The Cognitive Dissonance Of Anti-Influencing Influencing

Lee From America Broke My Brain

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I have never envied influencers. No matter how beautiful or easy or rich their lives appear online, whenever I’ve imagined myself in their place I feel full body shudders. Since the first time I was aware of being perceived, presenting myself to others has always felt arduous. Even now, when I post something on Instagram, I can’t NOT think about the various ways it might be misconstrued (for better and for worse). Nor can I stop myself from hating how much time and effort go into the attempt to share something that originated as internally authentic and, through the various necessary layers of manipulation and performance, becomes something else entirely. It’s psychologically exhausting.

Every single influencer I interviewed for Momfluenced confirmed this sense of fatigue and psychic strain. They all talked about the critical need for boundaries, logging off, self-reflection, and maintaining some modicum of privacy. To succeed as an influencer, you must be sharply attuned to both how you desire to be perceived AND what that perception can afford you in terms of capital. There is never such a thing as singular authenticity because the very nature of an influencer’s job is to perform herself for an audience to consume. The performance changes according to audience response, which changes with the tides of culture and commerce. It’s a symbiotic relationship in which the influencer’s persona does not even exist without viewers to validate that persona.

In her new memoir, If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die, Lee Tilghman incisively shows us the toll of this tightrope dance between embodied selfhood and performative selfhood as a player in the influencer economy. I read the book in one sitting; it’s a fascinating trip back in time through the eras of Instagram, many of which seem downright quaint today. Remember all the self-serious photos of coffee mugs nestled against sprigs of lavender? The avocado toast? The moody bathroom selfies? The artfully arranged restaurant meals meant to communicate good taste, insider knowledge, and aspirational joie de vivre?

As LeefromAmerica, Lee was one of the first wellness influencers, and at the peak of her success, boasted 400,000 followers and earned around 300K a year. Her editor at Simon & Schuster refers to her book as a little “American Psycho,” and this characterization completely tracks for me. Here’s a harrowing and illuminating passage.

I was a prop—a disposable, soulless, increasingly emaciated mannequin used by companies to sell more stuff. We all were—all the billions of us who thought we were using Instagram when really it was the other way around. I post a photo wearing a matching tank-top-and-leggings set. Someone sees that and buys the same set and posts a photo of themselves in it. Someone else sees that and buys it and posts a photo of themselves in it. Someone else sees that and buys it and posts a photo of themselves in it. Someone else sees that and buys it and posts a photo of themselves in it. Don’t forget to hashtag. Don’t forget to tag. Short captions drive more engagement. Long captions drive more engagement. Commenting on comments drives more engagement. Driving more engagement is lame. Posting to the grid is lame. Posting to the grid is cool. Post the thirst trap. Slide into the DMs. Deep like accidentally. Deep like intentionally. Soft launch the relationship. Unfollow after the breakup. Delete the soft launch post or leave it up? Definitely delete it, right? Look at that ring. Look at that wedding. Look at those kids. What’s wrong with that kid? Why are his teeth like that? Why is she posting photos of her kids? Wait, did they get divorced? Why did she stop posting photos of her husband? What’s per problem? Why hasn’t she talked about it? Why is she being so secretive? Why is she still talking about it? Why hasn’t she moved on already? I miss you, Grandma. You were taken too soon, Mom. I wish you were still here, Dad. Best dad ever. Best brunch ever. Best workout ever. Thanks leefromamerica for the outfit rec and discount count.

SEE WHAT I MEAN? Tilghman lays bare the erasure of self that influencing demanded of her as a young person who barely knew herself, and her memoir is an excellent read for anyone who views professional influencing as an aspirational or remotely “easy” career choice. As a writer, her strength is a sometimes excruciating attention to detail that make the reader really feel the crushing pressure and claustrophobia of dancing to the algorithm’s mercurial rhythm.

The other narrative arc that made the book a compelling read for me was Tilghman’s struggle with disordered eating and orthorexia. Particularly as a wellness influencer whose [gluten free] bread and [cashew] butter was selling followers on the benefits of whatever-superfood-of-the-month that promises to cure all that ails you. The book ends (this isn’t really a spoiler) with Tilghman quitting influencing and seeking treatment for orthorexia, leading the reader to assume that she’s tacitly denouncing the extremes of the wellness industry. In one heartbreaking scene, she spends half a day manically searching for a green apple in Japan with her mother because the red apples offered by her hotel would “spike her blood sugar.” Food is Tilghman’s enemy. It’s also her calling card.

