From Infamy to Intimacy: The Transformation of Trisha Paytas
Photos / Savanna Ruedy
Styling / Ali Mullin
MUA / Selena Ruiz
Hair / Luca Burnett
Set Design / Dripdome
Photo Assistant / Bianca Mehnert
Trisha Paytas is one of the most controversial, beloved, and constantly surprising among the internet’s familiar faces, the early YouTubers that included Ryan Higa and Shane Dawson. Even before the platform’s rise, she lived a life that was interesting above all; she courted fame the old-fashioned game-show way, appearing on Guinness World Records Unleashed in a failed attempt to become the fastest talker, The Ellen Show, and even My Strange Addiction (she was a tanning addict). She worked as a stripper and escort in LA, and appeared in the music videos of Eminem and Amy Winehouse among others. Though her Linkedin would be a mixed bag, this bit of biography alone backgrounds a genuinely fascinating individual— but her adventures, as all online know, did not cease there.
On YouTube in the 2010’s, she began making trolling videos wherein she, playing blonde bimbo to the maximum, outraged as many as possible for the attention and controversy. But between the parodic bits, she uploaded raw documentations of her emotional breakdowns, sobbing and venting to the camera as though to an intimate friend. The videos are striking in that they feel absolutely natural, something characteristic of all Paytas’ videos— but here, the ease of communion between Paytas and viewer is heartbreaking. The viewer is privy to Paytas’ rising and falling moods even within the course of one ten-minute video, as well as her plaintive appeals to God to make life better. The polar opposites of her forcefully comic and abrasive self, and her self dissolving in emotion and self-blame, portraits a woman magnetically and pathologically attached to extremes, who seeks the existential comfort of being seen in some, any, way.
In a recent interview on the podcast Soul Bloom with Rainn Wilson, he suggested (condescendingly) that her breakdown videos were somehow a cash or fame grab that then led to another breakdown from excessive attention— a materialistic vicious cycle. But the videos were more a reach for solace, for some stabilizing commune. “I just want to be seen, and I want people to see the actual angst I’m feeling,” Paytas explains. “Breakdown videos, those hurt me to see. Those are things I never liked posting, as opposed to videos where I was purposely trying to make people upset, to cancel me. Those were different things.”
Throughout her career, she was not in hot water as much as running her own constant bath of scandal. However, her recent controversies— her coming out as a trans man, when she had previous come out as a chicken nugget, and her alleged appropriation of religions, where she attempted to identify with multiple at once— have been unintentional, and Paytas has both apologized and attempted to better articulate herself. She seems to genuinely be trying to grasp her true beliefs, her sense of self (readily embracing my suggestion that she might be a Gnostic) and it just so happens that much of her thinking is done, with a footprint, online.
Her relationship with her now husband Moses Hacmon impelled a dramatic change and determination to heal in Paytas, who began meditating for five to six hours a day in an effort to improve her mental health. She also began journaling and embarked on a spiritual journey for a religion that resonated. The change in her is evident, and her past self now seems vastly distant. “I don’t recognize the person. I don’t want to know that person. I’m embarrassed to be that person, so I just don’t like talking about it,” she says. “There’s no, ‘Oh, I could slip back that way’ because it’s so far removed from who I am now. It’s a shock to see. That’s why I took down a lot of videos. It’s stuff that I wish didn’t exist, to be honest, in my story,”
The other big change in Paytas’ life: motherhood. Her daughter Malibu has just turned two, and her second daughter Elvis was born earlier this year. Paytas was told by doctors she would not be able to conceive naturally, but in the course of her spiritual journey, she unexpectedly became pregnant, a great joy to the couple. Paytas continued her meditation practice throughout her pregnancy, which she described as “blissful,” but she was also motivated to meditate by her daughter. “I was like, ‘Okay, gotta do everything I can not embarrass her, and I’ve got to get control of myself,” she laughs.
When Malibu was born, Paytas began suffering from postpartum depression. “I didn’t think of myself as sad as much as just overwhelmed. And I started having intrusive thoughts, like, I shouldn’t be a mother, I made a mistake that I can’t go back on now,” says Paytas. “I would lock myself in a bathroom downstairs for four hours at night time, because I couldn’t go to a concert I wanted to go to— very odd and strange, I would start cooking dinner and just get in my car and leave. It was scary because I just wanted anything I could to get out of the house, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know it was postpartum depression, because I didn’t seek help right away.”
“It took me about a year to get out of that fog, to finally feel comfortable even holding her— I was so scared to hold her,” confides Paytas. “I finally felt the maternal instinct kick in then…When I finally found my footing, I was pregnant again; I was very excited to get pregnant, but I was very nervous and I got anxious, like, what if I can’t handle two? And then Elvis came, and everything fell into place. Everything became so easy. I don’t know what it was.”
Paytas’ actual mothering is reminiscent of her comments sections, which are flooded with people addressing her as “mother.” And when she talks about how she raises her children, she could have easily been talking about her viewers. “You’re shaping a new generation. You’re telling them what’s good, what you should be doing in the world,” she says fondly. “You tell her, patience, patience. And she’ll repeat, patience, patience. The fulfillment grows every single day. It’s the best thing ever.”
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