When Sabrina Bahsoon, 22, filmed her first TikTok in August, she had no idea what was going to happen. At that point she was a Law graduate from Durham University, whose family had all moved back to Malaysia and were asking her what she was doing in London alone, without a job.
“After law school, I was sick of doing things I didn’t want to do,” she tells me. “The unhappiness made me think, what’s my purpose? What am I doing with my life? I was trying to find ways to be creative and express myself more, authentically. So, I turned to TikTok.”
One day, when Bahsoon was on the Tube, listening to music like always, she felt the wind coming through the Tube, and realised it ‘felt like a music video.’ That was when she decided to effectively make her own, filming herself dancing to Nicki Minaj, fully moving her entire body and mouthing the lyrics.
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She posted it on TikTok, and two weeks later, it went completely viral. The name ‘Tube Girl’ is now fully her own, and the hashtag has had over a billion views on TikTok. It’s partly because Bahsoon’s energy is so infectious – but it’s also mainly because most of us just can’t get over the fact that she doesn’t care what the other people on the Tube think about her when she’s filming.
“It isn’t enough to make me nervous,” she shrugs. “I don’t care if people I don’t know are there. I’ll act unhinged – I don’t care. I’ve stopped caring about what other people think for a while – I’m going to live my life.” But was she always this confident?! How does she do it? And how can we?
“I wasn’t always this way,” she admits. “You have to have self-love and appreciate yourself and what you can do. I am smart and analytical and beautiful. I have a good personality. Admitting that to yourself is really hard because people will tell you otherwise when you say it out loud.
“I had to work on that the whole time in university and after that, I was like, I want to get into fashion and music. I want to have confidence. I didn’t come from anything close to these industries. I was doing a law degree. Rihanna says fake it till you make it, so I was like, I have to act.”
She managed to stop faking it a while before her TikTok videos, which means her confidence in those videos is all natural. It’s inspiring a whole new host of women – and men – who are posting their own ‘Tube Girl’ videos in an effort to beat social anxiety. “It’s the best part to come out of all this,” says Bahsoon. “A lot of social media trends aren’t so deep in that way. I’m so glad men are getting over the toxic masculinity and being macho, and just living their life on the Tube.