Around the USA: “Starting from scratch in any country is difficult, even in your own”

For a year now, Tatiana has been running her YouTube channel. Our Client Tatyana told us how quarantine prompted people to study YouTube and what difficulties people face in the USA.

Tatyana, how long have you been living in the USA?

Good afternoon everyone, I have been living in the USA for 25 years. Moved back in the 90s.

How did it happen that you changed your place of residence?

At that time, many were looking for good luck away from home, in my opinion, in any part of the world, since parents lost their jobs right and left, it was unrealistically difficult to find something paid after graduation. Well, I didn’t want to go to the market to trade things from China. And it turned out that starting from scratch in any country is difficult, even in your own. And native walls do not help much if there is no powerful administrative resource behind you.

What do you especially like about modern America? What is not?

Yes, of course, there are things that I really like and admire, and there are things that I still get used to. First of all, I like how people with disabilities are treated in the USA, absolutely as full members of society, this is also expressed in the inclusiveness of school education, acceptance and support of society as a whole.

I am also very impressed with such permissiveness in a good sense, emancipation, self-development and self-love at absolutely any age. This is expressed in clubs for the elderly, tourist trips, volunteer activities, dates, college classes without being limited by any age limits. It really amazes me so far.

From what I’m concerned, it’s not entirely clear why the US is not developing preventive medicine. There is a very complicated and expensive medicine here, which I think does not contribute to the improvement of the nation as a whole. It is difficult to knock out some kind of extra analysis, an extra visit to the doctor, an extra diagnostic test, not to mention an MRI. The answer is always the same, insurance most likely will not pay. Many Russian-speaking residents of America do medical examinations in their former homelands during their holidays and carry suitcases of medicines with them back. But not only we do this, and the Indians, and the Chinese, and the Vietnamese with the Koreans and Latinos.

How did you come up with the idea of running your own YouTube channel? What difficulties did you face?

Since I’ve been working in corporate America for over 20 years, office work, many hours on the road every day, this did nothing to encourage the emergence of any kind of energy-intensive hobby until quarantine came in 2020. We began to work from home, and those 3-4 hours that I used to be in traffic jams every day turned into an interesting hobby – a YouTube channel.

There are many difficulties, until you plunge into all this and start to study and try, you don’t understand how interesting it is at the same time, but also very difficult. All these YouTube algorithms, monetization, clickbaits, likes, warm-ups, warm-ups, copyrights, strikes, shadowbans…. horror 🙂 But I don’t want to lag behind the youth at all, so I will develop until all this is excitingly interesting, and then we’ll see.

You changed the theme of the channel in the process of maintaining the channel. What is it connected with?

I am still looking for my topic, trying to find something interesting and useful for the Russian-speaking audience. I was interested in cooking as long as I learned new recipes and ingredients myself. I have vegan friends, they helped expand my horizons in terms of healthy seeds, superfoods, so there were video recipes for orange jam with chia seeds and so on.

Then my friends advised me to shoot useful video instructions, since I read a lot and always share useful information with them. So there was a video about government services for those coming from abroad, or how to apply for a green card lottery.

Are travel restrictions in the US due to quarantine? How is it shown?

Yes, there are no particular restrictions, everyone has been traveling and flying for a long time. Rather, restrictions due to rising prices for everything, for example, the prices for car rentals have risen very much. And my advice to everyone would be to first look for and book a car, and then everything else. Since a car can now easily cost more than a hotel.

There are things that you especially miss from life in the former soc. camp?

Probably not now. It is much more difficult for people who grew up and lived in one place, acquired a huge number of friends, acquaintances, connections or had a good job to change their place of residence, country. We moved around Russia a lot and lived in different cities from the Far East to St. Petersburg, so I never had attachment to one place, and nostalgia does not torment me. After 25 years of living in California, I feel at home here.

The interview was prepared as part of the “Interviews with our Clients” project. If you are our Client, and we still have not talked about your project in the blog, contact us in any convenient way to prepare for publication.