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For her more than two million social-media followers, Tinx is the arbiter of all that is worthy: boyfriend behavior, bachelorette destinations, where to order shrimp cocktails and Martinis in many a metropolis. She is what “Dear Abby” would be if Abby knew her angles and had been president of her sorority—a benevolent big sister to women trying to figure out who they are and what they want.
Christina Najjar, a thirty-two-year-old former freelance writer, is the woman behind Tinx. (She adopted the moniker as an alter ego when she was a teen-ager.) Three years ago, as the pandemic set in, she joined TikTok and started posting videos that satirized rich moms in various regions (Beverly Hills, Aspen, the Upper East Side). People liked and followed. Sponsors sought her out. As her flock grew, Najjar instituted twice-weekly “Ask Me Anything” sessions on Instagram, which led to a podcast and a live SiriusXM broadcast in which followers call to ask such things as why the guy they vibed with didn’t text them back.
Najjar’s empire has grown to encompass merchandise (her “Rich Mom” sweatshirts routinely sell out), salad dressing (a collaboration with Tabasco), and “The Shift,” a book coming this week from Simon & Schuster and billed as “a guide to dating, self worth, and becoming the main character of your life.”
Unlike “The Rules,” the draconian dating Bible of the nineties, “The Shift” is not about “capturing the heart of Mr. Right.” “Dating is not a means to an end,” Najjar notes, in the introduction. “The goal is to know yourself, completely. And by that metric, I’m wise as fuck.” She acknowledges her privileged perspective as a straight, cisgendered woman, and writes that because she would “never want to speak from an unqualified place,” she chose to “focus on dating dynamics between heterosexual men and women.” “However,” she adds, “my main message comes down to self-worth and prioritizing your own happiness,” and she invites anyone seeking more of that to take off their coat and stay awhile.
A week before the release of her book, I met Najjar to discuss why she feels qualified to dole out advice, how becoming famous has affected her ability to date (she is single), and what it felt like to almost be cancelled. We met on the leafy patio of Mauro’s, a restaurant in West Hollywood. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
Your book is like the new “Rules.”
Let us pray, from your lips to God’s ears.
But you don’t have to be in search of a relationship to have it apply to you.
I wanted it to be that way. Obviously, it’s dating-heavy, but, really, it’s a guide book for self-esteem, and that affects every area of your life. Even if you’re in a relationship, you should still have your own life, you should have strong self-esteem and really safeguard the things that make you happy so that you can continue to have a great relationship.
I think about your section about D.M. do’s and don’ts. (Bad: “I think you’re hot. Just wondering if you’d like to meet for drinks sometime?” Good: “You’re hot. Want to meet for drinks sometime?”) “Just” is pretty much my safe word. On e-mail, I always say, “Just wanted to check in.”
“Just checking on that; I just wanted to see if”—yeah, it’s insane. I try to catch myself. You sound so much cooler without it, you know? “You know” is my safe word that I’m trying to cut out. It’s really hard, I add it to the end of every sentence. I fill space and I’m always speaking up until the last minute so that people can start their sentence, but I am desperately trying to stop it.
There’s something about women and people-pleasing. This necessity, whenever we say something, to make sure that we’re not offending anyone, that we’re not talking too loud, that we’re coming off in the “right way,” whatever that means. It’s really hard to deprogram yourself.
It’s massively hard to deprogram. I think it’s all connected: the sense of not feeling valid unless you have a boyfriend, worrying that you won’t be happy until you’re in a pair, body image, body dysmorphia, making yourself small, wanting to conform, using the word “just”—it’s all connected. I feel like we’re in a paradigm shift right now. We’re at the beginning of it. We’ve got a long road.
I wrote this book for everyone, but I really, really want younger girls to read it. I really want to give back time that I wasted in my twenties, when I was so desperate to have a boyfriend. Desperate not because I was craving love or because I’d met anyone who was worthy but because I craved legitimacy, and I thought that having a boyfriend is what would make me legitimate. Then you go into all the, you know, the behavior that I accepted. . . . I don’t want girls to waste six weeks on a guy who doesn’t even remember their last name.
