Meet Tea….

As an homage to this insidiously charismatic creative firefly, I’ve decided to punctuate this article with excerpts from my inner voice that whisper me artistic death threats as I write. Ayomitide Adesanya, Tide, ‘Tea Day’, or ‘Tea’ to friends, and @teadyblogs to friends online, has been on one journey and is now on another. The first, a trip from working class roots via parental expectations, a flirt with finance, and a falling out with Ad land. Her destination? Content creation. The second is a bounce between both love and fear, familiar to anyone who pursues creativity with intention. And so it feels fitting to lift the curtain on my own relationship with love and fear, as told by the voice in my head, whilst I journey through the creative process of writing this article and introduce you to Tea and why we’ve fallen in love with her.

Inner Voice - Tom? That. Is. Shit. Does it even make sense? So you want readers to jump from one narrative to another every time you write about what I’m saying to you. Poo, bum, wee. Poo bum, wee. I’d be surprised if they haven’t left already. “I’ve got nothing to do”, they’d think as they head off to do it instead. You don’t even know what you’re going to write next, do you? I bet you’ll try one of your wanky metaphors, probably from a book you’ve never read.

Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy in the 14th century. It’s a three part story and the first two, ‘Dante’s Inferno - The Descent through Hell’ and ‘Purgatorio - The Ascent through Purgatory’, map out as a sort of mythical framework for Tea’s two journeys.

Inner Voice - And…. no more readers. Bell end.

Tea Day’s Inferno

The story of Dante’s Inferno starts with him waking up in a dark forest. It’s a pivot point in life having lost the right path or, frankly, having never really found it in the first place. Beasts of pride, lust and greed await, followed by a descendance through nine circles of hell that helps to find clarity on misguided desires and false motives - all in search of a way to act in truth from here on out. At rock bottom is Lucifer himself, frozen by cold heartedness and unable to stop Dante from climbing through the darkness to emerge under stars with renewed purpose.

It’s hard to spend time with Tea without thinking that she too has emerged under stars. In our recent MOMT podcast she talks about rejecting “learned helplessness”, a conventional path to financial security and advice even from loving and supportive parents. “Don’t do creativity. Don’t go down that route. There’s nothing there for you”, they would say. On then finding traditional work in the creative industry, as a working class girl she noted that “There’s a certain language in middle class spaces that keep working class kids out”. So she picked up some freelance work and journeyed on. Each step closing in on her truth. Each step passing someone she could have become - out walking their beast on a leash, thinking it’s a pet and not a pitfall.

Inner Voice - That last line is great, man. Shame about the rest. Please don’t mention Dante again.

Creativitio Purgatorio

For Dante, story two starts with the stars fading as the sun rises, and in front of him lies Mount Purgatory. We often hear “purgatory” as a place we get stuck in or condemned to, but this is an ascent not of punishment, but of purification.

The mountain is tiered with seven terraces, each a mini breakthrough themed almost as if taking direct inspiration from exactly the type of messaging Tea puts at the heart of her content. Terrace one is a progression from pride to humility. Terrace two turns envy into generosity. Then wrath to gentleness, sloth to zeal, greed to compassion, gluttony to temperance, and finally, lust to love.

At the mountain’s summit is ‘Earthly Paradise’. It’s an ultimate resolution, of sorts. Eternal creative peace in this metaphor, perhaps. But like all stories and exactly like the most overused cliche I can muster - it’s about the journey, not the destination. At least in non-fiction. A journey Tea, and all of us, are forever taking.

Inner Voice - Tie this analogy together, Tom. Wrap it up and make it pretty. The whole article depends on this next paragraph so don’t fuck it up. Spoiler: you will.

Dante is both author and protagonist, and so is Tea. They’re first person accounts of self discovery shared for the purpose of all person resonance. In a sense and unlike Dante, Tea is also publisher and distributor - the entire supply chain of how ideas travel from one person to another. Neither journeys are comedies in the modern sense of the word (although Tea is funny as f*ck). They are paths from difficulty to joy, shared for the benefit of others. Through art and through openness.

