I woke up to 116k views on a TikTok one morning — and that’s it. There was no gradual rise to stardom, there was no play-by-play of my success story. I, like several thousands of users, had been posting videos on TikTok for over a year. Nothing ever made it past 100 views. But one evening, I decided to pursue a rap challenge that was circulating the app. I wrote my verse, sat in my pajamas, and “rapped.” The next morning, I was semi-famous.
My friends congratulated me; even people I barely knew were pleased to see my face on their “For You” page. Back in 2018, when it was uncool to have a TikTok (then known as m.usically), people might have made fun of me. In fact, people did make fun of me. But guess where those people are now? They’re on TikTok.
I wrote a decent verse, but people were mostly drawn to my voice. The comments praised its raspy, mysterious notes. I saw these comments and I saw my views climbing, and I knew I had to act fast: a method I dubbed “riding the viral wave.” If I didn’t ride this wave, I knew I could lose an opportunity to change my life.
“You sound like Mai from Avatar,” TikTok user @mabesquinn wrote on my rap video. Mai, a raspy-voiced villain from the Nickelodeon series, Avatar the Last Airbender, became the force that transformed my social media. In the next video I published, I quoted one of Mai’s iconic lines. As of October 19th 2020, that video is short of a million views; it’s the reason I have a platform.
Following my success as Mai, I found myself in a few different TikTok subcultures. The first was the Avatar community of TikTok. It just so happened that the video streaming service, Netflix, had recently added Avatar The Last Airbender to their serve. People were either discovering or rewatching the hit series in 2020, which meant that there was a re-emergence of Avatar in pop culture. I learned, quickly, that there was a whole community of TikTokkers that were famous for simply sounding like Avatar characters. And I just so happened to get lucky: the gang was missing a Mai. Talk about right timing.
The second subculture I found myself in? The Dark Knight Trilogy. People wanted me to perform lines as Heath Ledger’s Joker, Tom Hardy’s Bane, and Christian Bale’s Batman. Following that, I dipped my toes into AI voice acting. I performed lines as GLaDOS, a corrupted computer system from the game, Portal. I had a better time trying lines as Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri.
I even found myself circulating anime trends. I took a stab at Nature’s raspy and boyish lines (“Believe it!”) and the OG Ash Ketchum from Pokemon (“Alright Pikachu. Use thunderbolt!”) I gave Buttercup from The Powerpuff Girls a try, but my voice was much too deep.
No matter what subculture I visited, however, my videos received the same comments:
Can you make a OnlyFans just for your voice? Phone sex with you would be crazy. I could listen to you all day, but preferably at midnight in my bed.
I knew my time as Mai wouldn’t last forever. She doesn’t even have that many lines in the show. But when the conversation shifted from cartoon characters to my sex appeal, I was sad. In order to stay relevant, a part of me wondered if I would have to commit to this hypersexual caricature of myself. Should I embrace it, I thought, like Jessica Rabbit? In theory, it’s fun to imagine yourself as a sex icon with a unique voice, like Marilyn Monroe or Lauren Bacall. But I’m not an actress in an Old Hollywood film — I’m a senior in college. I began fearing I had damaged my reputation already.
I thought about deleting my account, but that felt like I was being ungrateful. I thought about discontinuing my posts, but the media would still be out there, permanently. I was paranoid that something bad was coming for me, but I didn’t know what kind of bad. When your videos get hundreds of thousands of views, reality begins to shift around you.
And reality continues to shift around me. I am regularly consumed by my dread. I worry that my online presence has tarnished job opportunities. I worry that my privacy will be revoked.
People tell me that it is dumb to feel this way. “Hundreds of people would do anything to go viral,” my professor said. “You have a chance to do something here. You really do.”
I want to believe that, but I don’t know exactly what it is that I am doing. I am humbled to think that maybe no one does. We take gorgeous photos and post them online, hoping to gain plenty of likes and followers. We breathe a sigh of relief when we pass 1000 followers: we think we’ve somehow made it. Yet there is still the underlying question of why: why are we really doing this?
When the social media accounts of deceased relatives, friends, or strangers appear on my social media, I feel something indescribable. There are often recent comments on the latest post. “You’ll be missed;” “I’m so sorry;” or “Rest easy, angel.” These comments will never be read by the person they’re meant for, but they’re permanently there. Yet something feels illegal about scrolling through these pages. It’s a violation of privacy and nature. This is especially strange when several years have passed. The world has moved on, and yet the inactive account remains frozen in time.
It may seem strange for me to relate accounts of the deceased to my active social media, but I feel the same anxiety. Every time I post a video, I wonder what will happen to it. We send these darlings off into the big, bad Internet without a clue on what will happen to the source and to ourselves. I wonder if my videos have affected people, if my videos are quoted like other Internet memes. I wonder if old friends and ex-boyfriends have stumbled onto my page. I wonder if these videos will ruin my life, or if one day, my voice work will be in some 2020 film archive.
The Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma” broke down this feverish malaise best: we weren’t meant to interact with this many people. Our brains are able to process about 150 people at most, so the fact that our Instagram picture may reach 300 likes is mindblowing. Even my lowest performing videos reach an audience of at least 3500. That’s insane to me.
But what part of this is sane?
Even though I am filled with dread, even though I am uploading videos into a void, I still feel a commitment to do this. You’d think that after all of this, I would be relieved to see my views drop. I feel the opposite, though. When one of my posts flop, I worry that my fifteen seconds of fame are finished. So what do I do? I make more content.
In that way, I become the product that “The Social Dilemma” warns of. Our brains like numbers. Our reward centers are pleased to see our Instagram posts get 400 likes as opposed to 200 likes. It inspires us to make another post, — to get even more likes — so that we may feel the rush of serotonin.
Plenty of us are aware of this, yet we continue to keep using the apps. “It’s hard to ignore your phone when it feels like the entire world is on your phone,” my friend, Jasmine, told me over the phone. “We’re addicted because we’ve made it impossible to not function this way.”
Jasmine is right. We are lying to ourselves when we say that social media is a tool. It may have once been a way to keep up with family or reach out to strangers. But tools aren’t supposed to drive us into emotional turmoil. They’re supposed to better our lives.
I’m still posting on TikTok — only performing Mai lines once in a while — to discover what opportunity to make of this. It’s been a month and a half since my debut, but I am still feeling new to all of this. Each morning I wake to 99+ notifications and each night I go to bed with 99+ notifications. That kind of attention will change you. For myself, I hope it’s a good change.