Victoria Hutchins sits on a yoga mat in a sun-dappled apartment in downtown Houston. A coffee cup is on the mat next to her, and a large binder full of papers rests gently on her lap. With a microphone in one hand, she begins to speak—of heartbreak. It seems as if she’s speaking of all of our heartbreaks, or at least the collective ones of the more than 1 million TikTok followers and 400,000 Instagram followers who watch her daily on their tiny screens.
“I know we’re strangers now, but I still peel my mangoes using the rim of a glass, just like you taught me. I still get the number six, no egg, at the Thai place on Franklin, but I eat both spring rolls now. I can still hear your voice telling me that a person doesn’t really die until they’re thought about for the last time,” she says in a poetic stream of consciousness. “I still hope you slow down on the highway. Maybe you do now. I know we’re strangers now, but if you die before I do, I’ll keep you alive.”
Hutchins, 31, is best-known as the Daily Victorian. Yes, if you haven’t gathered already, she’s an influencer. But what sets Hutchins apart from some of the others in her rank is that she’s also a burgeoning poet with a book deal, an online yoga teacher, and until last November, she was an international lawyer.
The poet part is new. It was her social media followers who first labeled the monologues she delivers—often while doing elaborate yoga poses—as poetry.
“A lot of my audience is women in their 20s, so it’s the sort of things I would have needed to hear at that point,” Hutchins says. “I don’t have any answers. I’m still flailing around but just sharing thoughts.”
What began as just “sharing thoughts” has evolved into a book deal with Convergent. The book, Go Seekis scheduled to be released in spring 2025. Publishers asked Hutchins during the book proposal process how much of her book would be poetry and how much would be prose, as she tends to share both art forms on social media.
“I was like, Oh, I do?,” she says with a laugh.
“I don’t have a background in creative writing,” she explains. “I’m having so much fun learning about it, and working on a new craft is so much fun. But it’s so vulnerable [to be] substantively talking about vulnerable things. It’s also scary to put yourself out there creatively.”
Writing and publishing a book of poetry is a far cry from the career that brought Hutchins, who’s originally from North Carolina, to Houston in the first place: international law. A graduate of Columbia Law School, Hutchins was introduced to the Bayou City by spending two summers here for internships with global law firm Baker McKenzie.
In true yogi fashion, Hutchins celebrated taking the bar with a trip to Bali for an immersive teacher-training experience. “I didn’t really have any intention to teach at all because I knew I wouldn’t have time,” she says. She had already accepted a job at Baker McKenzie and officially moved to Houston in 2018.
“I felt really isolated when I first moved to Houston. I did nothing but work when I was at the law firm,” she says. “I was just really burned-out with my job and looking for a way to connect with people.”
When Hutchins transitioned from a law firm to a cybersecurity company in 2021, she found herself with more free time, which led her to begin sharing yoga tutorials on social media. In early 2022, she began posting on TikTok and found herself with a quickly growing community.
This success led Hutchins to realize she wanted content creation to be more than a hobby, and she left her job this past November. The career change has been an adjustment for Hutchins, who describes herself as someone who had her life and value tied up in academics and her career.
“I’m an attorney—it’s such a straightforward way to describe who you are and what you do,” she says. “There was some kind of personal worth recalibrating to do there.”
While Hutchins may no longer be negotiating contracts for international companies, she does have a successful yoga teaching platform, a book on the way, and more than a million followers who listen to her every word. Along the way Hutchins was also able to find the community she was initially searching for when she turned to social media.
“Some sad little whiny post about how I didn’t have friends took off a little bit and people started forming a meet-up in the comments,” she recalls of how she met two of her best friends. “I think Houston, this might not be everyone’s experience, but it’s not a place that spelled itself out for me. But then once I took the effort to sort of immerse myself in it and meet people… I love Houston now.”