I downloaded a live-streaming app one night sitting in my bedroom in Kingsport, Tennessee, with no plan and no audience. I just wanted to see what would happen. Five people showed up. That was enough to bring me back the next night, and the night after that.
Kingsport is not the kind of city that puts people on the industry's radar. There are no talent agencies on Main Street, no industry connections built into the school system. If you want to work in entertainment from a place like that, you have to build it yourself, which means you learn consistency before you learn anything else.
By 2016 my following had grown to a point where it felt like something real. I was posting to Instagram every day, going live on YouNow as often as I could, and starting to understand that the audience I had built actually cared about the content. Not just the face, not just the numbers, but what I said and whether it was honest.
The POMSCON tour was the first time I left home for something I had built. I traveled with other creators and met fans in cities across the country. Standing in a room with people who had watched my videos and felt something because of them was a completely different experience from seeing follower counts go up on a screen.
When Liza Mandelup told me she wanted to spend years following my life for a documentary, I agreed because I thought it would be a record of something I was proud of. What I did not expect was for the film to become something that played at Sundance, won a jury award, and got picked up by Hulu for a national release. That is not the outcome you plan for when you are a teenager going live from your bedroom in Kingsport.
Jawline showed me what I had actually been doing for years: performing, connecting, and working at something I cared about. That clarity pushed me harder toward acting as a formal pursuit. The camera does not lie, and what I saw in that documentary was someone who wanted to be on screen and had been preparing for it without fully realizing it.
I am still in Tennessee. I still create content. I still go back to the same place I started and make something from it. The work has always been the point, and that has not changed.