by Kelly Harms
Looking back on that time, it was the beginning of something huge, for sure, but also the only year social media was just plain fun. In that first year, my yoga studio began to bustle. I hired staff, raised prices enough that I covered the rent, and dropped my own offerings to three classes a week. Instead of putting their mats as far away from the stage as humanly possible, my students crowded my low platform, mats practically touching, and jostled for the closest positions.
I taught workshops, and people came. I made new online friends and got together with them IRL. My world got really big, and my circle got really strong. I really was hashtag blessed.
Also that year, I was approached by a “monetization expert” who told me to create “passive income streams” and join a speakers’ bureau. I loved speaking. I loved sharing what I’d learned in the process of “growing” my reach, and I loved carrying Mike out at the end of the talk, to thunderous applause. Mike loved thunderous applause.
After my speeches, I sat in the back of the little library halls and meditation clubs and signed people’s yoga mats and sold my college friend’s handmade upcycled practice jerseys, collected when high schools dumped their old ones. She—Lynnsey was her name—sliced the upper back into thirds and braided it into a racer back. Then she sewed new seams in the sides and turned it into a chic yoga top, then screen printed it with my studio logo, which at the time was still a line drawing of a blunt-nosed, three-legged pooch in downward-facing-dog position. Those shirts had to go when the studio sold a couple of years later, but then, just a glimpse of that studio logo would make me swell with pride.
Around one hundred thousand followers, I started getting meaningful press. I wasn’t speaking at yoga-teacher trainings and garden clubs anymore. I was speaking at women’s expos, in big convention centers, with headsets and sound crews. Lynnsey couldn’t keep up with the orders anymore, and she didn’t want to do all the things she needed to do to scale up—work with new material, use an offshore factory, outsource production. In the end she told me to go on without her. At the advice of my monetization expert, I gave up on my “too cutesy logo” and started selling a fifteen-dollar @Mia&Mike water bottle with much higher profit margins. Even now, with every reusable water bottle sold, I donate a disposable water bottle to the Red Cross. Sometimes the environmental upshot of this makes my head spin.
Then I got to 250,000 followers on Pictey, and as fast as I was growing, Pictey was growing faster. My “space,” as Pictey’s director of growth and change calls it, was getting crowded. Newer, younger girls were posting newer, bendier yoga poses, on silks in the air, on trampolines, from bungee cords, doing things I didn’t even care to attempt. And it didn’t matter, because by then I was ready to outgrow my space. I wasn’t limited to yoga talk or meditation links or gut-flora-replenishing smoothies. My followers wanted anything I cared to post, as long as Mike was somehow involved. And the word on the street was to post as often as you could, twice a day, three times. Four! Yoga posts were fine, but I hardly had time for that anymore. In desperation I took pictures of my lattes and my new mascara wand and my trips and a new meditation app. But most of all, I posted about Mike.
And that was when I started charging for endorsements.
Before, companies would send me their special kind of yoga chalk or new totally unnecessary prop or luxe cashmere blanket, and if I liked the thing, I’d post it, and if I didn’t, I’d give it away to my followers.
But things changed on social media. I was being a chump, I was told by other, more experienced influencers. Endorsing a blanket for the cost of a blanket! Outrageous. From then on, if I didn’t get paid, I didn’t post it. The high-end espresso machine you saw on my feed came with a thousand bucks for the trouble of unpacking it. The fair-trade earrings I wore in a single picture cost two hundred dollars to my viewers but made me two thousand. And the biggest-ticket items, the brands who wrote the big checks, got to be in a picture with Mike.
Mike loved to be in pictures. He would wag his tail and arf, because he never, ever barked, and sometimes he would sort of hop straight up with all three legs straight, which to this day I never could figure out the biomechanics of. I always told a company that if their product was shown with an in-air photo of Mike, they could expect it to go viral. And I was always right.
