We were lucky to catch up with Rainn recently and have shared our conversation below.

Rainn, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I honestly can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t want to do something creative. The exact niche I wanted to fit into changed over the years, from me being a little kid thinking that I wanted to paint professionally, to moving up to the idea of creating my own comics, to really falling in love with storytelling and thinking I was going to become a writer. The medium might have constantly changed, but that passion for making something has always been a part of me.

Unfortunately, as with many creative minded folks, along with the passion has always come the self-doubt and the critique. I always found a reason why I couldn’t do something creative. It might be that I didn’t think I was doing it well enough, or it was fun but it wasn’t going to make money, or I was just in a bad state and I couldn’t find the energy to be creative. As so many of us are, I am my own worst enemy when it comes to the things that I love the most, and so for a long time I put the idea of dedicating my life to any sort of creativity out of my mind.

Cue 2020 and everything that came with it. I think the limitations that were put in place during 2020 led a lot of people to find new hobbies or rediscover old hobbies, and I fell into that category. Originally, I thought I was just falling back in love with doll collecting. A new brand was coming out, Rainbow High, and they looked so beautiful I knew that I had to have them. I hadn’t collected dolls for about five years at that point, but they really reinvigorated my interest in the hobby.

What was different, though, was that I didn’t feel content to just have them. In the past, I had collected dolls, and that was all the joy I needed. Yet in this era of my life, I found that I was not only craving the experience of enjoying a collection, but also being a part of a community and being able to do something creative with this love for tiny plastic people. I remembered watching doll reviewers and doll customizers when I was younger, and I thought…why don’t I do that?

Immediately that little voice inside my head woke up again. “You’re not that funny, you’re not that interesting, what do you really have to offer?” But this time it felt less compelling, and there was another voice that was asking a different question: what was stopping me?

And the answer was nothing. I had Internet access, I had a phone in my pocket that was fully capable of filming videos and recording audio, and editing whatever footage I ended up getting. I had a supportive then-fiancée, and a lot of time on my hands because, again, it was 2020. So instead of letting another creative outlet fall to the wayside and becoming victim to my harsh self criticism yet again, I unboxed a doll, and I filmed it. I set up a YouTube channel, posted the video thinking that no one would see it…and yet, people did. What’s more, people liked it.

I haven’t stopped since that moment. It’s been coming up on five years now, and I can count on one hand the number of weeks that I have not uploaded any video. I’m thinking of new ideas constantly, interacting with the community that we’ve built, and just having a blast making something creative the focus of my life again, even though when I was younger, I never would have predicted making videos would have been finally stuck for me.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I go by Rainn, mainly use they/them pronouns, and I am a doll collector, enthusiast, and content creator.

I was raised as a girl, so I played with dolls growing up and it wasn’t really a taboo situation. It was “normal” for little girls to play with dolls, so my interest in them was fully supported by my family.

As I got older, I did have my phase where I hit somewhere around 12 to 13 and thought, I’m too cool for Barbie now. It’s sad looking back, because my love for dolls never faded, it was just the knowledge that I was “supposed to” grow out of them that led me to give up my toys and move on…for a couple of years.

Then a new doll brand came out, Monster High. And they were cool and edgy enough for my teenage self to think it was okay to get back into dolls, as long as they were the weird ones. During this time, I did start to explore a little bit into the online doll community, and I was especially fascinated by people who made videos about their dolls. Sometimes that was just sharing them and their thoughts, other times it was redressing their dolls, or even going so far as to remove the factory face paint and give them a new face.

Once my beloved Monster High was discontinued, I stopped collecting dolls because I thought (again, as an angsty teenager) I couldn’t justify buying other types of dolls that were too cute. I wasn’t super secure in myself and my interests, so I let this passion fall to the wayside.

Overtime, though, I was able to reconnect with my love of dolls, and as an adult, I was able to do it in so many more ways and so much more deeply than I had been able to when I was younger.

