ReesaTeesa Is Still Figuring Out What Comes Next

Her answer is unfinished. “That’s a process,” she says. Johnson says her instincts were present throughout her experiences. The problem was not that she lacked intuition.

She did not always listen to it. In the book, she describes her instinct almost as another character in her life, one with a bullhorn that she still manages to ignore. That realization has changed how she approaches relationships now. Johnson says she is deliberately more guarded because she does not want the excitement of meeting someone new to erase what she learned.

She jokes about the danger of meeting someone who gives her “butterflies and Christmas” and suddenly forgetting every lesson that came before him. So she is choosing not to rush. Her instinct, she says, is telling her she is not ready. This time, she is trying to listen.

There is something unpolished about the admission. Johnson does not present herself as a woman who endured betrayal, learned the correct lessons and emerged completely healed. She is still learning. Still questioning.

Still trying to understand why she wanted certain relationships as badly as she did. “I’m figuring things out one lesson, one day, one month, one year at a time,” she says. That may be the more difficult version of recovery. Not declaring yourself healed.

Accepting that healing can remain incomplete while life continues anyway.

ReesaTeesa on What Comes After Going Viral

Tamira Chapman sits down with ReesaTeesa for a conversation about shame, healing, self-forgiveness, faith, ownership and learning to trust yourself again.

No one interrupted to ask whether she had gone deep enough. A book could. Baker’s questions kept returning Johnson to places she might have preferred to leave alone. What about this?

What about that? What part did you play? Johnson says there were chapters she had to read and then simply cry. “This book had a lot more tears than the 50-part series,” she says.

The reason is simple. “The book is a mirror to me.” The distinction matters. The series focused largely on what happened.

The book required Johnson to examine herself inside what happened. There were relationships before her marriage. There was loneliness. There were choices she made because she was trying not to be alone.

And there was the uncomfortable realization that marriage itself had become something she wanted intensely enough to compromise other parts of herself. Johnson names it plainly. “I acknowledged that I’ve been a pick-me.” She wanted to be chosen as a wife.

She wanted to become the mother of someone’s children. “I wanted the ring more than anything else,” she says. Putting that on a page required a different kind of exposure than explaining someone else’s deception. The person under examination was no longer only the man who hurt her.

It was also Tareasa. That changed the work.

There is a question in the conversation that Johnson cannot answer neatly. Has she forgiven Tareasa? Some of her. Not all of her.
“I’ve forgiven Tareasa for some things. I haven’t forgiven Tareasa for everything,” she says. The admission sits at the center of the book’s larger project. Johnson has stopped treating every decision made by her younger self as something she needs to be ashamed of. In a letter to that younger version, she tells her she is proud of her.

That was a breakthrough. But self-forgiveness has limits she is still discovering. Johnson notices the small jokes she makes at her own expense. The jabs.

The moments when old judgment returns disguised as humor. Those moments tell her there is still work to do. Some things, she says, were outside her control. Others were not.

There are choices she can now look back on and say plainly, “I messed up.” The book does not ask her to erase that responsibility. It asks her to live with it differently. Johnson also writes about a previous relationship with a man she believed, completely, was the person she would spend her life with.

Writing honestly about that relationship meant acknowledging how deeply she had loved him and how much loneliness influenced other decisions in her life. She resisted including some of it. Her collaborator, Tracy, kept pushing. “This is going to free somebody,” Johnson remembers Tracy telling her.

That possibility became enough to keep writing. The vulnerability in What TF Do I Do Now? is therefore not simply the willingness to reveal embarrassing details. It is the willingness to complicate the version of yourself you would rather preserve.

There was once a version of adulthood Johnson imagined for herself. Marriage. Three children. A home in the suburbs of Atlanta.
That is not the life she has now. Faith, for Johnson, has become partly about accepting the distance between the life she pictured and the life that actually arrived. She can joke with God about it. “You could have taught me this lesson another way,” she says.

But beneath the humor is dependence. Johnson says she is trusting that God will make meaning out of circumstances she still does not fully understand. The publication of the book is part of that faith. “In the midst of all this chaos, I’m still going to get the glory,” she says of what she believes God is showing her. “I’m still going to use you.”

Her mother has reinforced the same idea, reminding her of biblical stories in which deeply imperfect circumstances still became useful. The language may be familiar. For Johnson, the need behind it is not. Her career now includes experiences she never prepared for.

Her name is entering rooms she never expected to enter. Her story is moving through publishing and other forms of media. She describes much of it as foreign. Faith gives her somewhere to put the uncertainty.

The dream has changed. She has not stopped believing there can still be one.

Virality gave Johnson an audience. It also introduced her to an industry. Suddenly, the story she had recorded on her phone had value far beyond TikTok. Offers came.

So did lessons about intellectual property, trademarks, life rights and what can happen when a creator does not understand the value of the thing she created. Johnson learned quickly. “Own your stuff,” she says. She describes discovering that some people making offers were counting on her not understanding the business.

What appeared to be an opportunity could also mean surrendering control over her own life story. Johnson decided she wanted a seat at the table whenever that story was used. Not simply consultation. Ownership. Participation. A financial stake in something being built from her experience. “If you want to tell my story, I’m going to be at the table,” she says. The book matters to her partly for that reason.

Johnson has always loved books and audiobooks. She even structured the TikTok series so listeners could move through it almost like an audiobook without needing to watch the screen. But publication represented something more permanent. “Books are forever,” she says. “And I wanted a small piece of forever.”

The statement captures how much her relationship to the story has changed. At first, she needed to get it out of her. Then the world took hold of it. Now she is deciding what form it will take, where it will live and who has the right to profit from it.

The Storehouse & Friends conversation with Tareasa “Reesa Teesa” Johnson is not really about going viral. It is about shame. It is about loneliness. It is about faith.

It is about ownership. It is about the unsettling work of realizing that surviving someone else’s choices does not eliminate the need to examine your own. And it is about what happens when the story everyone knows about you is only one part of who you are. Johnson became known for explaining what someone else had done.

What TF Do I Do Now? turns more of the attention inward. She looks at the woman who wanted marriage badly. The woman who ignored herself.

The woman who feared being alone. The woman who told the story anyway. And the woman who is still trying to forgive all of them. Near the end of the conversation, Johnson reads a letter addressed to her 2025 self.

She remembers the different versions of the girl and woman she had been, from Willingboro, New Jersey, to Marietta, Georgia, Florida A&M University and the Georgia State Patrol. Then she considers the distance between that life and this one. “Our name is being spoken in rooms we never dreamed of,” she reads. Then comes the correction.

“Well, God did.” For someone whose public story began with discovering that the life she believed she had was not what it appeared to be, there is something fitting about refusing to pretend she knows exactly how the next chapter ends. Johnson does not have a polished answer to the question in her book’s title. She has something more believable.

She is still answering it. One decision. One truth. One day at a time.