Inner Voice - Hey Tom. I’ve been tough on you and don’t get me wrong, this could have been better. Loads better, honestly. But I’m thinking of a post by Tea screaming the words “Create more than you consume”. Remember that? It’s good isn’t it? I’d love to see this in Tiktok’s terms of use - just imagine the whole world doing this. Or at least keeping it in mind as they doom scroll. Anyway, today you did this. So I want to say…. um…. you did… ok. Considering you’re, well, you. Know what I mean?

Meet Ryan Lloyd Haynes.

There’s something uncomfortably human centipede about attempting cultural commentary on a cultural commentator. Like a joke explained, the funny dies. But I’ve been desperate to unpick why it is that I admire Ryan - the man, the myth, the content creator. What lies beneath this admiration is a deeper set of truths I need to know. I’m sure of it.

And I think truth, as related to the world around us today, is probably the operative word.

Born in Coventry to parents from both the UK and the Caribbean, Ryan’s spent most of his adulthood running the clothing brand, Elsie and Fred, with his sisters Natalie and Leanne. A photographer and videographer by trade, in the last year or so he’s founded a running group (@letsrunwithpurpose) and a studio in Hackney, London, (@project.neighbourhood) - documenting this and a broader hunt for meaning from his personal account (@ryanlloydhaynes).

Armed with despair - or grief as we discuss in our pod sit down - in the wake of Elsie and Fred closing its doors, and dismay at the downturns in community, connection, wealth equality, men’s mental health - let’s just call it the state of the world, he produces short form monologues cum video essays and they hit hard. Really fucking hard.

But why?

Convenience Trumps Credibility

Let’s check the news. We can always trust the news…

In June this year (2025) we crossed the divide from TV to Social Media for our predominant source of news. Interesting.

However, only 25% of those surveyed in the UK trust news from Social compared to a 50% trust level for TV. Eeesh.

In the US, of the 54% of Americans who now get their news from social platforms, a staggering 22% cited Joe Rogan as their source for news over the period of the presidential inauguration. Shit.

All is not lost, though. As this re-distribution of news is both a cause and metaphor for the wider proliferation of mistrust. Systems that underpin everything from finance to pharmaceuticals and food production to modern day politics have continued their iterative design journeys from favouring the many to the few. The questioning of history itself is itself being questioned - revisioned narratives unbiasing majority protagonists are now back in the hands of their original and all powerful editors as they claw the pendulum back from whence it came.

The Feeling of Truth

Experiencing a trusted perspective has become so rare it’s almost visceral. Beyond a cognitive understanding emerges an actual feeling, and with that feeling comes a sigh of relief as everything immediately becomes totally clear. It’s an alchemy amongst the noise in a world only getting louder.

Like others in this MOMT community - I’m thinking of Charlie Craggs and her work on Trans rights, or Adwoa Botchey and Solomon Adebiyi as re-educators of African mythologies, Ryan provides these feels. They’re not newsreaders. They’re truthsayers. Using the very platforms that lack trust to garner it, reaching millions and shifting perspectives for the better in the process.

Decoding the ‘Truth Bomb Don'

Ryan’s videos cover male violence, community running, injecting frog juice, digital health and more. But to really decode his truth bomb’s ‘Don’ status, the first of his videos to pop all the way past the 10 million view mark - a 52 second straight to camera piece on wellbeing culture - is the one I’m going to geek out on here first.

As a former Meta creative strategist, wheeled around the world to speak about short form video narrative structures and styles, I can tell you that this video is Zuckerberg’s wet dream. 175 words at 202 words per minute disconnects brains from thumbs and in this world that’s half the job. The half that’s yukky, let’s be honest. A tight, handheld shot feels casual, authentic and, yeah, trustable, too, which helps. But this is all just tactics.

As a human reflecting on my contribution at Meta convincing brands and creators to produce shorter and faster, I can tell you that without substance, this alone is a one way ticket for the race to the bottom. Ryan’s substance is his weight of words; in this video (shown above) it’s a prose on the absurdity of wellbeing tropes and commodification, finessed with a healthy dose of parody. The comments being proof of a truism shared.