From then on, I hardly ever had time to speak or teach classes. I got paid to put my name on things, to post about things, to show pictures of things, to write captions, to re-Pict, to do just about anything except the reason I’d started it all in the first place. I sold my yoga studio and spent most of the money on photo equipment. I bought a place in a neighborhood I didn’t exactly love for the pure reason that it was very photogenic. I stopped eating carbs. I started coloring my hair. I carried my tripod with me everywhere.
And then, at one of the darkest, loneliest moments in my life, I fell for Tucker. Maybe Tucker was, just a little, just at first, a way to keep my career moving forward when it seemed like it would be easiest to just stop. Maybe Tucker knew that himself, a little bit, in his own way. Because when we first met, on an online date I had posted about just ten minutes before I’d walked into the bar, he knew exactly who I was and what I did. If he had wanted no part of that, he could have turned around and walked out the door back then. But he didn’t. He did the opposite. In fact, the first thing he said to me, the very first sentence out of his mouth, was this:
“Did you know I’m an excellent photographer?”
Back at the inn where my wedding was to be held, I unpack a plastic bag full of gluten-free garbage foods and a very good bottle of bourbon. I will have to multitask tonight—run my Pictey feed while eating my feelings. It’s not a first, let’s just say. Life with Tucker has had its ups and downs, especially over the last few months, when he has begun to suggest that Pictey has become too important in my life and I have become too concerned with my brand. To this I say, So what? Of course I’m concerned with my brand. It’s my job! He should be more concerned with my brand, since it’s his brand by proxy. I mean, his username is @TuckerlovesMia! His income as a photographer pays for only half of his current lifestyle with me. He wanted to trade on my name, my followers, and my reach, but he somehow also wanted me to be more “authentic” and “in the moment.” “Where in my brand statement did I ever write ‘in the moment’?” I asked him. Answer: I didn’t.
I suppose this is the last big letdown Tucker will put me through, and I should be glad of that. But I’m not there yet. I know from experience that I can survive loss, as long as I keep myself intensely distracted. I know I will survive this just the same.
Only I don’t want to do it in public.
But public is how I live my entire life now. I open my Pictey feed and start scrolling my newest comments. There are hundreds.
A large majority of them are just what I think of as longhand likes. Instead of only clicking the heart button, lots of users also write something nice to me like Love it! or Great photo! I’m not sure what motivates people to make the effort, but I’m greatly appreciative that they do, because I depend on these messages to bring my engagement numbers up in the Pictey algorithms and make my post more visible to others. If a follower writes more than this, if she writes something very personal or asks a question, I try to respond back within a couple of days. It’s usually little more than a (hopefully) appropriate emoji, but sometimes I do get engaged in the conversation.
Today is going to be one of those days for sure. On my post about hiking there’s a thread extolling the virtues of the Rockies that I cannot pass up, as well as a thread about favorite restaurants in the area. My followers don’t know exactly where I am, but I did say we would be getting married near the Arapaho National Forest, thinking it was a large enough area that no one would be able to successfully stalk me even if they tried, and their suggestions are indeed covering an area that would take almost three hours to drive. Some little piece of my brain that doesn’t want to think too hard about my canceled wedding righ
t now takes careful note of the cafés and art galleries near the inn. That part of my brain is whispering, Go on, Mia; go get some good new sponsors.
But then I find another thread, one much more worrying. It’s from a follower I think I’ve heard from before, though I can’t remember in what context. That’s not unusual—some of my followers comment on every single post, talk to each other in the comment threads, and even strike up friendships offline. Once a group of four women who met on my feed started their own yoga retreat together and sent me a photo in my DMs. I loved that. That feels so long ago.
