Confessions of a Former TikToker

2024

January 1, 2021: The day I went viral on TikTok

Fifty-five million views.

More people than the entire population of Canada had watched a video of me painting, overlaid with a melodramatic, confessional voiceover set to a mournful piano soundtrack. The piece depicted an ashen female figure curled in fetal position, ensnared by a swirling mass of menacing red tendrils sucking the life force out of her. I entitled it Mother. 

In the sixty-second voiceover, I disclosed to the whole wide internet: 

My mom never wanted children. She was too strong-willed, too independent. She always thought she’d make a terrible mother. But my dad threatened to divorce her if she didn’t bear his children, so here I am. My mom never wanted children, and she reminds me of it.

“I hate you.”

“I don't want you anymore.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I will never speak a word to you again.”

“You’re the reason I'm depressed.”

“You are the one who makes this family unhappy. You are the one who makes me unhappy. And if you’re unhappy, it’s all on you.”

She’s the reason I used to cry myself to sleep and hyperventilate in school bathrooms. At the end of ninth grade, I came in twenty minutes late to my physics final, sobbing, because she was screaming at me and refused to take me to school until she was done.

It’s not always like this though. Sometimes the turbulent sea calms and sunlight peeks through the suffocating clouds. And in the brief tranquility, I allow myself to hope. Stupid hope. It seems like I never learn my lesson.

I love my mom, and I know she loves me too. But she’s also the person I fear most in the world.

***

By my junior year of high school, I had practically abandoned art. The haunting penumbra of college applications loomed over my future. I could not afford to give into hedonistic pursuits – I had to focus on the debate and varsity tennis teams I captained, the Girl Up club I founded and led, the school council I sat on, the event committees I chaired, the nonprofit organization I ran. I had to prioritize AP Biology and AP Calculus and AP World History and AP Computer Science and not some silly little childhood pastime that brought me joy. Art was not a viable vocation – it was frivolous, indulgent, peripheral. I watched my once-passionate devotion erode into sand and slip through the cracks of my fingers.

When I was in middle school, drawing was almost an obsession. Wielding my colored pencils like weapons that endowed invincibility, I spent every spare minute filling the many pages of my many sketchbooks: bristol, vellum, toned tan, toned gray.

Every other weekend, when I packed for the journey to my dad’s house, my art supplies would occupy more volume of my rainbow-striped suitcase than would my clothes. I would carefully pad my Prismacolor and Faber-Castell pencil sets with sweatpants and T-shirts, protecting them like fragile precious eggs. I deeply dreaded these bi-monthly visits to the too-big house that folded its arms and turned its back to me. I would spend those weekends holed away in my room, hiding from my dad and stepmom, relishing instead the companionship of my markers and pencils. My dad would try to coax me out, decrying my devotion to drawing as extreme and unreasonable.

My mom wasn’t much more supportive. Every time she caught me indulging in what she felt was a pointless endeavor, she would berate me for “wasting time.” She also successfully shamed the bookworm out of me: as a kid, I devoured hundreds of novels every year, but my mom kept insisting that fiction was distorting my perception of reality, and kept chiding me to “get off the couch and do something more productive,” until I eventually stopped reading for fun entirely. (I’m not sure what exactly she expected me to do instead – conduct leukemia research at age ten?)

As much as I tried to resist, this messaging wormed its way into my psyche. I came to believe that art had no utility, that it made no tangible impact on the world, that it was superfluous, utterly inessential. And so, as school intensified, I began to relegate my creative practice to a mere “hobby,” allowing it to unspool itself from the fabric of my identity. What had once been an integral component of my everyday existence shrank down into a rare indulgence.

It took a global pandemic to bring me back to art. In 2020, the year that time warped and stretched like silly putty and the word “unprecedented” bounced around everyday discourse like a ping pong ball, I found myself painting again. When, for the first time, the pace of life relented and gave me space to breathe, my fingers itched for a brush to hold. Tasting my first morsel after a prolonged and painful fast, I began to create nonstop, ravenously, urgently. Holed up in the musty basement alongside my rodent and arachnid companions, I churned out seventy-four paintings that year. I was painting from sunup to sundown, straight through my Zoom lectures on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the 18th-century persecution of the French Huguenots. Every day, I awoke bursting with excitement to greet the canvas once again. I could do this for the rest of my life, I thought. And then I burned out.