There’s an idea that you discuss in the book, that men date like stockbrokers and women date like venture capitalists—women see potential. Women have a sense of, “Gosh, if anyone is interested in me, then I owe it—”
“I can workshop them. I can ride it out. Oh, well, you know, my friend’s cousin, she waited around for this guy, and after two years of treating her like trash he finally married her.” And it’s, like, “Is that what we’re going for?” No. In that sense, we need to really be more focussed on the power of now. Is this guy making me feel good now? Is he good for me now? Is he improving my life now? This is not to say that if he’s wearing, like, ugly dad shoes, he’s not viable. Ugly dad shoes you can change. But if a guy is a dud, he’s probably gonna stay a dud, and it’s not your job. You’re not a mommy or a therapist.
Right. Although, I don’t know if you’ve ever observed other people’s relationships where it seems like one person does want to be the mommy or the therapist, and maybe the couple is happy like that.
That’s totally fine. I really encourage everyone who reads the book to know themselves. Know what you need. For someone, that might be a very comfortable role to play, but then actively choose it—be, like, “I love to have a fixer-upper. That feeds me.” Where I get sad is when women elevate these guys they’re dating to a higher status than themselves—like, “I need to rehabilitate him, I can fix him up, I can get him to stop smoking weed, I can get him to get a job.” And it’s, like, “Do you need this? You already have a job. You already have friends. You already have a hobby. You don’t need to do this. There are a lot of fully actualized great men out there, and you should be dating them.”
To back up—tell me about how you grew up. You were born in the U.S.?
I was born in Washington, D.C. I moved to London when I was a baby, with my very American parents—they’re from the Midwest and they were both working as lawyers. My dad’s firm had an opportunity in London, and they asked if he wanted to go for a year. They never left.
I went to an all-girls school in England. I had this really interesting swirl of an extremely Midwestern mentality and then a very worldly upbringing in London. I came back to the States to go to Stanford, where I was in a sorority, because I love women and female friendship. I was an English major there. It was the best time of my life. Then I worked in San Francisco.
What did you do there?
After I graduated, I worked at Gap, Inc., in something called the Retail Management Program: “The Harvard of Retail”—their words, not mine. It’s for people who think they want to be retail execs. After that, I landed in merchandising at Banana Republic. Then I worked at Poshmark. The whole time, I was freelance writing on the side for places like Teen Vogue, PopSugar, Refinery29, Eater.
With retail, I was, like, This is not what I thought work would be like. I know I have the capacity to love my job. This isn’t it. I was also really bad at my job.
The freelance writing was amazing. I wanted to be Andie Anderson, the “how to” girl from “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.” I couldn’t articulate why, but it’s the Nora Ephron thing: if you fall on the banana peel and they laugh at you, they’re laughing at you. But if you fall on the banana peel and tell everyone about it, it’s your laugh. I love that. I think that was the early stages of what I’m doing now. I’d do little writing experiments, like about dating my trainer, or how I was addicted to Poshmark—that’s how I got my job at Poshmark, actually. They wrote to me and said, “Oh, my God, you’re insane. You should come work for us.”
What I found fulfilling was connecting with people over shared interests and experiences. After a few years in San Francisco, I figured I had to go to grad school—
Why?
I think I was a little bit lost, and, for my peer group, it was, like, “If you’re lost, go to grad school or business school”—which is an incredibly spoiled, privileged, rude thing to say, but that’s what it was.
Also, for my parents, who grew up poor, education was the great equalizer. That’s no longer true, but for them it was. They really wanted me to get one more degree. I was interested in pivoting anyway, so I was, like, “O.K., well, I can hit a couple birds with one stone, try out New York, work in fashion, but continue to write.”
I went to Parsons for a master’s in fashion journalism. I interned at a fashion company. I continued to freelance write. But New York kind of swallowed me whole. When you don’t know what you want, New York is a bad place to live.
I remember you saying that you were crying in a coffee shop trying to write a paper and your friends had all these important jobs.
I felt so behind. All my friends were getting engaged. They’d all been working at Google and other big tech companies since we’d graduated. They were making so much money. I was making no money. I felt the pressure of: I’m almost thirty and I have nothing to show for it.
I wrongly identified the problem as New York. The problem was me, obviously. I decided to go to L.A.
Had you lived in L.A. before?
No, I’d just visited a lot. I said, “I’ll go figure it out. I’ll consult for all these cool D.T.C. brands my cool Stanford friends started. I’ll help with their social media.”
I moved to L.A. on my twenty-ninth birthday. I got here with two suitcases, and I remember thinking, I really fucked up this time. Once I get an idea in my head, I’m like a dog with a bone. I can be a little impulsive. I remember thinking, I’ve gone too far. I’m starting over. I don’t know what I’m going to do for my job. I am a twenty-nine-year-old intern, basically, and I’m in this new city, I don’t have a car, I’m fucked.
