why I stopped trying to be an influencer

I spent years sharing my life online, until somewhere along the way, I realised I wasn’t really sharing it anymore, I was packaging it.

My page looked like me, but it didn’t always feel like me. This is what happened when I stopped trying to fit inside the version of myself I’d built online, and started sharing my actual life instead.

and started sharing my actual life instead

I’ve been sharing parts of my life online for years, long enough to remember when “content creator” wasn’t really a career people understood, UGC definitely wasn’t something being thrown around in every second Instagram bio, and telling someone you took photos of yourself on the internet for work required a slightly uncomfortable amount of explaining.

I started by sharing outfits, beauty products and little snippets of my life, and somewhere along the way, it became my job. Brand collaborations, gifted products, campaigns, briefs, deadlines, analytics, deliverables, trying to make something look completely effortless while simultaneously remembering the seven things that absolutely had to be mentioned within thirty seconds.

And for a really long time, I genuinely loved it.

It gave me opportunities I never imagined I’d have, introduced me to some beautiful people, let me make a living being creative, and eventually gave me years of experience in content and social media that I’ve carried into everything I’ve built since.

I don’t regret that chapter at all.

But after years of working as an influencer and content creator, I started wondering whether I had outgrown the version of myself I had built online, because somewhere along the way, without really noticing when it happened, I stopped feeling like I was sharing my life and started feeling like I was constantly packaging it.

And there is a very big difference.

I became really good at being palatable

For most of my life, I’ve been incredibly good at reading a room.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 32, and looking back now, I can see just how much of my life involved observing other people, mirroring them, adjusting myself, reading their reactions and figuring out which version of Samantha belonged in whichever room I happened to be standing in. Social media just became another room…

Except this particular room had tens of thousands of people standing in it, which is obviously very relaxing and normal 😂

I knew which photos looked beautiful, which version of me brands would probably feel safest working with, which parts of my personality were easy to package, and which parts felt a little too loud, too emotional, too strange, too opinionated, too honest, or simply too difficult to squeeze between a discount code and a call to action.

Without ever consciously deciding to, I started shrinking again… The funny, deeply reflective, slightly chaotic woman who has approximately seventeen ideas before breakfast was obviously still there, she just wasn’t always the woman I was showing online.

And eventually, I could feel the disconnect… My page looked like me, but it didn’t always feel like me.

The sparkle had been gone for a while

I think we stay inside familiar identities for much longer than we realise, not necessarily because we still want them, but because we know how to be them. I knew how to be an influencer, how to create campaigns, photograph products, film beautiful content, negotiate deliverables, hit a brief and make the whole thing look effortless.

It was familiar, I was good at it, and there was absolutely nothing inherently wrong with it, I just didn’t really want to do it anymore. And I think I knew that for probably two years before I finally admitted it properly.

I wanted to talk more, I wanted to write, I wanted to share the weird thoughts that appeared while I was folding washing, driving home from school drop-off, standing in the shower or lying awake at night wondering why humans do the bizarre things we do.

I wanted to talk about ADHD, motherhood, identity, relationships, health, healing, ambition, creativity, being a woman, figuring yourself out, losing yourself, finding yourself, and all the strange little contradictions that exist between those things. I had so much more to say than I was actually saying.

But stepping outside the box I had built was terrifying, because even when a box becomes uncomfortable, at least you know who you are inside it.

Then I basically told everyone to unfollow me

Eventually, trying to maintain the old version of my online identity started feeling harder than risking what might happen if I let her go. So naturally, I made a series about reasons people should unfollow me (an absolutely flawless social media growth strategy, obviously 😂)

But something shifted in me when I did it… I stopped trying to convince everybody to stay, I stopped wondering whether every thought belonged inside a perfectly defined content pillar, I stopped trying to make myself broadly palatable, and I just started talking.

Actually talking.

I wasn’t teaching from some imaginary pedestal, pretending I had figured life out, or trying to position myself as the expert on being a human being, because oh my gosh, imagine 😂 I just started sharing what was happening inside my head while I was actually living it.

That meant talking about being diagnosed with ADHD in my thirties and realising how much of my personality I had spent years masking, talking about motherhood and sensory overload, probably once a week it meant crying haha, and fairly regularly it meant laughing at something wildly inappropriate because apparently dark humour has been carrying me through life for decades.

Some days I looked glamorous, other days my hair looked like absolute shit and I had acne all over my face. I’d somehow manage to articulate a thought beautifully one day, then be sitting in my car swearing about something the next.

But that was kind of the point, I stopped trying to decide which parts of me belonged online and just let myself be a whole person there… and for the first time in years, my page started feeling like me again.

And then something really strange happened

The less I tried to appeal to everyone, the more women started telling me they felt seen, which is kind of funny when you think about it, because I’d spent years assuming the opposite would happen.

Our lives weren’t necessarily the same, but the feelings underneath them were. Women started messaging me saying things like, “I thought this was just me,” or “I’ve never known how to explain this,” and sending my videos to their partners because I’d somehow managed to put words around something they had been feeling for years.

I think that has been one of the most beautiful and unexpected parts of all of this. 🥹🥹🥹🥹

For so long, I thought being polished, consistent and easy to categorise would make me easier to connect with, when actually, the more specific and honest I became about my own experiences, the more other women seemed to find pieces of themselves in them too.

The things I worried would make me too much became the things women connected with, the thoughts I nearly kept inside my own head became conversations between thousands of us, and every time I showed a little more of myself and someone on the other side said me too, I think I gave myself a little more permission to keep doing it.

Turns out spending my entire life trying to be palatable may have been a slight waste of everyone's time hahaha.

