"Okay, but does this f*** with your head at all???"

The mysteries, secrets, and confessions of a veteran social media "influencer"

In the heat of my seventeenth summer, I was working the best job my meager teenage resume could afford me: collecting and pushing stacks of discarded shopping carts from their sad asphalt graveyard to the eager (and often abusive) shoppers whose groceries paid my 5 dollar hourly wage. The dry inland July was just as nauseating as the tedium of the work, and I passed countless day-long shifts doing the kind of math that only other minimum wage warriors understand:

In four hours, it will only be two hours until I have one hour until I have thirty minutes until my shift is over…

One afternoon, after a particularly brutal day that left my uniform damp with sweat and my feet pulsing in my non slip shoes, my manager had incredible news: if I wanted it, there was a spot opening up in the floral department.

Floral department.

I was the Little Princess learning that her rightful inheritance had been restored and she no longer had to serve as the orphanage scullery maid. I was free.

I agreed and showed up to my first shift ten minutes early. It was only then that I discovered what my role would be as the new kid in the refrigerated kiosk. I was on balloon duty. For eight hours a day, five days a week, it would be my unique and sole responsibility to inflate and arrange all of the (both mylar and latex) balloons necessary for the operation of this mid range suburban grocery store. Birthday parties, graduations, anniversaries– all of it.

The only problem, of course, was that I had a blood-freezing, bone-shaking, head-spinning fear of latex balloons. Specifically, I had the urge to jump under a table when one of them popped. And when you’re inflating fifty of the sunuvabitches before your first morning break, lest you face the wrath of the then-unnamed Karen who would be more than happy to verbally abuse you in front of your entire neighborhood if she’s late to the most socially significant baby shower of the season, they will pop. Many of them will pop. And they will pop with vigor.

I weighed the challenge of mettle laid before me. I looked to the parking lot I left behind. And I made my choice.

Who wants to be an “Influencer”?

I think about the balloons often, especially when I have to explain what I do for a living now. I’m at least five or six careers deep at this point, numbering among them: English teacher, live-in nanny, public health nonprofit educator, and (briefly) plus size runway model. They’ve all been easy to explain, and many have helped to inflate my ego when I made a first introduction. Oh me? I’m a high school teacher. Yeah, I know, but I love it so much. I do it for the kids, you get it. I still don’t know how to tactfully add “influencer” to the list.

When you say you’re an influencer, it summons (at least, for a long time, to me), an unfairly vapid portrait of a careless and wealthy Gen Z’r paying for luxury rental cars to take selfies in front of, or else a heavily filtered ingenue telling fast stories about something SHOCKING that happened to her on the subway in a 25-part series, all while applying layer after layer of mystery products to her perfect skin, peppered with pointed moments where the products take center stage, framed carefully, label-out, in front of her open palm. A modern Tom and Daisy Buchanan living comfortably in the digital East Egg we’ve built just for them.

Even if that’s our most reduced version of “the influencer,” it doesn’t hold up for long. The little people who live in your phone are much more than that. Scroll for a while and who do you see? Move through the scripted and clipped chunks of Saturday Night Live, past the crisp wordless chef making a functional pirate ship out of modeling chocolate, through the disembodied hands chopping bricks of moon sand into smaller bricks of moon sand. Eventually, you’re with people in their living rooms, their offices, their bedrooms, on their morning walks. They’re teachers or therapists or writers or baristas or handy ma’ams. They’re telling you stories about their lives, they’re recounting and explaining movies or memories or current events or history or art. They’re laying belly-down on the floor under their desk, telling you what’s happening in the world you share, all in less than ninety seconds. This is the kind of “influencer” I am. It’s not quite lifestyle, not quite vlogging, not quite journalism– it’s something completely new. The snootiest part of me hates the word “influencer,” and uses “digital creator” instead. But honestly, as I’m typing it out, it doesn’t sound better.