This user, @thatJessica17, is not planning a yoga retreat. In fact, from what she’s written, it almost sounds like she’s planning a suicide. I note with relief that a few other followers have already written her some encouraging words, and I hope she takes heart in them. I watch the comments grow as they share hard times in their lives and post hotline numbers and talk about recovering from depression. I have been low before, terribly, terribly low, but I know the difference between that and unmanaged clinical depression, which is a life-threatening disease that can’t be fixed by a fun new boyfriend. I don’t dare weigh in about something I’ve never personally experienced myself, so I flounder for words and try a few overly cheerful replies, only to delete them before hitting enter. Still, I hit refresh over and over again and feel grateful for my followers, who seem to be so much stronger than me. They don’t seem to hesitate before telling stories of their worst days. They don’t issue sunny platitudes either. They are vulnerable and raw, and they are the ones who should really have a hundred thousand likes on their posts.
But they aren’t the ones. The OP wanted to hear from me. She wanted to hear from @Mia&Mike. I pour a second finger of bourbon and position my thumbs over the keyboard and type the best advice I can think of to give her.
@thatJessica17, I will be honest, I haven’t personally ever had thoughts of suicide. I’m so sorry if you’re going through that. I think the other commenters here can give you much more support on that issue than I can. I will only say, I beg you, try to find a friend right now. It doesn’t even have to be a human friend. In the past I found a lot of strength in Mike that helped me get through my hardest days. Maybe what you need right now is a Mike of your own, who will lick your tears when you cry and snuggle up when you need a hug. xoxo Mia
I look at my glass. It’s empty, and the slurry of strong drink, nuptial remorse, and talk of my best friend has left me teary eyed. I set my phone to ring with Pictey notifications so I will see when @thatJessica17 writes me back, then drop my phone and switch on the TV and try to distract myself from my disappointment with baked taro chips and Veep reruns. It works, up to a point, and I lose the rest of the night in a sort of numb haze. But I don’t forget that post, and when she hasn’t written me back within a couple of hours, I decide it can’t hurt to err on the side of caution. I find the original thread and call it up, read it again. It’s probably nothing, I tell myself.
But just in case, I long-click on the comment. A small menu drops down. The prompt asks me: Would you like to flag this comment? I think a long time, shrug, and then click “Yes.”
PAIGE
The day after the penis-face incident, I come into my office and sit down at my workstation, and my computer screen is off.
It’s quite unexpected. Who would turn off a computer screen? Who turns off computer screens at all anymore? I think of my father, a professor of statistics who works from home in the summer. When he still lived with my mother, he would call me into his otherwise off-limits office every summer day at three thirty and announce joyfully, “It’s quitting time!” Then he blew canned air into his keyboard, shut off his monitor, and pushed in his desk chair, like a janitorial team might be coming in at any moment to vacuum and he wouldn’t want to inconvenience them.
Assuming my dad, who now lives in Washington State, wasn’t here in the office messing with my workstation, that means someone else from his generation was. That means Karrin, I suppose. She is the only older person within ten miles of the Pictey offices, and she isn’t very old, in point of fact. She still has half a life ahead of her, if she isn’t a smoker. She is just old for a start-up, old for the company, and I am sure we feel like children to her. She certainly treats us like children.
With a sigh, I stand up, head to the lounge. I don’t want to be summoned to Karrin’s office by an act so passive as a turned-off monitor, but at the same time I am not quite sure what else to do with myself. I know she’s been at the station, or someone has, and I know from experience that this only happens after an escalation. Karrin doesn’t know how to do remote work. She has this understanding of a computer as a thing, a box, with stuff inside. If she wants to see what I was working on yesterday before I logged out, then she comes to my computer, wakes it up, enters her high-clearance password, and runs an applet that shows her every single moment of my day in fast-forward.
Never mind that this function works via any computer in the office, or any secure company laptop, of which she has at least two sitting in a corner in her office. This is Karrin.
Karrin wasn’t hired for her intelligence. Or rather, she was, but I don’t subscribe to the notion of what she has as actual intelligence. They call it EQ, of course, but no repeatable study shows there’s any concrete way to test EQ. Depending on who is administering any given test, a scholar will get a different result. I therefore conclude that EQ is not a real thing.