Now I like to say, anything you can do with dolls I will with do with dolls. I do make some content for Instagram and TikTok, but my main focus is making YouTube videos. I will do doll reviews, critiques, opinion pieces, analyses, customizing….really, anything! I love the freedom that being a content creator in general and especially creating for the community that has been built around my channel brings. I feel like there are endless ways that I can express myself and bring in other interests to this central theme of dolls.

Sometimes I like to gather data, and I can do that with slightly more analytical videos, like when I tried to determine if there was a link between the race of Disney princesses, and how many limited-edition dolls they were given (results were inconclusive, but it was a fun experience). Or if I’m feeling artsy, I can make videos creating my own characters with dolls, like when I did a series turning existing base dolls into rainbow themed fairies that I designed myself. Or most often, if I just want to share my opinion and talk to other people who are into the same things as I am, I can chitchat about new releases.

It’s just such a cool feeling to always have my mind going in some way when it comes to my channel and the dolls that I collect. I’m constantly looking for inspiration as I’m out and about for how I can connect different things to dolls or new things I might want to talk about, or new concepts for different customs. I’m never bored, and there’s always something unexpected and wonderful on the horizon.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal is simple, obvious, and honestly one that I think is still overlooked despite that: have fun.

In all fairness, this is pretty easy for me to say because I’m in a situation where my videos don’t have to generate enough income to live off of. I have a wonderful husband with a career of his own, so there is inherently some more freedom that I have knowing that he can sustain us and I don’t have to.

But even recognizing that, I still think that having fun is a goal that anyone doing something creative should have for themselves even if they do need to make a living off of what they’re doing. Working in any sort of creative field, to me, is not like working a 9 to 5. If you work in an office, as long as you get through your tasks for the day, you don’t have to care. You might pretend to, because that’s what your boss wants to hear, but you don’t actually have to have a passion for inputting numbers into a spreadsheet, for example.

Creativity is different. You can’t force creativity. You can’t clock in, not care but get the work done, and clock out. You have to have a desire to make something and there is always going to be a little bit of soul that needs to be brought forth, at least to my mind. I don’t think that you can make something creative and good without caring about it at least a little bit.

So while saying that my goal is to have fun might sound frivolous, I honestly think that it’s necessary for me to continue to make good content. If I’m not having fun, the videos that I produce are going to be worse because it’s impossible for me to put my full effort into something that I don’t care about. Whereas if I am having fun, I’m going to end up having more innovative ideas, and I’m going to put in more effort without even realizing that it’s happening, and the people who view what I make can feel that.

Burnout is always something that can happen to creatives, and it still does happen to me on occasion, but I find that it is so much easier for me to get out of slumps if I make sure the number one priority is always that I’m making something that I feel good about and that I would want to see. If I wasn’t putting fun first and wasn’t genuinely excited to sit down every time that I need to film, my videos would be soulless and empty and boring, and I wouldn’t be successful. In a lot of spaces, it seems like the narrative is that fun is antithetical to success, but I find that for me, the two have to go together.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I first started making videos, I would not have necessarily considered myself to be the pinnacle of health, but I was healthy. At the very least, healthy enough to go about my day to day without really thinking too much about any aches or pains or sensitivities. I have asthma, so sometimes I would need to take my inhaler, but for the most part my physical health was average. Not something that I had to think about.

Then, in 2022, my hands stopped working.

Or at least, that’s how it felt. Seemingly overnight, I was having terrible pains in both of my hands. And it wasn’t just one kind of pain, either. It felt like I was cycling through every symptom in every book that there was. Sometimes my hands burned, sometimes I lost strength, Sometimes they were numb and tingling, sometimes there was just a bone deep ache. But they were always in pain.

I quite literally could not function. I couldn’t even unscrew a water bottle or carry a mug full of coffee without being in pain. Washing my hair in the shower became an event because it hurt so bad. I ended up having to take a leave from the retail job that I was working at the time, because I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even exist in my home, let alone do an outside job.

