From Nurse to TikTok Star: Susi Vidal Talks Pesto, Going Viral, and Her "OnlyPans" Series (EXCLUSIVE)

"Call me crazy if you want but I've never liked store-bought pesto."

If you've spent any time on TikTok lately, chances are you've seen Susi Vidal's face at the start of a video that promises to be full of unexpected plot twists.

Susi has been making TikToks for years now, sharing recipes for her "OnlyPans" followers — but you probably know her best for being the girl at the intro of every wild trauma dump story on the app right now.

"I personally don't notice how viral it is until people talk to me about it or until I get recognized on the street for being like the crazy pesto girl," Susi said on a call with Distractify. "Because the stitches don't come up on my For You page."

While any Susi stitch video ensures the viewer is in for a good storytime, Susi is also behind some great cooking content on TikTok.

"Welcome to my OnlyPans, I hope you're horngry, babe," is the intro to many of Susi's TikTok cooking videos. She calls these videos her "OnlyPans," the name of which was meant to poke fun at her thirsty followers asking her if she had an OnlyFans account.

"I created the OnlyPans just to kind of make fun of them — like no I don't have an OnlyFans, but I have an OnlyPans," she said. "I don't know, people just liked it. And it just took off. It was kind of a joke."

That "joke" has since turned into a brand of her own, for which she's amassed 3.5 million followers in her three years making innuendo-laced cooking content on TikTok.

"I've always been into making videos and then I started cooking in nursing school [with my best friend]," she said of her TikTok origins, noting she used to post vlogs on YouTube before she moved to TikTok. "So then during nursing school, I would just post random vlogs and also what I was cooking, and it kind of took off."

Susi claims her best friend "dragged [her]" into the hobby, starting when they made homemade pasta together one night.

"We both sat there and we were like wow we made this whole dish completely on our own with zero chef skills and zero cooking skills," she said. "And that just kind of sparked something in me."

Since then, Susi has found a home among FoodTok, sharing recipes and cooking videos regularly with her followers. Though she landed a nursing job not long after graduating, she quit it in February to pursue content creation full-time.

"I feel like it's everybody's dream job being able to work for yourself, and now I'm able to just make fun videos and enjoy life a little bit more," she said. "I'm very grateful to be in this position."

Susi's pesto video has thousands of stitches, each story wilder than the next — and though the format isn't really the kind of content she's comfortable sharing on the internet, she says being known as the "store-bought pesto" girl doesn't really bother her.

"The whole thing is just wild," she said. "And I think people are really creative that they took the intro video and decided to make it into this full-blown trauma dump trend."

Susi attempted to participate in the trend she's best known for, sharing a story of her attempting (and failing) to hide a wild hangover from her parents when she was 18, though the comments on her video seemed to poke fun at how tame the story was compared to some of the other stitches.

"At this point, I've just given up because I honestly don't like to trauma dump online," she said. "I just figured people wanted me to say something about it. So I feel like the best way to say something without sitting there and actually saying something was participating in the trend to be like, 'I see you guys. This is fun,'" she said.

You're bound to see plenty more of Susi's stitches come across your For You page in the coming weeks before the trend dies down, but if you want to see more of Susi's content (and pick up some cooking skills along the way), she said you should watch the recipe featured in the stitch.

Her homemade pesto recipe is super quick and only takes 10 minutes and a food processor — no trauma necessary.