The metric I find most accurate for intelligence is a coding-challenge site that ranks the fifty top-scoring coders hourly. I do very well by this standard. I was in the top fifty for six weeks, and I am also a woman, which makes me very desirable to companies who are trying to create some semblance of gender balance. Pictey recruited me and said I could pick where I worked within the company. They did not expect me to pick Safety and Standards, where I barely code at all. They underestimated my desire to be left alone.
I have reason to believe Karrin would not be able to complete even the log-in for a coding-challenge site. Her job title is resiliency manager, and she is supposed to save us from drinking ourselves to death, which a few Safety and Standards people attempted to do before she arrived. Since she’s been here, there haven’t been any more rehab emergencies, and Karrin feels personally responsible for this. I put it down to the fact that they gave us all a 6 percent raise, three more paid vacation days, and access to the company travel agency.
Karrin likes to “listen” to us. We have to go into her office once a month or so and tell her the most disturbing things we saw, then take her “prescription for self-care.” My prescription for self-care is the same as it has been since I was in my late teens: high doses of SSRIs, mood stabilizers, and benzodiazepines as needed. Karrin’s is a piece of notebook paper with some instructions on it. Instructions like: Take time to breathe. I told her I am fortunate in that I can breathe while doing other things. She laughed, as though I were kidding.
Largely, I find Karrin to be an impediment to getting my job done in a prompt fashion and a danger to the future of my career. She doesn’t exactly understand how all the proprietary software we need works and is always pestering the higher-ups to get them to write in trigger warnings before each potentially upsetting flag. I tell her what they tell her, but less patiently: You can’t have a computer warn you about something until it knows what it is, and if the computer always knew what it was looking at, we wouldn’t have jobs, now, would we?
Karrin is in the lounge.
I turn around and start to head back to my computer, but it’s too late. “Paige! Terrific. Just the woman I was hoping to see,” she calls, uncomfortably loudly. I keep walking while considering what I know about Karrin. She values the odious “people skills.” She won’t talk to me about an escalation in public, grab my arm to keep up with me, or shout through the office that I need to report to her at once. She would view any of those behaviors as “disrespectful.” So I am now free to go back to my workstation, turn my mon
itor on, ugh, and start going through flags.
But when I sit down, I start to wonder what she wanted. Was there an escalation? Did I in fact err? Nothing of import strikes me from yesterday’s flags. In fact, it’s been a very quiet week at Pictey, if only behind the scenes. From the user interface, things are more exciting. A few of our biggest stars have things going on this week that they’re either live-ing or posting hourly about. There is going to be traffic in droves, and I’m going to make a fortune on daily-flag bonuses if I come in this weekend. In particular, my half sister’s favorite influencer, @Mia&Mike, and her much less famous fiancé, @TuckerlovesMia, are getting married on Pictey this weekend. The lead-up has been everything you’d expect from a woman who makes a living taking pictures of herself: vapid, commercial, and exceptionally good looking.
There will be so many flags.
To my knowledge, this is Pictey’s first major wedding. It is also the first wedding that I’ve been invited to in years, if you count running Safety and Standards during the event as an invitation, which I absolutely do.
I turn on my monitor. In the log-in field I type a 7, the first user ID number for management, and the autocomplete fills in Karrin’s user ID. I’d know it anywhere. Curses.
I think back to last night again. What if there hasn’t been an escalation? What if I missed a question on last night’s Emotional Safety Questionnaire, and now I have to do a remote therapy session, or worse, an online mental health workshop, before I can get back to my work? What if I can’t work this weekend? I have no plans to visit my father. What on earth would I do with myself instead?
I stand up and walk through the office. A few sets of eyes follow me, I think. I suspect people in this office will look at anything they see and think Y or N. I try to ignore their eyes. Karrin’s office is set into a corner right by the bathrooms. I could be going to the bathroom, for all they know. What’s unusual about using the bathroom? I almost go, just to sell it. But I can’t even wait the length of a pee to know what’s going on.
