About

Me Leaving refers to a trend on TikTok collected largely under the hashtag #MeLeaving, often set to a portion of the song "Blow Your Mind" by Dua Lipa.^[1] Videos following the trend feature an on-screen caption that often starts with the words "Me leaving" followed by a description of an event that went poorly for the user. For example, "Me leaving the DMV with my driver's license fully believing you could legally turn left on a red." The user blows a kiss to the camera, turns, and walks away in an exaggerated manner, as if walking down a catwalk. The trend is closely related to the Mwah Dance Challenge, which became popular in April of 2020.

Origin

In April of 2020, the Mwah Dance Challenge^[2] began spreading on TikTok. The challenge, set to the song "Blow Your Mind" by Dua Lipa, involves blowing a kiss to the camera and performing a choreographed dance. The challenge was performed by many famous TikTokers, including Addison Rae on April 15th (shown below, left) and Avani on April 27th (shown below, right) garnering over 31 million and 16 million views respectively in 6 months.

On October 16th, TikToker Brandon Bouley uploaded a video using the original sound popularized in the Mwah Dance Challenge. The video features Bouley blowing a kiss to the camera and walking away under the on-screen caption, "me walking away from my computer after googling every question and still getting a 44" (shown below). The video gained over 1.9 million views in 10 days.

Spread

Brandon Bouley's video inspired more TikTokers to create videos following his format, many using the DMV and driving tests as the premise of the joke. On October 20th, 2020, TikToker sutherlandphys, a teacher, uploaded a video following Bouley's format featuring the caption, "Professors walking away from the computer after they've finished reading off their slides for 2 hours and assigning 7000 pages of reading" (shown below, left). The video gained over 1.8 million views in 6 days. On October 22nd, TikToker talonbuzbee uploaded a video following the format, also making mention of the DMV, garnering over 4.3 million views in 4 days (shown below, right).

Sometime around October 25th, the hashtag #meleaving started trending on TikTok, increasing the number of videos following the format. As of October 26th, videos under the hashtag have garnered over 652 million total views.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References