Endless Thread - MEMES, Bonus: Overly Attached Girlfriend

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Unlike some of the other everyday-people-turned-memes featured in this series, Laina Morris leaned in big-time when her parody entry in a Justin Bieber fan contest turned into the epic meme Overly Attached Girlfriend in 2012. The screenshot from the video that launched Laina’s face into online ubiquity featured an intentionally off-putting open-mouthed, wide-eyed stare. She continued making YouTube videos until 2019 when she announced that she was ending her online career to address her mental health. We hear more about Laina’s decision to open up publicly about her depression and anxiety and why she’s not tempted to get back in front of a camera.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. How would you define what a meme is? Ooh, man, hey, okay, that's a big question.

A meme, I know when I became a meme, which is like a weird sentence to say, but when that happened to me in 2012, memes were very much like, a photo with text on the top, text on the bottom. Every meme looked like that. Every meme had a name. A few months ago, as we were learning everything we could about memes, Ben and I sat down with Lena, who has a particular take on them. A take without a doubt shaped by her unique experience as the accidental star at the center

of a beloved, if unsettling meme. Well, my name is Lena Morris. I am better known as the overly attached girlfriend, which is a meme on the internet. I did YouTube full-time for like seven to eight years. And now I'm just hanging out in Arizona with my dogs, you know, quarantining still. And that's my life. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson.

And today we're bringing you another bonus endless thread meme series episode. a conversation with the person behind one of the most famous memes, overly attached girlfriend. Which, if you haven't seen or can't remember, is a classic. It's a image macro with impact font, that style of meme, and the images of Lena posing as well an overly attached girlfriend. So picture a wide-eyed woman in her early 20s, an odd, forced smile, head cocked to the side as if she's kind of interrogating you. Or like maybe you're a pet and she's about to like hug you to death or something? Exactly. And it's always paired with these captions like,

Just because you broke up with me doesn't mean I broke up with you. And did you get my messages? About my other messages? It took you 10 minutes to get home. Google says it takes eight minutes. Who is she? And as with many meme stars we've spoken to for this season, Lena's relationship with fame,

it was far from Rosie. even if its origin was pretty innocent. Innocent, only if you think stuff that involves the Beebe is innocent. This all starts with a Justin Bieber contest of some sort, right? When did you find out about that contest? Are you a Belieber too? Or were you? I liked him. I think it was also a little bit. I thought it was funny to be a Justin Bieber fan at 20 years old.

And, you know, like I dressed up as him for Halloween. And I kind of just thought it was funny. You were Belieber agnostic. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to put it. So, okay, yeah, so the contest, I, it was early June, and I remember just, like, waking up and getting on my phone. And I say I wasn't a fan, and I'm going to tell you that, like, the first thing I did was look up Justin Bieber News. But, like, I wasn't a fan.

I saw that he was having this contest to promote his new fragrance, which was called Girlfriend. And he had just released a song called Boyfriend. And he basically asked fans to make a parody song from the girlfriend's perspective. And I started writing these lyrics like from the perspective of a clingy girlfriend. and I got off work one day and the contest was like almost over. So I like ran to my room and put on a random t-shirt that I found on the floor, which, you know, if I knew how many people were going to watch it, maybe I would have done something different.

You log onto your YouTube like from this website and it uploads your video and it titles it J.B. fan video all on its own. I shared the video on my Facebook just so my friends. friends and family could see it because I thought it was kind of funny. And, you know, I thought that was kind of that. And then that same night, it started getting a lot more attention than, like, just my friends and family. And the next day, it was a meme. The video begins with Lena sitting still in a kind of cheap t-shirt, chestnut brown hair facing the camera. And she holds that awkward, wide-eyed look we described, with blue eyes that seemed to just swallow the

you up. Then? If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the wall. Question here with, yeah, I'd always call and call. I wouldn't call it jealousy, just looking out for you. Reading all your texts, watching everything you do, nag. If the lyrics aren't already creepy enough, she leans in, letting the song unfold into a full-blown ode to the Bebes, styled after Kathy Bates in misery. If I was your girlfriend, I never let you leave without a small recording device,

taped under your sleeve. This was supposed to be a silly video she shared with friends. But to enter the contest, she was required to upload the video to YouTube for everyone to see. And they did. The video started taking off. First 52 comments, a few hundred views. Then something like a million views a day in 2012. I remember calling my dad and being like, do you know what a viral video is?

