INTERVIEW WITH ELI RALLO: TIKTOK STAR, AUTHOR, RENAISSANCE WOMAN

Wednesday editors Emily Blake and Stella Brown had the absolute pleasure to sit down with Eli Rallo, who you probably know on TikTok as @thejarr , to discuss her rise to popularity, finding your niche, and what it means to be “serious.”

Wednesday: We found out about you through TikTok. What inspired you to start making videos? Have your goals shifted since you’ve gotten so popular?

ELI: It was in May of 2020. I had just graduated college, I went to the University of Michigan, and I was in Columbia J School to get my masters like that was the next step. I was moving to the city in August. I studied theater as an undergrad then I studied journalism. I just never really knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to create content! I love to make things and I love to write. So those were like, kind of “my things” that I like – my hobbies. I was screwing around one day with my brother, and I was like, oh, like, let's make a TikTok of this big jar that my family has. And I have celiac/ gluten intolerance, so when I was growing up, we would make like a snack mix in there that I could take like a cup of as a fun way to make a snack; it would be like gluten-free pretzels, gluten-free cookies, and then like nuts and dried fruit and like chocolate chips. So we were like, really bored over quarantine, so we made a video of it. And it was so stupid. And I don't wanna say stupid, it was just funny. And then I posted it. And I woke up with like, 10,000 followers roughly. And so for the first 50,000 people, we rode that wave of the snack jar. Like, it was really funny. This was at the time when Tik Tok was on the come-up, but when we look back on it now, the content that was being produced was cringy. And now it's so educational and like, it can literally change your life (like it changed mine). And, watching people's content can elevate you in so many different ways. So I was thinking of it as a joke, like a fun hobby thing to do. Then, slowly, people started asking me questions about my life being like wait! I would mention in a video that I went to Michigan, or studied theater, or was gonna go to Columbia, so people started asking questions and I started slightly shifting my focus, but I was still like making snacks and like that's kind of what it was. And then I made a video remember right before I moved to New York and I was like “full transparency like this whole jar thing has been like on my parent's money like throughout COVID…I'm about to go to grad school where I'm taking in debt and I'm going to be nannying like pretty much full time to afford to live in the city.” That video really blew up, went totally viral, in a way that I didn't expect. I was really nervous. And I thought people were gonna be like, “fuck that, we were here for this jar thingy and like, we don't want you.” But it was so like, “we cannot wait for New York content, we can not wait to see what you do in the city.” And around the same time, I hit 100k. And so I went to J School and I still was really thinking about it as a hobby. I think it's the kind of thing where, like, you're given a platform, and then you start finding your footing slowly. And there were so many, like eras that I went through to find the footing in the audience in the niche that I really wanted to capture. Around this time last year, I started to go outside myself and think about it more critically. I was also making a lot of friends who were monetizing in really intelligent ways. As I was identifying my niche I started to develop my brand awareness and connect myself to my brand in a really interesting and authentic way. That's when it became a reality that it could be a career, and then it could balloon into other things that I really want to do. So I think it's like, my goal has never changed because, throughout this whole thing, it's been just to entertain people and like, make people feel good. Even those jar videos were, silly and funny, and my voiceovers were always entertaining and make people laugh and like, elevated their life experience brought them joy. I think I'm just doing that in different ways. But of course, the goal back then was like, “I'm going to be a news reporter for the New York Times!” And then J School was like, “Well, you have to delete your social media if you want to be like a White House correspondent.” I was like, I guess I'm choosing social media. I think I'm happy that things you know, shook out how they did. But yeah, that's kind of how it all started and how I got to today. 

Stella: Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you, honestly. Speaking from my own experience as well, I feel like that aligns. I've always wanted to be a journalist. Like I was thinking about applying to Columbia J school as well post-grad, and then this year kind of hit and I was like, there’s too much creative shit going on up here.

Wednesday: I didn't follow you when you were just doing “thejarr”, I followed you, when a lot of your, like lists, would come up, or your, like, recent posts about, for example, “the things you can control today”. Stuff like that was sort of how just it came on my For You Page. I feel like I was me and Stella were talking about like, a lot of our FYP is advice to a younger women audience. I think that that is just part of the nature of the algorithm and what we do with Wednesday Zine. So that obviously makes sense that that's the content coming up, but like, what do you hope that your TikToks are communicating to your audience? Given that your audience is so overwhelmingly women? Does that push you to post certain content?

ELI: Yeah, that's a good question. I think, you know, in college, I always knew that, like, what I wanted to do with my life was to create things that make people feel heard and seen, and specifically women or people that don't feel like they fit somewhere else. In college, a lot of the plays that I wrote, all had to do with women. I wrote a play about female friendship that was sort of like Vagina Monologues asks, like tableau scenes. It would be all about the special and intimate relationships that women have with one another, be it romantic, sexual, mother/ daughter, friend, enemy, like, you name it, we covered it, and it covered like all topics, like getting your first period, and like having sex for the first time, and like, you know, identity things and whatever. That was work that I was so passionate about because I felt like I was seen, and other people felt seen by the piece that we created together. And this ensemble of women was just phenomenal to work with. That was my senior year of college thesis. I always knew that was the kind of content I wanted to make. And so it's no surprise to me that that's how my audience has gravitated. But I always say that my goal is to make content that influences people but not to like buy something or to like, compare their body to mine or their skin to mine, but just influences them to feel a little bit better about themselves or to smile for five seconds. That's the kind of influencing that's important to me. And if that for some reason means that you see me using a product on my skin, and you think that that could make you feel better, because it's helped me clear mind, or you see me putting so like pillows on my pillowcases, because I say it makes me like really romanticize my bedtime routine, and then it influences you to get that, at least you're buying something in a way that's going to elevate your life and bring you joy. And you're not just like filling your life with useless shit or just like filling your life with content that makes you just feel like comparing yourself. Comparing ourselves always happens. But there's something to be said about the way that I could make content to make someone feel good about themselves, instead of, you know, influencing them to do anything else. 

