A year ago, I disappeared from social media.

A year ago, I disappeared from social media. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to. This is a story of what happened to many creatives in LA that get taken advantage of because of the hunger of fame. LA runs on a simple equation: someone gets the deal, someone else does the work. The person with the deal gets the pressure, the person doing the work gets the promise, and somewhere in between, most people fold. Not because they're all evil, not because they set out to hurt you, but because when you're handed a $100,000 and told to build a team, launch a career, prove your worth the investment, morality becomes negotiable. I didn't know that yet. I met her on Christian TikTok in 2020, peak pandemic, when everybody thought that Jesus was coming back in three days. She told me she wanted to be a pop star, and I believed her. We reconnected later, years after, and she told me something I desperately needed to hear: I won't do you like other people have done you. See, I've been burned multiple times before. I poured into people while my cup was empty, being for others who I wanted for myself, something she and I both share. So when she said that, I trusted her. I thought this time it would be different. I was only supposed to come to LA for two weeks, help her get started with her Columbia deal, and then go back to Dallas. But at the end of those two weeks, she broke down crying, how am I gonna do this alone? I need you. Because I knew what it felt like to need someone and have them walk away, I said yes. I moved my entire life from Dallas to LA in two days, sold my stuff on Facebook Marketplace, packed everything I had, got food poisoning in Phoenix. I was still editing and uploading her content from my boyfriend's bathroom, okay? She got signed to Columbia Records distribution deal, and she told me I'd be making $7,000 every two weeks as her creative director. Living with her was gonna be temporary because obviously, Joy, I'm gonna pay you enough for you to move out in like three months. I got her signed to an influencer agency, picked up her prescriptions, ran her brand deals, I created her first music video, and when the editor botched it, I saved it. The head of A&R, the woman who also discovered Rihanna, told me I saved the day. I came up with a meme campaign that made her streams jump to 50,000 in one night. Any gift she ever gave me, down to the food, would be taken out of paychecks I never received. Then she bought her manager a BMW and a high-rise apartment in downtown Los Angeles and bought me a Mercedes-Benz instead of paying me. All of these gifts and all of these items being given, but I couldn't be able to afford sanitary pads. When I asked for a contract over and over, nothing happened. And then something happened. So I started looking for other work. I pitched myself to one of Beyonce's many hairstylists, started getting my own clients, and that's when everything changed. The moment she realized I was building something outside of her, she told me I had four months to move out, then two weeks. She called me ungrateful, said I was abandoning her dream. But what about mine? I left LA with nothing, left with no money, no plan, and no proof of the work that I had done. I lost myself. I spent a year asking, where was Joy? And the answer, Joy was missing. Not because someone took her away, but because I gave her away. I gave her to a dream that wasn't mine, to a system that doesn't protect people like me, creatives, the ones who show up with heart in a game played with strategy. The hunger for fame doesn't just consume the person chasing it, it consumes everyone around them. And if you're not careful, you'll disappear too.