30 Before 30 by Marina Shifrin

Author:Marina Shifrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

14

BECOME FAMOUS

Before posting the video, I washed my hair, made my bed, and invited fame into my life. Just like that, like an honored guest I was eagerly anticipating.

Quitting on YouTube started out as a joke idea, created out of ludicrous fantasies, but it became a reality the night I woke up in the hospital. Something inside of me broke. It was clear that I wouldn’t be able to work in the same, blindly trusting way ever again. I had to be smarter, tougher, and more calculated with my career. I vowed to never again allow a poisonous work environment to seep into my bloodstream. A career rebirth was on the horizon. Cue: fame.

My craving for fame began after I saw what it could do for small-time writers. My life in digital media was entangled with the need for views, clicks, and likes. The more views my animations received, the more it meant I was doing a good job. The more visitors my blog attracted, the more it meant I was succeeding as a writer. The internet was building a vapid infrastructure of faves and likes; my salary and emotional stability became dependent on it. I went from a generic attention whore to a full-blown attention addict.

“You need to add more boobs to the thumbnail,” Jerry once said while looking over my shoulder. “It will get people to click.” I was working on a story about a Ukrainian woman who had demolished her body with plastic surgery in the hopes of looking more like Barbie. I added four more sets of breasts to the thumbnail, and our view count jumped to over 700,000, making me an official member of the Capitalizing Off Women’s Insecurities club. It made me feel powerful and masculine, like Jerry.

The benefit of writing for a big company is that there is an established voice that’s going to make money. All you need to do is show up on time and write in the voice of the company. When you write for yourself, you have the opportunity to choose your own words, your own voice, but the getting paid thing gets a lot trickier. In short: you have to be known to get paid.

The day my Modern Love story was published in The New York Times, I was certain I’d made it. It was something written on my own, for myself, and The New York Times published it. There’s a current of excitement that runs through your body when you stumble on something you know you can do for the rest of your life. Especially when that something requires little more than a laptop and a room.

You begin to envision an existence where you work from your small apartment, occasionally stepping out for coffee at a charming café. The only schedule you watch closely is your menstrual one, and when people ask what you do, you can giggle and say, “Oh, I work for myself.” I wanted to giggle and say that.

After The New York Times article agents and publishers reached out to ask about me.

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