Josh Monologue

The speaker shares the story of a Puma jacket that holds significant meaning to them. They have a passion for content creation and video production, starting from making skit videos as a child. In high school, they continued to make videos with special effects and gained a large following on Instagram and TikTok. To establish a recognizable identity, they chose to wear the Puma jacket in their videos, making it a part of their online persona. While they no longer wear it, the jacket holds sentimental value as a reminder of their accomplishments and the memories made with friends and family. So, the item I'd like to share and talk about what it means to me is a Puma jacket. It's a thin zip-up gray like a fall jacket, and it really represents for me an important and fulfilling time in my life when I began to thrive and succeed in what was and is a big passion of mine, which is content creation and video production. So, for a little bit of background on why this Puma jacket is valuable to me, when I was about 10 years old, I fell in love with making little skit videos with my friends and my family. I always remember just hounding my friends and siblings and being like, hey, let's make a video. I got a great idea. I got into doing special effects like lightsabers and gun muzzle flashes and people flying around and stuff, and I would always make like fight scenes with my friends. So, flash forward to high school, which for me really wasn't a great time because most of my friends went to other schools, but through this time I continued to make these funny videos with editing and special effects, and I started posting them on Instagram and eventually TikTok where the videos really took off. I remember being at that wild stage of going from like 100 followers to all of a sudden gaining tens of thousands of followers every week with millions of views on my videos. This was all super surreal and really fulfilling to be witnessing the, you know, really the payoff to the hours I had spent making videos prior to that. It was at this point that I had the thought to pick out something to wear that would be like my outfit, something that would identify me that I could wear in all of my videos. So I looked through my closet and I picked out this gray Puma jacket because I was like, oh, this looks kind of cool and it could go with different colors of shirts and I could definitely wear it while I'm doing whatever I'm doing for the videos. So I wore this little jacket, or I wore this jacket in a little video of me like dancing with a lightsaber or something, and almost every video after that I was wearing this jacket. It became a part of my online persona, something that was instantly recognizable for people, and I saw it as like a fun little costume or something. I think this jacket is honestly the only article of clothing that I have that I would never want to lose or give away just because of what it means to me. I don't even wear it at all anymore because I kind of see it as like this special thing just because it holds a lot of sentimental value for me now. Eventually I took a little break and I stopped wearing the jacket, but it'll always remind me of how far I've come, what I've accomplished, and the great times and memories I've made with my friends and family making those videos.