In this blog post, I write about my own personal experiences, and only speak for myself. This post is not intended to disparage anybody for being a content creator on TikTok, OnlyFans or any other platform. These are just my own thoughts on my own experiences.
For a while, I was a TikTok Live streamer. The thing about streaming on TikTok Live, like any other facet of the online experience, is that people are animals. You take a chance and put yourself out there in a way that’s inherently vulnerable, and people will bombard you with insults and compliments and demand things from you from the comfortable anonymity of the chat. And if you don’t hold yourself steadfast, you can easily get swept away in that attention, positive or negative.
I never considered myself to be an especially attractive person. I always knew I was moderately handsome, but I found from streaming and posting on TikTok that those features that always made me feel insecure, like my red hair and my big nose, were attracting positive attention. I was soon able to leverage the attention I was getting from those features, and use my body to gain a modest following on the app. I was logging onto TikTok Live on a regular schedule, hanging out, playing games, all while showing off my body. At first, this was exciting. Thrilling, even. It was a huge boost to my ego. I was happy to give the chat what they wanted, to an extent. I streamed in short shorts with my bulge on display, or shirtless with my chest out. I was happy to show off features I’m proud of, in exchange for positive attention from the chat.
Attention was a drug I was becoming dependent on. Against my personal judgment, I let the chat talk me into making a Twitter account, which I used to share my stupid opinions and pictures of my body. That turned out to be an even more successful vehicle for farming the attention I was craving. I was becoming addicted to the attention, and was starting to leverage that attention I got on Twitter (or X, I guess) for monetary advantages through financial domination and selling nude photos of myself. This was an exciting time for me on the Internet, and all of these things together brought out a fun, new side to myself that I didn’t know was hidden in there. I was ready to ride the wave all the way to OnlyFans, in the hope that I could bring in an extra stream of steady income for my husband and I. At my peak, I had 8,000 followers on X, and I had told myself (and my followers) that I would make an OnlyFans account when I hit 10,000. But this all came to a screeching halt when my X account was flagged for suspicious activity, and I was locked out and unable to access it.
I am not one to typically assign meaning to meaningless things. However, I interpreted the timing of this as a sign for me to slow down. At the time I was negotiating with myself, thinking, do I need to make a new account? Should I start from scratch again and keep pushing for that 10k follower count to leverage into a full OnlyFans account? I decided to accept this as a sign that I was on the wrong path. Had I started an OnlyFans page, I would have had to do it with zero reservations. I would have had to stand ten toes down on my decision, and truthfully, I was so wrapped up in what I was doing online that I wasn’t looking at this decision with a clear and objective mindset. In hindsight, it would have been something I know I would have regretted. I was so addicted to the rush of attention and positive affirmation from strangers that I would have made the jump to this next level in my content journey without proper consideration. Just for the next high, to continue chasing that dragon.
After being locked out of my X account, I lost my steam when it came to live streaming in the way I had been, a way that was self-exploitative. Losing this steam allowed me the space to stop and think. What was the point of all this? If it weren’t leading to some type of financial venture such as OnlyFans, what was I doing this for? For the love of the game?
I was able to take some time and ruminate on what gave me gratification. This attention I was receiving, while exciting at the beginning, had started to make me feel empty inside. For a while, it boosted my ego, gave me confidence, helped me to self-actualize in a way I had never viewed myself before. And there was some inherent value in that, in the short term. But ultimately, being desired by strangers online was a pointless thing. Viewers in the chat are demanding and reductive. Followers on TikTok and X are creative and verbose in their perversions. They think they own you, and in a way, they own a version of you, a version you’ve made and delivered to them. I was feeling like I was handing over too much of myself to strangers to chew and gargle and spit right back at me.
I still stream to TikTok Live and Twitch, but I have changed my strategy. I exclusively stream from my PC, and only when I’m playing video games. When I stream now, there is a core group of viewers who typically swing by to say hello. Some stay to watch me play and hang out. But long gone are the days where crowds of anonymous viewers show up in my chat to ogle at my body on display and leave perverse, deranged comments sexualizing me. And I prefer it this way.
It’s a funny thing the way my hunger for attention grew, like a malignant tumor begging to be fed, at the expense of my privacy and my modesty. At the time, I felt like I was giving the chat what it wanted, and in doing that, I was building a streaming community. But that community wasn’t built on much depth. I found that the times I had tried to stream with intentions beyond just showing off my body, like playing a specific game, or chatting about certain topics, people were simply uninterested. I had established a standard for my content that, were I not to deliver on, the audience was not interested in engaging with me, even if I felt like my content still had value.
These days I don’t have much of a “content strategy,” as I’ve transitioned myself from creating content to exclusively streaming video games (when I feel up to it, not on a regular schedule) and blogging. These days I acknowledge the cravings I had for attention and validation from strangers who desired me, to be a vice, similar to cannabis and alcohol and doomscrolling. That vice is detrimental to my self-perception and my self-image, in a similar way that cannabis and alcohol and doomscrolling are detrimental to my mental and physical health. I do my best not to feed that vice anymore.
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