The snootiness comes partly from knowing just how it sounds to consider yourself “influential.” No one quite wants to acknowledge just how much the people in our phone mean to us, even though the format all but demands it. But really, why wouldn’t they? Our phones are a portal we share, even if we all see a different world on the other side. And the people within it are speaking to us; they’re sharing their lives, their joy, their pain– directly with us. We hear the shake in their voice when they’re emotional, we can feel the radiating energy of a good day from their eyes before they even speak, and sometimes we even see them cry. How many of us have relationships as intimate and emotionally honest as that with members of our own family? They speak into their phones as if they know who’s right on the other side, and we might follow what they’re up to, and what they have to say, for years.

I’ve been making “content” for TikTok and Instagram for something like the last four years, and there are people I have never met who have been with me the whole time. I started as a teacher who was just beginning to realize that he was probably trans, and there have been long periods where I was making, editing, and posting a 60-120 second video every. single. day. From 2021 until now, that’s hours upon hours of one-sided conversations to which they’ve been privy. Most of my audience is made up of other queer people, many of them teachers and parents, who never miss an opportunity to tell me how important I am to them. Earlier this year, when my husband and I were scrambling to pack and escape a volatile housing situation, we both went dark on all social media for a couple of weeks. Busy with prepping and moving a trailer hundreds of miles from our original home, we didn’t have the physical or emotional space to engage with the digital world. When we came up for air and had the chance to “check our phones,” we were flooded with care and concern from every corner of the inhabited world. Where had we been? Were we okay? They were thinking of us. They hoped the cats were okay, and that the chickens and dogs had found new homes. What would we do about the farm? Where would we go? Did we want to stay with them? We were welcome any time.

For two trans men who were facing radio silence from much of our biological family, it was hard to know what to make of it. Was love sent through a desktop any less real?

The prickle of shame

Part of what makes me resistant to the thought of being an “influencer” is the prickle of shame I still have from leaving my life as a teacher in my rear view. The stability of that life was one of the reasons I wanted it, and why it was so hard to leave, even when it became painfully clear that it was going to eat me from the inside out. I thought I would do it forever, and that I would have the eternal satisfaction of retaining one of the only modern careers you can still find in the pages of a Richard Scarry storybook. After I left teaching, I searched for a career of equal weight and societal value to fill the hole that was left behind. Even though I was still making, as I used to say, “little videos for the internet,” I wasn’t convinced it could be the only way I could help to pay our bills. I had to find something of substance.

But my six months in the nonprofit world was a disaster. I watched as queer people in power used their station not to uplift their community, but cement their own position and pull the ladders up behind them. It made me bitter and pessimistic and disempowered. If I couldn’t find fulfillment in one of the last “morally pure” ways to survive under the boot of capitalism, what was the point?

It couldn’t really be “influencing,” could it?

It’s the kind of career that feels like it should always have air quotes around it. It comes at the end of the list of side hustles, not at the beginning. It’s impossible to explain, and even harder to justify. You’re supposed to throw it away when you say it; laugh at yourself. I’m an influencer. Can you believe it? That people pay me to do this? Richard Scarry would never allow for a small illustrated mouse to engage in such a line of work. It’s not enough. It’s not serious.

But I do take it seriously. It does matter to me. It is my career. And, for the most part, I love it.

Between Instagram, TiKTok, and Substack, the people who have actively chosen to follow what I create numbers just under half a million.

When I first started, I used to look up census data for cities in California to understand the size of it. Our brains aren’t engineered to comprehend numbers that large, and I still don’t. As I started to take what I was doing more seriously, I watched it grow. I have as many followers as there are people in Palm Springs… now Yorba Linda… Anaheim… San Francisco…

If it feels unserious, where does that notion originate? On the crowded flight in which I am currently tap tap tapping away on my little glowing laptop, every single person around me is watching or reading or listening to something created for them by someone like me. A woman jots down notes as she pauses and rewinds a podcast. In front of her, someone is binge watching every episode of Game Changer. In front of them, someone is scrolling TikTok and laughing silently to himself. In front of him, a neatly polished finger is swiping through an Instagram carousel, each slide in bold Helvetica, citing injustices, protests, and calls to action at NYU. Even my dad, someone who has never quite been able to grasp what it is I do, admitted to me recently that he and his wife spend their evenings watching YouTube travel influencers– couples taking cruises and living in vans and white water rafting in all of the aspirational places they want to be. We’re everywhere.

