Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles - Hey everyone, my name is Tyler Oakley and this is my life. I was born March 22nd, 1989 in Jackson, Michigan at Foote Hospital. My parents were divorced when I was a toddler so I've always had two families. Between my sisters and my step-brothers and my step-sisters and my half-brother and my in-laws, I have 12 siblings total. In elementary school I had to get glasses so my parents let me pick out whatever pair I wanted. So I got these big round glasses that were bright purple. It was basically the start of my fabulosity. Back then, I began to develop a bit of an addictive personality: No matter what it was that I was obsessed with, I had to have everything involved with it. When it was Pogs, I had my own Pog maker. When it was Beanie Babies, I had tag protectors and value handbooks. When it was Pokemon, I competed at local video game stores in tournaments. I guess that's why nowadays I can't get off Tumblr. When I was going into the sixth grade, I moved to a new city and I knew nobody, so I turned to choir and drama for a new group of friends. I met Dolan and we instantly became best friends. Leading up to this point in my life, I had an addiction to food and I had always been unhealthily overweight and very unhappy about it and so I took matters into my own hands. Unfortunately, I wasn't smart about it and my addictive personality took a 180 until I developed an eating disorder. I refused to eat and I became addicted to exercise. I went from one unhealthy way of living to another. And even after losing 30 pounds, I was still unhappy. Luckily throughout my middle-school years I developed a close relationship with the choir teacher, Miss Borton, and she noticed the fluctuation of my health and happiness. She was always there to talk and was always supportive of me. By the time I reached high school, I was able to overcome my eating disorder, even though sometimes I still do have body image issues. When I was 14, a freshman in high school, I decided to tell everybody the truth about who I was. Although some family was not supportive of me being openly gay, I was lucky enough to have so many friends and family that were, and I knew that nobody, no matter how important society deemed my relationship with them, had the right to denounce me for who I was. So I cut the people who didn't support me out of my life and I never regretted it for a second. In high school, I got involved in drama club and choir and I found my people. Dolan and I met Eric and the three of us became inseparable. My senior year I joined yearbook and became obsessed with it. In yearbook I met Rachel and we couldn't believe that we had never been friends before. And soon she was added to the posse. My high school career came to a close and I spoke at my commencement ceremony about how all the world's a stage, right before I went off to find my own stage. I went to Michigan State University where I studied communications with focuses in marketing and social media. Although I was doing my own thing at MSU, I still really missed Rachel, Dolan, and Eric from high school and I wanted to find a way to keep in touch with them. Somehow I stumbled upon YouTube and I saw people talking into cameras. I had just saved enough money to buy a laptop so I figured, "why not give it a try?" My first videos, which are now private, were 15 minutes long talking directly to my three friends and showing them all around my dorm room. I even remember one video getting 100 views and that freaked me out because I was like, "I don't know if I even have 100 friends, so who are these people watching?" Around that time during my freshman year, I met Korey, an RA in my building. We bonded over MarioKart and soon became inseparable through our mutual love of YouTube and blogging. After my junior year, I decided I needed to get out of Michigan and spend a summer interning. I had two internships: One at a celebrity PR firm and the other at the Trevor Project, both of which were in LA. Half my summer was spent working for an organization that saved lives every day and the other half was spent doing nothing of importance. I soon realized that if I was going to be working in social media, it had to be something that I cared about and something that was fun. Slowly but steadily my YouTube presence was picking up. It hadn't really hit me until I reached one moment where I found out that more of you guys were watching my videos than could fit into my university's football stadium. That's when I knew something big was going on. With my college career coming to a close, I began applying for adult jobs, but none of them were sticking. With rejection after rejection, I started to think that maybe my online life was keeping me from getting a job. I was so discouraged, and so I decided to take advantage of the situation. Me and my best friend Korey took a chance. We flew to San Francisco, a place we had both never been to, and we fell in love with the city in just one weekend. And in that weekend we signed a lease. We flew back home to Michigan, packed our bags, and said goodbye to our families, and headed off to the San Francisco Bay. We lived in The Castro, which is a gay neighborhood in San Francisco, and continued making videos together and have done everything from a video of him buzzing my head to the Chicken Nugget challenge. I had my own group of friends, a community that embraced who I was, a city full of life with something crazy happening every weekend, but one thing was missing. My career. I had a couple of jobs here and there to help me pay the rent, but nothing that inspired me to wake up every morning loving life. I decided that if I wasn't going to enjoy my job, I was surely going to start loving my hobbies. And with that I went full speed ahead with YouTube. I started making more videos and dedicating more of my time online. Every week more and more of you guys tuned in and about a year later, so many of you had found me that I began to think that maybe my life online wasn't keeping me from getting a job, my job was keeping me from my life online. After careful consideration, I decided that if not now, when, and I put in my two-weeks notice and became a full-time YouTuber with dreams much bigger than YouTube itself. Although San Francisco was amazing socially and culturally, not much was going on there when it came to taking my online life to the next level, and with every opportunity that came up, I was spending more and more time traveling to make it happen. I got to the point where I was spending so much time living out of a suitcase that I didn't feel like I had a home anymore. And so, with my U-Haul packed to the brim, I cried while driving alone down the San Fransisco Bay bridge, leaving behind my favorite city and so many of my favorite people. All because I knew that if I wanted my dreams to come true I had to take the leap and move where it all could happen. Los Angeles. Now, so much is happening and when I'm not making videos, I'm working on so many projects that I cannot wait for you guys to see. What boggles my mind the most though is that as of this week, I have a million people who have chosen to push "subscribe" who care enough to tune in to see all of my dreams come true. I can't thank you guys enough. My life is only just beginning and I'm so excited to take you all along for the ride. So that was my Draw My Life.