I was a writer and an influencer. I am still a writer.

guess it's time to talk about this

Man, I had to log back onto Instagram for this shit. I’ve been off for over a month which is practically a silent retreat for someone like me who, you may deduce from the title, has spent a considerable chunk of time on there.

I had to log back onto Instagram to retrace my life. And I had to write this directly in the Substack CMS versus my usual Google Doc because it feels like time is of the essence, and I better speak before the winds of discourse come a’blowin. Before another CEO is shot or famine breaks out or Melania gets a BBL or whatever.

That’s something I learned from influencing: act fast lest they move on.

It all started in 2014. I’d been out of college a while, still living with my parents in rural Pennsylvania, working as an admin assistant at the local hospital. Life wasn’t panning out how I’d hoped. Not that hope had a name or shape but it rang like a faint bell at all hours:

Gotta be someone.

Gotta be someone.

Gotta.

Be.

SOMEONE.

Work was slow. I sat hunched in my cubicle devouring blogs. Drinking black iced coffee with Splenda. Drove to Philly on the weekends for warehouse raves. Railing lines, dodging the ghost of missed opportunities. I knew nothing about how the world worked but I knew that I was born to write. That I could spin my lowly existence into emerald silk and perhaps, one day, it would be worn by someone important.

That year, I discovered Elite Daily’s contributor program. I Googled “how to write a pitch” and fired away. Everyone starts somewhere, right?

Baby, if you could read the capital d Drivel upon which I cut my teeth! I wrote about Drake. I wrote about astrology. I wrote about raving. I wrote about how betrayed I felt by the promise of a college degree—something no one in my family but I had. And I wasn’t getting paid by this corny ass site but I didn’t care because I was writing. And people read it. Sometimes they even shared the links on Twitter, praising my garbage essays as “so relatable.” I guess we were all 23 and on molly, anyway.

Relatable. Ah. I liked the way that felt on my tongue. That I did not have to be more than what I was to be a writer was news to me. I ditched the downtown New York cool girl fantasy and sat cross-legged in the bookstore until my eyes bled. Rihanna had just accepted her CFDA award where she proclaimed, “she can beat me, but she cannot beat my outfit.” That’s how I felt about writing. I had a lineage of lifelong waitresses and Italian immigrants on my side. You can’t knock the hustle.

I moved to Philly in 2016 and that amorphous hope took shape. I started hanging out with creative people, learning more just walking the streets of Francisville than I had in my 25 years back home. Underground rap shows and poetry readings and oooo what’s this socialism stuff you speak of? and yes, I’ll model for your streetwear brand and spend my electric bill on an Indian feast. All the more to write about! So I bought a laptop and a nice camera, and launched my blog in 2017.

Now, I was working three jobs at the time: My 9-5 as a grant writer at a low-income school—the job I moved to Philly for; bartending at a sports bar across from Reading Terminal Market; and managing social media for a local dentist. I would get home from the bar at 2 AM on a Thursday, write until 4, and be off to the school by 8 o’clock to take some lawyers on a tour and ask if they’d like to sponsor the basketball program for $3,000. It was unsustainable as fuck but I was tweaking off this need to create; everything else was means to an end.

I noticed an uptick in readership as I invested more time in self-promotion. I started curating my Instagram: self-timer, cool outfit, empty street. Random filler photos of coffee or architecture to hone the “aesthetic.” Hashtags! So many hashtags! I thought, who cares if I’m writing about grief under a bikini selfie on my fire escape? Or capitalism and aging with filtered Coachella pics? If it makes people read my work *and* I’m getting gassed up in the process, that’s a win-win, no?

Brands started reaching out. Mejuri because she loves gold. AllSaints because she looks good in leather. Outdoor Voices because she’s #doingthings. Merit lipsticks and complimentary facials and CBD gummies and Le Labo perfume and silk maxi skirts and free meals around the city. I had next to no following and somehow, I was building a lifestyle that looked cool enough from the outside that people wanted to look under the hood.

wearing a bunch of gifted AllSaints clothes, drinking a Panera tea in a parking garage… with short hair? confusing times at BBM HQ

Commence Substack migration. My tiny audience was engaged enough that I had over 100 *paid* subscribers within two months of launching.

But the Instagram fodder grew spiritually unbearable. I felt grimy encouraging people to buy things while resenting my own materialism. “Use code DIA15 at checkout.” Working angles to get the shot. Gag.

But I was a girl from Appalachia who swept the floors of a dive bar from the time I was old enough to hold a broom. I had people drop me off down the street so they couldn’t see where I lived. And I was gonna be a writer, goddamnit. And if that meant performing something I didn’t believe in to reach people with the work that I did believe in, then I could live with myself. Remember: means to an end.

COVID changed my brain, both the virus and the cultural impact of lockdown amid political upheaval. I was possessed by morality, ready to bully anyone’s grandma into donating to mutual aid funds and protesting in the streets. Fuck a little tear gas, we ride at dawn! My Instagram story was always 100000 clicks long. Candy-colored social aphorisms for days. Yes, I was a self-surveilling liberal robot, paralyzed by the knowledge that there wasn't enough daylight or money in my bank account to save the world.

Outdoor Voices had asked me to do a story takeover, i.e., they send me some clothes that I film myself #doingthings in, and they post the whole thing to their Instagram story. This was only a few months after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered on run, so I used the opportunity to talk about the politics of safety and running during These Violent Times. It did not even occur to me that this likely wasn’t “brand safe” for them. I rushed around to meet their content deadlines only to be totally ghosted, “story takeover” be damned. Lol.

Then in 2021, I posted to my story (story, story, story I wanna kill myself) that I was taking some time to learn about Gaza. I shared links to Palestinian documentaries and resources for support. A local artist and activist (whom I’d considered a friend) wrote a long story about a “yt influencer she had to unfollow after writing lazy ‘I’m learning’ posts instead of standing against genocide.” She did, indeed, unfollow me and continued her diatribe.

Getting hate like that was new for me. I thought I’d clearly communicated that my brand would never eclipse my politics. People over property etc. But being reduced to “yt influencer” which I cannot even type now without laughing put the nail in the coffin; mark my words, I would never work with a brand again. The only creative output you could connect me to would be writing, the thing I set out to do in the first place. I archived nearly all my Instagram photos and unfollowed the bitch. Spent an entire year hating myself. Never worked with a brand again.

For a long time, this journey embarrassed me. My shiny, orange checkmark never fails to remind me how I got here: by telling people this vitamin C serum will make your skin GLOW and doesn’t MY glowing skin and witty voice make you want to visit brokebutmoisturized.substack.com, maybe toss me forty bucks while you’re at it? And I mean the WHITE FRAGILITY of getting UPSET over being mini-cancelled! Lordy. I could not give less of a shit now. I live honestly. I uplift people. I keep writing. There is nothing else.

I have learned, against my will, that some journalists see influencers on Substack as a bad thing. A blow to platform credibility. The vibes are off. Fair enough. But speaking from experience, I implore you to look back on your career and recount the ways you’ve sold your soul to write knowing this is the only option. Bloodshot eyes. Carpal Tunnel. Language. Truth. Story. The end.

At least some of us got cute clothes out of it.