And, like the many other creators who came before me, as I exist more publicly in the world, my anonymity grows ever thinner. A hand on my shoulder as I wait for my Lyft at the airport. I just wanted to say thank you for your videos. They help me a lot. A small wave at the grocery store at 11pm. I heard you were in town, it’s so cool to run into you here. A smile as a barista hands me my coffee. Not to be weird or anything, but I watch your stuff on TikTok. Thank you.

It’s the kind of life I never pictured for myself, but it’s also definitely not for everyone.

Regrettably, the intimacy of this new digital frontier is the perfect vehicle for those who need a place to project the most unhealed parts of themselves. I’m not just talking about the unhinged corners of the internet we now see making all of our domestic and foreign policy decisions– that’s an obvious one (and we’ll return to it in a minute). I mean the subsection of my inbox and comment sections that are haunted by people who are looking for answers– the kind I couldn’t possibly have for them. There are requests, and pleas, and questions, and accusations numbering somewhere between fifty and a hundred or more a day. They range from the earnest and hopeful (I’m a 45 year old cisgender woman, and my mother doesn’t understand why trans people deserve to live. I’m trying to find the right words to help her get it. What should I say?) to the emotionally exploitative (I don’t know if you’ll ever see this, but if you really care about trans people, you will post this information IMMEDIATELY. It’s irresponsible that you haven’t already, but I’m sure that if you just read the attached link, you’ll see that—) to the downright hostile (to suggest that we should vote in an election that supports the institution of American imperialism makes you a supporter of genocide. The blood of these children is on your hands. You should be ashamed).

And that’s just from the people who like me.

This isn’t to say that those messages deserve to be ignored, that there’s no value or truth or light within the people who sent them. They’re just barking up the entirely incorrect tree. Like most other digital creators out there, I’m a (largely) one man operation. To answer everyone with the thought and nuance necessary would mean setting aside, at minimum, five to ten minutes for each of them. On a quieter day, that works out to about 5 or 6 hours. On a more active day, the math is impossible. There aren’t enough hours available for it.

And experience has taught me that even if that time could be magicked into existence, it wouldn’t satisfy most of them. That’s because they really aren’t talking to me, they’re talking to themselves. They might think they want something from me, but really what they’re expressing is a frustration and powerlessness that is much more painful and unsolvable than that. When we make big assumptions about people we don’t know, when we want answers from them they can’t possibly have, when we find our reactions to the things they say to be disproportionate and emotionally tumultuous, it’s because there’s a deeper part of us that is in need of something practically unnameable. We want to be heard. We want to be seen. We want (my deepest apologies for this one) our inner child to find healing and safety and attention and peace.

We are not super excited to be confronted by that.

Going Viral

And all of this is amplified tenfold when I find myself in the worst possible intersection of online circumstances: virality.

“Going viral:” the dream of the business owner and the nightmare of the creator.

If you aren’t familiar with our shitty mistress, Lady Algorithm, I’ll take a moment to explain how she works (in part). Though she is largely unknowable, we do know this about her:

When someone creates something and then hands it over to her, it passes through “tiers” of viewership, not unlike the trials and tests of Hercules, or the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno. The first tier is a sort of “test” audience – those who see it right away will be existing members of your digital following. These are usually a mix of your most die hard viewers and whoever happens to be online at the exact moment you post. If it does well within that highly selective focus group, the content moves outward for round 2. This will be more people from your existing pool of frequent flyers, but maybe not just followers this time. They could be people who have seen and liked your stuff in the past, but haven’t made a commitment to the “follow” button. If things are still going well, it pushes to viewers who fit the “audience profile” of your fans, even if they maybe haven’t seen you before. This model keeps rippling outward, reaching more and more people as the content gains traction and speed. Eventually, if something does well enough, it’s shown almost exclusively to new viewers who may have little to nothing in common with those in round one.