After my nine-month art bender, I was suddenly seized by an inexplicable and overwhelming dread. Even just thinking about painting sent anxiety crawling up my limbs. Putting brush to canvas no longer felt liberating and joyful, but contrived and excruciating. Creating art felt like labor. Friend turned to enemy. The betrayal was devastating.

But before that, TikTok. 

When the app first gained popularity at my school, I vehemently situated myself against it. I was not interested in tweenagers dancing in place or lip-syncing to formulaic pop songs, not interested in losing myself in vortices of endless scrolling. I refused to hop on the bandwagon that more and more of my peers were climbing aboard. “At least I haven’t downloaded TikTok yet,” I would often say, as a facetious expression of resilience when everything else was crumbling. As in: “I might be losing my shit, but at least I’m not completely gone.” 

But the haze of quarantine aimlessness scrambled my brains, weakened my resolve. In late March of 2020, I finally caved to the pressures of my chronically online generation, joining my fellow Zoomers on the vertical video app with the disturbingly-addictive algorithm.

I started off posting pure silliness: videos of myself painting SpongeBob and Peppa Pig and Kermit the Frog adorned with gold leaf backgrounds like Byzantine icons. I shared my embarrassing third grade sketchbooks filled with manga drawings and hyperrealistic eyes (only the right one of course, because left was way harder). I painted flowers on the pockets of old mom jeans, translated pixelated memes into pigment on canvas.

I celebrated when I hit twenty followers, imagining my entire English class congregated together to watch me paint. Twenty whole people! But then, before I knew it, twenty became a hundred, a hundred became a thousand, became a hundred thousand. By December, I had amassed around three hundred thousand followers. 

And then I posted the Mother video. My final painting of 2020, completed just minutes before the clock struck midnight on the last day of the year. It blew up instantly. My follower count shot to one million. 

I received some of the most heartwarming messages: people told me I made them feel seen, that I articulated the struggles they felt but could not express, that my vulnerability encouraged them to open up and be brave. And then there were the people who accused me of fabrication, who declared that my mom did not in fact love me, who pointed out that oh she’s Asian so of course she has a frigid heartless tiger mother. Those damn Asians.

Outweighing the thrill of overnight stardom was a dense, sticky guilt that lodged itself deep in my chest. Was I milking my own trauma for clout? How could I expose my mother like that? To air our dirty laundry in the most public of squares, the omnipresent and indelible internet?

But at the same time, I felt like after everything I’d been through, I deserved this outlet of catharsis. In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche posits two opposing art impulses: the Apollonian – order, harmony, clarity, logic – and the Dionysian – ugliness, disarray, dissolution, discord. Art is what cloaks an enchanting Apollonian illusion over the Dionysian chaos of reality, transfiguring suffering into something bearable, something beautiful, even. We need art to survive. There was something empowering and redeeming in transforming my pain into paint. So I carried on.

I created paintings and prose about my destructive control freak tendencies, about my myriad corporeal insecurities, about my confused and shaky sense of cultural identity. I spoke aloud the scary things, the shameful things, the painful things that most clutch deeply within. 

People from as far as Switzerland and Indonesia and Germany bought dozens of my paintings and thousands of my prints. Young students from England and Portugal and Mozambique interviewed me to create research projects on my art. Pre-pubescent teenagers told me they looked up to me, post-menopausal mothers told me I helped them understand their wayward sons. Multiple people asked permission to get my artwork tattooed on their bodies, to brand my creations into their skin.

It was a blessing. It was surreal. It was too much. 

I was ultimately paralyzed by the crushing weight of external scrutiny and the ever-increasing standards I set for myself – each painting had to be better than the last, each narrative more moving and profound. Baring my soul again and again, subjecting it to the cold evaluation of views and like and shares, began to take its toll. Trauma doesn’t translate well into performance analytics. 

I had no conception of boundaries. I overshared as a means of coping, shining a flashlight under my bed to prove there was no monster lurking. I was a lost and hurting seventeen-year-old who wanted to make something of her suffering, who needed desperately to imbue it with meaning. But my wounds remained raw and bleeding. I should have let them scab over and flake off in scaly chunks, but I didn’t know how. So I exposed myself to fire, hoping that cauterization would expedite the healing process. But how could I heal when I was still living in the very place that hurt me? 

I had to get out.