Professionally Parasocial: My Full-Time Job is DMing Strangers

Professionally Parasocial:
My Full-Time job is DMing strangers

My therapist asked me to name the people I talk to most. It’s not my friends. It’s not my family. It’s a group of editors whose government names I do not know. My job title should legally just be “professional DMer” because that’s what I do all day, every day. If talking to someone daily for months on end but never learning their government name is a red flag, I am waving an entire parade of them.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you before you get into edits: your coworkers don’t have names. They have usernames. I could be deep in a creative back-and-forth with someone whose handle is longliveonedirection.aep and I will never know if they’re 15 or 30 (probably closer to 30 at this point tho)

And listen, as someone who has personally INVESTED hours of her life to One Direction edits, Taylor Swift Easter-egg theories and every The Hunger Games edit I get it, I am it.

The best editors I work with came up making fanedits, cutting sync-perfect tributes to their favorite artist at 2am for pure love and that’s a FULL resume line. Could be a kid who picked up Premiere during quarantine syncing cuts to a bridge everyone already has memorized. Could be a grown adult with a full-time job doing this on the side. I guess we’ll never know.

Every DM is a full roulette spin. You never know what you’re gonna get:

• “Hey! Lovely 🩷” (unclear if this is a 19-year-old or someone’s actual auntie)
• “yo” or “bro” (single word, no context, and yet you understand each other completely)
  • Btw, this is who you’re calling “bro”:
    ![][image1]

Never underestimate the power of a fan account and a genuinely unhinged well-thought-out edit. Some of the most technically insane work I’ve seen comes from accounts with 200 followers and a bio that’s just three emojis. Talent does not care about your follower count or your age or your government name. It just shows up in the timing and intention.

But real talk — under all the bits and the bro-texting and the “dear”s — this is the job. The relationships are the job. Every campaign that’s actually gone somewhere, every edit that’s blown up, made someone cry (probably me while approving it), made someone stop scrolling, that came out of an actual relationship with someone on the other side of a username.

So yeah. My job is DMing strangers. It’s also, somehow, the reason the work works.