A Creator’s Perspective on Parasocial Relationships: a Love Letter to the Void

I often think I may either be too evolved or not evolved enough to fathom my presence on the internet. I confidently believe the human brain was not made to withstand much of the impacts of social media because holy shit it is not normal to see so many extremely rich extremely attractive people at the frequency we do.

I want to get a time machine and show a victorian child what Bella Hadid looks like and then teach them how a phone works and then once they’re done speaking in tongues at my talking devil box they’ll scroll my FYP to see an abundance of Bella’s, and feel quite odd about their own existence, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that reasonably, I have more followers than the population of the country of Iceland, if Iceland were 3 times as populated. So 3 entire Icelands but it’s one ultra Iceland, and it’s quite populated. 3 times so the norm, but you get it. That is not a normal thing to casually live with, and I don’t even have a lot of followers in the scheme of the internet. Not. Normal. I’ve never been great with believing in things I can’t see. I don’t even mean God or anything I mean I am still not convinced there are bones in my body, logically I know they are there, but I just find it all quite suspect. I know that I have a lot of people who follow me, and engage with what I create, but like, that number on my account? No that does not for one second make any sort of possible sense. I’ll accept a couple thousand, but even then, my brain can process only the approximate amount of people that can reasonably fit in the size of a medium college lecture hall. And that still seems like a lot. So that’s really as far as my comprehension has gone. I reached that amount, and while I’ve occurred significantly more followers than that, in my head, it’s 65 total people. Being publicly perceived by so many people all the time in an age where that isn’t that unusual is quite a bizarre way to live. I open my phone, and as far as I can tell, I am the most famous person alive, but then I close Instagram (actually I have an app that locks me out of Instagram because I have no self-control) and I am seemingly quite unfamous. Except when I was on a college campus. I was very famous there. And that one time someone in a Trader Joes recognized me and gave me flowers. Also very famous in that moment, thank you again for that.

