Elyse Myers of TikTok shares autism diagnosis, son’s heart surgery
AUSTIN — Elyse Myers is a theater kid, through and through.
Expressive, eclectic, effervescent. Her voice bounces off the walls of a large hotel meeting room, just like it echoed through my eardrums when listening to the audio version of her new story collection, “That’s a Great Question, I’d Love to Tell You.” The digital creator, 32, yearned not just to read but perform for audiobook readers.
That makes sense, given she’s used to broadcasting snippets of her life to her more than 7 million TikTok followers and nearly 4 million on Instagram. You’ve probably seen her arguably most famous TikTok, which has 24 million views, where she recounts the worst first date she’s ever been on in which she buys a man 100 tacos (and it only spirals from there).
In her book, in a departure from what one can accomplish meaningfully on social media, she tells some stories in the third person.
“I wanted to be clear sometimes, when I was writing, what I was experiencing in my body and what I was almost watching happen, and it was kind of a way to also remove myself from it for a second and allow someone else to step into it and it and it be them,” she said of the writing choice.
As funny as her life seems, like everyone’s, serious moments pepper the comedy. Myers spoke on a panel at SXSW in March about life as an influencer navigating mental health. She found out she was autistic at 30 years old .
“I was grieving the fact that I had to figure this out so late,” she said. Her youngest son Oliver, now 2, was born with a hole in his heart and needed surgery, sending her on a six-month social media break.
“I felt really overexposed, because I was dealing with something. I mean, every day I was like, ‘I could lose my kid,'” she shared. “That’s a wild thing to be carrying all of the time, and I felt like I could not be processing this information and then sharing it at the same time. That just felt so, almost traumatizing to even imagine.”
She’s made peace with the idea that as much as she shares on social media, some parts of life are allowed to stay private. And that no matter where you go, you can’t run from yourself.
‘I wanted to, like, win at being a human’
Her book pops from topic to topic faster than popcorn ping-ponging around a microwave. Did you know she accidentally thought a man was interested in her, only to find out later that he was a sex worker? That she’s lived everywhere from California to France to Australia to Texas to Nebraska? That during an early interaction with her now-husband Jonas she touched his beard, unprompted? Plus, she tries out different narrative styles.
“Sometimes you’re going to inform somebody about something about you through a joke, and sometimes it’s going to be through drinks and crying, and sometimes it’s going to be through a written letter or a text,” she admitted. “And so I wanted it to feel like you were getting that from my life as you would a friend.”
Myers also detailed her struggles with trying to be perfect. “I wanted everyone to walk away from me being like, that was the most incredible interaction I’ve ever had with a human being. I wanted to, like, win at being a human.”
That quest led her across the world in her late teens and early 20s to Australia. But running away from her stress didn’t help.
“I was frustrated because I was still dealing with the same things,” Myers said. “But in the most beautiful place I’d ever been in, like looking at the Sydney Opera House, and then just being upset and crying, and I’m like, ‘Am I gonna feel this way forever, all the time, everywhere I am?'”
She met Jonas, who was from Kansas, while living in Australia.
“Jonas is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me in my life,” she said, recounting how difficult that was to capture in writing. “And how do you like pick what to say and how to say it. You also struggle with not wanting to romanticize things, like because everything seems real rosy when you look back, but there was also a lot of hard things about that season, and a lot of it was my inability to receive such a good thing.”
Elyse Myers on autism diagnosis, son’s heart struggles
Later, her path to an autism diagnosis by a professional dragged on, as it tends to for adults.
“You’re used to masking. I literally would answer a question, then five minutes later be like, ‘I’m sorry I was not being really honest with you,'” she explained “That is hard for me.”
But Myers learned, importantly, that she “wasn’t broken” and saw “the world a bit differently, and allowed me to give myself a lot of grace when I was younger and then moving forward.” She also gave herself grace as she navigated her son Oliver’s heart health struggles.
At four months old, doctors diagnosed him with a large ventricular septal defect (VSD) between the left and right ventricles in his heart, as well as pulmonary hypertension. Myers and her husband are also parents to 5-year-old son August.
“I just felt like this incredible desire to shrink-wrap my life and vacuum seal the most precious things to me and hold it so closely,” she said, grateful for the break — she archived everything on most, if not all, platforms — because it allowed her to heal with her family.
“I didn’t want any other opinions or voices in my life other than those, the four of us and the doctors and it just felt really necessary,” Myers said.
Now, it’s like nothing happened. They’re lucky. “You would never know it looking at him, he’s such a wild dude,” she said. “He’s so cool.”
More brightness is on the way, Myers hopes, when thinking about what’s next. More whimsy.
“I’m learning how to fall back in love with the art of just creating videos for fun,” she explained.
And if the tacos she ate the night before this interview are any indication, she’s well on her way.
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