It’s a funny thing, being an influencer, because you’re showing your fans parts of your life, but some — maybe much — of it is also a character. Like Rockelle said, being on camera is a performance — like when she thought her boyfriend cheated on her so she staged a stunt for social media content. Where it gets confusing is that the stunt was born from her real feelings, from a real situation she was going through. After so many years, it’s hard to tell where the performance ends, and where the actual Piper Rockelle begins.
“They’re not too different,” she shrugs. “I guess Piper the person has more real feelings than what people see on the internet, but they’re not too different.” One thing she keeps for herself: her love of rescuing animals. Otherwise, her fans know the real her “for the most part,” Rockelle says. But when critics judge her, Rockelle also thinks they don’t really know her. At 18, Rockelle guesses it’s sort of hard to figure out who the real her is anyway. “I don’t even know myself, so how am I going to expect [my audience] to know me if I don’t even know who I am?”
All of this is to say that Rockelle really doesn’t know what’s next, but she’s ready to move into adulthood no matter what it brings. Rockelle has a lot of dreams, but for the last few years, they’ve been overshadowed by the specter of her mother’s alleged wrongdoing and the documentary detailing what is painted as Rockelle’s hellish childhood and adolescence. “But once I’m 18, I don’t have to worry about that,” she says. Maybe, she thinks, brands will want to work with her again, and she dreams of releasing more music (she already has some songs on YouTube). ”I wasn’t born with an angel’s voice but I do think that I could put my mind to it,” she says. She’d even like to try acting: her dream role would be in Netflix’s Outer Banks (“that would be super ironic,” she says of a world in which she appears on Netflix, not as the subject of a documentary, but as an actress).
“How am I supposed to become an actor and start singing and working with a record label and get paid to promote a drink when my name is surrounded by dirt?” Rockelle says. She hopes that after her birthday, she can find a fresh start, away from the allegations about her mom.
Still, behind Rockelle’s teenage bravado, she seems deeply hurt by the events of the last few years of her life. “Of course it hurts,” she says. “It’s never not going to.” As she becomes a legal adult, she’s planning on signing paperwork to transfer the ownership of Piper Rockelle, Inc. to herself from her mother’s hands – but not, she’s quick to clarify, because she doesn’t trust her mother. “It’s protecting my family,” she says. “It’s protecting me. If I take 100% ownership of every aspect of my life, anything that happens from now on will be my problem and nobody else’s.”
It’s easy to relate to Rockelle’s sense that she’s on the brink of a momentous shift — and that adulthood might come with respect, answers, solid ground, freedom from the past. In the years to come, she may think differently about this time, about how young she is even now, the way 18 starts to feel awfully long ago when you’re 22, or 25, or 28.
But at the time of this conversation, she’s 17 and feeling that the whole world is about to crack open in front of her. She knows what she wants the world to see. “Just Piper, the successful girl that looks happy. That’s all I want. For people to be like, she’s happy. She found herself, I guess, is what I would like.”
As for Rockelle’s 18th birthday celebration, she’s going to have her favorite cake — chantilly — and maybe she’ll have some kind of pasta, ideally alfredo, for dinner. She’s set to appear at a kitten adoption event, part of that love for rescuing animals. Of course, she curated something for social media, posted promptly at midnight on August 21. “I have a photo shoot so I have photos to post on Instagram and stuff like that. I want to make them super cool. Of course, everyone wants to have a good birthday post.” She’s already posted a few, one captioned simply “Hiii fellow adults.”
