12 Years Ago, She Became Overly Attached Girlfriend Meme. Then Her Viral Fame Sent Her Into a Spiral of Depression (Exclusive)

• Laina Morris went viral in 2012 when a screenshot of her face from a Justin Bieber parody video was turned into a meme.
• Dubbed the “Overly Attached Girlfriend,” Morris built an online following off of the viral fame, though she admits the pressure of constantly creating for an online audience was difficult.
• 12 years later, Morris reflects on her virality and the pressures it came with, admitting to PEOPLE why she left her YouTube channel five years ago.

Laina Morris isn’t particularly attached to the meme that made her face a viral sensation.

On June 6, 2012, Morris uploaded the now-famous video, titled “JB Fanvideo,” as an entry for a contest Justin Bieber was hosting to promote his Girlfriend perfume. Set to the beat of his then-brand new single “Boyfriend,” Morris delivered a parody mimicking behaviors that would warrant a restraining order from any prospective romantic interests — all while maintaining intense eye contact with the camera.

“If I was your girlfriend, I’d never let you leave without a small recording device taped under your sleeve. And you’ll only look your best and shave your face for me. Don’t hide secrets in your house, cuz boy I stole the key,” Morris threatens the fictional romantic interest.

The bit was meant to be a funny entry for the contest, and she eventually shared it on her Facebook page that evening to laugh about it with her friends and family. Eventually, it morphed into something entirely different.

It wasn’t until the next day that Morris says she truly grasped just how far her contest submission had reached after the clip went viral on Reddit.

“I remember waking up, going out to my living room and my roommates were already awake on their computers and they were like, ‘You’re a meme,’ and showed it to me,” she recalls to PEOPLE exclusively. “And then I just spent all day looking at these memes online.”

“It’s been so long that I’m not 100 percent sure on the numbers, but… at least the first couple days it was at like a quarter of a million views, which at the time was quite a bit for having just posted it,” she continues. “So that’s when I knew. I remember calling my dad and being like, ‘Do you know what a viral video is? I think I might have one.’ “

It wasn’t the video that made Morris’ face a staple of meme culture, but the single screenshot of her staring unblinkingly at the camera, often overlaid with various phrases and shared around the internet. “It took you 15 minutes to get home. Google Maps said it takes 12. Who is she?” one popular iteration of the meme reads. “Your bedroom looks different through binoculars,” another bout of text superimposed over Morris’ face threatens.

The original video, which now has more than 22 million views, has countless comments from viewers finding the source of the meme years later. It still makes the occasional appearance on an online forum or in group chats with friends.

“It was crazy. It was in the hands of the internet almost immediately,” Morris recounts. “I didn’t name this character Overly Attached Girlfriend, I didn’t make any of these memes — it was kind of like I was in on the joke, but also, I don’t know, I was just following along with everyone else as well at the same time.”

As the views continued to roll in, Morris says it was her brother who encouraged her to monetize the post, though she was initially hesitant, worried that it would disqualify her from the contest. (She was eventually named a runner-up.) But despite the video’s viral notoriety, Morris admits, “I really don’t remember how much [it made].”

“I guarantee it’s not as much as anyone would guess,” she says. At some point, the video was eventually hit with a copyright strike, so while there are still ads on it, she says, “I don’t make money from it anymore.” Instead, Morris jumpstarted an online career from the memes, altering her career path.

A then 20-year-old, Morris was taking a semester off from college when her face became an internet staple. She had been studying to become a teacher, which she admits she was only pursuing because both her parents were teachers, though she knew it wasn’t what she wanted to do. 

“I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and in the back of my mind, I always had entertainment, comedy, acting, writing, something — like I would really like to do this, but I don’t think I can,” Morris says, noting that she resigned herself to going back to school for advertising after the short break. “Right when I went back was when the YouTube videos took off. And so I definitely jumped at the opportunity that it gave me.”

Though Morris has deleted many of the videos she made following her internet launching point, some other Overly Attached Girlfriend skits — like a spoof of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and the memed character trying to be a “Normally Attached Girlfriend” — also brought in 20 million and 11 million views, respectively. 

In an age where being a YouTuber or content creator was far from a traditional or even popular career path to pursue, Morris was able to support herself from the content she made. Her channel currently sits at 1.23 million subscribers, and she still holds a lofty following on her other platforms.

“It fell into my lap and was like a door open that I didn’t think I’d be able to do,” she says of her time on YouTube. “So I don’t know that I would’ve pursued anything in that world had that not happened — but I certainly wanted to.”

Though she wasn’t the winner of the Girlfriend perfume contest, Bieber did see her video, posting a clip where he recreated her wide-eyed stare. That, coupled with a gift basket and a brief appearance in the commercial for the fragrance, was her official winnings for the contest entry, despite being the only “JB Fanvideo” still living rent-free in most internet users’ minds. (“I don’t blame him for being a little scared,” Morris jokes.) 

As her viral fame grew, Morris appeared on late-night talk shows and met her fans at events like VidCon and Playlist Live. She made skits that had nothing to do with the Overly Attached Girlfriend, trying to insert “just Laina” into her content where she could. 

But even as she tried to detach her online image from the meme she didn’t mean to become, Morris found that the videos featuring the fictional creepy character brought in the most views, “or was what people wanted to see the most,” she explains.