I was consulting for this weed company. I don’t smoke weed. I was in a studio that didn’t have a couch, with a Peeping Tom and break-ins all the time, on a main road that was horrible to walk out of. I thought, This is really bad.
I got a couple of clients, and I grew to like my consulting work. It wasn’t a sustainable life style, financially, but I enjoyed the copywriting and helping clients with their social media. I started to build up a little life. Then the pandemic hit. Obviously, consultants are the first to go in a bad job market. I thought I would move home, back to London, and then I thought we were all gonna die. So I said, “I might as well create content, because why not?”
When I made my first TikTok, I was, like, Oh, this is what I’m supposed to be doing in my life. It took thinking the entire world was ending to try it, because I feared judgment. It’s hard to say, “I want to entertain people,” especially when you don’t know what that looks like. If you want to be an actress, a singer, there are more clear-cut paths. I knew that there was something about entertaining and writing. I didn’t really know what it was. And then when I got on TikTok I was, like, Oh, it’s this.
My brain has always thought in terms of memes. I used to make memes for other brands. Call me crazy, but I think that memes are kind of like sonnets. It’s a structure that you can fit anything into to create new meaning, but it’s a set structure that everybody understands. My brain just works that way. It was very easy for me.
So your family was in London during the pandemic?
Yeah. There was nothing to do. I had friends here but not that many, and no one wanted to see each other. It was just me, myself, and I, and whatever I wanted to do to feel good, I would do. If I wanted to stay up until five and then sleep till noon, I would do it. If I wanted to eat chicken fingers for every meal, I would do it. It reminded me of being a teen-ager or a child, because that’s when you’re your most creative. You don’t think about things with another lens. In the pandemic, when I was creating all that content, I didn’t know that it could make me any money. I thought we were all gonna die and I had endless time. I was creating and doing it out of the joy of connecting with people, and I think that’s why it worked so well.
It was a fun new thing, like having an Angelfire page back in the nineties : you’re, like, “O.K., I don’t really know why I’m doing this, but it’s fun, so why not?”
Exactly.
When you started doing the rich-mom satire, was there a part of you that was, like, “Oh shit, I’m gonna offend some people”?
Rich people are the only people that you can safely make fun of anymore. Also, it’s always laced with aspiration. That’s by design. I don’t hate rich people. I’m not of that camp. I make light fun of them because it’s interesting and funny, and the secret is that everyone really does want to know where they get their coffee and what those moms wear and how they run their lives. My take is that people will always want to know how rich people live. All of a sudden, everyone on TikTok is obsessed with the “old-money aesthetic.” Let’s not pretend that we’re beyond rich people. We all like escapism, and we all like to know how the other half lives.
Was there a moment when you first realized that you enjoyed giving advice?
At the all-girls’ school in London, I remember sitting in the back of the bus and watching this older girl put on mascara. I remember thinking, This is everything—watching her do it, hearing her talk about how she had a boyfriend. I loved it. I thought she was a, like, mythical creature, and I wanted to soak up everything she knew by osmosis.
[A server sets down a Diet Coke.]
When I was in college, and in the sorority—oh, it’s a glass bottle, that’s so amazing, sorry, I have to take a picture.
Please.
So you start and you’re the baby of the sorority. Everyone is fawning over you, and you’re someone’s little sister—they’re telling you everything. You go into this sisterhood. By the way, there’s no wackadoodle stuff at Stanford; there are no weird rituals. It’s hard when I talk about this, because people say that sororities are really racist at some schools, and there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on. But at Stanford it was just a way for women to live in really good housing together.
Once I got in, there were all these cool older girls who had these cheat codes for life: “Don’t take this class, take this one.” “Yeah, we know about that guy. He will sleep with you and then ghost you.” We had this e-mail list. Girls would write, “Does anyone have, like, a pink feather boa I can borrow for this theme party tonight?” “Has anyone taken Calc 45?” By the time the next year came around, I was so excited that I had knowledge to pass on. The ability to give back—I loved it.
I also realized when I was freelance writing that I liked giving advice. Social media wasn’t as big then, but people would e-mail me sometimes. I wrote a piece about wearing light-wash jeans and being self-conscious about it, like, “Here’s this simple mundane insecurity I have,” and it made other people feel better. That felt really good to me.