I would argue that I have had one of the most positive experiences online possible for someone with my following. I am truly not sure how I have managed to escape the brutality of the internet, I have had an audience for over three years and I have received almost no hate. I can think of two times in all those years the internet was mean to me: 1. When I posted a video explaining the hack political science discourse being thrown around by conservatives during the height of the Black Lives Matter Protests and explained that only a dodo bird with rocks for brains can’t comprehend why Black on Black crime is not a thing and it got on the wrong side of TikTok, and 2. when I ended up on my college’s Reddit thread for a video I made about the co-op I lived next to. Shout out Bumpkin Frat, you guys were super cool, Reddit is very mean to women. Besides that, up until I really grew more on Instagram in these last few months, I can’t even think of an individual hate comment I’ve gotten. It has been all nice all the time. It’s not even just that I don’t really receive hate, it’s that I have the kindest most thoughtful collection of people watching and engaging with what I do. I know everyone says that, but it genuinely is true for me. If you read my article about being autistic online, you know that I haven’t always loved my comment section for how I get typecasted on the internet, but that is not to say the comments were never ever anything but well-meaning. My comment section has always felt much more like we’re all in a book club or something, but instead of us discussing books (actually we do discuss a lot of books), we are discussing me and the things I make. It has at least to me, always felt really equal. Anytime I see a creator refer to their audience as their “fans” it makes my tummy feel weird because that would feel so wildly inappropriate if I did that. I know some creators exist more so as celebrities, so I understand that they really do have fans, but then there are creators, who sometimes are literally celebrities, but as someone who loves and engages with their content, feel more like a friend. Like Annaxsitar to me is a celebrity, whereas Brittany Broski, a literal celebrity at this point, feels like a friend. Like I could dm her and we would hang out, and the only reasons we haven’t are purely logistical. Of course, Brittany Broski and I are not friends, she does not know I exist, and if I dmed her to hang out that would be weird because she does not know who I am. But she feels so much closer to reality than so many creators do. That’s how it feels from the audience, but as a creator, at least to me, often it is not nearly so different. I have truly had a cult-like following that has consistently grown with me probably since early 2020. I mean that pretty seriously, I don’t want to sound like I’m talking my shit, but I am really really well-liked by a solid chunk of my following. It’s so fun, I feel like one big alpha feral dog with a ton of little tiny feral dogs that think I’m really cool following in a line behind me as we go on adventures to do the dumbest shit imaginable. We’re all walking face first into a wall because I led us there, and we all think it’s so funny and nobody is mad. I think, until I really expanded into creating content that felt more true to me and my passions, I felt pretty uncomfortable with the idea of people really liking me and expressing how much they liked what I created in such large numbers. These days, I feel so honored and overwhelmed all the time to I have so many friends I don’t know. I know I have been harsh on parasocial relationships and so have a lot of creators, but I do it out of love and respect for our lil community. I don’t care about a lot about a lot of things, it takes a lot to hurt my feelings, especially on the internet, but I don’t often tolerate anybody doing or saying anything towards me that feels like a boundary being crossed. It’s not so much that I feel the need to stand up for myself, like I said, I am pretty unbothered, but I also acknowledge that if you like someone, you usually don’t want to act like a dickhead towards them, and sometimes, I think especially in this parasocial realm, lines of what is and isn’t appropriate get really fuzzy. This is a realm still new to all of us, and course correction isn’t a bad thing. There are a lot of forms of parasocial relationships that I love. I love the people who have been around and engaging with me for long enough that I know their names, or who dm me updates about their life, or who send me things they find on the internet they think I would like. It’s hard to explain this to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but it’s such a sweet little friendship to share and it’s so cool to share it with so many people. I like how many people I’ve gotten to know even just casually, just through a dm here and there. I love that people dm me things they hate because they know how much I love to hate things. I love that someone sends me a picture of them doing the silly little gym jumps I do every time they work out. I love that people read my book reviews and send me their opinions, and I love that people share their favorites for me to read as well. I love that I have a whole little world inside my phone with people I have never met and who I really don’t know all that much about, but that is okay, because we have all these shared things in common. I especially love that while all of this is because of the content that I create, I never feel like we are talking about me. We’re talking about the content of a video, maybe, or about a project I am working on and looking for feedback, but it never feels as though I am the sun. That is a good thing to be so clear. With the way the internet works, unless you are selling something or building a company or whatnot, you are the product you sell. I am the thing I am promoting all the time, it is in its nature an incredibly self-centered job. My job revolves around me. What I am doing, what I am thinking, what I am feeling, and I don’t say that in a negative way, but I think it’s important to be cognizant of. There is more to the world than me, and when I am really focused on what I am creating, it’s easy to get lost in myself at the center of my universe. It’s especially all-consuming when you feel as though you’re being misunderstood. I’ve said it before, but your narrative stops when you publish anything, it’s then up to the audience what they make of it, and when they interpret you as something that feels unfitting is when you’re or me, I guess, because this is about me after all, when I am most likely to get completely too absorbed into my own universe. Tiktok has always made me feel like my world revolves around a version of myself I do not always identify with, everyone there seems to think I am much nicer, much softer, much more outgoing, much more enthusiastic than I am. Not that I am not those things to some degree, but they see me as a perfectly lovely version of myself that is not me, and that feels weird. Tiktok parasocial, if I am being real was mostly all terrible. No offense. Something about how I was interpreted made people think I was incompetent, in need of guidance and pity. I would tell a story that was wild and outlandish and probably made up and the amount of, “oh honey,” or “sweetie tell me you didn’t do that” and I am not joking the ones that take the cake “I just want to give you a hug” and “I feel the need to protect you”. Out of pocket. Timeouts for all of you. No more internet for the day you lost your privileges being weird online again. This was the kinda stuff I was constantly setting boundaries around. Then Instagram came along and completely changed my view of parasocial relationships. It was the first place I felt like I was being seen as less of a character and more of a person. Instagram allowed me to diversify my content on my feed, and be a real person on my story. I got to engage with people in a new way on there, I got to share how I felt, or what I was doing in a way that Tiktok simply does not allow. I got to show myself as a dancer, as an artist, as a writer, and I was suddenly perceived as dimensional. Not even that, I was understood and supported in everything I did. The first time I really deviated from my routine funny haha maybe a little bit helpful content was when I posted my first book review. I knew the numbers wouldn’t be great, and they weren’t. But they were good enough to be worth the time, and the response to it has been so much fun. If someone were to ask me why I was on my phone so much the odds that I’d have to confess that I was reading book review comments to see what everyone else was reading and what they liked or hated is pretty high. That is so fun. We are such good friends there. I was sharing something I loved that I never expected anyone to engage with, and now we have a comment section book club, and my favorite part is that everyone is talking to each other in there, responding to other comments, sharing recs, discussing, are you joking that is so cool. I have reached a point where I am pretty much able to do whatever I want, share whatever I want, and know it’ll land with someone. After years of Tiktok digitally beating the shit out of me with a metal bat for posting anything but I AM SO QUIRKY OH MY GOD LOOK AT ME AND HOW QUIRKY I AM content, it is so rewarding. As I started posting my writing this last week, I have very quickly come to find that of everything I’ve done on any platform, this is by far the most meaningful experience. I am not being uniquely funny, I am playing to an audience or checking analytics or playing the algorithm, I just knew it was time to write. I was really hesitant about sharing it, and the only reason I did was because I assumed nobody would really read it, but in the three (I think) things I’ve written and published, I have received the most overwhelmingly positive and supportive response. I have never felt really at a lack of words with any of this sort of thing, but this? I started writing in an effort to be more comfortable being candid. I’ve played the silly little jester so much of my life that to drop the act, the bits, the jabs to cover any real truth, felt really daunting, but I step back from the jest to find that perhaps people seeing me for all that I am is not so terrible. As I have published my uh, blog feels wrong, article feels worse… things… Things I made with just myself in mind, I have received so many messages from people who have read them, sharing their responses. I got a lot of messages that would be from someone sharing their story and then saying, “thank you for writing this, I have never felt more seen.” and every time I can’t help but to respond and say “thank you for reading this, neither have I.” It feels quite symbiotic on my side of the internet. Parasocial relationships are weird a lot of the time because they are by nature generally quite one-sided. I create. You consume. You love me. I love being loved. You know my face, my life, my hobbies, my cadence of speech. You have inside jokes you share with me. I don’t know you exist. But that’s not how it feels to me. I create. Perhaps we share a mutual interest that connects us. You love me. I shout I love you back into the void and hope it reaches you. Yeah you know my face, my life, my hobbies, my speech. We share inside jokes. I like being friends with the void. I see almost everything that is sent my way, I hope you understand that I respond to everything with love and admiration and perhaps a little laugh in my head to you in the void. I forget to type and send sometimes. But you certainly exist. I think we are mighty good friends. It feels like I’m shouting into a tunnel. Not for any particular reason, but because when you go into a tunnel, you shout. Just how it is. I use the term void most affectionately, I don’t always know your names or your faces or your hobbies or your speech, but I know you are there. I hope you hear me when I shout my thanks.

Just me and the void and all that which it holds.