Are Selfies Making Me Miserable?
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What if You Suddenly had 2 Million Instagram Followers?
How would that affect your art?
Would you feel compelled to monetize your community\\u2019s love for you? Would you post more selfies and \\u2018lifestyle\\u2019 photos to keep the bots and the potential advertisers happy?
I\\u2019ve been contemplating this recently. After realizing I have been posting in the same way you may throw bread to a flock of pigeons and then run and hide behind a glass wall. Wanting them to fly toward me, and frenzie over the content, but not get too close. Realizing that I had an unhealthy relationship with my \\u2018followers\\u2019 was a side effect of realizing I had an unhealthy relationship with my own image. That I was running behind that glass wall because I didn\\u2019t actually want to engage with the identity that I was presenting either, or admit it wasn\\u2019t really me.
But that image of me was pretty successful.
Not 2 million followers successful, but decent.
The main problem with what I had created online was that it didn\\u2019t represent me anymore. I wanted to post what I saw, photos I take of the world, not always photos of me, but the social media baby didn\\u2019t like that. The only posts I was getting love for were shots of me like, times 200%: 60 likes for a shot of the world, 300 for a shot of me. Slowly, Instagram went from a fun place to interact with mostly strangers and look at art to a place where I could go to look at some version of myself that consistently lives in good lighting. You know you\\u2019re in trouble when you spend more time on your own page than everyone else\\u2019s.
Despite the good lighting, consistency is not my strength. For me, consistency requires disciplined behaviour that is motivated by some deep need, or unanswerable life-defining question, something other than cartoon hearts.
It feels like the true discipline required to achieve social media success is like the discipline required to be a sitcom-parent from the 50s: consistently presentable, knows more, is bigger than you, and never lets you see them fight or cry.
What kind of cluster-f*ery is this social media persona s***? I recently read that Instagram determines who your posts are sent to based on how quickly people respond to your photo. I need to do more research, but I believe there are also claims that the algorithm favours selfies over all other forms of content. I\\u2019d love to know if this is a chicken or egg scenario. Did we create this monster where posts only do well with selfies in them by liking everyone\\u2019s selfies more than their other photos? By making people feel loved by liking their image did we create a culture obsessed with it\\u2019s own image?
Amazingly, I stopped feeling disconnected from my own image when I decided to let my gray hair grow in without dying it. I was (am) very scared about it and needed support and approval from loved ones and strangers (mostly strangers) to stick to my guns. All of the posts I\\u2019ve been creating are authentically me while I\\u2019ve been documenting the big change on social media, and it feels great, but...
I\\u2019ve been\\xa0saying\\xa0that the reason I\\u2019m documenting it on social media is to dismantle the\\xa0tool\\xa0that turned me against myself by using said tool to post about my struggles with it\\u200a\\u2014\\u200aie; the fact that the social media baby only seems to be happy when I post photos of myself looking hot, happy and young. And by posting about the struggles while looking normal, how every I\\u2019m feeling at that moment,\\xa0and my age, but I have to be honest and say that that is not working, and I am just as needy for cartoon hearts as I ever was, maybe more so now that I am being myself online.
It is making me supremely unhappy to be turning this deeply personal project of going grey into a social media extravaganza, hoping to build a following for my pain, write a book and be able to turn down endorsements from hair dye companies someday. It is also filling me with joy to find empowerment to continue on this journey and connect with others who are walking the walk with me, and those who\\u2019ve been listening to my podcast,\\xa0and\\xa0I am writing a book that\\xa0I\\xa0need to read.
But I feel once again trapped by the algorithm. My engagement goes up when I have moments where I cry and tell the truth about how hard this is. So what happens when it starts to become easy? Do I drop the victim experience and opt for happy? How do I build a brand around something that is not true anymore? And WHY THE F* DO I HAVE TO TURN EVERYTHING INTO A BRAND IN THE FIRST PLACE?
I attempted to beat the algorithm at its own game by showing up with grey hair and a different attitude, to loosen its grip on what I post, and when and why, but it\\u2019s got me again. It\\u2019s winning. It seems like the algorithm is too consistent, knows more, is bigger than me, and it doesn\\u2019t fight or cry in public. Because it knows that to do so would be to lose followers.
