I went viral on TikTok and it wasn’t what I expected

‘Must be hard being a one-hit wonder,’ a follower negged me once. Actually, yes

(Sonja Smith-Yang)

Fifty years ago, Andy Warhol said that everybody in the future would be world-famous for 15 minutes. He also never said that. The quote is widely attributed to him, but it was the director of Sweden’s Moderna Museet art museum who told a journalist to include it in a program exhibit. And while we haven’t quite yet reached a world where everybody in the world is seen on the global stage for 15 minutes, it’s certainly become more likely. I know, because I’m still enduring the fallout from my own 15 minutes of fame.

In December of 2020, I posted a video of myself singing “Snowman” by Sia on TikTok. Before then, my account was made up of an equal split of music and miscellaneous slice-of-life content like jokes, trend videos and vlogs. I’d break 100 views here or there if I got lucky. I had just one other singing video that had comparable success a couple months before — but nothing quite like 3.4 million views.

If you’re on TikTok, you’ll know even 3.4 million views isn’t even a big deal — not necessarily. And if you are on the app, you might already be familiar with what happens next. A compilation of 10 singers on the track edited to an animated slideshow of Harry Potter characters went viral overnight: a male voice set to Harry; another girl’s voice set to Hermione; and, after those two, mine set to Ginny. I found it that January, when the sound had 5,000 videos. The original and the top two reuploads amassed a total over 500,000.

“I stan @lynlapid,” read my caption, referencing the viral artist I first saw do the trend — namely, singing the prechorus of “Snowman” into the chorus all in one breath. “I’ll tell you the secret right now,” I began in my video, trying to convince whoever came across it that the challenge wasn’t as hard as it looked because “taking a big enough breath is more than half the battle.” Then, I put my phone down and attended my best friend’s virtual birthday party. I haven’t been able to look at my phone the same since I left that Zoom meeting.

Lynlapid followed me back. Another girl went around saying my voice was her; some of my friends corrected her in comments before I even saw it had happened. For months, people made copycat fan videos. My voice invoked the praise of Percy Jackson’s Annabeth, Gossip Girl’s Serena, and the original Ginny Weasley. Models and influencers lip-synced to the sound, asking which voice suited them; people made jokes about how girls would hope they’d get mine — “number three.”

Girls like that may have sounded like me, but I looked nothing like them. As disorienting as it was to have my voice go viral separate from my body, I’m relieved that it happened that way. A lifetime of being overweight left me with a habit of not showing my body online, at least not without my guitar to obscure me — and, like so many others, I’d gained weight during quarantine.

Luckily, not everyone was curious about who was behind the voices, so only a few stray comments slipped through the cracks. Once, I scrolled through 2,000 comments on someone else’s viral reupload of my video, just to see if anyone might be insulting what I looked like. A strange satisfaction turned upward in my stomach when I found what I was looking for. I didn’t take a screenshot, but I don’t remember it being too grisly — just something basic about me being fat.

Outside of my own video, I saw about the same number of comments calling me fat as I did calling me pretty — three or less of each. It was disorienting to heard so ubiquitously yet somehow simultaneously ignored.

I got emailed by a T-shirt company and a few other brands, and messaged on Instagram by some independent producers. I filmed a guitar cover for a digital magazine, the only offer I followed through on with something to show for it (I spent four hours trying to get a take I felt okay with). I auditioned for a talent show on Fox. The agent who invited me tried her best to find a unique yet marketable personal brand to give me an edge against her other applicants, but I wasn’t giving her much to work with. I sang, but so did everyone else (it was a singing show). That had always been enough for me, even if it wasn’t for TV.

That winter, I did frequent livestreams where I sang covers with my guitar. I would take requests from the chat, stumbling through the ones I did recognize and apologetically refusing the ones I didn’t. I never refused when people asked me to sing “Snowman,” because I knew it and had no reason not to (and because it was easy — I could do it a cappella and give my fingers a break from playing guitar nonstop on stream). Exhausted, I would take a breath before the chorus. Last month, around the one-year mark of the original video, I attempted the full challenge again off-camera. I started struggling about halfway through, didn’t make it by a long shot, and laughed.

On my account, I got involved in social commentary and aired my political opinions. I posted my prose and original music. Now, I have 29,000 followers, almost triple what I had that first fateful winter, doing what I want. The videos I post these days draw a handful of familiar usernames to my notifications — not quite friends, not really strangers, faced and faceless alike.

TikTok these days feels like busking more than anything else, and I’ve found that such expectations have changed my experience for the better. And on stream, I have my set of the same 10 songs over and over, the same 10 songs I know well enough to do all right on my worst day. I could get harassed. I could score a tip or two. But I can usually count on at least few people stopping to listen. I’m grateful for that — grateful for the things that make me feel real.

“Must be hard being a one-hit wonder,” a follower negged me once. “Actually, yes,” I joked in a now-privated video response. “Thank you for noticing.”