Cartia Mallan Misses the Girl Who Didn’t Give a Fuck.

There is something very interesting about having a conversation with someone you have watched for years. Long before Roe existed, before I was sitting across from Cartia Mallan asking her questions for our September cover, I knew her through the internet. I followed her when YouTube still felt less like an industry and more like a place where people simply made things. I watched her videos, listened to her speak about life, and found myself inspired by the way she seemed to move through the world. There was an openness to her, a curiosity, a kind of blind confidence that made you believe you could probably figure your life out too.

So when, towards the end of our conversation, I asked Cartia what she would tell herself ten years ago, I expected the usual answer. Something about trusting the process, you know, that everything works out. That the heartbreaks and mistakes eventually will make sense.

Instead, she turned the question around completely. 

“Can a young, 10-years-ago girl call me now and give me a pep talk?” she said. “Because she knew more.”

It hit me, because I understood exactly what she meant. There is a particular fearlessness you have before you understand the consequences. Before you have enough to lose. Before experience teaches you all the reasons something might not work. I told Cartia that I recognise it in myself too. I used to believe almost anything was possible and then simply make things happen. Growing older hasn't taken that belief away entirely, but adulthood introduced something far less romantic: risk management.

“Audacity,” I told her.

That is what we had.

Cartia remembers a version of herself who would deliberately run towards whatever frightened her most. She was attending acting school while posting three YouTube videos a week. She was outside more. Creating more. Thinking less about what everyone else might think.

“Who the fuck cares what people think about you?” is what she imagines her younger self telling her now. “Keep being outspoken.”

It would be easy to mistake this for nostalgia. It isn't. Cartia has spent more than 15 years online. She belongs to a generation who didn't simply become influencers; they existed before we had fully decided what an influencer was. They documented their lives before documenting your life became a career strategy. And now, the camera stopped simply coming along for the ride, is it the ride.

“We're living our lives to film it,” she says of today's internet culture, “instead of the other way around.”

For Cartia, the distinction is what really matters. Her original dream was simple: build a life she loved, live by the sea, be surrounded by friends, go to music festivals, bring her camera and film when it felt natural. Now, she describes brand trips where the experience itself can become secondary to manufacturing the best piece of content from it. She has deliberately stepped away from much of that world over the past two years. “This is not normal” she said, referencing the typical influencer life and everything that life entails, if you are successful.

“This is not relatable to so many people.” There is no superiority in the way she says it. In fact, what makes Cartia interesting is how often she implicates herself.

She has performed too, she knows what works. And that might be the problem.

Last year, she had what she describes as a crisis with Instagram and almost stopped posting altogether. She questioned why she was still doing it. Then she remembered why she had started: expression, filmmaking, writing, creativity, helping people.

“I think what's been lost is just the soul of people,” she says.

She talks about Pinterest-perfect photographs and feeds slowly collapsing into one indistinguishable aesthetic. Everyone has access to the same references, the same trends, the same blueprint for what performs. Eventually, even individuality can start looking oddly similar.

“Everyone's feeds and everyone's photos look the same,” she says. “We're losing all elements of what our brains could naturally come up with.”

Then comes the something that stays with me most. “I've literally forgotten how to show up as myself.”

After enough years online, Cartia knows how to perform for the internet. She understands the images, behaviours and versions of herself that work. She describes that knowledge as almost a form of conditioning.

The irony is brutal: you can become so good at being perceived that eventually you have to remember how to exist without thinking about being perceived at all…

Cartia knows both sides of comparison. Girls have approached her throughout her career saying, “I just want to be you.” She hated hearing it. “I don't want you to be me,” she remembers thinking. At the same time, the internet was teaching her to scrutinise herself. She speaks openly about anxiety, body dysmorphia, struggles with her weight and being bullied at school. The more visible she became, the more aware she became of her looks and what the industry expected from her. “The comparison of it all,” she says, “it ruins you.”

Visibility, it turns out, has an interesting cost.

Cartia also began questioning the traditional markers that told her she was doing well. Fashion Week became one of them. She remembers attending and feeling inadequate, wondering why she continued putting herself through something she didn't particularly enjoy simply because being invited signalled success to the public, the industry and her peers.

“You don't have to just do things that you hate,” she eventually realised, “just so the public, or the industry, perceive... ‘Oh my gosh, she's killing it.’”

Perhaps growing up is partly dismantling the life you thought you were supposed to want. 

For Cartia, that has also meant becoming more protective of what remains hers. After sharing so much of herself for so long, she reached a point where parts of her personal life became too complicated to simultaneously live and explain publicly. “People know so much about me,” she says. “I don't have privacy. And I don't give myself privacy.” So she withdrew.

And interestingly, the thing that began repairing her relationship with her career had almost nothing to do with her career. Working alongside her mother at an orphanage in Bali brought Cartia back into the physical world. Being with the children and people whose lives looked entirely different from hers grounded her. Her attention began moving towards a different question: not “how can I show people my life?” But “how can I actually participate in other people's lives?”

She now speaks about focusing on acting, her art and reclaiming enough creative autonomy to make things that feel meaningful again. Maybe that is why this conversation feels like a full-circle to me.

The Cartia I started following all those years ago inspired me precisely because she seemed to be living first and sharing second. Years later, I am interviewing her for the magazine I went on to build, while she is trying to return to the qualities I admired in her in the first place.

Neither of us is the girl we were ten years ago. We shouldn't be. But perhaps getting older isn't always about becoming someone new. Sometimes it is about recognising what experience taught you to abandon and deciding what deserves to be taken back.

Cartia Mallan doesn't seem interested in disappearing from the internet. She just wants to make sure that, this time, the real her doesn't disappear inside it.

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Photo ©  Roe Magazine / Cartia Mallan (@cartiamallan) Photographed by Hannah Bowker (@bannahhowker) / Styling by Katie McCormick (@katiemccormickstylist)