A friend\\u2019s poetry professor once said that people like to see happy, uplifting art, and my other friend, who is legitimately famous for being happy and funny, but who also battles addiction, denial, and sometimes has to sleep on the subway, agreed with her. I used to hear nearly the same thing when I worked in the galleries; blue paintings sell better than brown, yellow better than red, etc. I mean, it was true, but, sleep on the subway much, ye artist who paints with blue when you really want to f some stuff up with a tube of red?
What responsibility do we as artists have to make everyone else happy with our art?
If no one likes my art, it is becoming increasingly hard to continue to create it\\u200a\\u2014\\u200aespecially when I release it before it is fully baked\\u200a\\u2014\\u200awhich is often the case with Instagram \\u2018art\\u2019, but half-baked art is a whole other topic (I\\u2019ll share a poem I wrote about it at the end of this essay).
Sometimes, of course, I make happy art, but happy times are not often when I feel most inspired to create. When I am full, my capacity to give love is enormous, when I am not, I am easily depleted by my hungry social media baby seeking to have more of what I just fed it on Instagram\\u200a\\u2014\\u200awhich I can not do when the inspiration pot is empty.
When I create just for myself, one of two things happen: I go into complete disorder and abstractions and my emotional experience of the output is more in charge than the actual organization of thought into something concrete, or (and sometimes just after the first thing) I get totally out of the way and something inspired\\xa0and organized\\xa0comes out.
When I\\u2019m not in a heightened emotional state while creating art (which is most of the time) I enjoy creating within the context of what I think the public will like. Like, allowing the shape of expression to come out in the form of an article with a beginning, middle and end (unlike the meandering masterpiece you are currently reading). It too gives me a release of some stored up tension, makes me feel accomplished, takes the edge off.
But easing the tension and rejuvenating my creative well by pulling deeply from the tank of the Universe are two very different things.
Easing that immediate tension is what I do when I post on social media. The platform gives me a framework in which I can share, but, I as a human and an artist start to shrink in the face of the feedback that framework gives me if I\\u2019m not constantly breaking, rebutting and rebuilding that framework to suit my creative expression.
I have heard many times in acting classes that professional art is not supposed to be therapy (I think this is a slippery slope on the part of acting teachers who I believe should have training in psychotherapy in order to understand how to support their students who do deep work, and create a safe space by also understanding transference and countertransference, but that is another blog topic). If you are a professional, you are supposed to create until you discover what your audience responds to, and then keep the fighting and crying to yourself.
Maybe this is actually a good thing; to keep less sensitive public eyes from going deeper into the rabbit hole with you. To not share the work until it is fully baked, not let them see your process. Like, when you discover what they respond to, the happy stuff, then this can become the artistic space in which you can rest awhile, or the space that can be used as an amusement to keep the social media baby happy while you go and do some wild finger painting on your face.
Maybe, when it feels tedious that you have to keep posting photos of mid-century doors when you really want to show the ones of you and your dog in matching hair bows, just create a new, private instagram account for that, and don\\u2019t let anyone follow you, ever.
POEM:
The art that separates; the art of absolutes, is not the art that gestates;
it is the art that you consume.
You get to dictate
to terminate
to equate
without relating,
just by making it of the other.
A morsel of the divine plucked up too soon like green fruit set to turn to color on a truck skimming through miles
ripening on fumes
only to never be devoured because the algorithms dictations were detained by a glitch, the truck cornered and obliterated by the highest bidder.
The origin of species of originality
of new specifics
was about to intensify, but instead the neurons were commodified and sold for the highest ad buy.
Only the palletable will survive in the name of keeping the masses satiated
satisfied
complying.
IDEAS THOUGH!
They continue to intensify.
Many demand time be taken to emulsify
but
commerce can\\u2019t be satisfied by proper timing.
One piece of art for each! (Makes me want to consume everyone else\\u2019s niche,
(But then I don\\u2019t see it cause I\\u2019m busy reaching while I\\u2019m eating)).
And if I do have a moment with your muse I seek atune-ment,
but there\\u2019s no one there to tune into.
All those other souls just consuming and shitting it out.
Unable to digest
divine in-sight
the same way my intestines won\\u2019t let nutrients pass into my in-sides.
Walls lined with parasites just eat it all up.
Un-ripened art: soon to be consumed before it\\u2019s plucked.
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