I didn’t actually want a niche, I wanted a voice

I completely understand why people talk about niches, from a marketing perspective they make perfect sense, they tell people what to expect from you, they make your content easier to categorise and presumably make the algorithm very happy.

The slight issue is that I have spent quite enough of my life trying to fit myself neatly inside boxes 😂

I’m a mum, I’m a founder, I’m studying psychology and counselling, I’m a writer, I’m fascinated by ADHD, identity, human behaviour and why we become the versions of ourselves we become. I love making beautiful cinematic things, I love talking about the deeper parts of being human, and I also firmly believe I could turn a roll of toilet paper into a metaphor about motherhood if you gave me approximately fourteen seconds and some dramatic lighting.

There are days I want to talk about something that has completely changed the way I see myself, and there are days I want to make something utterly ridiculous because it made me laugh.

Both of those women are me.

I think that was the part I had been missing when I kept trying to figure out my “niche”, my consistency didn’t have to come from talking about the same thing every day, it could come from the way I see things, the things I notice, the way I tell stories and the conversations I naturally want to have.

I didn’t need a smaller box, I just needed to finally trust my own voice. 🥹

And once I started doing that, creating became fun again.

Resiliently became part of that shift too

Around the same time all of this was happening, I was building Resiliently, my self-care and mental wellbeing platform for women, which was probably the most vulnerable thing I could have chosen to build at the exact moment I was learning how terrified I was of being properly seen hahaha. And if I’m completely truthful, after I launched it, I hid from promoting it properly for months.

When you create something for another business and someone doesn’t like it, they’re rejecting the work. It might sting for five minutes, you make yourself a coffee, probably complain about it to someone and then you move on.

Building something that came directly from your own brain is different.

Resiliently was my ideas, my experiences, the things I had learned through some of the hardest seasons of my own life, the things I wished had existed for me, and this enormous idea I had somehow decided I was capable of turning into something real.

So putting it in front of people felt incredibly exposing… I launched it and almost immediately felt myself shrink again, my entire body basically went absolutely fucking not, this is far too visible, and for a while I listened 😂

But the more I started showing up as myself online, the easier it became to talk about Resiliently in the same way. I started sharing what I was building, why I was building it, what scared me, what I was learning, what it felt like when another woman joined, and what it was like trying to build something big when I didn’t grow up surrounded by entrepreneurs, investors or adults telling me my giant ideas were completely possible.

And eventually I realised Samantha Elle and Resiliently weren’t two separate things I needed to figure out how to market. They had grown from the same place. 🥹

A huge part of the past few years of my life has been learning how to come home to myself, getting curious about who I actually am underneath all the versions of me I learned how to be, and Resiliently became somewhere I could create little ways for other women to do some of that too.

Once I saw it like that, talking about it stopped feeling quite so much like selling something and started feeling like sharing another part of what I was already doing.

I still work with brands, I just don’t want them to define me anymore

I should probably clarify that none of this is an anti-influencer manifesto hahaha. I still work with brands I genuinely use and love, I still adore creating beautiful content, and after doing this for so many years I have a huge appreciation for how much skill goes into creating campaigns that actually make people stop, watch and connect with something.

I just don’t want brand work to be the centre of my creative identity anymore.

I don’t want to wake up and think about what I could create for a company before I think about what I actually want to say, I don’t want every interesting thought to immediately go through the mental filter of does this fit my niche?, and I definitely don’t want to spend another chapter of my life making myself easier to understand at the expense of actually expressing myself.

My content strategy these days is incredibly sophisticated… I have a thought, I record the thought, I edit the thought, I post the thought. Groundbreaking stuff 😂

Some of those thoughts have reached millions of people, others have very much not hahaha, but I think one of the biggest changes is that I don’t attach nearly as much meaning to that anymore.

Of course I want my work to reach people, I’m still running businesses and I’m not going to pretend numbers suddenly mean absolutely nothing to me, but they’re not the thing deciding whether something was worth sharing.

When I look at my page now, I recognise the woman who made it. I think that matters to me more. 🥹

Maybe this is what coming home to yourself actually looks like

I used to think finding yourself would eventually have a finish line, like one day you’d finally figure out exactly who you were, arrive there with all your little emotional suitcases, unpack them and think beautiful, glad we sorted that out, and then remain that exact woman forever 😂

I don’t think it works like that anymore.

I think we’re constantly meeting new versions of ourselves, we outgrow identities that once fit us perfectly, we shed parts of ourselves that once kept us safe, we discover things we love that we never gave ourselves permission to explore before, and we find parts of ourselves we might not have had the safety, confidence, experience or language to express yet.

I also don’t think outgrowing a version of yourself means she was fake, that has been a really important part of this for me.

The influencer version of me wasn’t fake, I genuinely loved that chapter of my life for a long time. The quieter versions of me weren’t fake. The versions that people pleased, performed, masked or made themselves easier to understand were still me too. Something doesn’t have to have been false to become outdated.

I think coming home to yourself is less about stripping everything away until you uncover one final, perfectly authentic version of you who was hiding underneath it all, and more about giving yourself enough room to keep evolving, changing your mind, discovering new parts of yourself and getting to know the woman you are now.

And when I look back at why I moved away from traditional influencer-style content, I don’t really think it was about social media at all. I think I had reached a point in my life where I didn’t want to keep performing a familiar version of myself just because I already knew how to be her, I wanted to know what would happen if I gave all the other parts of me enough room to exist out loud too. 🥹

Somewhere in the process of doing that, something really beautiful happened.

I started finding women who understood me, and maybe even more importantly, I started understanding myself a little more too.

Written with all my love,

Samantha Elle x

what happened next…

what happened when I stopped trying to find my niche, and let myself become the niche instead.

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