“I don’t know when this happened, but I feel like at some point I was able to disconnect myself from the meme,” Morris says, admitting she still stumbles on the image ever so often in her online scrolling. “I don’t really know how to explain it, but it feels like, ‘Oh, there’s my meme,’ rather than, ‘There’s my face,’ or like, ‘There I am.’ ”

“I don’t know. I feel like there’s some kind of disconnect happening that maybe I had to do in order to take in what it became,” she continues.

Looking through Morris’ YouTube page, the uploads eventually dwindle. As the internet culture shifted away from the meme, even the videos of the Overly Attached Girlfriend character capped out at just over 200,000 views. Though she didn’t share this publicly, at the time, she shares now that she was struggling with her mental health and the pressure that her viral fame put on her.

“My time on YouTube as a consequence of going viral,” Morris admits plainly. “The hardest part for me was probably when my mental health was not great and I wasn’t able to fully do my job as well as I would’ve liked to. I feel like I wasn’t performing well.”

Morris initially dove into YouTube headfirst, maintaining a weekly upload schedule for much of her time on the platform. One of her latest uploads, in 2017, celebrated her two-year anniversary of adopting her dog, Gilly. It was one of the only posts she made to the channel that year.

“Mentally, I wasn’t in a place where YouTube was working for [me],” she confesses. “I was just really overthinking. Every time I would try to film a video, I couldn’t do it.”

This, Morris admits, is one of the hardest parts of being as public-facing and trend-dependent as content creators are.

“It was out there for everyone to see. I mean, people didn’t really know that I was struggling mentally, but I feel like if you’re in a tough spot and you’re not performing well at your job, that’s not a thing that everyone’s going to really know,” she continues. “But it’s right there for everyone to see with the numbers and the followers and whatever. And at the time, that’s something I really cared about for some reason.”

“I knew I wasn’t doing well, and it was hard for me to know that everyone else could also see I wasn’t doing well,” she adds. “And I mean, at the end of the day, everyone else probably didn’t care, but of course I just assumed like, oh, everyone can see I’m doing terribly and whatever. I was in my head about it.”

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Two years after her adoptaversary video, Morris uploaded a nearly 30-minute video breaking up with YouTube. It’s a candid video, where she confesses to her viewers for the first time just how severely she was struggling with her mental health as she tried to maintain that diligent upload schedule. 

“Starting around 2014 … I landed myself in a real deep depression, and I was keeping it a real deep secret from everyone around me,” Morris shared in the 2019 video. She was careful with her words as she made this admission, the background still showcasing pieces of fan art dedicated to the Overly Attached Girlfriend character. “I felt ashamed and I felt guilt for being stressed and overwhelmed in a world and with the job and opportunities that were so great. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t handle it for years,” she continued.

In between her honest conversation about her own mental health, Morris shared the intimate video diaries she took during those dark times. She admitted to having breakdowns in between filming and editing new videos, grappling with her own self-doubt and definition of success. 

“It just feels very selfish to be this upset because I can’t be successful and what I wanna do when I’m fine,” she admitted in one tearful video diary. “I own a house and a car and I’m doing fine.”

Though Morris began dealing with these struggles just one year after she dedicated herself to making content online, it wasn’t until 2018 that she began seeking professional help. After attending therapy for nine months, she began taking medication for her depression and anxiety in December of that year — a decision she openly says was incredibly hard for her to make, but was ultimately good for her. It was this period of self-reflection and dedication to getting the mental health assistance she needed that led to her decision to upload the breakup video.

“I don’t think anything’s wrong with stepping away and not addressing it, but I just personally really wanted to do that. So that’s why I posted that video,” she says to PEOPLE. “And I thought if it could help anyone who’s struggling with their mental health, it might be worth posting.”

A lot of that struggle was attributed to the rapid recognition she found from the meme — something Morris knows was not nearly as monumental or life-tilting as going viral now has the potential to be. But nonetheless, the meme followed her throughout her online career.

“It felt like starting at the top, and there was just nowhere else to go but down a little bit. Like you’re not building up to that success, you’re just kind of like handed it,” Morris says. ”I had no idea where to go from there and a lot of people were watching me to see like, what’s gonna happen next? And I didn’t have the answer to that.”

Since that video, Morris has returned to her channel sporadically and on her own terms, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Overly Attached Girlfriend and reflecting on five years since officially breaking up with YouTube.

While taking time away from her online platform, Morris says she spent her time freelancing and editing videos for other creators. She calls her current period of life “transitional,” confessing that while she’s trying to get back into making content for her online audience (focusing more on short-form with her TikTok and Instagram), there’s still “a lot of things I’d really like to try.”

“I feel like I don’t really know how to do a lot of the big things I’d like really like to do,” she says. “I’m kind of trying to figure that out right now.”

“It feels like a totally different life I lived. And when I look back I’m like, man, I don’t feel like I was fully present in all of the really cool parts of that.”

Morris’ experience is one that isn’t often shown in an age where the shelf life for a viral moment continues to get smaller and smaller. She knows going viral in 2012 was a wildly different experience than that of those who find themselves raking in millions of views on TikTok, and though she repeatedly emphasized how grateful she was for the experiences becoming a meme gave her, her journey is a clear example of how difficult it can be to take the bull by the viral horns. 

“I am where I am because of [Overly Attached Girlfriend], but I do think if I could go back and just tell myself to chill a little bit,” Morris reflects. “I think I let myself get really overwhelmed. It was a lot of eyes on me very quickly. There are opportunities I had that I didn’t take and that I sort of regret or I feel like because I was so overwhelmed, I didn’t fully take advantage of those opportunities and enjoy the really cool, good parts.”

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

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