Jools Lebron was in her car, taking a break from her job in a supermarket, when she posted the TikTok video that would change her life. “You see how I do my makeup for work?” she told her followers that day in August 2024. “Very demure, very mindful … A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”

“At first, it was like any other video,” she says, on a video call from her home in Chicago. “A few likes, a couple of comments. But then I started noticing the numbers moving faster than usual – faster than anything I had seen before. I remember refreshing my phone and just staring at it like: ‘Wait … what is happening?’”

Within days, she was a meme. “You see how Earth looks in space?” Nasa wrote on X. “It’s very demure, very mindful.” Joe Biden’s White House X account posted: “Cancelling the student debt of nearly 5 million Americans through various actions. Very mindful. Very demure.” Khloé Kardashian repeated the phrase for TikTok while getting her own makeup done: “Do you see how I’m sitting here, very ladylike, very mindful, very demure.”

This wasn’t Lebron’s first glimpse of fame. Then 30, she had previously had some success as a YouTube makeup artist, after transitioning in her early 20s and going online in search of a new community. A fan of the trans makeup artist Nikita Dragun, she had decided to make her own videos. “I felt like I’d never seen a trans woman that looked like me, that was a bigger woman, that even came from my background,” she recalls. “So I started telling stories while doing my makeup and it’d be like: ‘Oh, first time hooking up with a straight guy,’ ‘The first time coming out to my parents,’ and then those videos started doing numbers.”

The more she shared, the higher her engagement. Eventually, she had almost a million subscribers. She used to think that transitioning had brought so much negativity to her life, but now it was bringing positivity. “It felt like I finally found people who I understood and who understood me truthfully.”

But it all came crashing down after an online feud with another influencer, Patrick Starrr. She lost brand deals, developed a serious cocaine habit and was dropped by her management.

After years of her mother telling her to get a normal job, she stopped trying to strike deals with big beauty brands. Her new life was very mundane: stocking shelves, organising products, helping customers find things, sometimes working the cash register. “I’m working a regular job,” she remembers thinking. “This is so good. I turned my life around. That same week, ‘demure’ happened.”

Lebron was feeling good that day in 2024 with her pink blush and simple black winged eyeliner, so she recorded and posted an off-the-cuff video commenting on her makeup. Then the views kept coming, and coming and coming … “It wasn’t even excitement right away,” she says. “It was confusion, then a little bit of fear, because I knew something was shifting. I just didn’t know how big it was going to get.

“No one tells you how to handle this. At one point, for 10 or 11 weeks straight, I was not home. I was flying back and forth to hotels.”

“At first, it was a lot of emails, a lot of interest, and trying to figure out what made sense. Then came the first deals, followed by bigger conversations. Shortly after that, I started getting asked to do appearances and interviews.” She appeared on an episode of the talkshow Jimmy Kimmel Live! co-hosted by RuPaul; you could see she was more than just a catchphrase as she held her own in a witty exchange with the Drag Race presenter.

Again, though, the dream started to turn sour. Brands had been reaching out, wanting the exposure her virality would bring, sending her items to post about, but the volume of requests quickly became too much to handle. “I’m waking up to like 100 packages a day at some point, and a lot of these are just getting stolen before I can even get to them.”

One deal collapsed after theft delayed a promotion for a hair care company. “They cancelled the brand deal and a person from that agency went on to tell a bunch of people at other agencies: ‘She’s horrible to work with. She can’t meet a deadline. She’s a mess.’”

Lebron also began to feel used. She felt brands convinced her to work with them by offering lasting collaborative partnerships, but the interactions felt short and one-sided: “It’s like they got their viral moment and they don’t see you as a long-term creator.”

What these companies didn’t know was that Lebron was in a vulnerable place. Just after her “demure” post went viral, she was assaulted by a man she had met online. The event left her feeling shaken, but she had no time to process it. She mentioned it to some of the people around her, but no one wanted to slow the momentum. “It was heard and it hit their ears. But it was kind of just like: ‘Oh, we hear you, but Tuesday we do need …’ It’s like no one cared.” Feeling overwhelmed and isolated, she turned to drugs again.

Even as she shares her darkest moments, she finds some humour in them. While at Milan fashion week in 2024, getting ready to interview celebrities on behalf of luxury brand Bottega Veneta, she got a call from her ex-fiance to tell her their dog was being put down. The glam team struggled to put on her makeup as tears rolled down her cheeks.

It had all happened so suddenly that she didn’t get to say goodbye. “My manager was like: ‘I’m so sorry: we have to go.’ And then I go, and fucking Kendall Jenner’s mean to me.” As she approached the model for a soundbite, “she looks at me and looks at the manager and goes: ‘Do I have to do this?’ And so then they just walked away. I left that party in tears. And I went back to my hotel room and I was like: ‘Where are the drugs?’ But I was in Italy, so there were no drugs.” She bursts out laughing, stroking her long wig.

She sometimes found herself thinking about death: “A part of me did think that it would be a better way to end everything if I overdosed.” To add to the pressure, friends and family were relying on her for a living. She came from a big, loud and loving Puerto Rican family, who had always been supportive of her during her low periods. Now she wanted to support them in return. She paid her grandmother’s medical bills and her brother’s debts, and helped her dad renovate his kitchen. She hired her brother to appear on a podcast with her, but the agency running the podcast pushed her into letting him go. She paid him all the same, “out of guilt, because I made him quit his second job to do this”.

There was no one to turn to. “I would reach out to influencers who were bigger than me and they would kind of be like, ‘Diva, it’s not that serious. You’re just doing some coke. You could be doing heroin.’” Influencers with less of a following told her: “But you went viral! You’re lucky.”

Her income was drying up, and she had to let go of her employees and honour the salaries she owed them. At that point, she says, “I’m like I hate ‘demure’; I never want to hear that word again.” She was angry at those around her, her family, and most of all herself. Finally she told herself: “I don’t deserve to think about it that way. I don’t deserve to feel so negative about the best time of my life. I don’t deserve to be yelling at my family. And you know what? My family doesn’t deserve to have to deal with this side of me. This isn’t fair to them.’” Not for the first time in our conversation, she wipes tears from her eyes.

One day, she woke up after another bender. There was a man in her house whom she’d spent the past three days with. “I looked at him and I had seen this man so many times. Not the same man, but metaphorically, another random weird guy here that you’re hanging out with. And then I just messaged my mom: ‘I need therapy.’”

At least she managed to buy herself somewhere to live. “I do have a stable place to heal,” she says. Her most recent videos have been her getting ready for the gym, going to the dentist and prioritising her health.

Looking back, she thinks she’s been struggling with guilt: “It feels like everyone around me tells me I’m so lucky to have had this happen. But because I was just so heavily in use I don’t remember a lot of it … I wish I had taken better care of myself, but I can’t go back and try to change that.”

And, for the moment, at least, things are looking up. “Brands are reaching out again, the views are up again and my relationship with my audience is up again. Being yourself will always pay off …”

Speaking of which, she wants the world to know that she’s more than just a meme. “You can be the biggest person, but at the end of the day, you are still a person. You’re still a human being under all this. And I want people to know that I’m Jools Lebron. I’m 32. I’m a Puerto Rican girl from Humboldt Park in Chicago who’s transitioning and trying to recover from this. And I’m a person very much making mistakes – just like you, you know?”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org