How Emma Chamberlin soothed my summertime sadness
How two unrelated pieces of pop culture glimpse into my childhood and adult loneliness
When I listen to “Summertime Sadness” by Lana Del Rey, I flash back to the summer of 2018. Years have passed since the remix of Del Rey’s breakout hit the radio and dance floors alike.
At the time, I recently moved in a two-story house in the Point Breeze neighborhood of South Philadelphia. Unlike Del Rey reminiscing about a former friend who tragically died during the summer, I experienced my own kind of summertime sadness, alone indoors with the air conditioning blasting. I heard my neighbors convene outside with music turned up; their kids played together so loudly that you heard them scream at each other. I scrolled my social media feed of people documenting beach and camping trips, outdoor music festivals, and bottomless mimosa brunches. It felt like the world was throwing a block party and I was the only one who wasn’t invited. I felt empty in a way only “Summertime Sadness” could explain.
I adore much about the summer. I love spending entire days at the beach with friends, jumping in the ocean and between its waves, picking at my favorite Trader Joe’s snacks throughout the day. My birthday falls at the end of June, so my own celebrations often coincide with the Fourth of July weekend.
The summer also has a somber tone for me, because it reminds me of my childhood loneliness. Growing up, I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t have any siblings to play with, either; even in my extended family, I was often the cousin who was “in between” ages, too young to play my aunts’ and uncles’ children but too old to play with their children’s children. I generally lacked social connection with people my age. The warmer months only exacerbated this.
When school was out for the summer, I missed the place where people my age convened. While I dreaded waking up early and my excessive daytime sleepiness, I still enjoyed the consistent faces of my peers throughout the halls and in classrooms. Over the summers, I grew very lonely, often for weeks and months on end, waiting for the following school year to start again, only for the cycle to repeat again year after year.
In the summer of 2018, it was like I woke up and Realized the impact of my childhood. While I’d been in therapy for a few years, I’d only recently, I started taking therapy seriously. I started seeing a Really Good therapist, the first to truly challenge me. I began recognizing how my childhood loneliness carried into adulthood, how it isolated me from my present-day relationships. My inner child felt lonely, so and therefore, my adult self felt lonely, too.
I also Realized I wasn’t eating enough. I increasingly struggled to eat alone. My hunger worsened as I felt more isolated. With YouTube, however, I never had to eat alone. That summer, YouTube became my primary mealtime entertainment, where I’d find mukbang videos of creators eating all kinds of foods—seafood, candy, pasta, you name it. (Mukbangs emerged in popularity from South Korea in the early 2010s and have since become a global online trend.) Mukbang content led me to type “vegan fast food” into the YouTube search bar one day. A user named Emma Chamberlin came up with her video, VEGAN FAST FOOD REVIEW. Intrigued, I picked up whatever food I had, sat down on the couch, and watched the then Emma, a teenager with a driver’s license from a Bay Area suburb.
In the video, she drives to Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, rating fast food items on a scale from 1-10. As she grabs a chicklenless teriyaki bowl from a brown paper Jack in the Box bag, she says, “What the fuck? Oh my God, ew, this is what it looks like,” before zooming in on the sad excuse of a bowl with the caption “vegans :/” as the sound effect of a crowd booing plays. She censors each F-bomb she drops. (There are several.) She continues her review:
“It doesn’t actually look that bad, but there’s deadass literally no teriyaki sauce on it at all. What?! So why do they call it a teriyaki bowl? It smells like cow manure. Like, I know it’s just vegetables, but it smells like a fucking cow. Let’s try it anyways. Okay, the rice is good, but it has an undertone of like, sock, but it’s rice, how bad could it fucking be, you know what I mean? It does not smell good to me. I mean, I hate to be dramatic, ‘cause I know this is like, ‘the broccoli smells like socks, oh, poor Emma,’ but no, it’s not appetizing, but I mean, you do what you gotta do. Yeah, no, that’s just not good. I mean, I can imagine if it had a sauce on it, maybe it could be doable. I give this a solid two out of ten.”
Her demeanor is lighthearted and silly, the kind of tone I craved. I was immediately hooked. I binged her backlog of videos with every meal. On countless summer weekends I spent alone, I could always count on her to hang out with me.
Similar to how I watched her videos, she was also alone in nearly all of them. She sometimes filmed herself doing activities at home, like baking or doing arts and crafts; other times, her camera accompanied her in the car to a coffee shop, Target, or a thrift store in San Francisco as she talked into the camera on the way. A fellow only child, I watched her entertain herself by turning a weekend into a staycation or nearby adventure.
While many of her videos are centered around food—like let’s eat burritos and chat :D and VEGETARIAN TRIES MEAT FOR THE FIRST TIME—I stayed for the ride, watching new uploads often the day they dropped on YouTube. Most notably, her video—why I dont upload that much.— spoke to me because of her honest explanation of how emotionally draining filming, editing, and publishing YouTube content weekly is, especially for a 17-year-old. While I didn’t have such responsibilities at her age, I very much did as I watched as a 25-year-old who went to therapy and paid bills.
Over time, I became a loyal fan, watching Emma achieve one career milestone after another. Months before the pandemic started, I scouted out CVS storefronts all over Philadelphia for her Cosmopolitan cover until I finally found a copy.
Flash forward to the summer of 2023. Our parasocial relationship has evolved with her continued accomplishments. Today, uploads to her YouTube channel are rare; instead of food reviews, her vlogs showcase her travels abroad and appearances at prestigious events like Paris Fashion Week and the Met Gala. She does, however, upload two podcast episodes per week to Spotify, where the platform retains exclusive rights to her podcast, thanks $5 million deal last year.
In the past month, Emma and I ran into each other—parasocially, of course—at Walmart, where her successful coffee brand recently started distributing canned non-dairy lattes. (We even ran into each other again during a recent Ulta trip, where I noticed a dry shampoo product made with Chamberlin Coffee branded matcha. What can’t this woman do?!)
Five summers later, I’m not desperate for social connection as I once was. There’s an abundance of lovers, chosen family, and peers around me. I’m still in therapy, but I’ve come a long way emotionally, enough to write this essay. I feel a lot more grateful and full than lonely and isolated. When I occasionally listen to “Summertime Sadness” or hang out with Emma, it reminds me that loneliness—even in the summertime—is temporary.
WRITING PROMPT: This essay was inspired by a writing prompt by a former writing teacher, Lizzie Lawson. (Follow her on Twitter!) Try it yourself. Take two pieces of pop culture (a song, album, movie, book, news article, YouTube video, TikTok video, essay, television show or series, etc.) and write about how they intersect using your personal experience. Write about it and reply to this email with how it went!