Teacher-Turned-OnlyFans Creator Chanel Yui Says Her Teaching Colleagues Attended Her Mum’s Funeral Only To Ask When She Would Return To Work

Despite only getting into content creating full-time last year, influencer and OnlyFans model Chanel Yui has already gained over 29K followers on Instagram, and more than 5K likes on OnlyFans.

Chanel appeared on the latest episode of R U Okay?, where the former teacher spoke to host Jean Danker and clinical psychologist Jeanie Chu about her reasons for leaving teaching, and the mental health struggles she faced over the past few years.

Upon receiving a scholarship from the Ministry of Education, Chanel pursued her education at NTU’s School of Art, Design, and Media. She later graduated from NIE, and became an art and maths teacher.

As a secondary school teacher, she enjoyed watching her kids grow “from level zero to level 100”.

“It’s the point where a kid turns into an adult so you kinda watch the speed run in four years,” she recalled with a smile.

However, the conflicts she faced during her time as an educator had more to do with the other teachers and school management rather than her students.

“I always tell people that in teaching there are two types of people: the kids and the adults. The adults are always the ones who are more difficult to deal with,” she said.

While some kids can be difficult, Chanel believes the adults, such as her colleagues, school management, and parents are the ones who make the "culture of the place”.

She continued: “I think the main issue for me is that I don’t really fit the mould of a regular Singaporean teacher kind of image — like you must be super role-model, wholesome, have BTO, two kids. I’m not that type of person, and when you don’t fit the mould, people will tend to pick on the stuff you do that’s not within their acceptable zone.”

Her day job aside, Chanel had hobbies and activities she liked doing.

“I had friends who liked to party, they were in the nightlife scene. Some of my friends are in the media and fashion industry and I would spend my free time on weekends doing things like that, like partying, attending fashion events, photo shoots, cosplay, fashion blogs. These are the things that interest me, and I also ran a public Instagram account, but that was for my digital creations,” she recalled.

Back then, her account was more limited to digital artworks, which saw Chanel focusing more on fashion-related content with digital edits.

She enjoyed dabbling in “funky” styles, which in turn, wasn’t very “role model-y and Singaporean-dream-like”.

While her students found her content cool, the problem came about when they started talking about Chanel with their other teachers.

She did not fit into a typical teacher mould, and got into trouble for the things she posted online.

Over the course of her teaching career, she was questioned about her online content several times.

“It becomes very tiring ‘cos why are you adding so many more management problems for me to deal with?” she said.

While juggling an already packed schedule as a teacher, Chanel found out her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.

“A few years in, it affected her speech and her ability to do things because it was in the brain. So she needed a lot more help at home. There was a time when, between my classes, I needed to go home to check on my mother. My home situation was a bit messy ‘cos my siblings were between jobs and working part-time, and there weren’t people at home to take care of my mum. I had to go home between classes to check if she had anything to eat,” said Chanel.

It was a stressful period for her, and was one of the reasons that made her feel like taking a break from her job.

When she realised she wasn’t being very functional, Chanel decided to seek help at the Institute of Mental Health.

“At that point my mum was in the terminal stages of her illness, she had a few months left. I was spacing out ‘cos of stress at work as well. At that point in time, management decided to pick a fight about my Instagram stuff again,” she said.

The issue? Chanel received sexual harassment DMs on her Instagram. She screenshot the message and posted it on her story to stand up against the harasser.

“How I realised I wasn’t functional anymore was [when] I was conducting my classes as usual. When I enter a class it’s like I switch on a mode [and use] muscle memory to be interactive and engaging, but once the students leave and it becomes a switch-off mode, I turn of the lights and just sit there for an hour, or however long the break was,” she recalled. 

The “switch-on”, “switch-off” mode became routine for Chanel. When she sat alone in the darkness, she simply zoned out.

“I would thumb through papers, open and close my laptop, open and close the apps [on my phone], but I wasn’t looking at anything. I just needed to have something moving,” she described, adding she had simply “lost interest in life”.

After seeking help for her mental health, Chanel was diagnosed with clinical depression, and was put on medication.

She used that as a reason to apply for no-pay leave, and told the school she wanted to take the break to take care of her mum and help her pass on.

She was granted six months of no-pay, which started in March 2022. However, her mum unfortunately died two months later, in May.

Chanel then shared the “last straw” she had with her teaching job.

“When my mum passed on, we held a funeral. My colleagues came down to the funeral, and some were more tactful, some were less tactful, but the gist of it is that all of them were asking “when are you coming back to work?”. At my mum’s funeral. I was too shocked with my mum’s death to react properly, so I laughed it off and brushed it aside,” said Chanel. 

A few days passed, and she realised her colleagues’ questions weren’t appropriate. That was when she decided she wasn’t going back to her job as an educator.

It's been over a year since Chanel quit teaching. She is now off anti-depressants, and much happier than she was in her old job.

Catch all 3 seasons of R U Okay? on meWATCH here. You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify and meLISTEN.

Photos: Chanel Lui/ Instagram, meWATCH