Does writing about your insecurities help you deal with them? Is it a kind of therapy?
Totally. It’s totally a defense mechanism, and I know that. But I think, of all the ways to process insecurities, writing and sharing is probably on the safer side. If you write about your insecurity, it’s already out there. No one else can call it out. The cherry on top is that you can connect with other people about it. What could be better?
What makes you uniquely qualified to write this book and to give relationship advice?
I’m a person who learns and who puts change into action. Through trial and error, I have made good on a lot of the dating mistakes I made in the past. I also care deeply about women, and I don’t think that there are a lot of dating books written from the perspective of “I just want women to be happy.” I’m not guaranteeing you’re gonna have a boyfriend by the end of this book. I am guaranteeing that you will understand the importance of self-esteem when it comes to modern dating.
Have you read “The Rules”?
I’ve read parts of it.
Was that in preparation to write this?
It was back in the day. I think that all of the dating lore from the nineties and two-thousands puts all the onus on women. Even magazines we were reading when we were growing up—like, “Forty Ways to Blow Him so That He’ll Propose by December.” And it’s, like, “What?” Everything was about how you can change yourself to become viable, to be someone’s wife. It’s no wonder that women are out of their mind stressed about dating, because we’ve told them, “Your looks are a depreciating asset. You will not be happy until you’re married. Your wedding day is the best day of your life, and everything hinges upon you getting this done. You’re a ticking time bomb.”
Once you actually release yourself—which is very hard—once you try to release some of those strings of control and terror, there’s so much life on the other side, and you can be so happy. That’s not to say that I’m not excited to find the love of my life. That’s the other thing: I always felt that the reaction to stuff like “The Rules” was this angry, over-the-top, often hypersexualized brand of “I don’t need a man; I’m O.K. without him”—that kind of Samantha Jones vibe. You can be so excited to fall in love, to be married, and have a family. That doesn’t mean you have to stress out and have a terrible time dating. Isn’t that what women want?
You talk about how dating apps are tools, how you’re not meant to spend entire nights swiping.
It’s like Uber. When you’re organizing your phone, put it next to Uber and Postmates, because it’s a tool. The apps are psychological warfare. What started as such a well-intended project has become, obviously, a huge industry and so much more complex, but people just use them for validation now.
Are you on them?
[Sighs.] Kind of. I’m so busy right now. I tell my followers, “If it’s very important for you to be dating, then use the apps.” For me, I have never met a boyfriend on an app. Last summer, I had this initiative with my followers called Summer of Outside—put down your phone, go to the party, the dinner, the art-gallery opening, on the trip. Use your apps for ten minutes a day, but treat it like background noise.
We’re acting like you can’t meet people in real life anymore. We’re acting like bars don’t exist anymore. It’s bizarre.
I know people that have gotten into this checklist mentality, which maybe existed before the apps—he has to be this tall and have this kind of job, etc. You could spend your entire life searching for someone who meets all those factors.
I like to say, “I don’t date to marry,” which always sends people into such a tizzy—like, “What do you mean?” All I mean is that, when I meet someone, I’m not interviewing them for the position of husband. Instead, it’s “Do I like this person? Is it a match, to spend time together? What’s happening right now?”
The checklist creates so much pressure. It’s not a job. It’s a person. Especially in the beginning, it’s a vibe check. How can you make a list and just think that if they don’t have brown hair and didn’t go to Yale, they’re not a fit?
Until you’ve heard someone laugh, until you’ve watched someone go through a menu and order a drink, you have no fucking idea if you’re going to fall in love with them or not. It’s honestly kind of comical that we’ve boiled this cosmic, chemical thing that we’ve been doing since the dawn of time into a little checkbox.
I understand that some women really do just want to get married, and I’m not belittling them when I say that. Everyone is entitled to their own dreams, but I think that it’s becoming less and less suitable for women to have that dream. Fifty years ago, getting married was kind of the best thing that could happen to us. Having a big house with a car was pretty fucking sick, and you had your husband and your dog and your kids—that was pretty great.
Now we’re, like, “I want ten houses. I want my own empire. I want this, that, and the third. I expect to orgasm every time I have sex.” It’s just different. Again, I’m very much, like, “You do you,” but I just don’t think that a lot of women are going to be satisfied simply by getting married. Also, the divorce rate is over fifty per cent. It’s something to consider.