Like, I think there's, I think I did that. Someone took a screenshot of Lena's intense overly attached look, and coupled with a few creepy captions, the overly attached girlfriend meme was born. Lena had already taken a semester off from school, unsure about what she really wanted to do with her life. And she knew she liked to entertain, so she ran with it and decided to make another parody.

The song, Call Me Maybe, by Carly Ray Jepson, was really popular at the time. I've never heard of it. Yeah, no. Hey, I just saw you with that lady, paid for her dinner. That's kind of shady. I decided that I would make another parody and do it to that song. And I did.

And that video blew up and my videos were like number one and number two on YouTube at the time. And then I knew I wanted to see where it could go. I made another video, but when I made the other video, that's when I knew like, okay, I want to see how far I can go with this. Lena was all in. For a 20-something living in Texas still trying to figure out life, the idea of turning her 15 minutes of fame into something more was kind of exciting. Her dream of being an entertainer was no longer just a dream.

Her family hired an entertainment lawyer. Lena signed with Big Frame, a management company in Los Angeles that specializes in representing YouTube stars. And then she got to work, making weekly videos, taking offers from big brands, doing the work that celebrities do. My two favorite things that came out of it, I can tell you, were number one, I was on Jimmy Fallon when he was doing late night, late night with Jimmy Fallon. Okay, cool.

It was a real quick sketch. I didn't have a single line. I literally came out and made the face and then went away. Don't you see the similarities and why you guys would get along? Look at those. Look at her eyes. And then the other thing, which I feel like these two are just tied for the best, was that I got a Kia Soul, which I was obsessed with Kia Souls.

Everyone makes fun of me for. Kia Soul. I need a Kia. But the good vibes wouldn't last. What went wrong in a minute. My current car's not great. There's nowhere to put my cup. When I play my music, my speakers don't light up.

There's nowhere in my car to plug my iPod. And local radio stations are my only friend. I need a Kia. Kia soul. I need a Kia. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

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Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. In the years after Lena Morris became the overly attached girlfriend, she built a pretty successful YouTube following, often playing that character, the clingy, creepy, cringy, can't let you go, girl.

But it wasn't easy. When did things start to take a turn? And things started to feel like, maybe this isn't going the way that I thought it would, or maybe this isn't what I wanted to do. Pretty quickly, it was a very lonely job. You know, I lived in Texas, and I had no one around me that was doing the same thing I was doing. It's a job I did from home every day. So it wasn't around people as much as before I wasn't in school anymore.

It was just kind of like me at home all day, which I think maybe people can kind of like relate to. now. I think a lot of people think, you know, that's like the dream and it's really fun. But sometimes it's like I needed some structure that I didn't have and it really, it messed with me mentally. I think also one thing that was really hard was just sort of the expectation of like, like, what are you going to do now? Are you going to act? Are you going to do stand-up? Are you going to write? Are you going to go back to school? And I didn't know the answer to any of these questions that I felt like I was being asked all the time. Yeah, I don't know that there was like a specific point or period I can say like this moment,

this video, this time is what triggered everything to kind of like not be so fun anymore. It was just sort of slowly over time. With all these questions swirling around in her head, Lena was also dealing with what many young women deal with online. Creepy guys on the internet's real like sexual, disgusting. Like, I don't know. I still get them. Like, might be kind of sad, but it's something I became, like, very used to very quickly, unfortunately. It was all becoming a little too much.

