If you're a TikTok user, chances are you've stumbled upon the young girl who stabs a straw into her Starbucks tea, swirls it around, expells an "ahh" noise, and clicks her acryllic nails on the screen between each word in the phrase "here's the motherfucking tea."
Following her viral introduction, the woman begins ranting about a guy she used to know. If you haven't seen the original video, you may have seen the host of memes it's inspired, so much so that she's earned an interview.
According to BuzzFeed News, the originator of the video in question is Sammie Lewis, an 18-year-old from Washington. Lewis explained how the video came about to the outlet.
In regards to the snippet that's inspired legions of pop-culture obsessives to circluate similar "tea" memes, Lewis isn't quite sure where she drew inspiration from for the introduction. "I don’t really know where it came from, I was just feeling a bust of energy I guess,” she said. "The video blew up on TikTok so i just kept making more."
In terms of who exactly she's talking about, the 18-year-old explains that it's just some guy who came into her job. "It was about this guy who came into my work originally," she described, "sometime after he came in and completely just didn’t know who I was and I was just a little bit mad about it."
After the success of Lewis' first video, she decided to publish another to even bigger success, although watching her TikTok induces a fair share of anxiety. Despite the lack of roadside safety, audio from Lewis' second clip has been used by other users over 50,000 times.
Lewis does find the spinoffs her performance inspired hilarious: "It doesn’t bother me at all. I think it’s really funny when people go ahead and make their own content, so why would I bash on someone who’s also trying to be funny and make a joke?"
