Myspace Moves on Instagram's Dancefloor

 

I apologize in advance. I can already feel this one being a long, bloviating blog entry. I really hate that I do that honestly, but I have a lot to say on this topic. 

You can find my Instagram business account here; https://www.instagram.com/lucid_nap/

At current, I have 1931 followers, but that's only because I follow 7,451 people. Some of them were bound to reciprocate.

I used to post first thing in the morning, and on average up to 6 times in a day. When I was traveling, I'd sometimes dump up to 25 posts.

I use every possible hashtag I can think of to cast my net. I always use all 30, (the maximum allowed.) Sometimes, they only vaguely connect.

 When Shane Dawson could do no wrong and was promoting his Conspiracy makeup palette I used #conspiracy #beauty #makeup in a lot of my posts.

Why not? I write an audiodrama that deals with conspiracies, I create art (that's beauty right) and in my selfies, I'm wearing make up! 

That and it was trending. I always check to see what's trending.

For all my efforts, I averaged about 30 likes on a post in the first day and usually maxed out at 50. More if it's a selfie, way more if it's "spicy."

To this day, people are stunned to learn that I run a business, write an audio drama, podcast or comic. Those facts never rose to the surface I guess. 

Some people know that I draw stuff. They like that it's dark and sexual.

A lot of people leave comments about how I could better craft my appearance for their liking. I'm told I could stand to be more dark and sexual.

I'm not exactly sure what people think I do. Probably run a dark and sexual Only Fans.

You see, since taking this class, I have had to come to terms with the fact that my disgust with my online followers, and their lack of interest in my business was unjustified. I was out here marketing with my Myspace moves on an Instagram dance floor. 

Do you recall Myspace, and all the shenanigans that took place there in? All you had to do back in the day was show up looking like a hot, bowl of sex with heavily processed hair and boom, you were a super star.

For example...

 

This edgy little picture of me for example had several thousand likes and comments on Myspace.

 

 

It's a little distorted because its a picture of a photograph taken with an iPhone. I don't remember my Myspace log in.

Now, before you scoff at this photo for being contrived and the oh so dreaded diagnosis of unrelatable, it was taken outside of a nightclub, so this wasn't my usual look. 

This picture also represents my longest sober streak, from 2001-2009. During that period I earned two degrees and held down jobs in the marketing and media industry. It's actually the only period of my adulthood where I felt like I was living my life, rather than being dragged along by it.

Anyway... none of that actually matters of course, because so much of marketing back then was about the aesthetic appeal to a demographic. I had the edgy hair, (at times I even wore colorful extensions), the dark makeup, the T and A, I was good to go!

Back in the day, we focused a lot more about creating a visual identity for a brand than we did anything else. If you had a sleek print layout, and could get it placed in the right magazines, you were in business.  

There was more to it of course, but you didn't have people watching your online activity, checking to see if your personal philosophies were a match to theirs. No one cared, and people who did were boring and overly sensitive!

In fact, the entertainers of the day thrived on vulgarity and had an in your face attitude. They were rude, raunchy and didn't care about answering to anyone else. Think South Park, Jefferee Star, Paris Hilton circa The Simple Life.

That didn't just come out of nowhere, there was an insatiable demand for that kind of structured naughtiness. Entertainers just spooned out what their audience wanted to see. 

It was a lot more surface back then. You just wanted to exude a certain aura.

It's actually been a process of slow humbling by shame and failure that brought me to the realization- marketing has evolved, and I am slowly becoming a fossil.

Marketing Now

Employing the same methods I had learned back in the day now makes me come off as vapid and trashy. 

To paraphrase Dave Kerpen, author of "Likeable Social Media", if you're going to put on a show, be an improv routine. People want to see fresh, lively, authentic content rather than a well rehearsed and choreographed musical production.

People don't want costumes and glitz. They want to believe in their heart of hearts that they really know and connect with you.