Of course, I went to the doctor. Initially, I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, and advised to rest my hands and do some stretches and wear wrist braces to try to ease the pain. And some of those things helped a little, but the pain would not go away. I was supposed to only have to go easy on my hands for a couple of weeks before I would start to see improvement and allegedly be able to return to my job, but at the end of those couple of weeks, I was still in agony every day.

I ended up having to quit that job entirely. Since then, I’ve been to many different medical professionals in varying practices, and I actually still don’t have a diagnosis. Carpal tunnel syndrome was ruled out after I had a nerve test and my results came back fine. X-rays revealed nothing. One person in orthopedics was baffled by me because I had regained some grip strength when I went to see them, and I had plenty of flexibility in my hand, but I also had this unexplained pain.

A combination of going unbelievably easy on myself, stretches, and massages managed to get the pain down to a bearable level, but anytime that I tried to resume what used to be my normal, it came back full force. While I would love to have answers and a solution, at the current point in my life, the simple truth is, I can’t use my hands the way that I used to, the way that most people do, and I have to be so careful with them.

I have to plan out things on my day to day. If I’m going to scrub down the kitchen, I absolutely cannot chop vegetables for dinner that night because that will cause the pain to flare up again, and I won’t be able to do anything at all for a few days.

And of course, while the most immediate and noticeable impact was on my simple human activities. just maintaining being a person, losing my ability to freely use my hands severely hurt my capability to create things.

I can’t type on a normal keyboard. Touchscreens are a lot better, but typing on a laptop or desktop computer is out of the question for me. Even just using a mouse on a computer for too long can do me in. That makes editing videos not nearly as easy as it used to be. When it comes to the really physical creative elements, like drawing up a design for a doll or braiding a doll‘s hair, tasks that used to take me 5 to 10 minutes now take me hours or even days because I have to be so slow about it so as to not cause myself harm.

The whole experience was and still is unbelievably frustrating. For a while there, when the pain was at its worst and most constant, I didn’t know what I was going to do. So many of the things that made life worth living for me were tied up in being creative, whether that was around dolls or not, and I didn’t know how to find meaning if I couldn’t write, couldn’t draw, couldn’t sculpt, couldn’t edit.

There wasn’t anything that I could do besides buckle down and hope And I had to hope because if I didn’t have that, I had nothing. I knew that things couldn’t be the same as before, but I had to find new ways to do them. I didn’t have to do every type of art that I used to, and I didn’t have to do it in conventional ways, but I had to have at least one outlet or I was going to lose my mind.

So I was extra careful and stopped doing anything really tedious for a while. I tested out countless different tools to try to help me. Different wrist braces, and pencil grips, and using talk to text a lot more than I ever thought that I would.

I experimented and failed and tried again, and finally was able to tend to my hands enough to make the pain bearable, and find ways that I could still do the things I love.

It’s still not easy, but as long as I am careful, I can do most of the things that I was afraid I was going to be robbed of forever. I can’t draw for eight hours at a time like I used to, but I can draw for 30 minutes, and that’s better than nothing. I have to try to edit my videos at least a couple of days in advance so that I have enough time to do it in little chunks, but I can still do it.

Of course, there are still days where it gets me down, and I wish that my hands could function normally, but most of the time I’m just so grateful that I found that inner strength to not just give up and quit on everything that I cared about. It might sound dramatic, but it really felt like a do or die situation. With no one in the medical field, able to give me a way out, I had to find a way to make it work because there simply was no other alternative. Find a way to do what I love, or life would be meaningless.

Now, everything that I am able to make honestly feels more special. I’m so aware of how much harder I have to work to accomplish the things that I do, and it makes the fruits of my labor so much sweeter to know that, even if it took me forever and was difficult, I did the thing.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/faerytaledolls/
• Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/c/faerytaledolls?sub_confirmation=1