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 Journalism

and, most notably

* a slew of HOPES & DREAMS

The 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 m...