Zafiro Ramirez is a content creator based in Spain. Photos submitted
By Tom Victoria
Zafiro Ramirez explores the human condition. The content creator covers contemplative topics on social media.
“I just post very human content, I would put it,” he said. “My videos are always revolving around deep topics or things that I think through on a daily basis. I talk about family issues and love, and then my own opinions on different topics. It's me trying to remind everyone that we are all human and that it's our first time being human. We kind of forget all the time. We're always trying to be perfect, to be the best version of ourselves. I've been seeing a lot of content on that, but we have lost the plot. It's our first time here. Chill out. Try to grow as a person, but just enjoy while you’re here.”
Zafiro, 24, of Spain covers such subjects as dealing with parents.
“That video was was titled You Cannot Save Your Parents,” he said. “It was basically me talking about how you cannot force someone, not even your parents, to change if they don't want to. It was me trying to share a little bit of my own personal experience with my own parents and trying to break this stereotype of because they are your parents, they are entitled to your forgiveness and to your love, and you owe them something. I was very much trying to say the opposite, saying they are your parents, yes, but they have to earn your love, too. There's parents that do not deserve the title of being called a dad or a mum.”
Fortunately, Zafiro’s parents learned to accept him for who he is.
“I've been lucky enough for mine to earn it because they have made their mistakes as I have made my mistakes because we are human, we are valuable,” he said. “But they changed out of love and for the right reasons. I thought about that video for a long time, and it was basically about we all have this desire to help our parents and we sometimes see that they are struggling and suffering from something that they can actually change. But if they don't want to, you cannot do anything about it because you're just dragging yourself into their own mess.”
Zafiro’s sexual orientation initially was an issue between them.
“We have come to a common ground more now, but the very breach we had in our relationship was because I came out when I was 13 years old,” he said. “They didn't like that at all. It was a mixture of scared and disappointed and all of these things you can imagine. I struggled with them with this topic a lot, but after many years of them actively trying to change and trying to see things in a different direction, a different perspective, they completely changed. The people that are my parents right now, they are nothing like the people they were when I was 14, 13 years old.”
Zafiro said his parents decided they didn’t want to lose having a relationship with their child.
“It was either they changing or they losing me,” he said. “I was a very rowdy teenager. I never disrespected my parents. I've always had very strong morals. I've always knew what I wanted. So there was this time where they were struggling with it. I was 17. They were still trying to figure it out. We didn't talk about it. But my dad caught me trying makeup on, and he started cussing me out. I took a random backpack, some clothes, and I was just like, I'm out of here. I don't want anything to do with you. Luckily enough, I had a friend and they let me stay with them. I was with them for a month, with his whole family, because they were very open to the LGBTQ community.”
Zafiro records a video for YouTube.
Zafiro was resolute in his stance.
“My mom was calling me every day like, we can fix this, let me try to talk to him,” he said. “I told her it's either you change or I'm not coming back. I will work. I will not study anymore. I don't care, but I cannot live under the same roof of abuse. I'm not oblivious to abuse. If you live with people who are bent on destroying you, you will be destroyed. They came to pick me up. I accepted. My dad said he was sorry. It came to a point where my mom was finally on my side. She told my dad you either accept this or I'm taking my son with me and you will never see him again. At the beginning, it was rough. We didn't talk very much, but as months progressed, I started seeing how he was trying to communicate more with me, talking to me, asking how I was doing in high school or in uni.”
Eventually, Zafiro’s parents became outright supportive.
“And now they are gladly talking about it and saying, do you have a boyfriend? Or so you want to have a family? Or maybe you can adopt if you want,” he said. “Now they have radically changed.”
Zafiro posts about whatever he’s dwelling on that day.
“I started with TikTok and then I opened the YouTube channel because a lot of people were asking me to do longer videos,” he said. “I started a series, it's called One Last Thing Before Bed. It's me trying to express this thought that you get and it doesn't let you sleep, and you're trying to think about it all the time. I talk about what I found about myself that week or what I've experienced that week.”
Zafiro talked about people’s fear of death in one video.