During our interview for the MOMT pod, Ryan referred to this video as “Silly.” “Silly?” I thought. Sure, it’s tongue in cheek, but comments like the above are far from silly. They’re shifts in mindsets. They’re alleviated anxiety. They’re lost perspectives back with their rightful owners. But shortly after this conversation I got to understand what he was really saying once he’d posted another monolog-y video. Equally tactically astute. Equally weighty with words. But this time a deeper, more systematic, personal yet wide reaching subject matter.

In Hope of The Upswing

The phrase “speaking truth to power” has Quaker origins dating back to the 1950s during the promotion of non-violent protesting against the Cold War. But the voices of those who have done this have been heard through centuries, not decades, and from within the very centre of almost every reformation movement there’s been.

I often wonder (perhaps like you) whether power has ever been as concentrated and centralised as it is today, and in what form reformation will take when if and when it comes. At the heart of coming change has to be a shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’. In the book, The Upswing, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett trace how every great period of renewal in America began with voices that dared to speak uncomfortable truths out loud - voices that insisted on community over isolation, equity over hierarchy, and trust over suspicion. These truth-sayers, often dismissed at first, were the sparks that set broader reformations alight. Ryan, with his monologues in one hand and his IRL community building work in the other, stands in that lineage; a reminder that the next upswing will not be initiated by any new political system or corporate reckoning, but by people. People speaking up, listening hard, trusting truth and acting…. together.

Meet Charlie Craggs.

Our interview with author, activist, public speaker, and self-identifying but-by-now-I-reckon-universally-agreed ‘GAYcon’, Charlie Craggs, challenged and changed a core belief of mine. One I had felt, until now, was an essential attribute to change making. One that I now accept is a privilege to have and an idiot’s ideal to expect.

On the Will of Grace

I experience proper, full body awe when I learn about beautifully simple, gracious acts of non-violent activism. Gandhi’s your man for this sort of thing. Sitting, reflecting, spinning cloth, waiting - on one particular occasion for many years - as Indians from top to toe pleaded with him to do at least something in the face of British colonial suppression. With unbound grace and only once ‘time had ripened’, he set out on his famous salt march and with it the first steps of Indian independence began. Cut and paste MLK Jr, Mandela, the Dalai Lama and co for obvious comparisons, but it’s the Polish community of Britain in 2015 that fleshes out my superfandom for creating change with a vibe that gets my goat for good. Facing pro-Brexit discrimination, 2,300 British based Poles donated blood on the same day as a gesture and metaphor for their contribution and commitment to the country that until then had welcomed them with open arms. In a row these blood bags would span half a mile which, in theory, would go on to save up to 6,900 lives. Stick me in a silent retreat with a deaf duck and I’d still tell it this story, such is the simplicity and win/win/win-ness of this beautiful act of humanity.

Nail Transphobia

I find Charlie’s life work so fascinating because her pre-social media era spawned a campaign that sits pride of place in my depository of grace-fuelled goodness. She is the originator and orchestrator of ‘Nail Transphobia’ - pop-up nail salons providing free manicures to members of the public in public spaces (think museums, galleries, shopping centres, etc), enabling one-on-one conversations with a trans person and for people who likely had never met one. This method of bridging conversations reminds me of Daryl Davis, a black, blues musician who has helped 200 members of the Ku Klux Klan leave the organisation simply by taking the time to sit down and talk to them.

There’s a ripple effect to campaigning in this way, and it travels as a message that sits deep within the method itself. Of the 1.5 million(ish) animals on this planet, who in their various ways fight for survival amongst one another, only we humans can actually just talk it out. Even in the face of heinous prejudice, this can often be all that’s needed. No wars. Just words. Grace over grudge.

And Then Everybody Talked

Charlie’s activism has shifted in tone. By her own admission she wonders if Nail Transphobia as an idea and activation would work as well in today’s culture.

Because, social media.

