Eli Rallo
Eli Rallo is an idol for eldest daughters, theater kids, people who self-identify as “annoying,” people who left Greek life, people who deal with endometriosis, people who eat gluten-free snacks, people who love Sex and the City, and above all, 20-somethings trying to figure out what to do next.
Rallo gained popularity on TikTok with her various lists of (fun) rules and declarations of what’s in and out. Her book, I Didn’t Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself, commits some of those theories to print.
Rallo spoke with the Scene about Sex and the City, YouTube and gossiping ahead of I Didn’t Know I Needed This Live at City Winery.
You’ve been called the Carrie Bradshaw of the TikTok generation. What’s one thing that is accurate to being a writer in New York City and one thing that is not?
It’s accurate that it typically doesn’t really pay well, being a writer in New York City. When I was in journalism school, they would always tell us that people don’t go into journalism for money. I would always hear the same thing when I was in theater school.
Self-expression through fashion is not only acceptable, but celebrated. People dressing like Carrie Bradshaw dressed in the middle of a small town might be a bit of a shock, but here nobody bats an eye. I really love that about New York.
What’s not true — I think this is a sign of the times and the technological advancements that we’ve had — just the ease of meeting people in person. Every episode of Sex and the City is literally about Carrie Bradshaw and her friends meeting strangers and what the strangers then become to them. That does not happen in a post-COVID world, with dating apps and everything else.
Turning 25 can be a big time of realizing things for people. You turned 25 around six months ago — has anything changed for you as you look back on your earlier 20s?
I have the type of brain where I feel like I’m always realizing things. Thank you, Kylie Jenner, for saying “me and my friends are just realizing things.” I put out an episode about friendship like a year ago, and in that episode I said a lot of things that I still believe to be true. But in the last year or even in the last few months, I’ve had 1 million other realizations that are either subsets of those things that I thought were the deepest that I could go on a certain topic, or are different thoughts that I’ve had that maybe aren’t at odds with what I originally thought, but maybe paint the world in a different shade of gray than I initially expected.
I think that I’m always realizing things, and it’s nice to have an audience that’s kind of flexible with that — having constant realizations and updates to what I’m feeling and thinking.
I feel like I owe so much to the women I watched on YouTube in high school in terms of learning to navigate the world. Who were those people for you?
I have an education, professionally, in theater, but my love for theater and my vast and expansive knowledge of theater did not come from school. It came from literally YouTube.
I think that the beautiful thing about the internet is that so many kids who have found home or allegiance or community in something that maybe you don’t have like immense, tremendous access to. There are only so many community theaters, and there’s only one drama club show a year. I was able to satiate myself and learn via theater YouTube. That is just something that I hold so dear to me.
Jenna Marbles and Fred and all of those comedy YouTubers that were popular when I was in middle school, I feel like everything they’ve done has paved the way for me to be able to have my own sort of career. I do feel like I owe a lot to them.
What gives you the confidence to post so much online?
Something that I’m constantly thinking about is that for women, one of the many ways we can survive the patriarchy is sharing information with one another. If you look back at the origins of gossip — gossip has a bad reputation because it was literally women sharing information with one another, and the men didn’t like that because it gave women power.
The fact that sharing my life online and being open and honest is a way to share information with other women, then they share information back to me … it’s a domino effect of empowerment through the spread of information. Once I realized that that was a part of what I was doing, even on the smallest level, it became a responsibility of mine.
What’s the best advice you’ve been given, and the worst?
The best advice I’ve ever been given is be still and wait — which I write about in the book. I would say the worst advice I was ever given was to delete my social media presence if I wanted to be a serious writer.
