SUNSET TOWER

I’m finding it hard to focus as my head is still spinning from the news this morning. Nothing that you’d find across any newspaper or headline however, yet somehow it feels just as devastating. 

This morning, just one day after I launched my first ad for Trew Love, after four months of building a new website, and eight months of building click funnels, my accounts were all hacked and used for some ad coming from China and hence flagged for removal. 

Everything I’d built, including my personal Trew Love facebook page. All the posts, all the photos, all my ad accounts, disappeared in a matter of hours. 

The crazy thing is, this is the SECOND time this has happened as I’ve just about launched a brand. 

The first time this happened was after I’d acquired 10,000 followers on MySpace back in 2006. Back then 10,000 followers was a big deal, especially in Kansas City. 

I operated under the alias of “Lady Aries”, a blonde pink and black haired glam-punk makeup artist. I’d just gotten a job at MAC, and I loved setting up photoshoots with local photographers with different concepts to practice the more creative expression of makeup. I loved modeling too, and the photographers were eager for non-corporate shoots. I was at what felt like the high of my life. I got my side piece tattoo and I was being recognized by name out in public. My first taste of fame. It was then that I took the photo that then got sold around the world, one of which was picked up by an artist that turned into the largest glitter sequin portrait in the world that somehow made it to the Ripleys Believe it or not museum at Hollywood and Highland- one of the busiest intersections in Los Angeles. (I didn’t learn about this till I moved to LA 4 years later however)

I was having fun and making money doing what I loved, and going to underground rave parties on the weekend. I was having the time of my life! 

And then… 

One afternoon… 

I log into Myspace at work (of course) only to see that EVERYTHING was gone. All my floating skull html codes, my photos, my writing that I’d poured my soul into… 

GONE. 

HACKED. 

ALL FUCKING GONE. 

I was still able to get into the account, at which point I saw another person making actions within the account. I sent myself a message to see if the person hacking me would hear my plead to stop. 

I said Why are you doing this?? Please stop! Why are you doing this? 

He said… 

“Because I can”. 

My heart broke. Everything I’d created. Gone. 

What I learned through this, is that social media following can be stolen, and years of work can be obliterated by someone with vindictive intention. 

The scar this left, was and IS undeniable. 

A great deal as to why I’m not further in exposure online at this point, November 2024, with 13.4K followers who were for the most part, purchased. I bought them at a time where I wanted to regain the social recognition that seemed so necessary for getting contracts, but was still yet too burned to put myself out there to do it authentically. 

This only made me feel like more of a fraud of course, which was the first insult thrown at me by a vicious liberal who didn’t like a truth I was sharing. Thankfully I’ve come to accept my reasoning for doing it, and maybe this time around, it’s just another cycle of the same story, back for new and fresh lessons. 

Back to this morning. I wake up to see that my ad account for Patron Portal for artists- which I’ve been building over the last year- was hacked. Through there, they posted an ad that got flagged for review, denied, then my account, including my Trew Love account, and my Trew Love ad account, were wiped clean off the face of the internet. 

GONE. All of it. All the posts. All the videos, the artwork, and the first ad that I’d just got done filming last week. 

All. Of. It. Gone. 

Again. 

At this point, a deep, heavy depression washes over me. A sadness that felt like a death. Like a death within myself. Once again, I’m at ground zero. Zero followers, zero dollars. Where the fuck do I go from here? 

To that question I don’t yet know. Do I rebrand? Do I rebuild? Or do I allow this to be a sign from God to change directions entirely. 

It was only this morning as well, as I recently got back to my Sugar Coated painted collection (as I have a show in January) only to have a looming narrative haunting the back corner of my mind, whispering  “No one’s wants these”. 

Is this a sign to start fresh there too? Is everything I built in LA, including my entire social network attached to the Trew Love name- falling off of me? 

I couldn’t help but think about all the times someone tried to tell me California was going to fall off the coast of the country. Maybe it’s just a midwest joke, or maybe they were on to something, just not in the ways they thought. 

And maybe… Maybe I’m just “being dramatic”. Making a big to-do about nothing. But I gotta tell ya.. 

This feels like betrayal. And abandonment. And Loss. And I don’t know what’s more painful than that. 

That being said, I acknowledge this tower moment as a sign I must have been headed up the wrong ant hill… my empire of sand. 

I think too about the destiny of social media generally as the cancelled community grows ever more the majority, and whether soon this will be such a common experience that we all give in like the Chinese youth and declare “Bai Lan”; Let it rot. 

These moments as I consider whether I want to rebuild again, I can’t help but ask myself why. Why all of this? Why even try? 

And maybe that’s just where God wants me. On my knees in total surrender to the Void and all that comes with it. The confusion, the lack of faith, the burnout, and the inevitable burnout from the cycle of it all. 

Where this leads, I don’t know, I ponder as I drive back from my sister’s house and on the radio plays “Only God Knows Why”

Top down and the music loud enough to drown the defeat, I let the sorrow take me back to the blank page I left all those years ago. 

And maybe that’s where I begin again. 

Trew Love

Also Known As Adrienne