In her last YouTube video of 2020, influencer and makeup artist NikkieTutorials reflected on her whirlwind of a year, which included publicly coming out as transgender after she was blackmailed by people attempting to leak her story to the media and getting robbed at gunpoint alongside her fiancé Dylan Drossaers in their Netherlands home.
In a fan Q&A, Nikkie, whose full name is Nikkie de Jager, talked about coming out just shy of one year ago.
"I came out under pressure and at the time, I've said this a couple times, I felt like I was going to lose it all. Thank god I didn't," she said. "I don't know if I'm allowed to say this but to the one who tried to blackmail me, honey, look at me now."
The artist, who recently collaborated with Selena Gomez in a YouTube video, added that she doesn't like how the conversation shifted from her accomplishments after she shared she was transgender.
"The one thing that I feared in the beginning was that everything that I accomplished or achieved in life, it would no longer be, 'Oh Nikkie won this' or 'Nikkie did that,'" she explained. "I was scared that it would become, 'Oh Nikkie, the transgender, won this and achieved that.' That has happened, which, if you're part of the media, you need to stop that, okay? I doesn't matter what I am, I'm Nikkie, okay? So if I win an award, I win an award!"
Nikkie called the day after her coming out announcement the "best day" of 2020, while her robbery was by far the worst, even compared to being blackmailed.
"The robbery was worse," she said. "In that moment, I feared for my life. With the blackmailing, I feared for my career."
Later in the video, she said she would have preferred to keep the robbery private.
"Now I have to keep talking about it. It gets brought up so many times now. I think if you're not in the public eye, you can forget about it faster," she shared. "Now people are like, 'How are you after the robbery?' People always come from a good place, but it's a lot. For me, the entire experience happens again. It repeats and repeats in my head."
Watch the full video above.