I SAID WHAT I SAID: E-Girlism With Mackenzie Thomas

OFFICE — How was after your show? 

MACKENZIE THOMAS — I drank so many liquids onstage, so I was drunk, off a Redbull, and extremely hydrated. I just laid in my bed wanting to have some type of emotional moment, but my body was not there. So I just rolled up in a ball and thought about myself. 

You’ve read my Substack so you know I’m in solidarity with you on this, but you said you got in trouble for some of the essays you wrote. What’s that about? 

I walk an extremely dangerous line. I’m very personal and I'm very vulnerable and I give people a real look into my life online, but I keep the important stuff for myself. And with my blog, I WILL DO WHATEVER I WANT, I have a lot more control of the way that my narrative is perceived because it’s words. You have to engage with them differently than a live performace. If I'm saying something in a live performance, it becomes gossip. I'm putting something on my blog, it’s less gossip and more essay. It’s less sensationalized. Some of the material, especially the summer parts of the show, are about a time in my life that’s still unfolding around me, so I know people are talking about it. And that’s fine. I cannot be stopped. 

You got famous from reading your diary entries for the internet, but obviously that was from a very far removed time. But now, Substack diary entry people are getting famous as writers. Even if not for the content, just for the salaciousness of it all. Do you think theres’ an ethical way to write about people?

Yes. The ethics lie within a code you make with yourself. All is fair in love and war. But the only ethical way to write about other people is to come to terms with every possibility that the outcome of your words can bring. 

Did you ask people before you wrote about them? 

No. If you're having a conversation with yourself and you're like, “Okay, this person might be upset with the way that I'm about to write about them,” then you have to call them. Ultimately I think that muses do get a say — they should have a say, but I think the artist has the final word.

Is everyone a muse for you? 

No, no. I write about things that really move me. I write about things that disturb me. If I’m writing about you, you’ve removed a Jenga block from the tower. Either that's a really good thing, or the block that you've removed puts everything in question. And I have to write about that. I have people in my life that I write about, like my friend Ian and my roommate and best friend, Taryn — they've disturbed me in a really beautiful way. I was sitting on a couch with them watching the Grammy’s being like, “Holy shit, I didn’t know it could be this good.” 

But then, I write about other people — people who’ve pissed me off, men who I have grievances with — they’ve disturbed me in a way that makes me go completely internal and makes me have a lot of uncontainable thoughts about myself and them. And I don’t really know where else to put that unless it’s somewhere in words. I don’t know how to come to terms with hurt without giving it to a feedback loop. 

I've used the internet as an outlet to express myself since I was a child. Even the little YouTube videos I was making that went nowhere — that’s an expression of my emotional self. My support system is the internet. Which is not normal. 

I undersand you. My phone, my computer, my Substack — they become their own entities that I can talk to, to the point where I forget that there are other people receiving and interpreting my things. 

Writing for the internet is different than writing a book or talking to a close friend. You’re able to talk so casually, but also you can shoot out the range of your emotional complexities. The internet is just a public space that you can turn on and off. It’s a club that you can show up when you want. It’s a shelf to put things. It’s a friend. It’s really incredible. 

Writing for the internet breeds a really interesting voice — I don’t have to compromise. Nothing that I’m writing is stream of consciousness, even though it might seem like that. I like that the internet allows me to think emotionally and casually. 

I love posting. It feels like someone is receiving something from me in a way that’ll have no emotional cost or consequence. It’s easier to post rather than text people directly. It feels less confrontational. It feels less needy than texting someone. 

Interesting. My friends know how I'm doing all the time. And you’re younger than me — oh fuck, I really want a cookie right now. [Mackenzie comes back with a cookie. The kind with the icing and sprinkles]. You’re younger than me, I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t want people to worry about me. 

With my blog, there’s enough of a removal from the current moment that relieves worry. I don’t want strangers actually worrying about me. Because even when I’m tweeting like, “i wanna kill myself,” I don’t really mean it. Sometimes I might feel that way, but I know my emotions are always passing and changing. And the consequence of having people I don’t know attached to a moment of true Instagram story vulnerability? I can’t have that as someone that’s almost 30. 

Maybe that’s something I shouldn’t be doing either at almost 24. 

No, you’re so good. 

I wish people knew me less. 

Being online, there’s an impulse to overshare. Especially when you're a girl known for your online presence. E-girls share their lives in a way that makes them feel super accessible to everyone, so we’re pandering to parasocial relationships and manufacturing intimacy.

Being an e-girl is really interesting. It’s not far off from being a flapper. It’s not far off from being a pinup doll. But we are also people that have turned to the internet for a reason. For me, I'm interested in writing and posting videos online and giving so much of myself up to the internet because I have a serious problem with control. The internet is something that I can control. I can control my narrative completely. I can control my whole entire life from behind my computer. 

There’s actually so much strength and wisdom in being an e-girl. It’s something that I’m immensely proud of. We all handle our personas differently. We’re living pieces of art. And I think it’s ok for certain girls to pander into emotional intimacy, because people are more lonely than ever. At the end of the day, I’ve never met an e-girl that was stupid. 

There was that one OnlyFans girl who made a lot of money acting like a kid. And I guess that in its own right is a very informed entrepreneurial move. It’s not stupid, it’s just really fucked up. 