That's where I struggle, because I very rarely connect with anyone. When I do, it's not in the way most people would deem a relationship should be conducted.

How to Fake Friends and Incinerate People  

 My best friend is a man I met online. He used to phone in to my radio show in college and we'd talk for hours Have you ever seen the movie "The Fog"? We're basically Stevie (Adrienne Barbeau) and Dan The Weatherman (Charles Cyphers). 

We bonded over our shared love for cartoons, obscure movies, little known musicians and oddball comics. 

We've never actually met. I think that might be part of the magic. Both of us are misanthropes and so long as we never intrude on one another's lives, we're good.

I bonded with my now husband (a different man by the way), because of his bizarre sense of humor. His jokes centered around biological principles (he's a biologist) or historical antidotes (he's a hobby historian). He comes off as shy and reserved but it's more a matter of his reluctance to waste unnecessary words.

I'd been in two previous relationships, one dragging on for 6 years, the other I endured for nearly a decade. My husband and I were engaged after 6 months. We'll be coming up on our 8th year anniversary October 12th, 2021.

I don't really talk to anyone else, other than my parents, or nieces and nephews. Most people just aren't that interesting to me. I'm indifferent. Not even coldly indifferent, I just don't really feel much one way or another.

I am however, a tremendous mimic and a diligent researcher. I can become anyone you want for a short period of time. It's how I get by in life. No one wants to be seen with indifference.

That's great if you're working kompromat (that's not an admission), but not so much for life in the long term. 

The people I dislike the most, and want to shuffle along, have a nasty habit of declaring me their best friend and most trusted confidant. That's because I placate them. I create a persona specifically for them, agreeable to their every caprice.

My hope is that I satisfy whatever it is they want to hear echoed back at them, avoid confrontation and usher them painlessly out of my life.

It doesn't work by the way. You probably already knew that though.

Contrariwise, the people I appreciate and want to keep in my life, I constantly offend. I'm told that I'm extremely blunt, though its never my intention to be.

I actually despise hearing people say things like "Don't mind her, she just doesn't have a filter," about me. I filter everything! I'm constantly second guessing myself, practicing responses to possible conversation scenarios and sifting through my words to find any kernel of offense.

My problem is I have a way of assuming everyone can see and remember what I do. Given that, I just speak what I regard as an obvious, inarguable truth.

For example, I made my mother furious on the phone this weekend.

I was talking about writing the network pitch for Creeping Wave Radio, when she stated that she'd always encouraged my writing. 

I replied, "not when you were editing my book. "

She was aghast!

I quickly tried to smooth things over with an explanation, "You told me it was convoluted and that I should just stick to doing comics."

"No I didn't!" She insisted.

"Yes, you did. You said because there was less opportunity to get caught up with flowery narration."

She knew she had said that, and I was just repeating her words back to her. However, after rehashing this scene over and over again in my head, I now believe she felt like my bringing this up was meant to be confrontational.

 It wasn't. In my mind, I was just making a correction to her mistake. 

"I see your point though," I insisted, "but that's exactly why I asked you to edit for me."

This didn't really assuage her, but she's known me long enough to where she's come to accept my unorthodox style of speech. 

I genuinely hate that. I hate the ideas that I'm constantly forcing the people I care about to live in silent rage because of my inability to be empathic and tactful.

What's worse is that I can't just flip the script and put on my placating persona with the people I love. That act requires constant and concerted effort. It's a song and dance I can perform but for so long.

Instagram Influenza

I mention all of this because the same pastiche in which I live my life  has carried over to my Instagram. Like a disease, I spread myself over the platform. I let other people tell me who I was and shape my persona for me. I just reflected what they already saw back at them.

Anything would be better than the truth. A presumably autistic, forty something with a drinking problem is kind of a tough sell. How about we go with an heroine addicted sociopath with a dark and mysterious past? That's sexy!

I tried desperately to be all things to all people, and wound up burning up anything that was left of myself in the process.

