I’m Rayne. I’m a writer. I have a blog, Internet Princess, where I write essays about womanhood and mental illness and internet culture and lots of other things, too. I’m a very emotional girl - I say that all the time to my friends, so I’ll say it here too. I’m a very emotional girl.

Internet Princess is my baby and my world and the most special thing that’s ever happened to me. It started as just kind of a dumping ground for the things that rattled around in my brain. Like, I would sometimes just have nights where I couldn’t sleep unless I got up and banged out a 3000-word essay just to empty out my head, and that was how I wrote most of my earliest essays on there. I never really expected it to be anything much more than a personal project, but I got so lucky and it found a big audience really quickly.
When I started the Substack, I’d been posting short-form video essays on TikTok for about a year and had built a pretty big audience from that. I found myself getting really frustrated with the limitations of the form — I felt constantly misunderstood and misinterpreted in everything I tried to say, and it felt like the platform was basically designed to discourage productive conversation or earnest expression. And my account kept getting banned for making jokes about men or whatever (“hate speech”). When I started using Substack essays as my medium, it felt like I had total control. And I’m a control freak!

I think it’s a problem that’s always existed in some form, but I do think the Internet has definitely offered a unique environment for fostering inflammatory, one-note takes on the topics we feel strongly about. And I think it’s really important to be aware that the online environment has been designed by tech oligarchs to make them as much money as possible, basically. They are not on our side, and they’re never going to be trying to build a space for productive leftist discourse.
When I’m feeling too nihilistic about the Internet, I just try to read a book or talk to someone in real life. I also love when I write an essay and I see someone leave a comment that’s like 600 words long reflecting and expanding on what I’ve written. Or I’ve even seen girls write whole new essays in response to my essays, which is the best feeling in the world. It gives me a lot of hope. Having big, long, expansive conversations feels so good, and it’s nice to be reminded that we can still have them.

I’ve never understood the idea that you should be sort of detached or impartial when it comes to your writing. It makes no sense to me. Why would I ever want to waste my time writing about something that I didn’t care about? What would be the point?
I’ve always felt, for myself at least, that I have to love something to really criticise it well. To me, criticising something means treating it like it’s important. I think the things that young women do on the internet are fascinating and culturally essential, and I think they’re worthy of the same kind of discourse that’s been given for hundreds of years to politicians and public intellectuals and great cultural figures. That’s why I write about it.
And I’m not saying that you should never be snarky, or that all your criticism should be warm and fuzzy. Harsh criticism is also even better when it’s aimed at something you really care for. Like, insults always hurt the most when they’re from someone you love, because you know they must really be fucking disappointed in you. It can be really powerful when writing feels the same way.

That’s very kind, thank you. I really hope that’s true. I feel really lucky that I’ve been able to accomplish what I have as someone who’s not traditionally educated, and I definitely still feel that inferiority complex sometimes. But I think there’s so much great writing and critical thought being produced on the Internet from non-traditional sources, and it feels like the culture has really started to shift - now, a lot of prestigious traditional publications are seeking out those voices specifically because they’ve been able to do so many interesting things on their own. It’s really wonderful to watch and I hope it empowers even more people, especially young girls, to start putting their ideas out there.

Yeah, definitely. It’s sort of frustrating sometimes because the majority of what I casually post online is sort of sarcastic, or meant to be at least a little funny, or written in character as a kind of satirical caricature of myself. Even when I’m making a real point, it’s rare that I’m not at least playing it up a little bit for laughs. And it definitely gets kind of frustrating when I bang out a tweet on the toilet and people start criticising it like a Masters thesis - I’m like, this was a joke about my pussy! I keep telling myself it’s better to be taken too seriously than to not be taken seriously at all, but I’d love to see how the other side lives. You give women much more complexity and lend them much more humanity when you allow them to be imperfect.

Yeah, definitely. I don’t know if I think it’s possible for any person to be truly quote unquote authentic online, and I don’t think anyone would really want that anyway. Everyone is basically playing a character that’s sort of loosely based on their real-life selves, and the whole online experience becomes a lot better — for me at least — when you start being aware of that. I think I just try to be pretty clear about that as it pertains to myself: I want to encourage my audience to think critically about everything, including me. I also really value the separation of my real internal self from the self that people see online, which usually just means I keep a lot of stuff to myself. I don’t know what I’d do if every part of who I am was available for consumption. I also really try not to lean into the parasocial relationship, even though I know they’re kind of inevitable.

Yeah. I always say that one of my biggest goals with my Internet presence is to show that you can be seriously, severely mentally ill, and have made a lot of mistakes or got to a really bad point, and still keep trying to get better. I think there’s never a point where someone is beyond being able to get better. I’ve had to believe that. I think it’s really easy to fall into nihilism about the world or especially about yourself — and it feels good to do that, in a weird way. It feels really good to think about yourself as a lost cause. It’s genuinely harder to admit that you give a shit about your life and want to feel okay sometimes, or want to be better to yourself and the people around you. But I think it’s worth it. And the only way to get there, I think, is to try to give yourself the love and attention that you have probably been denied.

It felt so amazing. I’d never been able to host a live event before, so I had no way of knowing what the numbers would look like — I spent the weeks leading up to it freaking out that literally nobody would come, and then like 400 plus people showed up to a 175-capacity event. It was really surreal and really emotional for me. I write stuff that is often really emotionally vulnerable and it can often feel like I’m shouting into the void a bit, so it hit me in a really visceral way to engage with people in real life who read what I write. There were 14-year-olds there and there were 60-year-olds there. It was just the most special feeling in the world.
I really want to do a lot more live stuff in the future — it’s hard because live events aren’t really baked into writing as a medium the way they are with something like music or comedy. But I’m trying to figure out a way to put a show together in a way that feels natural to me. I want to be able to make a reading feel like a concert. I’d love to do a tour someday soon.

I’ve never had any formal writing training, and I used to be sort of insecure about that, but when I got hired for my first writing job (I used to be a music journalist at a Canadian magazine) it turned out to be something my editor really loved about my work. I think especially in this era of online content, having a very distinctive voice is a huge advantage, and I think coming to writing as a total amateur and figuring out for myself what I like and dislike really helped me with that. I also feel really lucky that I got that music journalism job when I was 19 because it forced me to just write all the time. I had to write almost every day. And I didn’t love a lot of what I put out, in part because I had to produce so much stuff, but it’s just really good to stretch that muscle. So that’s my advice, I guess — write all the time, keep a lot of it to yourself, and figure out along the way which of your imperfections you want to keep.

Nothing is confirmed, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to release the details really soon — I’m a total perfectionist so I keep writing and rewriting my proposal. My agent is about to put a gun to my head. Without revealing too much, it’s going to be a book of essays that expands on the themes I explore in my existing work — womanhood, performance, authenticity, commodification, the Internet.

Too many things to list, and I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about most of them!! I’m really excited to eventually publish the book. I want to do more live events. I’m scheming up an event I want to host in New York right now, actually. I’m working on dipping my toes into fashion and film and screenwriting. People keep asking me what my goals are and I keep having to say that I want to do literally everything. My eyes have always been bigger than my stomach.