Page 4 of Everyone Is Lying to You

Ha. Me too.

The banality of it is soul crushing.

Peter is staring at me now. I’d be staring at me too if I were him. What expression must be on my face as I furiously type to this random person while lying in our bed in the middle of the night?

Emily,I mouth my sister’s name. My younger sibling has been working in Asia for the past six months so it’s never inconceivable to get texts from her at all hours. Peter rolls his eyes and then blows an imaginary kiss my way before turning over. I hate lying to him. And he hates it when I keep tapping away at my phone once he goes to sleep. We both do. We have an unspoken rule that once one of us shuts our eyes the other puts down the phone. I type a quick bye.

It’s late here…going to bed. Great to reconnect though.

Sorry. I always forget about time zones. You’re in New York. I’m such a turd

I smile at her use of the wordturdbecause it doesn’t seem at all like the kind of thing she would ever post in one of her captions and I feel like I’ve gotten a little bit of the real her. I hate the rush that gives me. Also, I don’t want to correct her about where I live. Leaving New York feels like a failure. There are a dozen things I want to type, but my fingers are frozen.

She keeps going.

But I really want to talk. It’s important. Maybe tomorrow?

Sure.

Great. Life is crazy. CRAZY. And I have been thinking about you a lot. I think you are the one person who can actually help me

Chapter Two

Rebecca

There’s a right way to be authentic and a wrong way to be authentic. It’s the first thing you learn when you start doing the kind of work I do. But also, the first thing you learn when you marry the kind of man I’ve married. I’m supposed to appear a certain way to certain people. I’m supposed to speak the right words in the right tones. Sometimes I’m not supposed to speak at all. I’m almost always performing, and I have gotten very good at it.

The right way to be “authentic” online is to give away bits and pieces of yourself that seem real, to gently mock yourself, to reveal tiny imperfections, but never big ones. Talk about your stress as a mom, but never your depression (you’ll lose followers real fast). Show a dirty dish, but not an entire messy countertop. Look melancholy at times, butdo not cry. Never let them see you cry.

Thursday is media day for us. It’s the day when we create almost all my content for the next week. Does that shock you? ThatI’m not snapping and filming and posting every second of every day in real time? That what you see isn’t exactly my real life?

I used to make all the videos and take all the pictures back in the very beginning, when this was more of a hobby, something to do when my first babies were little and I felt lost and lonely. That’s how all this started. It feels like a lifetime ago.

We moved out to Grayson’s family farm a year after we got married. His dad had just had a stroke and needed someone to take it on. The move seemed like a big, awesome adventure, also a way to make a new start, to begin a new chapter of our lives and leave all the terrible things that had happened with the two of us in San Francisco behind.

So, we moved out here and set up the farm, or rather, what was left of it. Farms aren’t cheap to operate and most of the land had been sold to big factory farms owned by Tyson and General Mills by the time we got it. But there was still a chunk remaining, a sizable lot in the middle of nowhere. The farm, or “the ranch,” as we now call it, is at least a ninety-minute drive from the nearest city and forty-five minutes away from the next town. When Grayson grew up on his dad’s land there was more of a community, even a Main Street of sorts with a hardware store and a doctor’s office and a grocery shop, but most of the local farmers sold their land to the big corporate guys, and when they left, the little stores and most of the people did too. By the time I finally got pregnant after more than a year of trying I was all alone with my first baby, Alice. Gray was traveling constantly, trying to get his various start-ups off the ground. He was always at some conference or another.

So I did what was recommended by the pastor of the churchGray had been going to since he was a kid. I began to journal, and I put my journal up online as a blog.

Then I had another baby. I somehow kept blogging through it all and then switched to Instagram.

That’s how it started. It sounds so basic, but early on it was just me and my babies, all of us crying more than I’ve ever cried in my entire life, me writing and posting pictures to try to feel better because it was nice when strangers told me that I was doing a good job.

So yeah, back then I took my own photos of our life together. I made the videos of how to bake for a bunch of kids. Those got me a lot of attention. Baking bread from scratch! Pain au chocolat and perfect éclairs out of a rustic kitchen with grain I had harvested myself! The Internet ate that up. But it was our kids who always got the most attention. Babies and pregnant bellies are what the algorithm loved and I gave it so much of both those things.

But I can’t keep up with it on my own anymore. It’s been years since I could. My audience is a hungry beast. It wants more, needs more. We need to produce photos, videos, captions, content, content, content, to keep the views, to keep the sponsors, to keep the money coming in. We aren’t just on Instagram. We’re on YouTube, TikTok, Discord, Pinterest, Telegram, and a few other places I have never even heard of but my content coordinator says will be the next big thing.

So Thursdays! Media day!

My kids hate Thursdays.

The big kids are so over all of this, except for Bella. My eight-year-old daughter loves performing in a way that is both adorableand slightly creepy. Alice, my oldest, hates it and begs me to keep her out of everything. I do what I can. Despite what many of my haters think, I do have boundaries when it comes to my children.

This is what happens on Thursdays: First we shoot a “get ready with me” reel. This is our most lucrative asset of the week. It includes seven sponsored products that you might not even notice, but which pay upward of $25,000 just to be mentioned in my daily routine. I get the kids up in the morning like I usually do. Kiki helps. She’s our nanny. You’ll never, ever see her on the socials, and Gray hates her and hates that she is here. He has told me over and over again that his mom raised him and his seven siblings without any help so why can’t I do it? He needs me to know that my lack of self-reliance is a moral failing.

Well, his mom wasn’t supporting their whole family and keeping a farm solvent while his dad flew all over the place desperately trying to find the next big investment to make him rich. So Kiki is here, and she is my absolute savior and, if I’m being honest, my closest friend. I’m not even sure if she likes me, but I love her.

Kiki and I get the kids up and we get them fed. If Gray’s around he avoids this part of the morning. He’s usually up with the sun, but not because that’s what farmers do. We have a staff for that. He’s working out in the gym down by the barn. He’s been on an ultramarathon kick that consumes most of his waking hours outside of work. He only joins us at breakfast when I tell him he absolutely has to be in the pictures because at the end of the day he knows where his bread is buttered right now. I would never say it out loud. There would be consequences for saying it out loud, but we both know the truth. On media dayswe also have Stacy, a professional photographer from the city, come out. She used to be a photojournalist for the newspaper but now she exclusively does influencers. She just bought a Tesla. Stacy is killing it.

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