"It's Hard To Sell Coffee Enemas If You Mention Chemo"

But after I finished the book, I felt unsettled. Despite many, many descriptions of deprivation and intensely rigid eating/wellness habits which demonstrably had negative impacts on her wellbeing, Tilghman never reckons with the wellness industry as a whole. She never directly addresses her role in selling the cult of self-optimization through white women’s wellness. And that just felt very, very odd in a book that repeatedly shows how predatory and harmful the wellness industry can be. For influencers and their audiences.

After finishing the book, I took to the internet to find someone else that confirmed my general feeling of cognitive dissonance. There were the redditors claiming the memoir is just another way for Tilghman to influence/grift. There were the many interviews in 2019 and 2020, when Tilghman came out as the anti-influencing influencer.

And of course, there’s Tilghman’s social media presence itself. Much of her current stuff is straightforward book promotion, which, yeah of course! But there’s also very typical . . . influencer content.

Multiple tagged brands, multiple don’t-you-wish-you-were-here photos, and even some hashtag wellness content. It’s a little weird, right? For Tilghman to refashion herself as a font of wisdom who can illuminate the dark underbelly of the influencer industry in order to sell a memoir allegedly imparting that wisdom. And then, in order to sell that memoir—simply go back to traditional influencing. Albeit with a more self-aware, tongue-in-cheek approach.

In my continued attempts to scratch my WTF itch, I brought my questions and half-formed feelings to to my Substack chat, where one thoughtful reader pointed me to Kate Kennedy’s recent Be There In Five episode on Tilghman. I adore Kate’s serious, perennially curious approach to all things pop culture (see my interview with Kate below), and her interview with Tilghman was HUGELY eye-opening.

Jessie Spano deserves a You're Wrong About episode

In the interview with Kate, Tilghman offers hard-won insights about how the influencer industry ate her up and spit her out; insights very much in keeping with the contents of her memoir. But she also says some pretty astounding things which completely clashed with my reading of the memoir. When Kate asks about her battle with orthorexia, Tilghman downplays it, saying she doesn’t “really vibe” with the term orthorexia anymore, that it’s not even registered as a real eating disorder, and that some of the things she learned in eating disorder treatment were almost as extreme and toxic as what she learned in the hyper-regimented and individualist wellness space.

Anti diet-culture was also a prison in its own way . . . there was so much hate and craziness in that world too where everything is toxic . . . a lot of these people have a lot of hate in their heart, it’s really extreme, and it feels like the other side of the pendulum.

She claims her eating disorder team told her to “never exercise again,” and made her feel shame for caring about her body or health. In the interview, Tilghman offers lots of grace for folks on their own wellness journey. “If it works for you, great!” seems to be her general mentality (and if you think fluoridated water is bad, that’s your prerogative!). But it’s odd to hear her speak so negatively about the harm the anti-diet culture space might cause people (????) while massively downplaying the harm of diet culture and wellness culture. Or the harm her own content might have caused, however unintentionally.

Instead, Tilghman emphasizes how many messages of thanks she’s received from followers for whom her health advice about managing PCOS, for example, has helped. I agree with Tilghman when she cites the power of women sharing their stories, but her myopic understanding of how much power folks with huge platforms hold is hard to square with her persona as an expert on how much power folks with huge platforms hold! While Tilghman should not be held personally responsible for followers absorbing her content as medical advice, I’m surprised she doesn’t have more complicated thoughts on the role of alternative wellness methods (and who profits from them, and how to most responsibly share information about them) in today’s MAHA landscape. Because it’s fucking complicated! Throughout the interview, she held strong to her stance as “just one person sharing my experiences,” but an influencer with 400,000 followers getting paid by wellness brands can never be a neutral, objective source for wellness information. This stance of individual curiosity is also a familiar strategy employed by wellness folks to evade responsibility for how their “personal, unique experience” might impact their huge legion of followers. Gwyneth Paltrow (someone Tilghman obliquely compares herself to at one point) wrote this particular playbook, and it’s proven enormously effective.

Gwyneth Paltrow Is The Original MAHA Mom

Tilghman was “cancelled” (a concept she never analyzes in the book or in Kate’s interview, which seems wild in 2025!) after offering an expensive series of Goopy workshops which many of her followers couldn’t afford. Here’s a short summation from a 2020 profile in The Cut.

People were outraged by the prices, accusing her of caring more about making money than serving her “community.” Others called her out for white privilege and cultural appropriation. She responded defensively, leading to more backlash. “I had never heard the words ‘white privilege’ before,” she says now.

