You know Nara Smith, the TikTok star and influencer who posts fashionable DIY cooking videos and lifestyle content.
Often, she creates content alongside her husband, Lucky Blue Smith, mentioning their children with their pretty unique names.
If you’ve seen her content and thought she simply fell under the category of a traditional wife, aka a “tradwife,” you’d actually be very wrong. Nara is officially pushing back on that label.
On a July 10 episode of On Purpose with Jay Shetty, Nara discussed her struggles with her “online presence” and people’s projections as a content creator. “When people hear that I have three kids at 23, and I had my first a few weeks after I turned 19, they always freak out,” she said. “They’re projecting how they want their life to be onto me. That’s one thing I struggled with in the beginning, doing social media.”
“People love projecting things onto me and kind of how I live my life just because I cook for my husband, because it’s my love language and I love cooking,” she said.
“They project onto it that I’m in the kitchen and trapped and I’m just at home and [my husband] the breadwinner and all of these things,” Nara added, “and I’m like, no, I work.”
In addition to being an influencer, wife, and mother, Nara has had a modeling career since she was 14 years old. She’s not just a traditional stay-at-home mother. “I work. I’m very busy. I travel almost every week. I have kids that I raise,” she said. “I love being in the kitchen because it’s a passion of mine, not because I have to. And sometimes I feel like this is where social media gets tricky for me personally.”
“It doesn’t matter how much I voice those things and try to make people understand that I am actually a full-time working mom that they just don’t wanna get it,” Nara continued. “They use me as this poster child of this like very traditional wife and I’m not. There’s nothing truly traditional about us as a couple, apart from maybe that we chose to have kids young and get married young. But apart from that, we split towards 50/50.”
In the interview, Nara explained that even her husband wouldn’t fall under the role of a traditional husband. “There’s things that Lucky does that I guess, traditional men wouldn’t do. Like do the dishes or get the kids dressed or do their hair, or whatever it may be that people don’t associate with a traditional man,” she said. “And there’s things that I do like having a full-time career and having Lucky be home while I travel for two weeks. People see that side of my life, and I voice that side of my life but they still don’t want to accept it.”
Nara discussed how people on the internet can be negative, and it’s even led to her crying to Lucky about it. “Nowadays, society they love drama. They love negativity. They feed off of fights and opinions and online situations that cause conflict,” she said. “I think that’s what people love projecting onto me. They love that I’m so controversial, and they can kind of say whatever. And in the beginning, it really used to bother me. I used to cry at home and tell Lucky, like, ‘I don’t understand why they’re saying all these things.'”
When Nara challenged the negative comments and tried to defend herself, she explained that she would face more pushback. “Then all the comments would be like, ‘She’s lying, she’s gaslighting us,'” she explained, “and I’m like, I literally cannot win. And I think that’s what I’ve learned. People don’t want to hear the truth. They don’t care for the truth. They care about what they wanna hear and what serves them. So the less I say, kind of the better.”
“It preserves my energy,” she concluded. “There’s no point in me saying something that someone doesn’t even wanna hear.”
Watch the full interview where Nara discusses balancing her career, building healthy boundaries, strengthening her relationship, and more:
View this video on YouTube
@jayshettypodcast / youtube.com