Even when it was at its peak and, like, I was doing my best, I felt almost like I was, like, tricking everyone somehow. Like, I was like, why are a million people subscribed to me? Like, I'm not very good at this. like I don't know a lot of like real negative thoughts self-deprecating thoughts and in 2017 I sort of took a step back and wanted to take a break that turned into like a really long time and then around that time 2018 beginning of 2018 I started going to therapy and really diving into like do I even want to do this like when I do make content I'm not real happy with it so I'm sure people watching aren't loving it. It's not benefiting them. It's not paying the bills. It's not making me

happy. Like, what's my motive here now? Her motivation and self-esteem had taken a hit, and she didn't know how to dig herself out of this hole. She says after she started seeing a therapist, she learned that she was dealing with depression and anxiety. As she was posting those public, funny videos, she also kept a video diary of her private life, like in 2018, when she wrestled with the idea, of taking medication. I think having to, like, face that I'm not okay on my own is hard. It makes me feel weak for some reason. It makes me feel...

I don't know. Like, I'm just not okay. Lanna would spend all week trying to come up with an idea for her YouTube channel. Then her deadline would come around, and with nothing written, she'd wing it, more or less. She was tired of it. And then my therapist challenged me to make a video. saying goodbye, not necessarily for anyone to see. Just like, see how it feels.

Sit down, talk, say goodbye, say whatever you feel you would want to say, and see how that feels, see if it feels right. And I did that, and that's the video I actually ended up posting. In her goodbye video, Lena opened up about her struggles with mental health. It was freeing in a way. As much as I don't want to admit it, I know that this part of my life is done, and it's time to say goodbye and how's it feel to be broken up with

by the overly attached girlfriend? But she wasn't really the overly attached girlfriend anymore. She told us when she sees that meme online now, she doesn't see herself. And that's a good thing. The best stuff, the stuff I'm still getting, which is really great, is like DMs and stuff on Instagram,

comments on YouTube, and people just saying, like, I watched your video, and because of that, like, I went and filled this. prescription that I've been putting off where I made an appointment with a therapist or you know you gave me hope because I'm in this really bad spot you gave me hope that it could get better stuff like that which is like more than I could have ever hoped for it just sort of makes me feel like the entire seven or eight years whatever that was like was worth it to just kind of end in that way and help even

one person do you look back on this with no regrets or do you feel like I don't know. Do you have the what-if conversation with yourself? I do think, like, my answer to that on a very surface level is just like, I have no regrets. It ended up exactly how it should have, you know. But there are definitely things I look back on and think, if I wasn't like overthinking every little thing or stressed about every little decision, There are, you know, opportunities and trips and stuff that I turned down because I was really struggling mentally or I just was very overwhelmed by every little thing. But at the same time, I just think, man, I was like in my early 20s, I wasn't doing anything else. Like, I just, I wish I had sort of jumped on and ridden the wave a bit more and, like, just had more fun with it, I guess.

There's one more thing we wanted to share from our conversation with Lena, something that came up unexpected. after about two hours of talking. The overly attached girlfriend, one of the biggest memes to come out of 2012. She has a boyfriend. In fact, she's had this boyfriend for nine years. Yeah, we started dating six months before I made that video, the first video.

Wow. It was a lot. I think for both of us, we were both just kind of trying to figure it all out together. A lot of people asked me, one of the most common questions I get is how has dating been as the overly attached girlfriend, you know? And I think I'm so lucky that I haven't had to, I don't have an answer to that question because I can't even imagine trying to like date and then know that I'm one Google search

away from scaring off anyone. So you're the right amount of attached to each other. Yeah, I like to think so. Lina, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much, Lena. Well, thank you. I had a really great time and I appreciate the good conversation. So thank you guys.

This bonus episode of Endless Thread was produced by Dean Russell and Frank Hernandez. And we are a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson and we'll be back in your feed on Friday

with the next full episode in our meme series. Farewell. Good morrow. I'm sorry.