Making the queer, neurodivergent, maximalist, punk, over 40 vlog content I want to see in the world
Remember a few weeks ago when I was lamenting the lack of misfit, freaky, queer, neurodivergent, urban, maximalist, punk, artist, femme vloggers over 40 on YouTube (y’know, people like me)? Well, I made the content I want to see more of in the world - and I hope you like it because I want to make more like this!
Join me for a week behind the scenes of my art biz (and life) as I plan and shoot a treasure hunt campaign for a painting collection release, work on my new collection Things Men Have Said To Me Instead Of Hello, and live my life out and about in beautiful Copenhagen. All in fabulous outfits, of course 😜.
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✨THINGS MENTIONED IN THE VIDEO✨
The Flourishing sales campaign treasure hunt
The Flourishing collection
Things Men Have Said To Me Instead Of Hello collection
10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World by Elif Shafak
Psycho Beach Party movie
🎶 All music by the incredible Caspar Riis: https://soundcloud.com/caspar-riis. Used with permission.
A while ago I found myself doing something I do embarrassingly often — falling down a YouTube rabbit hole looking for people like me.
Not me exactly, obviously. But you know, I’m a woman of a certain age (i.e. over 40), and a bit of a mad colourful maximalist. I live in the city, I don't have any kids, we do all sorts of cool city things — concerts, drag shows, meals out, cocktails. Just living in the city, doing city things. But a lot of the older women on YouTube I found are countryside people, which is amazing and I love watching that content too — they're dyeing their own wool and doing craft stuff and raising sheep and living in a van or a tiny house or something. But the content I love most on YouTube is sort of this slice of life stuff. I want to see how you make your coffee. Where you go. I want to see you run errands. I want to see what you're wearing. I want to see people just living their life. And I want to see that from other people like me!
That person didn't seem to exist. So I made the content I wanted to see instead.
There's a bigger reason too. When I started my channel, painting was a big part of my creative practice and so my videos were all about that, but the truth is that generally painting is actually a small part of my artistic output — I do a whole bunch of other stuff — and I felt like I'd painted myself into a corner. No pun intended. I wanted to expand the scope.
And it felt super defiant to do it. Earlier in the year I launched the Zuzu's Haus of Cats website, which was this wonderful opportunity to be a sort of three-dimensional human on the internet — a real rejection of the Instagramification of human experience, the personal brands, the niching down, doing it the right way. All of my artwork is on there, but also my outfits, events, conversations, everything that's inspiring me — books, movies, podcasts, music. I worked in online marketing for so many years and followed all the rules, and this felt like a real fuck you to all of that. I don't want to do it like that anymore. I'm going to do it my way.
And then I was shocked by how popular it was. How much people just joined in. People want to be a part of it, they want to talk about it and share it — it's a community. We're building a community for weirdos, basically, and that’s what I want to do with my YouTube channel as well.
The golden thread that runs through all of my work is always a celebration of otherness in some way. I'm a woman of a certain age. I'm also a neurodivergent woman — autistic, I have ADHD. I'm also queer. I'm a foreigner in a foreign land — I live in Denmark but I was raised in the UK. I'm other in ways that sometimes feel almost gratuitous, honestly. I'm left-handed. I have the rarest blood type. It's just kind of my thing.
Everybody should have the opportunity to feel like they belong. To feel that it's okay to be exactly who they are — especially in the current climate, and especially when there are so many people telling you that it's not okay to be who you are. The world can be a cruel and terrible place and very isolating and very lonely, especially if you’re a bit of a misfit, and I want to do what I can to try and mitigate that.
This vlog is that, basically.
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