I answered every DM, responded to every comment, reciprocated every like. I took note of what posts did well and what didn't, and worked to replicate these results. In doing so, I invited people into my life who felt perfectly justified in dominating every aspect of my existence. 

I had no right to complain, I'd more or less shown that's what I was there for. 

Going Forward

I don't really want presumably autistic, forty something with a drinking problem to be my brand. 

That just translates to quirky yet vulnerable, which in all honesty can be attributed to anyone.

I used to work in special education at the highschool level. I later worked as an intern in Children and Adolescent Services at Rady Children's Hospital. The students I worked with, many of whom had what we now call severe autism, had way bigger struggles than being brash and insensitive. I take offense to the ease at which the word "autistic" or "on the spectrum" is bandied around these days.

Can't we just be honest about what's going on here? Certain personality traits become desirable in a cultural dynamic. These are subject to trends, just like anything else. 

Chose any attribute you like, humor, seriousness, assertiveness, compliance, loyalty, flexibility, what have you. People who naturally embody these traits are rewarded. People who don't are encouraged to adopt them.

 Failure to do so is indicative of illness, and we rush to diagnose why these people aren't performing optimally, whatever the current definition of optimal may be. 

Colloquial wisdom dictates that any deviant personality trait is the result of a chemical imbalance. Administering the proper drug to either suppress or enhance neurochemical function, as the case may be, results in amending the personality.

I won't deny that some people really do find healing with medication. However, the broad notion that there is a consistent, baseline personality, which people attain when their neurotransmitters, hormones, etc are regulated is a fallacy. People are much more complex.

Complexity isn't valued by the current paradigm however. I don't know that it ever has been. 

The prevailing culture and its values in turn feed into the employment structure. We must work to earn an income, we must have an income to survive. 

Employers rarely celebrate the individual perspectives each person brings to the table. We're told that they do, but the accolades go to people who are agreeable, compliant, and pleasant. 

Heterodox thoughts might get a smile, a nod and a remark like "what an interesting notion!" More than likely, it will get you a meeting with human resources, where you'll be asked,

"Let's be honest, do you see this job as the right fit for you, and what you want to accomplish in your life?"

No, of course not! By far and large most jobs that provide you with enough income to sustain yourself are warm body positions. It doesn't matter who works it, so long as they fulfill the tasks allotted to them and are pleasant about it.

The opportunities to actually find work which suits an individuals aptitude is increasingly limited. This is especially true in creative fields. You can't simply be a writer or artist to make your way, you must be recognized as one of the elites of your craft. Then and only then will you be celebrated or at minimum, earn a survivable wage.

Knowing that, it becomes so much easier to enshroud yourself in a lie. Fake it till you make it as the old adage goes. Unfortunately, as I have learned, you can't fake it forever. You either get caught or hit a threshold where you just can't live as your creation anymore.

So What's The Point

In my life, the people who's work resonated with me seemed to battle with these same issues. The surrealists, absurdists, existentialists and dadaists I admired all marveled at the unbridled insanity they were told to call normal. In response, they created controllable worlds, in which they could make sense of such things, and reexamine their own life through their craft. 

While I haven't done much in the way of promoting Creeping Wave Radio through my Instagram, at it's core, it is another such controllable world. My compulsion to continue writing it, and these grotesquely long blog posts, stems from a need within myself to emerge from the convenient falsehoods I've forged all this time.

The world I've created through Creeping Wave Radio makes sense to me. Instead of getting bogged down in the social conundrum, I now choose to use this world as a metaphor and structure all my posts around it. Ironically, when I speak through the characters of my show, I am less a fiction than I am when I try to be relatable, whatever that is.

I've been posting in character for a few months now. I'm slowly unwinding the yarn that I hope to spin on this upcoming season. As I've been editing the script, I've started to notice how often my true feelings have seeped their way into the plotline. My stories free me from the burden created by my supposed  lack of empathy and tactlessness. They allow me to unapologetically tell the truth. Now, let's see who cares to listen.