things and to not regurgitate, repeat myself and I'm sorry if that means that the frequency of these videos or me is not a constant output because I don't take these opportunities and this audience for granted. It's because I do everything myself. I pick these flowers out myself. I edit my videos for weeks, sometimes months, hours and hours. I do the sound engineering. I make my title cards, graphic design to video editing to tactile production to the technical work and then on top of that marketing yourself like we said or attempting to make a business out of what you share. It's a lot of hats to wear and it's something that I care about so deeply and that I want to do forever and to sustain forever and so I must allow that the breathing room to grow and put my full heart and passion into everything I do. I've tried to half-ass it. I've tried to make it faster or hand it off and I can't do it, guys. I care so much about these projects, the poetry, the YouTube channel, these conversations, all of us and this journey so much. I want to continue to honor the ways that I'm changing and that my journey is changing and the ways that I am telling my story and honoring the passions that I've always had and the things that I've watched come to fruition now because of those passions. There's something new on the horizon. There's new lessons and it's the same journey but a new chapter. I think I'm trying to give myself grace and tell myself that I have time and I want you to feel that way as well. If there's something you're passionate about creating or something that you're growing towards and something that you are telling yourself and that you're affirming and that you're wanting to build, it takes time and if you believe in divine timing and that everything happens for a reason, you know, that can it can really work in your favor and you can see how hardships and things that you feel like are in your way can actually really lead you and propel you in the direction that you want to go in and I am just overwhelmed with gratitude looking back at my childhood self, the person who started this YouTube channel, the person who decided to put out this format of videos on a whim thinking that nobody would see it, you know, these things they come from a place of passion and inspiration and I never want to lose that. I always want to nourish that for little Anaya who started this channel and for the one a few years ago who started this show and the version of me now so thank you guys for truly being on this journey with me and all of us planting our seeds and watching our dreams flower together is all that I want to do in this life and to continue to inspire you to do. I am so grateful for flowering philosophies. It's definitely growing and flowering into all the things that continue to spark so much love and passion in me and if this podcast and show and channel has ever brought you that feeling then my wish has come true truly because I do all of this independently I do I have a hard time handing it off to people and so to be able to attract any sort of creative community or friends or trusted mentors individuals that have supported me on this journey I am so grateful and it's taken a long time and it takes a village for something to come to fruition and I guess I'm just watching how all of these things that at the time maybe I didn't know how it was being applied towards my dreams or what I really wanted or a dream version of myself or life that I could see down the line for myself I didn't know how that would come from certain experiences or things that I was being presented with at the time and I guess that's just life. I created a Patreon for me to continue to have these conversations with you members from this channel from this community I feel as though I can have conversations like these a little bit more unfiltered things that I um maybe don't want to be perceived by just anybody I do feel as though the Patreon is a really committed community to these conversations these flowers these moments with you the Patreon has sustained and supported a lot of this and continues to to be able to do this it comes from that sustained support and I will be continuing to share more and more on my Patreon for this very reason I do want to share things that maybe I only feel comfortable opening to the Patreon community so I've thought about making a tier system and all this stuff but I decided I wanted the Patreon just to be a flat five dollar so that anybody can join I feel like I should have been recording from up close this whole time but instead you were really far away and I just readjusted the camera so that I could close one of these crazy doors and here we are the Patreon is a place that I feel aligned with sharing those things and it's something that supports all of these creations these conversations the flowers it would not be possible without you and your help so whether you are a patron or not the fact that you're here and watching and we get to be on this journey together is the greatest privilege of my life so thank you for being here and thank you for everything I am so happy to have you here on my YouTube channel as we continue to flower together we're taking our time to process things take things in and I'm just so grateful that you're here with me and that you always feel aligned with the timing of a lesson that I'm moving through and sharing and continue to invest in flowers and I'm so inspired by the flowers the conversations we have the poetry that I create and put into the world and the clothes that I adorn myself with are a very big part of all of this dresses that I have like this that match the arrangement this is a new one in my personal collection at the moment vintage Betsy Johnson to match our beautiful arrangement I really right when I saw this beautiful fuchsia flowering lace I knew we had to get it but yeah guys I guess I just wanted to say that the ideas the hopes the dreams that we have that we plant at maybe a young age or today or at a certain time in our life they take time to nourish to grow to learn the lessons needed and I'm so grateful that I've gotten to learn those lessons and share them with you alongside me I am continuing to grow and learn and you can ask me any questions that you'd like on the Patreon I answer them directly I'm also going to be making Q&A's specifically for the Patreon and for all that we have done and created together it still feels like a dream that we have reached 300,000 I can't wait to continue this journey with you and to show you all that is to come to continue to share the art and the conversations that I'm having in my life the lessons I'm learning now I hope that these lessons and conversations that we've had and that we will continue to have ring timeless for you and that you come back to them and that you can continue to honor yourself and the dreams that you have the promises you've made to yourself the motivations that you have and that you've been working towards I guess to sum it all up I'm just in a stage of gratitude reflection and seeing that I am learning new lessons and transitioning into a new phase and a new chapter of life and placing my focus on the things that I wish to watch grow now it's never too late to continue to nourish the things that excited you as a young girl for me I'm thinking back to when I was 13 and started this channel the things that inspire me at the core of it all it's still the same of course I've changed and I've grown and I've tried to honor that but the core of the inspiration is the same what are what were the things that inspired you so greatly towards your dream the promises that you made to your future self as a child I'm not saying that we can ignore all the logistics and hurdles of life that adulthood brings and just reality I understand but if we really do want to figure out how to bring something to fruition and continue to fulfill ourselves sometimes we have to remember and go back to the core of what we love what inspires us that will show us how we wish to evolve and that's sort of what I'm receiving right now I'm remembering what has brought me to this point reminding myself that it's okay to change and grow and I don't need to confine myself to a specific format or box to tell my story my creations and I'm watching that unfold I'm giving myself permission to grow and flower and I'm nourishing that growth with remembering what I've always loved what has always inspired me and what has brought me to this point now I'm so excited to continue this journey with you thank you for being here I hope you're having a beautiful morning afternoon evening wherever you are whatever it is you may be doing never forget that we are on this journey together and I can't wait to talk to you again very very soon bye