The Other Side of Expression: Haifa Beseisso on a Decade of Being the Whole Show

“I have, I think, influencer fatigue.”

It is not the sentence you’d expect from someone with a following of 1.7 million, and Haifa Beseisso delivers it without any drama at all, halfway through a longer answer about where she wants to go next.

Better known as Fly With Haifa, Beseisso is a Palestinian-American creator who was raised in Dubai. She spent three years working as a television producer, launched her YouTube channel alongside the role, and eventually left to pursue content creation full time. Her channel currently has around 800,000 subscribers.

Before becoming a YouTube star, her first on-screen appearance was on a cooking show where she washed dishes.

“I always promised myself that if I was ever in front of the camera in the future, I would remember my first ever appearance where I was washing the dishes.”

What stayed with her was a rule about who gets the credit: respect everyone behind the scenes, because each person makes the show happen.

She kept that promise throughout her career. Now, she works completely independently. There is no crew behind a channel like hers. She writes, hosts, styles, shoots, edits, and promotes on her own.

The Advice She Refused

The decision that shaped the rest of Beseisso’s life revolved around language. She wanted to work in English. “My dream was to bridge the Middle East and the West and to communicate to the world who people like me are outside of what’s portrayed in Hollywood.”

Almost everyone told her this was a mistake. “A lot of platforms, companies, and people were against me, and told me to speak in Arabic because the Arab audience needs more female creators.”

She said no, and eventually the calls stopped coming. “They said, we will not support you. You do your thing.”

There was some truth in the numbers and, theoretically, in what the conventional path to success looked like.

Her videos, in English, eventually found their way to Warner Bros., which, at the time, was working on the Nobel Peace Prize Concert. In 2016 she became the first Arab YouTube host at the event in Oslo, interviewing performers including Sting.

In hindsight, she sees it as stubbornness paying off. What she had done was decline to let reach decide what she was making.

Four Days in a Wedding Dress

In February 2018, Beseisso borrowed a white gown and spent the day traveling around Dubai, handing strangers invitation cards to the wedding of “Haifa and Life”. It was her way of opening the conversation about the pressure on unmarried women to explain themselves.

The story ultimately gained significant traction, being picked up by Forbes and regional media outlets.

What she remembers is less glamorous than the finished video: four days of shooting, from seven in the morning until midnight, running between locations in a dress so tight her skin was bleeding by the end.

She barely talks about the footage. She talks about the response.

Men responded. So did people in India, who recognized the same pressure at home, which she had not expected. “I actually think that measuring content through the conversations it creates is more insightful. It’s a metric that tells you more than views ever can.”

Finding Her Voice

Somewhere amid this growing recognition, Beseisso noticed an unhealthy relationship forming between herself and her work.

“I felt that I was hiding behind the editing process, and that using my raw voice became something very scary for me.” So she set herself a thirty-day authenticity challenge and posted only unedited content.

She was frightened before she began. “By day ten,” she says, “I felt new courage.”

“We often hide from our own expression. It’s so powerful, that it can be scary. And sometimes every valuable thing is on the other side of expression.”

The pressure she felt did not come only from strangers. She was called “fake” during the stretches she considers her most honest, and another creator told her even her positivity seemed like a facade.

“I dimmed my light. I quietened my voice for years.” Then she spoke a thought that has stuck with me: “It’s not only people’s voices that get harsh. It can be your own voice too.”

Dressing to Express

Styling plays a larger role in Beseisso’s creative process than her category might suggest.

When she plans a video, the outfit comes before the script (which she hardly uses anyway). “I only script my videos a little bit, and I struggle when I need to follow one closely.”

What she works out first is an outfit that excites her, the location for the video, and the feeling she wants to leave the viewer with.

“I dress to express, not to impress. A person is a blank canvas, and what you wear is the painting. It’s the conversation you have with people before you even open your mouth.”

Her instincts tend toward the contrarian. Where everyone dresses expensively, she dresses down, and in bohemian places she overdresses. It’s the same instinct that told her to film in English.

The Return to the Collective

Beseisso’s advice for those building a platform is mostly about what not to do.

First, break your people-pleasing habits. Stop collecting opinions, “because people see your dream differently than how you see it.”

Accept that some people will find you “cringey.” Have fun and write the ideas down while you’re in a free-spirited creative space. “The content is usually most engaging when you get outside of your head and actually have fun.”

She also stresses the importance of selecting brands that align with your values. Ideally, a brand has watched your work and can tell you why they came to you.

“There’s no way I would abandon my values to push a brand’s sales.”

What she wants now is the thing she gave up to get here. She talks about a show with a crew, and about being a vessel for the work rather than the operation behind it.

“I want to be free to focus on self-expression, to be the vessel of feeling—not to do everything.”

Which, in a way, brings her back to the cooking show. What she describes wanting, a room of people with each person doing one job well, is where she was before she found her calling.

The creative industry has spent a decade encouraging younger generations to become one-person studios, glamorizing independence. Beseisso became one, and she reports that it has worked for about ten years. Now, she would like someone else to direct the lights.