AUSTIN — Elise Myers is a theater girl at heart.
Expressive, eclectic, and vibrant. Her voice can be heard bouncing off the walls of the hotel’s large conference room. It’s the same thing that resonates in my eardrums as I listen to the audio version of her new collection of stories, “Great Questions, I Want to Tell You.” The 32-year-old digital creator doesn’t just read; execute For audiobook readers.
That’s no surprise, considering she’s used to broadcasting snippets of her life to her more than 7 million TikTok followers and nearly 4 million Instagram followers. You’ve probably seen her most famous TikTok. In this TikTok, which has been viewed 24 million times, she talks about her worst first date ever, where she bought a guy 100 tacos (and things just spiraled from there).
In her book, she tells some stories in the third person, unlike what can be meaningfully accomplished on social media.
“I wanted to make it clear sometimes that when I was writing, I was experiencing what I was experiencing in my own body and what I was almost seeing happening. And it was also kind of a way to kind of remove myself from that world a little bit and allow someone else to step into that world, and it was them themselves,” she said of her writing choices.
Her life seems funny, but like everyone else, the comedy is interspersed with serious moments. Myers spoke about life as an influencer navigating mental health during a panel discussion at SXSW in March. She discovered she was autistic when she was 30 years old.
“I was saddened by the fact that I was so slow to understand this,” she said. She had to take a six-month break from social media after her youngest son Oliver, now two, was born with a hole in his heart and required surgery.
“I felt really overexposed, because I was dealing with something. I mean, every day I was thinking, ‘I could lose my child,'” she said. “It’s hard to carry that around all the time. I felt like I couldn’t process this information and share it at the same time. That’s exactly how it felt, and it was almost traumatic to even imagine it.”
She subscribed to the idea that parts of her life are allowed to remain private as long as they are shared on social media. And no matter where I go, I can’t escape from myself.
“I wanted to win as a human being.”
Her books move from topic to topic faster than popcorn ping-ponging around a microwave. Did you know that she inadvertently thought a man was interested in her, only to find out later that he was a sex worker? That she had lived everywhere from California to France to Australia to Texas to Nebraska? Does that mean that during an early interaction with her now-husband, Jonas, she touched his beard without being told? Additionally, she experiments with different ways of speaking.
“Sometimes I tell someone something about myself in a joke, sometimes I tell it while drinking and crying, and sometimes I tell it in writing or in a text message,” she admitted. “So I wanted to make sure that you could feel that in my life, just like in my friends.”
Meyers also detailed her struggle to be perfect. “I wanted everyone to walk away from me. That was the best interaction I’ve ever had with a human. I wanted to win being human.”
That quest took her around the world in her late teens and early 20s, and landed her in Australia. But running away from stress didn’t help.
“I was frustrated because I was still dealing with the same thing,” Myers said. “But as I was just upset and crying, looking out at the Sydney Opera House in the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, I thought, ‘Will I feel like this forever, always, anywhere?’
She met Jonas, a Kansas native, while she was living in Australia.
“Jonas is one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life,” she said, noting how difficult it was to express it in writing. “And how I like to choose what to say and how to say it. I also have a hard time not wanting to romanticize things, like, because everything looks really rosy in retrospect. But there were also a lot of difficult things in that season, and a lot of that was me not being able to receive that good stuff.”
Elise Myers’ son’s heart is in trouble after being diagnosed with autism
Then, as with adults, the path to getting an autism diagnosis from a professional took a long time.
“You’re used to wearing a mask. I literally answer a question and five minutes later I’m like, ‘I’m sorry I can’t be honest with you,'” she explained, adding, “That’s difficult for me.”
Importantly, however, Myers learned that she was “not broken” and that she was “able to see the world a little differently and give myself a lot of grace moving forward from a young age.” She also gave herself grace as she navigated her son Oliver’s heart health issues.
At four months old, doctors diagnosed him with a large ventricular septal defect (VSD) between the left and right ventricles of his heart and pulmonary hypertension. Myers and her husband are also parents to a 5-year-old son, August.
“I felt an incredible desire to shrink-wrap my life, vacuum-seal the things that were most precious to me, and preserve them with care,” she said, grateful for the time off and archiving everything on most, if not all, platforms. Because I was able to heal with my family.
“I didn’t want any opinion or voice in my life other than the four of us and our doctors. I just felt like I really needed it,” Myers said.
Now it’s as if nothing happened. they are lucky. “You’d never know looking at him, he’s such a wild guy,” she said. “He’s so cool.”
As he considers what happens next, Myers is hopeful that even more light is on the horizon. Be more eccentric.
“I’m learning how to fall back in love with the art of making videos just for fun,” she explained.
And if the tacos she ate the night before this interview are any indication, she’s on track.