This whole process might happen across days, or it might happen in the span of minutes or hours.

For smiling men who make chocolate sculptures or disembodied hands cutting moon sand, this is the opposite of a problem.

For transgender public school teachers…

There are messages and comments (and handwritten letters, angry emails, and recorded voicemails) that will ring in my head for the rest of my life– truly some of the most vial excrement possible in human communication exists in the screenshotted bowels of my harddrive. And though I largely owe strings of virality the platform that now makes up my entire career, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

We are not, as human people walking this earth together, built to know what five hundred thousand people think of us at once. And for creators like me, people who share our light and lives and authenticity along with our “content” – it really is personal.

And within the agony? Sparks of addiction. Nestled within every disgusting “delete and block” are a dozen strangers detailing every way in which I am actually the embodiment of goodness and charity and generosity and saintliness. The notifications pile up, the social slot machine rings and jingles with sevens and cherries. The algorithm giveth and she taketh away. If you aren’t careful, you’ll find yourself needing it. You’ll be up in the middle of the night, the soft light of your phone drying your eyeballs as you scrape dopamine from the very bottom of the barrel until you’re trapped inside.

Climbing out of the dopamine barrel

So how is it possible?

How have I done this over and over and over again for years without losing myself?

Well, do you remember the balloons?

My promised respite from the horrors of grocery store parking lot shopping cart collection?

The first time a balloon popped in my hands as I filled it, my scream rang so sharply through the fluorescent caverns of that Ralphs that two managers and the butcher ran to the front of the store to see if I was being violently murdered.

And then it happened again. And again.

Each time, it hurt a little less. My fingers became more skilled, more nimble, more practiced. I could tell when the latex was stretched right to its limit, and I would wrap its tail around and through, securing it to a ribbon in one movement. I bunched them into bouquets and made a set of extras for the drive. Balloons popped, and I didn’t blink.

The algorithm, in all of her mystery, has a singular purpose: to keep you scrolling. She wants you to stay, to engage, to feel angry, to snap. She wants her creators to need her, and to try and please her, even though we all know how impossible it is.

I don’t listen to her anymore.

Well, I listen to her less.

Like her master, capitalism (there’s always a bigger fish), rewards only come on the heels of exponential and unyielding growth. That might work for a computer, but not for the sacks of meat who built them. We have other needs, greater needs. We need to find and connect with one another, but we don’t need to do it in just one place. We need to walk in bare feet on hot sand, we need to make art, we need to giggle and dance as we make breakfast together, and yeah, we need to touch grass. My secret for making this my career is that I don’t let it sit in the center of my life, and I don’t put stock into my ability to please the unfeeling needs of an algorithm who doesn’t care about me.

To everything there is a season. There are times where the things I make find new audiences and I’m showered in a frenzy of validation and dopamine. There are times where I will work for days on a 3500 word article and only my cousin in Wisconsin reads it (thank you for your support, Justine). I trust that the cycle will continue. During the lows, I remember how much my work means to me. At the highs, memories of single digit view counts lean in close and whisper to me “memento mori.”

Recently, a client and friend who I have been coaching in the ways of Lady Algorithm asked me what it feels like to be right all the time. After two months of social media coaching, she had just experienced her first taste of virality, and was entering the finding out phase that always seems to come after fucking around. A video about Freud that effectively doubled her following on Instagram had also attracted a shocking degree of antisemitism once it breached the final algorithmic circle of the inferno. At the start of our relationship, I warned her that “social media coaching” was likely going to be “mostly the worst parts of therapy.” After spending a mothers day obsessively reading and deleting comments, she was ready to tell me how much that had been true.

What’s next, she asked me. How do you prepare, knowing that it’s just going to happen again,

Well, I told her. If you want to stay, you’ll just have to grab another balloon and try again.

This essay is a companion piece to Alisa Zipurski’s “I Went Viral and I Kind of Hated It”

If you’d like to follow or support my work, I’m on TikTok and Instagram at justflintisfine, and my first book — Teach Like an Ally — is available now for pre order!