Today’s culture is born from an entire civilisation reborn into a sudden existence within which everyone can communicate with everybody, literally all of the time. For only a decade and a bit, we’ve had phones in our hands and an ability to say whatever we want to whoever we want, whenever we want to. Right now, we’re in our teenage phase. We’ve no idea what we’re doing, and we’re dealing with that fact amidst a thunderfuck of hormonal incompetence. Unlike actual teenagers, however, in this shit-storm, everyone is a teenager at the same time. There are no babies to humble us, no adults to support us, and no elders to show us the way.

Yet Charlie’s Nail Transphobia initiative could absolutely work today. Both despite of and because of social media. These one-on-one conversations could well be watched by millions, dissipating prejudices through osmosis one precious view at a time. Charlie’s pop-up nail salons would then, in all probability at a certain scale, take on an open source spirit and be replicated and run by willing volunteers with an impact that becomes mind-blowingly exponential. In an ideal world.

But whilst the floodgates of possibilities have opened, hate is in the way.

One peer review study conducted by the University of Southern California analysed English-language posts from January 2022 to June 2023 on X, and found an overall increase in hate speech of 50% over the time period. The Trans community literally gets it worse than any other. Slurs directed at them spiked by a staggering 260%, and Charlie, being a public figure within this community, has surely had it worse than most.

It’s no conspiracy to suggest that social media platforms’ algorithms might actually recommend this more hateful content (research by the Anti-Defamation League & Tech Transparency Project discovered findings to this effect), and we discuss this with Charlie during the pod along with the suspected motives of our wider media ecosystem - but I’ll leave this topic for a future post. For now, let’s accept this state of hate in modern culture and communications and wonder what a gal like Charlie’s to do about it.

Nuts, Badgers & Privilege

To dream, as I do, of Charlie leveraging the potential of social media to scale the impact of her Nail Transphobia work is to ignore the nightmare she’s going through. It’s also a failure to acknowledge that I can dream.

Day-to-day, my biggest personal challenge is the cost of nuts at Waitrose. Or something like this. I dunno, maybe it’s the badger, badgering about my garden, destroying the grass at my two-up, two-down Victorian home I call the one I own. Grass which, if I think about it, is greener than almost everyone else’s grass living today or anytime before - a fact true simply by living now, here, and with a willy and white skin. I have, at least in relative terms, so few lived experiences of prejudice that my ideals around gracious solutions to the world’s problems ignore most of what is true beyond my own relationship of the world.

During our interview, Charlie spoke with crazy levels of vulnerability of a childhood being tormented by others for first being a gay boy and then being a trans girl. I’ve even heard her say the words “I was bullied by kids at school… and then by the world.” One nuance of this experience and many experiences of those from minority groups, is an expectation to turn the other cheek. To accept, whether by suppressing reality or, dare I say it, showing grace in the face of it, that the anger, resentment and injustice is on you to swallow. This is the role of the victim, right? But suppression is not the way. And grace, to this degree, requires Gandhian levels of strength. But Gandhi wasn’t on Instagram.

So who is Charlie Craggs 2.0?

A pig masquerading as a person once took to Charlie’s instagram and commented “once a man, always a man”. She went to his account, found some topless selfies and posted them as a response with the caption “..says the man with tits?” This is Charlie Craggs 2.0 - an archetypal ‘anti-hero’.

No one is more aware of the shift in culture brought about by the cataclysm that is social media hate. And no one I can think of is doing a better job at opting into it as a statement for others. She’s riding this wave on a surfboard of funny. She’s stealing power from those who think they have it, in order to give it back to those that need it. It’s Promethean. For thousands of real people, expected by the world to surrender to hate, Charlie’s voice and actions online are a signal that they too can clap back rather than cower. Just as she credits a moment in her life when she decided to no longer be a victim, she is providing these moments to all who follow her.

An anti-hero rejects the means and methods of a traditional hero character but is heroic nonetheless. This is Charlie Craggs 2.0. Still beautiful, still smart, and still busy with that grace fuelled activism an idealist like me yearns for. But she’s also in sync with the culture around her, and communicating with it in the language it communicates with her. It might not be what her past or future brand partners want. But it is integrity. And there’s no Maybelline concealer that’ll hide the importance of living life this way.