You’re really open, in the book and with your followers, about what happened with YG [Young Gemini, the code name for a recent ex]. How has your own rise impacted your romantic relationships and ability to have them?
It’s definitely harder to date. It creates another layer of complication. Look, I love talking about dating with my followers, but if you’re a natural storyteller it becomes problematic really quickly. You start to think in terms of your story—that makes me sound like a psychopath, but if you’re a writer or any type of storyteller you’ll understand what I mean. You start to think in terms of a narrative, and you don’t just feel your feelings.
Then you factor in whether the guys are there for the right reasons, or whether they’re there for the free trips to Mexico, for the influencer-boyfriend life? You can never separate why someone comes up to you. You will never know if they were really interested in you because they thought you were interesting or because you have followers on the Internet.
At the same time, all of it is intertwined, right? You can’t isolate one factor.
You can’t. It is who I am. But it’s also just complicated.
My boyfriend that I broke up with in February, I didn’t show his face on social media. People on the Internet were, like, “Oh, she’s embarrassed of him.” I haven’t shown any of my boyfriends on the Internet—it’s complicated enough. People still found out who he was and would D.M. him messages spreading lies about me, or message me and say, “I saw your boyfriend at a party with a girl,” and it would be on a night that we’d spent together. It was tough.
May I ask why the relationship ended?
Just wasn’t right. It just kind of ended, very amicably. I’m lucky that I got to spend time with him. It was a great relationship. I learned a lot. I say this in the book: I don’t think relationships are failures when they end. A relationship is only a failure if you don’t learn something.
If a critic were to say, “What position are you in to give out relationship advice when—”
I’m single?
Yes. What is your response to that?
My response is that they haven’t read the book. The whole point is that the goal should be to be happy, not to be in a relationship. You can’t rush timing. I can’t wait until I find my person, but what am I going to do in the meantime, light myself on fire? I have a lot to be grateful for.
I think we’re thinking about it all wrong. Instead of thinking that single is bad and relationship is good—there are amazing things about both. Wherever you are, you should be appreciative of that.
It’s a very binary way of thinking.
Also, I think it’s so crucial to stop pitting married women against single women. It’s another way to divide us. We’re talking about two eras. You wouldn’t say that being a child is bad and being a teen-ager is good. Those are two different times in your life, and both are fantastic for different reasons.
I try to lead by example, to offer another archetype apart from Samantha Jones. I love men. I love dating. I love being in love. But I’m not going to settle until I find someone who makes my life better and is amazing. You can have that softer feminine vibe and still be a romantic but not be in a relationship. It’s actually pretty simple.
You write, in the book, that there are plenty of great men out there. We’re at a time when masculinity is being challenged from all directions. How can you be so sure?
I think it’s so defeatist to say that there aren’t any good men out there. People have been falling in love since the dawn of time. It’s only since we’ve introduced this timeline and all these external stressors that this has become such a big conversation and issue.
I think every person has multiple soulmates. The way that we’re marrying and living life is definitely changing, but I think that that’s a good thing. I don’t see us falling in love less. I do see people getting married less, if I’m honest, but I don’t think that will mean people will stop falling in love and spending time together.
I want to talk a little bit about your rise. How do you feel about the terms “influencer” and “content creator”? What do you call yourself?
I call myself an influencer now. I don’t care. I think it’s all about how you say it, how you carry it. I am an influencer. I honestly was probably born to be an influencer, and I’m O.K. with that. “Content creator” . . . to me, that’s more embarrassing.
It’s a little robotic. Like, you can program something to create content. How do you feel about the derisive view of influencing, the fact that some people don’t consider it a legitimate career?
I get where the disdain is coming from. But I think that the more interesting angle to look at it from is: Why is influencing the No. 1 career that kids say they want when they grow up? Why is everyone so obsessed with it?
The truth is, influencing is the new American Dream. Influencing is the only way to make it seemingly overnight, and it’s available to everybody. America used to be a place where, if you worked hard, you could raise your status. Now the only way to make it overnight—and this is really horrible and a bad sign of the times—is influencing. One day, someone’s sitting in their living room, and the next minute they’re on the red carpet. The accessibility is what makes it feel so unfair, because these people are seemingly plucked from obscurity. Yesterday, they were just like you, in their living room in their sweatpants, and now they’re famous.
So I get the disdain, but I think that the whole shitting-on-influencers conversation is so boring. It’s overdone. It’s tired. It’s a cheap joke, at this point.