In her memoir, Tilghman does scant self-reflection about whether or not the critiques were warranted, but I vaguely got the sense she learned something about whiteness and privilege from the experience. But in her interview with Kate, she openly renounces the cancellation, saying she was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This may have been true to a certain extent, and mob mentality is certainly a huge factor for women misstepping online. In Kate’s analysis of the interview, she acknowledges that in 2018 (when Tilghman was “cancelled”), we were all a bit trigger happy in our desire to label anything a scam. Particularly if a white woman was at the helm. But Tilghman’s outright denial that she did anything at all worthy of closer scrutiny in the lead up to the cancellation doesn’t match the tone of her book.

Tilghman is VERY anti “women tearing other women down,” which is honestly its own sub-genre of choice feminism at this point. In this Washington Post profile and elsewhere, Tilghman seems to view critiques of women’s actions or the wider implications of those actions as automatically rooted in misogyny and/or the critic’s projection or jealousy of more successful women.

When a woman is canceled, Tilghman is often her first defender. “When those women went to space,” she said, referring to Lauren Sánchez and her merry band of celebrity astronauts, “I was like, ‘Guys, I don’t really care that they went to space. I’m not saying that this is the greatest thing, but why are we just so mad at women?’”

Except critiques of this particular cursed space jaunt had nothing to do with people being “mad at women.” Good faith analyses of the incident were critiques of empty gestures of hashtag girl power during a full fledged war against women’s rights. They were critiques of capitalism and the unchecked power of the 1%. They were critiques of American systems and the beliefs undergirding those systems.

In her Be There In Five interview (which I can’t recommend enough!) Kate asks Tilghman how her thinking about wellness has changed, and how, with the gift of hindsight, she views her prior role as potentially causing harm to others by positioning herself as a health expert. Tilghman squarely places the onus on viewers. “If it doesn’t work, leave it.” And sure, we’re all responsible for our own actions, and it’s not Tilghman’s job to educate her followers on media literacy. BUT ALSO, if you pitch a book on how being a wellness influencer changed you and your perspective, where’s the changed perspective? If you pitch a book about the often-toxic nature of wellness culture, where’s your analysis of the toxicity of wellness culture? It’s akin to me being asked about the impact of tradwives during a press interview for Momfluenced and saying, “If something bugs you online, unfollow. All women are free to make their own choices. And if traditional gender roles, raw milk, and submission to their husbands makes these gals happy, that’s great!” If I’ve explicitly pitched my book as digging deep into the ideologies being sold to mothers online, why would I pooh-pooh questions about . . . the ideologies being sold to mothers online!?

The whole thing is VERY, VERY meta, something Kate also notes many times in her assessment of the situation. Tilghman speaks quite movingly about feeling unable to be her whole self as an influencer, and of course, this chat with Kate is just a single interview, and shouldn’t represent her entirety as a human or the breadth of her critical viewpoints. Nor should I make any sweeping assumptions based on a current Instagram post in which she’s holding a handful of almonds. Or making matcha.

However! I understand why her old fans feel whiplash. Tilghman made a dramatic exit from social media following her cancellation, sharing a few photos of her new bowl cut before disappearing. Until she came back to disavow influencing. Which of course, required influencing. Publicizing a book ALSO requires influencing. It’s incredibly sticky! But it’s the very stickiness that attracted me to Tilghman’s story in the first place. And it’s a stickiness that she has failed to scrub away in both the pages of her memoir, and in her selling of that memoir.

In an email to me, Kate Kennedy notes a pattern of fall from grace followed by rebirth in all of Lee Tilghman’s reinventions of her public self, which she explicates with more depth in this Patreon ep.

There's a pattern of dramatic exits followed by inevitable returns, framed as awakenings or healing when she's still in the process of recovery . . . But it seems like the through line is nothing is ever processed before it becomes a product. It’s like she has multiple examples of positioning herself as the wise narrator who's learned from her mistakes and this book is the 3rd or 4th iteration of it, despite being marketed as a self-aware human who has broken that cycle.

It makes sense. A new outfit. A new kitchen remodel. A new marriage. A new divorce. A new baby. All these cycles of renewal increase engagement on social media. The push and pull between (both figurative and literal) life and death is evergreen content. So I understand why Lee Tilghman wants to sell her new identity - new identities always sell. I’m just not sure how to value her literary insight since that too, seems to be very much up for sale.