‘Fish Out of Water’: Amruta Godbole’s Photo Becomes a Meme and She Thinks it’s Hilarious
- The 35-year-old lawyer’s picture was taken in 2017 outside a bar at San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair, at a BDSM and leather event.
Anyone on social media nowadays (or, really, anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock) has most likely seen a few memes – some hilarious and some not so. When corporate lawyer Amruta Godbole’s friend snapped a photo of her, looking lost amidst a sea of shirtless, leather harness-clad naked canoodling men towering over her, little did she know she would instantly become a meme — identifying her picture with the feeling of being out of place, invisible or single.
Godbole told BuzzFeed News the picture was taken in 2017 outside a bar at San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair, at a BDSM and leather event. She added that at that moment she felt like a “fish out of water.” But today, Godbole tells SheThePeople that she doesn’t mind being a meme.
Although Godbole, 35, posted the picture to her own Instagram at the time, it didn’t take off until a friend with a sizable following shared it on his own account as a throwback Thursday post the following year. That post went viral, offering social media users a fresh template to make memes. “One of my main groups of friends in San Francisco is a group of gay men, so I have often found myself in situations where I’m the one woman amid all of these gay men,” Godbole said to Buzz Feed. I’m 39, also I’m 5’1, and they’re all very tall and muscular, so I was just so clearly standing out.”
Since it first went viral in 2018, Godbole estimates the photo resurfaces somewhere on the internet about once a month, most recently in a tongue- in-cheek tweet about how singer Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album “Sour” and her hit single “Driver’s License” has earned her a gay fanbase.
For the very first time, BuzzFeed noted that Godbole took to Twitter on May 22, identifying herself as the lost-looking girl in the photo. She recently retweeted a joke tweet, adding, “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it. Jk. I mean that is actually me in the photo. But I like it every time.”
Over the last few years, the photo has been used as a reaction shot for jokes about feeling out of place in places from a martial arts studio to a Pride event.
Godbole told BuzzFeed she used to get DMs about the photo from friends, and recently she’s been recognized in the meme by coworkers and people she hasn’t spoken to since high school. She added that she decided to come clean about her life as a meme after her colleagues and even old high school friends started messaging her about it.
“People send it to me and say ‘Is this you? What is happening here?’” Godbole told BuzzFeed, adding that it is amusing for her acquaintances to see her in the funny meme, given the seriousness of her profession. “When I was previously working at a big corporate law firm, that was very stodgy and old school, a colleague sent me a text exchange between him and a colleague asking if it was me,” she said to BuzzFeed, adding, “so it’s a funny thing for people who know me in the context of being a serious lawyer.