__There isn’t a lot of transparency around the industry or how much you can make from it—how, with sponsorships, it might not be all that different from being an actor or musician who has a variety of endorsements. As I was thinking about this, I thought about how Linda Evangelista said, in the nineties, that she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day. Now that you are quite established, do you have a dollar amount like that? __
I don’t care to take a low fee, but it’s so case-by-case. It really is. I might have had a number at one point, but I don’t have a lot of ego in the game anymore. I’m here for a long time, not a good time, and I’m just trying to make smart business decisions that make sense for me and my team.
How many people do you have on your team?
I have my management team, which is three people, and then my six agents, and then my publicists, and then hair and makeup, and then two assistants. So a lot of people. It takes a lot of people. I know that some people might think, That’s so diva-ish, but I don’t really care. I have a business, I have a vision that I’m building, and I’m so lucky to be surrounded by amazing people.
Last April, someone went through your tweets and found one from 2012 in which you called Kim Kardashian fat. They dug up some other, similar tweets and tried to get you cancelled. What did that feel like? And why didn’t you delete all of your old tweets when you started blowing up?
I had had a private Twitter for so long. I knew that I had tweeted for a long time, but I didn’t remember everything, and it felt inauthentic to delete the whole thing. Everyone has said stuff in the past. If you don’t take them out of context—like, if you read through all twenty thousand of my tweets—you wouldn’t think that I was a horrible person. This hate group cherry-picked eight tweets over the course of ten years.
We have this whole call for authenticity with influencers, but I don’t think that should just mean that we show our cellulite and don’t retouch it. It should mean that everyone has a past. Everyone changes and grows as a person. It feels so crazy that we should just wipe everything clean if we want to be in the public eye.
We all should be evolving.
Yeah. I mean, it felt pretty bad. I’m sorry for what I said, but I would not wish that experience on my worst enemy.
I know that I went back and deleted all of my old tweets after that happened to you, and you’re absolutely right: it’s not an authentic thing to do. I eradicated a large footprint that I had for a decent amount of time. But every time this happens, it’s, like, “Well, how dare that woman fly so close to the sun?”
My new take is that being outwardly misogynistic is sort of passé now, but cancelling women is a safe way to redirect an uncontrollable amount of rage at women, especially ones who are doing well. If you think I’m kidding, go look at the comments on articles about female influencers being cancelled. They are violent, misogynistic, terrifying comments. It’s like they’ve found a loophole. To be a man and be cancelled, you have to sexually assault about twenty women and, even then, you can still get that Netflix special.
Think about the massacre of the Girlboss era. Think about every female founder. Think about all the male founders. Where are they? On their third and fourth companies.
Billy McFarland will rise again.
Fucking Adam Neumann? Like, come on.
Again, I’m sorry that I called someone fat, but I didn’t need to get death threats. I didn’t need to have my mom chased off of Facebook. There was also this feeling, from certain followers, of “I trusted you. You betrayed me.” I was, like, “You don’t pay me tax dollars.” It was a wild time. But I got through it and, ultimately, I grew from it.
Maybe people are starting to realize that everyone would get cancelled if their entire past was on the Internet. What do you feel you owe your followers, if anything?
I owe my community honesty and doing my best. I tell them, “I try to be one per cent better for you guys every day.” When someone follows me, I view it as them making an investment in me, and I think it’s my job to entertain and inform them and make their lives better. I don’t know if I owe that to them, but that’s what I think my job is.
How have you cultivated your confidence? Where does it come from?
Confidence is definitely something you can work on. My practical tips for confidence are, firstly, you really can fake it till you make it. When I got to Stanford, I wasn’t confident, but I thought, Nobody here knows that I’m not confident, so if I cosplay as a confident person, they’ll think I am. When you do that, you get positive reinforcement, because everybody loves confident people. Then you kind of forget. The lines blur between when you’re acting and when you’re not. I do that to this day.
Also, find what you’re good at, even if it’s something small. Practice that thing and do it more. Only hang around people who make you feel good about yourself. When you leave your hangouts with your friends, you should feel better. That sounds unrelated to confidence, but it’s actually very important.
And take nudes. That really raises your confidence. Next time you’re in a hotel room alone, try it. You don’t have to send it. It’s for you. That’s what I tell my followers: “Take them for you.”
You’re not afraid of getting hacked?
I mean, my ass is basically on the Internet already. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
