Why We Need Emilia Fart

(This is part of a new series about emotionally intelligent YouTube channels. YouTube can either be addictive or educational; it is in our best interest to learn how to navigate its murky waters so we can use it as a cultural tool for bettering ourselves. The channels recommended in this series can, if we practice mindful watching, help us consider important topics and give us crucial psychological insights that help us learn more about ourselves.)

It’s difficult to describe Emilia Fart. Self-proclaimed “creepy goblin girl”, Fart uploads embarrassing videos of herself to YouTube as an exhibitionist form of therapy.

From here on, it’s important to keep in mind: Emilia Fart is NOT a character. The name isn’t real, but when you watch her videos, you are watching a real person expressing herself.

It’s hard to forget her once you’ve seen her. She is always covered up past her chin in bed-sheets, donning elaborate neon makeup, swishing her feather boas, and doing really weird things in public. At home or in a crowd, Fart regales her subscribers with her most embarrassing secrets and her most uncomfortable tragedies. She offers them up to us with equal emotional distress and flare. Her stories can be graphic but always wrapped expertly in comedy with a big tinsel bow of drama on top. She isn’t afraid to laugh, cry, wince, dance, or burp – sometimes all at once – in front of her 300,000+ subscribers. The content of her channel varies from fun self-empowerment soliloquies delivered while dyeing her hair blue in a public restroom to heartfelt confessions concerning trauma, loss, and anxiety while she sits, clothed, in a bubble bath eating (usually) pizza.

Viewers who happen to stumble on her channel could write her off very quickly as “attention hungry” – Emilia agrees enthusiastically, always reminding us she is a “monstrous attention-whore”. We could fall down the rabbit hole of the “Should we give attention to people who want it?” debate, but let’s skip to what we get when we pay attention to Fart.

What Do We Get From Emilia Fart?

The Comfort of “I’m not Alone” + No One Is Normal

We all can feel tragically alone in our weirdness. We hate so much about ourselves that feels inappropriate or unattractive. We spend a lot of our energy hiding these things and punishing ourselves for them.

Unflinchingly honest, Emilia shares absolutely everything. She challenges herself to tell us more and more. She especially loves sharing the things we would want to keep hidden about ourselves.

Emilia tells us both funny and uncomfortable details about her childhood in dramatic monotone in her video Talking about my childhood in a Toys R Us.

The secrets we sit on for decades, too scared to repeat even to ourselves, she ejects effortlessly and generously like a PEZ dispenser. Emilia Fart is a juggernaut, simultaneously confronting and blasting through many of the social and psychological barriers that keep us confused about ourselves most of our lives.

Emilia does not try to be normal. She recognizes that “normal” doesn’t exist.

For most of us, we’ve learned how to bind ourselves tightly into performing “normalcy”. Emilia has described her past life of believing she needed to be “normal”, but that she is much happier and freer now. We tend to believe that “being normal” is real for other people and always expected of us. We forget that absolutely no one is normal in private. When we believe other people are always and deeply “normal” we feel something is wrong with us, that our inner selves are ugly or broken. Emilia Fart helps us remember how to treasure what’s beneath our “normal” masks. We see ourselves in her. We recognize in her our crying, raving, silly selves that we work so hard to hide. We are comforted by her flamboyance that we are not alone in our weirdness.

“Before my monstrous attention-whore ways, I was equally bizarre, but I hid it. I hid like that for years, because I wanted to avoid the hurt of some people not liking me… I don’t want to live for fear anymore.” – From her video My response to the hate about Emilia Fart, wherein she describes her ascent to weirdness and her journey for self-acceptance as a reaction to the grief of losing a parent. We all have or will feel this grief, it is comforting to see the honest, vulnerable account of it from another.

Emilia pushes herself to both confront her insecurities and to find joy in exploring her strangeness. Her enthusiasm for her journey is contagious. She teaches us the courage to find something fun, not shameful, in how weird we are. She is a perfect example of the wisdom of foolishness; she doesn’t get too bent out of shape preserving her dignity – in trying to seem invincible or graceful or perfect. She recognizes herself as sloppy and silly and ridiculous, and celebrates it. This is very refreshing for those of us exhausted by protecting our dignity or weary of feeling ashamed.

Normalizing Mental Health Talk

What sets Fart apart from the typical daredevil cringe channels on YouTube is that Emilia spends much of her screen-time reflecting on her moods, her past, and her mental health. She talks aloud to us, searching for new ways to love herself. She leads by example, showing us how to look deeply into ourselves and investigate our most embarrassing hangups about sexuality, intimacy, dignity, identity, family, grief, therapy, mental health, and pretty much any other subject we get embarrassed over.

“After I came to terms with my sexuality, I had to re-wire my brain on how I thought about women, my value as a person, and what I thought about beauty. I actively stopped looking at things that reinforced the ideals I had when I was a skinny, sad, little brown-haired girl… [but] I know I have a lot of deep, deep-rooted fears and insecurities that prevent me from being in a romantic relationship.” – from her video Talking about my eating disorder & being forever alone while eating fortune cookies in a hammock.

Although she can be very silly, she is uniquely skilled at exploring her mind and heart with self-compassion. She falters sometimes, but does her best to recover. Although she is struggling, her emotional intelligence shines through each monologue. She digs deep and works hard to love herself. Importantly, Fart is a vocal proponent of therapy and seeking mental health resources, directing her subscribers to important support.

Mesmerized by her wild strangeness until they become invested in her relatable emotional struggles, her subscribers are singularly loving. On a website full of vitriol and judgment, her comments sections are overflowing with adoration and admiration. She is revered by young people who love her courage – not simply the courage to look or be silly in public, but the courage to share how hard and how messily she is working on herself – as we all are, just more quietly.

We Need Emilia Fart When…

• We feel like we take things a little too seriously.
• When we’ve lost touch with our silly, sloppy sides.
• When we’re convinced our secrets make us unlovable.
• When we’re afraid of imperfection.
• When we’re afraid of digging deep into trauma or grief.
• When we need to see an example of honest “normal weirdness”, so to speak.
• When we need to contemplate self-compassion.
• When we feel lonely with our traumas or shames.

If we grasp to social conventions too tightly we might want to write her off, but we need Emilia Fart because she offers an important service: She reminds us that normalcy is an illusion, that we can love our strangeness, and that twerking in a park singing Cher isn’t illegal nor does it make you any less of a person.

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Thank you for reading!

This blog, Screen Therapy, is dedicated to exploring how we can mindfully use the time we already spend on games and movies to strengthen our emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is crucial when we face the everyday stresses and anxieties we all endure (such as the fear of death, how to develop the skills for loving relationships, or learning how to cope with just how difficult life feels, etc.)

We receive very little formal education or help in processing these difficult challenges, but by strengthening our self-knowledge and emotional intelligence through art and culture we can better pursue our personal balance.