YouTuber Eva Gutowski on How She Avoided Getting Bullied in High School

Eva Gutowski discusses her life on YouTube for a living, and with the release of her new book, My Life as Eva: The Struggle Is Real, she offers advice to her fans on how to overcome issues like bullying. As a freshman, Eva almost got jumped in high school but avoided doing so. She looks back at the experience with a laugh now, but at the time, it was frightening.

"Someone comes up to me and was like, 'Are you Eva?' And I'm like, 'Hi, yeah!' And they're like, 'Oh, uh, Candy wants to beat you up.' Apparently somebody had confused me with somebody else and had started a rumor, and that's how I got into the mix," Eva said. "This senior girl wanted to jump me after school. I didn't know her!" She ended up talking to "Candy" and sorted it out. "I was brave enough to talk to her and was like, 'I don't know who you are, I'm sure you're a great person, like, this is what's going on,' and we actually ended up fixing everything."

By confronting the situation, she was able to defuse a potentially destructive outcome. That's why she encourages people to take a step back and think before saying something about another person. "Bullying's a train. If one person bullies you, then you want to bully another person, then the other person wants to bully another person, and then it just keeps going to where a whole community of people are terrible people!" Eva said. "And the train is going to come to you and you have an option to keep the train going, and keep spinning negativity in the world, or you can stop the train dead in its tracks and suddenly everyone behind you has to get off."

Check out the full interview with Eva on this week's episode of Pretty Unfiltered, and be sure to catch her on Me and My Grandma on YouTube Red this year.