When 22-year-old Sabrina Bahsoun made her first TikTok in August, she had no idea what would happen. At the time, she was a Durham University law graduate whose entire family had returned to Malaysia and were asking her what she was doing in London alone, without a job.
“After law school, I was tired of doing things I didn’t want to do,” she tells me. “The adversity made me think: what is my purpose? What am I doing with my life? I tried to find ways to be creative and express myself more authentically. So I turned to TikTok.”
One day, while Bahsun was riding the subway and listening to music as always, she felt the wind blowing in the subway and realized that it “felt like a music video.” That’s when she decided to effectively create her own by filming herself dancing to Nicki Minaj, moving her entire body and mouthing the words.
Tik Tok Content
This content can also be viewed on the site from which it originated.
She posted it on TikTok and within two weeks it went viral. The name “Tube Girl” is now entirely hers, and the hashtag has over a billion views on TikTok. This is partly because Bahsun’s energy is so contagious, but mainly because most of us simply cannot come to terms with the fact that she she doesn’t care what other people on the subway think of her when she’s filming.
“It’s not enough to make me nervous,” she shrugs. “I don’t care if there are people there that I don’t know. I’ll act upset – I don’t care. For a while, I stopped caring about what other people thought – I would live my life.” But has she always been so confident in herself?! How does she do it? And how can we?
“I wasn’t always like this,” she admits. “You have to love yourself and appreciate yourself and what you can do. I’m smart, analytical and beautiful. I have a good character. It’s very difficult to admit this to yourself because people will tell you otherwise when you say it out loud.” .
“I had to work at it all the time at university and after that I thought I wanted to get into fashion and music. I want to have confidence. I didn’t come from anything close to those industries. I studied at the Faculty of Law. Rihanna says you fake it until you make it, so I thought, I need to take action.”
She managed to stop pretending long before the TikTok videos were released, which means that her confidence in these videos is quite natural. It’s inspiring a number of women – and men – who are posting their own “Tube Girl” videos in an attempt to conquer social anxiety. “That’s the best thing you can get out of it all,” Bahsun says. “A lot of social media trends aren’t that deep. I’m so glad that men are overcoming toxic masculinity, becoming macho and just living their lives in the subway.