A woman who was born with a rare condition that means she doesn't have any arms or legs has explained how she's shifted her perspective on hateful online trolls.
Social media star Briel Adams-Wheatley has Hanhart Syndrome, a rare condition which affects fewer than one in 20,000 children.
She was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and was later adopted by a family in the US state of Utah after being abandoned by her birth parents.
She began sharing makeup videos online when the coronavirus pandemic hit. After the first time that she posted footage of her painting her face 'from the chest up', she explained that it 'did really well'.
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Speaking to People in March this year, Briel said: "But all the comments were like, ‘Why aren’t you using your hands?'"
The content creator now boasts a whopping 5.3 million followers on TikTok and another 1.3 million on Instagram, and has always been open and honest about her life with her army of supporters.
Last year, Briel answered 'a question I've been getting a lot lately': how her husband reacted to her transition.
She publicly announced that she was transgender in 2023, a year after she married husband Adam Wheatley, and explained that after sharing this news, it allowed her to finally feel 'like she could actually breathe'.
Briel and Adam met on Tinder in 2020 and she described him as her number one fan and biggest supporter.
"He was nervous at first," Briel admitted. "But I told him, ‘This has always been who I am. I just need to be fully myself'. And once he saw that, he was completely on board."
She added in an Instagram video: "I had told him a little bit before we got married, too that I was having feelings about it, but I just wasn't sure if it was something I was comfortable with, actually fully going into and just keeping suppressed. And if he was comfortable with it and everything."
Adam said: "I'm very happy that she found who she is. I fell in love with her and not what she was, just who she was.”
More recently, Briel has shared a message to online trolls who send her hateful comments.
The makeup guru explained how adopting a different mindset helped her stop 'crying over comments' that were left under her videos.
These days, Briel embraces the traction that hateful remarks left underneath her clips bring to her social media accounts instead of getting upset about them.
"When I first started posting, I let everything affect me," she said. "I’d be crying in the bathroom over comments. But eventually, I realised you have to protect yourself mentally.
"Now I’m like, ‘Thanks - you’re paying my bills!' If I could talk to my younger self, I’d say, 'It’s just not that deep'.
"People are either going to love you or hate you, but it doesn’t need to make or break you. You decide what makes or breaks you."
The drive to prove people wrong is a big part of what inspires Briel to continue uploading content, as she gets a kick out of showing doubters that she is in fact 'fully capable' despite her physical limitations.
"That’s one of the reasons I do social media; to show people that disability doesn’t mean what they think it means," she continued.
"I never had friends with disabilities when I was younger, so I always felt like I was facing everything alone."
Topics: TikTok, Viral, Social Media, US News
Olivia Burke