Beginning Again
How Writing in Public is Taking Me Back to the Start
It turns out there are quite a handful of people that read my writing here. Thank you to everyone who reached out, whether in comments here or via DM on Instagram. It warms my heart and is truly encouraging to know my writing matters to others, and that it’s more than that to some.
Now I somehow feel the need to explain I was not fishing for your comments. (Not that I am discouraging them!) Honestly, I was really just confessing my silly tendency of conflating the value of my discipline (of writing) with the apparent level of engagements (such as claps and comments). In other words, I pathologically believe that unless there’s a crowd cheering me on in highly visible ways, my public creative efforts aren’t worthwhile.
This experience of starting up a new creative venture (writing) is helping me remember what it was like starting up another creative venture a number of years ago: illustrating. It helps put me in the shoes of many who are in my audience: beginners. People who, for the first time, are trying illustration, and because it’s 2021, they are also sharing it publicly, on social media. It’s hard enough to learn a new creative skill and to find one’s artistic voice on their own. To add to this the pressure of performance on late social media is something I never had to do when learning illustration. While I too shared a lot of my creative work early on, there wasn’t the same kind of pressure there is today. Having a social presence was kind of niche and definitely voluntary. Those who shared on early social media had the advantage of being unique in doing so. It was largely the domain of creative types to do anything public-facing on the Internet. By virtue of being online at all, you were hitting above average. Today, having a social presence is mainstream and mandatory, especially if you are striving to turn your art into your business. The pressure for creating content on the regular is so prevalent today, we now emphasize frequency over substance or quality in what we are sharing. But more to my point, with followings in the 10s and the likelihood of literally zero likes on some posts, beginners feel defeated before they even start.
On my Instagram account, I feel far less pressure than I once did to generate content at the frequency we are told the algorithm demands (in order to gain more reach). And for the most part, I do not worry about the quality of what I am sharing. I’ve figured out my flow on IG. And like investing early in Bitcoin (this may become a very dated reference soon), I have seen gains just for being around at the beginning. I’ve also figured out my relationship to IG, and I don’t rely too much on it for my happiness as a creative. I learned to keep it at arm’s length—I just don’t let it get me down.
A few years ago, when anxiety about the Instagram algorithm peaked, I made a point of not letting it ruin my relationship to sharing online and created my own algorithm instead:
Post what you love.
When you are able.
As often as you wish.
And don’t worry about it.
Because I seem to have found a cozy space on mainstream social media, I may have forgotten what it’s truly like to feel vulnerable as a newly minted illustrator. Keeping this blog has taken me back to that early stage, where (as of this writing) I am sharing to an audience of less than a hundred, where even just one Clap 👏 (the Medium.com equivalent of a Like ❤️ on Instagram) means the world to me. These are early days. And honestly, this excites me!
But hang on. It would be remiss of me to gloss over my earlier remarks here about the requirement for today’s creatives to be on social media. I want to acknowledge that in fact I do think it’s important to share your work, to have an audience, today more than ever. I am actively working out this belief right now. Sharing is in many ways still optional. It’s just that we have more of an expectation to share everything.* My hope for creative people who are just starting out is that they find a balance between A) feeling free to explore and develop creatively and B) finding joy and community in sharing with an audience. Our work gets better as we learn how to resonate with an audience, and we get a better sense of whether this is happening by sharing to real people.
On Skillshare, in The Style Class, I not only encourage sharing our work online, I require it as part of the class project. Being an illustrator means being a public communicator. We are always sharing with an audience, and so we must always have an audience-facing mindset as we illustrate. And there’s something about the relationship between artist and audience, about messenger and receiver—about the dialogue and community that builds around one’s art—that gives our work its purpose.
For me, writing here is all about creating for and with a community. I have messages and I assume they are being received. I have to, otherwise I would give up for lack of a sense of purpose. Duh. But right now I am at the early stage, when I do feel more pressure to post more frequently, and I am in the sense that I care, “worried” about it. But I voluntarily put myself through it because I see no other way. There’s no way for me to understand my relationship to my audience, to get a sense of what my ideas do when they waft out of my window and mix into the outside air.
So this entry is about two things. First, it’s about how, for me, it’s important to experience being a beginner again. To understand the mix of feelings associated with putting what I make (write) into the open. It’s important because it gives me empathy, a sense of connection to whom I believe is a large part of my audience: beginners. Second, it’s about reminding myself (and encouraging others) that this is just the beginning. Beginnings are always fraught with doubts and missteps. We aspire to the greatness we admire in our heroes but find ourselves not quite there. There’s no such thing as instant success. Only showing up, as they say ad nauseum. It’s true. When we’re beginning, showing up and giving it our best is really all we can do. The catch is that showing up implies a rendezvous, an appointment, a meeting of some kind. That means other people are involved. This may be scary for some, reassuring for others, but when we show up, we are not alone.
*Interesting side-note: Even outside of creativity, we have this sense that if something didn’t get recorded, it didn’t count. “Pics or it didn’t happen”, right? I am guilty of this in running: I feel that unless I track my run on Strava and share it to my friends there, the run is somehow less valuable. But there is a difference: I am not a professional athlete, and it doesn’t matter if or what I post to Strava. Sharing on Strava is entirely voluntary and almost completely inconsequential on my career. As creative people, sharing our work on social is now an expectation, just part of the job.