We all search for people we can model. People whose actions we can mirror. It’s our own individual search and our own interpretation of what to model and mirror. Until now, my search has been confined to traditional hero characters. But now I’ve met Charlie.

It’s almost midnight and I’m 5 beers and a baby Guinness down. Enough to steal a little happiness from tomorrow. Not too much to forget on my walk home through East London that I best be holding my phone a little tighter than usual. The streets are Victorian, mostly. Beautiful buildings aging well but ageing nonetheless. There’s also modern architecture that I notice more for its brutalism than its charm, and as is the case everywhere in 2025, too many shops lie empty. Those family stores and independent coffee shops came and went with soaring rents. Even that high street bank on my right packed up and left - finding cheaper ways to spend its billions online rather than off. Suits suiting themselves, primarily.

I stop.

There’s a man. Hooded and huddled, almost bowing down to the front side of this bank. Is he…. grieving its loss? No, silly. Pissing? Eh! Probably. But his hands are busy. Oh god. Ah, wait a second. He has a glue gun thing and a silhouette surrounded by colour surrounded by concrete surrounded by night sky and this, well, it’s all just weird as hell. And entirely magical.

He turns. Throws me a look. Smiles, nervously. Then splits.

Life Imitates Art

When was the last time you fictionalised a memory based on an Instagram video you found mid zombie scroll? Statistically it should be often. The average Brit scrolls 914 metres a day. That’s over 9 times the height of Big Ben, or 6,600 phone screens stacked one on top of another. Consider view times averaging just a second or two and that becomes a video consumption number in the many thousands. Every. Day. This is a lot of material to capture your imagination and spark it into action.

Yet it’s rare, at least for a cynic and social media captive like me, that a video evokes such a fantasy. Even those idyllic looking travel influencers feel like wolves in sheep’s clothing to me. Baiting my attention. My fawning. My lifetime customer value.

But some content doesn’t bring out the bell-end in me. So to speak. It unearths someone doing something brilliant and communicating it brilliantly. It becomes a window to a million questions all of which I need to know the answers to. Climbing through that window and into the life it teases becomes the fantasy (or a set up for a Substack post, as it now seems).

After watching one such video from an account called @florist.ldn, a street artist producing and installing often irreverent and always pixel perfect mosaics across sad looking urban spots, I wanted answers. So I did a little slip-and-slide into his DMs and we arranged to meet.

Street Art & Sobriety

On his account, he’s faceless. IRL, I learnt as we met, he has a face and it drinks water. His craft is a gift and so is his art. Literally. He gives colour and culture out of his own pocket, inspired by a lifelong love for mosaics and, as he subtly alludes to in his videos but spoke in more depth on during our recent pod interview, a journey of self discovery after years of alcohol abuse.

Until now his identity has been hidden but I’m honoured to have his permission to share with you his name, his story, and my take on why this man is someone to admire.

Meet Daniel Edney.

Content vs Context

A purist’s view on the experience of art is that it’s a personal interpretation of sensory inputs with cognitive and emotional outputs. That’s what it is and that’s what it should be. The context is also the content, though. The setting, the story, the price, the process - it all shapes the mind’s view and the heart’s feel. Traditionally, much of this context is stripped back so as to not get in the way of the purist’s ideal. White walled galleries, sterilised exhibition guides, and their cute little mini me’s; those business card sized bits of wall text that say not a lot about anything.

Clearly, Street Art breaks away from this. Art in situ becomes a commentary on, and embellishment of, its environment. Its story has broader themes of urbanisation, urban culture and an often underground scene cultivating within it. Anonymity is rife and often fair game behaviour given the greyscale legal palette these artists operate within. Anonymity can also be a trope made alluring by Banksy and others, which Daniel explained to us is his most likely motivation for keeping his name and face private until now. I wonder, though, if hiding identities for either of these reasons is mostly the hangover of hiding context - that purist’s blood spilling out from the Tate to tarmac.