“One of my videos other than the last one I love so very much is that one about death,” he said. “Death is a very taboo topic and It's very scary for a lot of people. I've come to terms with it. I'm really young, but I'm not scared of dying. What I'm scared of is dying without having lived a fulfilling life. A lot of people tend to run towards religion, because they offer them a second chance or a better life next time. I do not believe in an afterlife. So I talk about how it's okay to be scared of death, but you need to realize and be honest with yourself that it's not death what you're scared of, it's not living to the fullest extent of your potential, of everything you can do here. That's one video I'm very proud of as well.”
Zafiro wants his followers to look at the big picture in life.
“I want them to look at my content and think,” he said. “We all need to think a little bit more about topics like this. We have come to an era, especially my generation, where we stay very much in the surface of the topics. We don't really deepen into it. We don't really get into the nitty-gritty of the stuff we try to talk about. It's very uncomfortable to face the truth. It's very uncomfortable to dive into these very philosophical topics and topics that have been around since humans have been on Earth. I want them to watch me as another human being that is trying to navigate life and is sharing my own journey and trying to express how I feel and in some way, get some comfort out of that as well, to make them feel like they are not alone on this journey as human beings.”
Zafiro wants to offer hope to those who need it.
“I was depressed for a long time because of my situation with my parents,” he said. “There's a video where I talk about how I'm planning for a future I didn't think I was going to have. I was a very depressed teenager growing up, and I didn't think I was gonna turn 20, let alone 24 right now. It's sometimes scary and overwhelming because when you don't expect to live longer than 18 or 16, you get to 20, and then you get to 24, and then you get to uni, and then everything is coming down to you. I talk about how thanks to how things evolved during my life and how things changed, I'm still here and I'm still working on myself and trying to encourage or to give hope to anyone around that could have been feeling the same way.”
Zafiro plans to utilize other settings with some videos.
“We have a beautiful park where I live,” he said. “I need to have a better camera, because right now I'm filming with my phone and a microphone, going out there to see the sunlight and also record videos of not necessarily following a series, but just me talking like a podcast almost.”
Zafiro was initially drawn to entertainment on social media before discovering more beneficial content.
“When I was a kid, I liked avoiding reality,” he said. “I wanted to be entertained and to not think about my personal issues. I just saw PewDiePie, gameplay, stuff like that. But then when I started to get into the more self-help side of YouTube, then I started watching longer videos and people talking about this. But it was so many years ago, I don't remember any particular creator who had my back or something like that. The first coming out video I saw that really impacted me was Joey Graceffa, and he made a video of his coming out and his story.”
Zafiro expounded on his content once he added YouTube to his output at the start of this year.
“I try to be very concise,” he said about his TikTok videos. “But I definitely hate blanket statements, so I don't just say things for saying them. I talk very much about what I speak about on YouTube. YouTube is just a longer version of my TikToks. For example, the last video I posted was my view on kindness. I was saying I don't just like people who are kind to me. I like people whose nature is to be kind to everyone around them. Because if you're being kind to me and lovely and whatever, and then you are the worst person ever or very cruel towards a waiter or another human being, I don't want that relationship. I don't want that connection because you are not kind. You are being kind to me, but you're not kind. I may make little reflections about daily life, what I journal about mostly.”
Zafiro’s career path is tied to language learning.
“I'm still figuring that out because right now I'm doing a master's degree in linguistics,” he said. “My plan for the future — I don't know if it will happen or if it won't happen because there's a lot of variables in life, so I cannot control everything — I want to become a professor at my university if that's possible. I will try my hardest. And if not, I will try to work. I'm thinking about working as a Spanish teacher or an English teacher outside of Spain, because I have this urge to explore the world a little bit.”
Despite what some follks espouse, Zafiro believes English is not a difficult language to learn.
“This is a very heated debate in the linguistics field,” he said. “I believe by what I have studied that English is actually one of the easiest languages to learn because it doesn't have as many tenses or as many different verb forms as French or Spanish or other languages. That's why it's globally used. In Europe, we all have a basic understanding of the language, and that's why it's used everywhere. It's scientifically proven that it has less units, less morphology, less lexemes. It's tricky because it uses its composition and its structure is very easy to learn, but then sometimes it changes. And there's no rules for those changes, but it does sometimes. I wouldn't say English is the hardest one to learn, but I don't think Spanish is either the hardest on earth to learn. But I believe that English is not as complex and as complicated as Spanish.”
Zafiro stressed the importance of inclusivity in society.
