Rather than organizing trips and shoots and looks, I holed up in my apartment, eating salted caramel gelato and bingeing on Netflix. My posts grew few and far between. The golden rule of influencing is Don’t bum out your audience, but I didn’t have it in me to smile. Saskia and Trini and Maya sent me concerned texts—You aren’t posting much, are you doing OK? What’s going on? Worried about U XX—but of course I knew from their feeds that they were continuing their lives without me. A new girl—a twenty-one-year-old Swiss pop star named Marcelle—had taken my spot in their jet to Cannes.
Mr. Buggles was run over by a taxi on the way to Bryant Park.
My followers started to get crabby about the lack of posts; and then, they started to unfollow me. Increasingly, instead of basking in the adulatory comments on my posts, I found myself focusing on the nasty ones: Get over yourself bitch. Where’s UR ring, did U get dumped? Haha. You think you’re cool because you’re rich, why don’t you sell that ugly dress and donate the money to refugee children? On social media it’s all or nothing: lavish praise or appalled outrage; sycophants or trolls. Caption-and-comment culture in all its brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found. So I knew I shouldn’t pay attention to this empty noise, shouted by those who knew nothing real about me, but I still couldn’t help myself. Why did they loathe me so much, a total stranger? Did they think I was breathing such thin air up here that I couldn’t feel pain?
With every new insult, Victor’s words came echoing back to me: It just feels…shallow. I thought of my father’s face, his words when I told him what I was doing: That’s not a career, cupcake, that’s just a shiny toy that’s going to get old real soon.
Maybe they were right.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Were people just following me in order to hate me? I never meant to be the personification of privilege; I was only ever doing this because it made me feel good about myself. And it didn’t anymore. I looked at the heaps of clothing in my closet, unworn dresses with five-figure price tags still hanging off them, and felt ill: How did I become this person? Because I didn’t think I wanted to be her anymore.
I was done with V-Life. I needed to get out of New York and do something new. But what?
And then it hit me one sleepless night: Stonehaven. I’d move there, really set myself the goal of becoming someone at peace with the world, someone balanced and self-assured. (The embodiment of those inspirational quotes I threw up sometimes, to fill the gaps in my feed: Some daily inspo, guys! #motherteresa #serenity #kindness.) I would breathe life into Stonehaven, make it a place that was habitable and appealing again, a home that my children (someday) would actually want to visit. I could remodel (or at least redecorate!), erase the taint of tragedy, start the Liebling story anew! Bonus: It would lend itself to a whole new social media narrative: Vanessa Liebling moves to her family’s classic Tahoe estate in order to find herself.
I called Benny to tell him what I was going to do. He was silent. “You know I’m not going to visit you there, Vanessa. I can’t be in that place.”
“I’ll come visit you instead,” I said. “Besides, it’s just for the short term. Until I figure out the next thing.”
“You’re being awfully impulsive,” he said. “Think about it for a second: It’s a terrible idea.”
I knew I was clutching at straws; but straws were all I had. Within the week, I’d packed my entire life into boxes, including the wedding dress that I never had a chance to wear; fired my staff; and terminated the lease on my Tribeca flat.
Saskia and Evangeline threw me a going-away party on a Chinatown rooftop, with a DJ and half of Manhattan in attendance. I wore a silver minidress that Christian Siriano had designed just for me and I dispensed kisses and invitations to visit the family estate. I made it sound like the Hamptons, only better. “We’ll come out this