The medium of video and the maniacal consumption of it in short form has blown open the expression of art context, and I wonder if anyone is taking advantage of this with as much skill as Daniel. I could, for example, watch Paul Cocksedge’s Reels / TitToks / Shorts all day - but this is an artist explaining context rather than storyfying it. Daniel does the latter.

Art and the Art of Video

Within the narrative of a typical Daniel video is all the standard, expected stuff - scoping spots, producing his pieces, and sneakily installing them. What elevates a typical Daniel video, though, is a combination of absurdist storylines, funny-as-fuck one liners, and out-of-the-blue moments of deep, deep humility. His edit style is short form mastery - a fact that’s nuts considering he only started learning to edit in February this year. All in all it’s raw, real, and revelatory as a lighthouse for how content (his mosaics) and context (his videos) combine as the sum total of artistic expression in the age of social media and the potential it offers.

The Purpose(s)

We look out for content creators who are led in some way by purpose. Voices - whether activists, advocates or artists - who create, not for clicks, but for a passion to contribute to, and serve, a rapidly evolving culture in ways that benefit it and therefore us collectively. Daniel’s art is a contribution to both streets and screens; spaces equally in need of what he provides them. But his B-Story might just be the story that really shifts a consciousness in others. I am the son of an alcoholic who incredibly and against all odds got sober only after my childhood had been and gone, and so I can you what Daniel getting there earlier must mean for his boy. As an artist finding ways to weave his context into his art, it’s this part of his story that will ‘shape the mind’s view and the heart’s feel’ as much as any other. He may never know the people who’ll benefit from this example he is setting for others. But it will not just be me - standing in front of a mosaic on a bank, in awe of the art and the man behind it.

Yep, ‘Theresa’ with an ‘h’. I know, I know. But first let me explain everything else.

In August this year (2025), on a walk to nowhere with Phie Mckenzie, an idea formed to build and celebrate a community of social media Creators whose voices were ones we felt needed to be heard. Voices with rallying cries for collective progress that already echo far and wide, but deserve to echo yet further and wider.

Phie runs a talent agency, Creative Ally, that progresses social and environmental issues through storytelling, conversation and connection, by representing the careers of exactly these people. I run Drop Dead Generous - a grant giving social experiment funding 1,000 people around the world including, you guessed it, exactly these type of people. So we felt that together we could do this idea justice. And now we’re seeing if that’s true.

We’re at a tipping point with the Internet. It’s perhaps our greatest ever invention yet rather than us consuming it, it is consuming us. A recent study covered by the Economic Times found the average American spends 49 hours a year on their phones…. whilst taking a shit.

Whilst it seems we’ve given autonomy of choice away to whatever split second rage bait side boob our social media feeds serve us - we surely don’t want this and, more importantly, we don’t have to continue doing it.

I personally have grappled with how to take this power back.

The fantasy, honestly, is phonelessness.

The reality, actually, is curation.

Conscious, considered, curation.

The truth is, there’s a seemingly endless pool of Creators - normal, everyday people using the internet in a really good way; swimming upstream to educate, activate, and protest for human qualities and outcomes that objectively make for a better world. They’re connecting us to what matters and inspiring others to do the same. As curators we’ll use this project as a means to find, interview, and write about who these people are, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and how. Our goal is to create an opportunity for you to consume the internet - rather than the other way round - and feel hope and motivation through the time you spend doing it.

And the name? Well, we no longer need to look for saints and martyrs as icons to admire. Hence (and with respect to Mummy T herself), the name ‘Move Over Mother Theresa’. Secondly, much like you, me, and everyone else there will ever be, these Creators are beautifully imperfect - so the typo’d ‘H’ in Theresa is our nod to this truth.

We’ll publish weekly. Both written reflections here on Substack as well as our podcast interviews on Spotfiy, Apple, Youtube and pretty much anywhere you might be.

Subscribe for free and get everything we produce.

Subscribe for a fee and get nothing but love.

Enjoy.

Us / @moveovermothertheresa (on IG)