Being on Teen Mom seems like a pretty sweet gig, right?
Sure, there are drawbacks -- you don't get as much privacy as the average person, and thousands of strangers scrutinize your every move.
But you also get hundreds of thousands of dollars per season just to let people film and edit footage of you living your life, so that's got to be fun.
Most of the moms on the show have gotten comfortable with this whole setup.
They've grown accustomed to the lifestyle that their large salaries provide them, they've gotten used to being filmed all the time, and it works fine for everyone.
But then you have Jenelle Evans, a person who somehow became too messy for reality television and lost her job.
Realistically, she's never going to land a job like that again, one that pays so much just for allowing her life to be filmed.
And so as we've seen for the past couple of years, she's stuck in kind of a weird place of trying to get a similar job, trying to become an influencer, really just trying to earn money without getting a traditional job.
Which is fine, of course, you've got to do what you've got to do and any traditional job she'd be qualified for wouldn't pay nearly as much as the salary she's used to earning.
But considering all of this, you'd think that if she was given the opportunity to come back to MTV, she'd jump at it faster than she chased Kieffer in those flip flops, right?
Well, apparently you'd be wrong.
As we've discussed, MTV is currently filming a Teen Mom spinoff in California -- moms from each of the shows are coming together for a retreat.
It's been very dramatic so far, especially since Farrah Abraham made a big return and kicked off a big ol' brawl.
Then yesterday Jenelle posted a video on TikTok of herself looking extremely broody and lip syncing to an audio that said "And now my guard is back up. I trust no one."
She captioned it "When they invite you to a Teen Mom Special in CA then no response for a month ..." and she also wrote "I feeling sh-tty AF" with the hashtags "mental health awareness," "anxiety," and "confused."
So it sounds like she was originally going to make an appearance on the spinoff as well, but MTV dropped the idea without telling her.
But according to a new report from The Ashley's Reality Roundup, which is typically about one billion percent more reliable than Jenelle, that's not exactly how things went down.
A source from production spoke with the site and explained that "Jenelle was contacted by [a producer], who told her about the spinoff but she was not invited and then ghosted like she's saying."
"Basically, she received the call and once they started talking to Jenelle about possibly doing it, they realize it was the same old Jenelle bullsh-t and dropped the idea so fast."
Yeah, that sounds more like it.
"Honestly," the source continued, "they were just playing with the idea of bringing her in to add shock value to the show because they knew people would freak out if they saw her. That's all."
"They weren't trying to get her back on the cast or anything like that."
So how exactly did she manage to screw this up?
You'll never believe it, but "Jenelle told them that she would not travel without David, and she insisted that he stay at a place nearby, since they said there was absolutely no way he was allowed at the filming location."
"She even tried to offer different options to production to try to get David to go, but as soon as they heard the word 'David,' [the producer] bailed and started ignoring her."
The source also said that "Since she was fired, Jenelle has randomly texted [a producer] saying she had 'new ideas' for filming, but they have always been ignored."
"This spinoff was being run by a different producer, but this whole incident kind of made them realize that nothing has really changed with Jenelle's situation and they have no desire to dip back into that mess."
And what a mess it is.
How goofy is it that she tried so hard to get David involved when she knows good and well that he's the entire reason she was fired in the first place?
If she had actually left him for good back when she moved to Nashville, it seems like there's a solid chance she could have been back on the show by now, and even if she could just function without him glued to her side she could have gotten at least this one paycheck.
But, once again, she's allowing David to ruin her life, because ... well, who really knows why she's so desperate to keep him?
It's hard to imagine another opportunity like this will come her way now, so, uh, good luck with YouTube or whatever.