“It's essential,” he said. “It's extremely important for younger people to see that there's so many different humans and life outside of the comfort of their own home and that there's an infinite amount of combinations that a human can have. You need to be inclusive in order to respect every single human being. That's one of my main morals. You cannot be cruel towards another human being. We're all just trying to get by, and why would you make it harder for somebody else who is just trying to live their own life? Leave them alone.”
Zafiro wants people to not feel alone.
“I know that people who watch me, a lot of them feel very lonely,” he said. “That's why they watch my videos and feel related to some of my topics. I talk about loneliness a lot as well. I promote a lot the search for your own community, your own people. Because you don't only feel safe, you feel understood and that's essential. You discover so many things about yourself just by being surrounded by the right people, your community, your own people, not necessarily the LGBTQ community. I have straight friends and they're great. They're amazing because they are decent human beings. They don't have to be gay. A lot of the times, we think it's very hard to find people and we're gonna be lonely forever because we are so different. I always say this, if you exist, people like you exist. That's a rule. I know I can make friends and I can find a community and I can find people who support me.”
Zafiro agreed there is a plethora of creativity in the gay community.
“Once you get around the idea of you being outside of the norm, of you outside of these strict boxes we have all been told to what we should do and what we should like and what we should not like, once you get outside of that, there's so much room for exploration,” he said. “You just get creative. You start exploring so many things, art, books. At least for me, I started to have this hunger for knowledge, this hunger for knowing other people's lives and other perspectives. It has a lot to do with the actual effect of coming to terms with your own identity carries because for you to be able to say out loud, I am gay, I am a trans person, I am from the queer community, I do not belong in this dull and dark box that everyone told me I should be in.”
Zafiro said people in the LGBTQ+ community realize they don’t need to be restricted by limitations others try to set.
“There's this process where you start to dig in and to try to understand yourself more and more and you start looking for things you may not have been interested in before,” he said. “Maybe you like art, but they told you liking art was too feminine, so you didn't want to appear feminine. Or you start learning music, but they told you music was just for girls. Or you start learning how to create videos, but being an influencer is just for girls. There's so much hatred towards femininity that it's crazy. Once you get outside of that, you get more creative because of that.”
Zafiro is unsure if he would want his content creation to lead to fame.
“I don't know,” he said. “I'm not consistent because I consider this a hobby for now because it doesn't pay my bills. I started getting a lot of followers, and then I got to 3,000 followers on TikTok from overnight, and I was starting to get really anxious. I was like, oh my God, that's too many people for me. Obviously, I don't have control over random people who might just have hatred or they just want to spit vile at you. But I try to curate my platforms so everyone has a safe space. I consider my YouTube and my TikTok as safe spaces for people to really express what they think of the things I'm saying. And if I grow, if I get to a million followers, it would get harder to be able to control how people communicate with each other. But it also would be hard for me to differentiate my worth from the content I put out. I'm not against it. If it happens, I will manage it at the best of my ability.”
Zafiro dispensed advice to aspiring content creators.
“Just do it,” he said. “Literally just take your phone. Everything I record is on my phone. Take your phone, record your ass, and do it. Because I am telling you, the only things you regret are the ones you don't do. If you really want to start making content, do vlogging or do fitness influencing or whatever it is that you like, whatever it is that you want to do, drawing, I don't care, gameplays, I don't care, do it. Because if not, you're gonna regret it.”
Zafiro said the best result is when a content creator can make a positive impact.
“I don't want to be famous,” he said. “If I did get famous, then okay, fair enough. But it's not my objective. I don't do this to be praised or to have fame or anything like that. I do it because I love to express myself. I've received so many messages of people telling me thank you for this video, it has helped me a lot and please keep doing content. You brighten up my day and you feel like a best friend. It's that part of creating content, of feeling like even though it's a 30-second video, I might have created or started a ripple into someone's life. It's just incredible.”
Zafiro said the most important thing people can do is be compassionate.
“It's such a cliche thing to say, but you never know what someone is going through, so just be kind,” he said. “Every time I go outside, every time I meet people, I'm always kind because I don't know what that person is going through. We live in such a society where we just are driven by interests and money and who looks better. Smile at everyone, enjoy your life. We have such a short life, just enjoy it.”
Zafiro’s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ZafiroDeVenus
Zafiro’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zafirodevenus