Wednesday: I would love to hear more just about how you navigate being a serious writer with also wanting to do other things many don't perceive as “serious,” even if you take to handle them seriously. Like, there's obviously another voice on social media saying many of these issues you talk about are not serious. How do you navigate that?

ELI: The whole conversation [at J School] was with older professors and older, visiting journalists and editors. And they were definitely more old-fashioned. And they're right. Like, if you want to be a news reporter, if you want to be a, “serious journalist,” you have to clean up your social media because you can't have bias anywhere. And obviously, my social media is biased. It's like a walking bias because I have opinions and they're loud, you know, and then that would just be a conflict of interest for like, any major publication. But I kind of reject this idea that to be a serious journalist, you have to cover news or politics, because first of all, the politics in this country are trash bullshit. Okay, that's serious journalism, but like, what about writing about sex and making women feel empowered in the bedroom in ways that a man is? How is that not serious? It has to do with our anatomy, our confidence. I had to reject the idea that being a serious journalist meant that I was covering politics in the White House. It can be my podcast, it can be my newsletter. I think that I had to realize that there's no one way to do it. And like, yeah, for sure, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times does not have a TikTok and her Twitter is not comedic. Like, she's like, literally one of the most infamous White House reporters in the country, like, obviously, that that's not what she's doing on her side. But I can do my Tik Tok and Instagram and write about things that I want to write about and still be considered a serious journalist. 

I also think it's kind of another thing about, like, what you were saying before, like we see women as only being able to be one thing. When they try to be more than one thing, they get criticized in a way that a man wouldn't. And I was talking about this recently, with even the whole mentality of becoming “that girl” or whatever. There's no such thing as becoming “that guy.” They're not held to the same standard of needing to achieve; they can be and do whatever they'd like, freely. The minute a woman wants to be a journalist or a writer and also pursue social media that she's finding massive success from, she's criticized. I just made a video earlier today being like “my mom told me to always be the breadwinner so that you don't have to rely on a man for money” and someone commented, “what's your mom do for work?” And I'm like, she's literally fucking stay-at-home mom with an autoimmune disease. And the reason she said that is because she doesn't have her own money, like, but also like, why are you criticizing my mom? I feel like people always say things like, “Oh, she's just a stay-at-home mom,” or” she's trying to do too much.” When have you ever heard any of that similar noise or opinion centered on men? You just don't. I've realized I can be whatever and everything I want to be and everything I want to aspire to. And I can be more than one thing. And it has been really hard to push through to get here to realize that because I think that like so many people, my whole life has told me to focus; you do too much. I'm proud of myself for always keeping my eye on the eventual dreams that I had. I don't really know what a serious journalist is. I don't know what a serious anything is, like, what if we just started telling doctors “you're not a serious doctor because you're not a heart surgeon”? I think that it's so dominantly centered on women when we say things like that. It's kind of fun that I can say like, “Yeah, I'm a serious journalist. And I read about sex and I don't care if you think that that's not serious”

Wednesday: One question that we always ask everyone we interview is what advice you would give your 18-year-old self? 

ELI: When I was 18, I was so different than who I am now. I think people need to hear that, honestly. Because people are like, oh, you should be a grown adult when you're 18. I don't know what I was doing. But I think I would tell myself that I just couldn't do it. I wasn't going to be able to get what I wanted. And I always just wanted to be creative. And I wanted to like, make a life for myself as a creator. That was my dream. And I told myself so much that I couldn't do it that my goal when I was 18 was to find someone to marry me so that in the event that I couldn't do it, I at least wouldn't be burdening my parents with the financial responsibility of me. I really had this idea in my brain that I was going to live in their basement for my whole life because I was never going to make the things I was good at. Because I was never good at math, I was never good at sitting at a desk, I have ADD. I was never responsible and organized. I just feared that I would never be able to do the things I'm good at “for real.” I think that if you speak to yourself in that way, that's the only thing that's ever going to come true for you. And if you tell the universe I think I'm going to fail, then it's going to make sure you fail. But if you tell the universe I know I'm going to succeed, then its job is to confirm your assumptions, you have to assume the best-case scenario instead of the worst. I spent so much time assuming the worst about my life. Like, if I don't have a boyfriend, I fucking suck. Or if I don't find somebody who wants to, like spend the rest of their life with me, like, number one, I'm not valid. I wish that I didn't waste that time. But I think that also there's something to be said about having that lived experience and sitting with myself for so long thinking I would fail. I had to snap out of it. And the only way that I've ever succeeded was snapping out of that, you know, self-talk, and instead of that, believing in myself. So I think that's definitely what I would tell my 18-year-old self if anything.