No, it’s really fucked up. But you have to have a certain level of self-awareness, a certain admiration for art. You have to have a certain grasp on the culture to be like this. It’s all incredibly important. All of our existences inform each other, whether we do good things or bad things. It’s an important web to examine on a larger scale. I’d be nothing if I never saw Molly Soda’s art on Tumblr. I talk about Molly in every single interview I do, it must make her fucking crazy, but her existence informed me and I’m forever grateful for it.

At the same time, it’s really insidious that we don’t have private lives. I was talking to Sophie (@Joan.of.Arca) about this and she was like, “I think in tweets and create mode posts now.” And I’m the same. It’s like that meme, “I’m going to turn this pain into something beautiful like a create mode post.” At least with how I’ve been moving on the internet, there’s a level of self-commercialization that I’m engaging in.

I stopped making TikToks talking about my life because I don’t like doing things for the plot. It makes me feel crazy and it’s just not the way I can conduct my life, as a very sensitive person. I liked stepping away from TikTok and trying my hand at writing and other forms of art. I like having a couple weeks away from something and being like, “Oh, I should probably write about that.” I don’t like being in the moment being like, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” That’s rarely ever how the sausage gets made. Sometimes I'll be hanging out with a friend and something will happen and I'm like, “I have to tweet about that.” But my life, to me, is a work of art. There's nothing that I need to do to make it into such, even though I do. 

I think a lot of girls online have an impulse to overshare because they think it’ll make people laugh — I don’t know if that’s ever going to stop. And that’s so scary. 

That impulse was something I had to become very conscious of. I always want to make people laugh. I always want to entertain people. That’s why I make art. But if I'm able to entertain people on TikTok, that's a much harder audience than people who buy a ticket to a show. On TikTok, you are competing with the attention span. You're competing with an algorithm. Doing stuff that’s live, or writing stuff that takes more concentrated effort to read – I think that’s worth me trying. And it’s working. 

That impulse will never, never go away, and I really want to honor it because it’s brought me so many places and taught me so much stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever stop chasing it. I’m interested in bringing the internet into the real world. I think the internet is the most important thing in the world. I'm interested in recording my life in different formats and the internet is just my tool for that. And because of that, my work will always be a conversation about life online, which is something I'm really happy with.

Do you feel like people know you better from reading your stuff? 

No.

Do you want them to? 

No. But also, the people who read my stuff know about a very important part of me. When I meet people who’ve read my stuff or watched me online, they're almost always someone I either want to be or wanted to be at one point. And they're all so amazing and so incredibly aligned to myself. Because if you're reading stuff that I'm making, if you're consuming my art, if you're coming to my show, you have to be a little bit like me. Right?

When did you come up with the show? 

I didn’t know that I was going to make that show until a month before I put it out. I came up with it in the middle of November and was tweeting consciously for a month and a half. 

You were tweeting with the show in mind? 

Yeah. Because I wanted to be so true to my life that I didn’t want to do anything too crazy. I was asking myself, “How am I going to end this show? I have to live through a point that is going to help me end this show.” And it felt very frantic. 

I felt kind of self-conscious. Because I was like, “Can I make this be as real as the rest of the stuff in the show?” I put a lot of pressure on myself. And I felt self-conscious that people in my Twitter circle would be like, “She’s tweeting differently.” 

“She’s tweeting performatively.” 

Exactly. But I’m really proud of how I SAID WHAT I SAID comes together. I think I did it the right way. And I like playing with the idea of making something that should be unpermanent into something permanent. 

I was working on a zine of my create mode posts. But it was so annoying to go through and screenshot everything. What was the archiving process like for you? 

The archive process was kind of grueling. I had to download my Twitter archive, which is something I recommend everybody do. But I downloaded everything from 2025, put it into Google slides, and had to take out the X logo in the corner of every single tweet. That made me really relive all the mistakes I made in 2025. It was not easy. Every time I went to put a run of the show together, I was emotionally traumatizing myself. But for some reason, I want to keep doing it and the outcome has made me smile, so I guess it’s the right thing to do. 

You talk about your yeast infections and sex life, but health and sex are things that a lot of people are very cagey about. I think I’ve mixed up the things that are fair game and the things that are off limits, because I’m fine with airing my sex life, but you’ll never catch me getting emotional. And I think part of that has to do with e-girlism. What do you think?

With sex, I think the poeple that are having sex with me know. Having sex with me — sorry — you’re running the risk of a different type of STD. Because I may write something about you. 

Do people act different around you because they wanna end up in your blog? 

Yes. I think there’s a certain cadence or type of behavior that I can clock — when someone is trying to be funny to me. I don’t know if they’re doing that to be in the blog, but I know I’m the type of person that people want to make laugh. I’m sure there are people around me who do stuff because they want to be in the blog, but I really don’t like to think that way. Being that aware, or looking for stuff like that, it’s not the person I want to be. There’s a lot of things about me that I'm not really aware of, where I choose not to be aware. Because I'm a very self-aware person, but I can't be that all the time.

Do you get worried that people have sex with you because they want you to write about them?

Again, you have to deeply disturb me for me to write about you. You gotta remove a Jengla block. You  have to do something that the person having sex with me wouldn’t even be aware of. I talk about sex because I have to. I talk about my health because I have to. I would feel so caged within myself if I wasn’t trying to make sense of these big things. I have to say it because I know there’s other people out there having similar experiences to me. There are other people out there that could feel soothed from what I’m trying to say. And I feel soothed saying what I’m saying. I feel like my head's on a little straighter when I'm able to say these embarrassing things in public. It really, really helps me push through. And if there are some casualties in my crossfire, oops! I’m sorry. Like, my heart is a machine gun and I don’t know how to control it!