Social media kinda sucks. But also…
Last year, my friends and I got VIP tickets to the Ninja Sex Party concert in Los Angeles. (They’re a musical comedy band that also does spectacular covers of 80s rock. If you’ve never seen them live, you absolutely should.) As part of that experience, we were able to attend a Q&A with the band. One of the audience members asked them, “What advice would you give to aspiring musicians?”
Bandmate Brian Wecht (a.k.a. “Ninja Brian”) was quick to answer:
“Stop calling yourself an aspiring musician. You’re a musician. Period.”
According to the Oxford dictionary, author is defined as “a writer of a book, article, or report.” You might notice that there are no signs of words like professional, money-making, or lucrative.
Authors are authors because they write. It is a title defined by a behavior, not an outcome.
In the past week, embracing this 90-day social media experiment, I have come across hundreds of profiles of authors. They post videos and images explaining their process, hyping up their manuscripts, and generally contributing to a community of people who are unapologetically creative. And in those hundreds I’ve seen, perhaps only a dozen of them have actually published something.
They don’t call themselves aspiring authors. These creators are authors. They also just happen to be teachers, accountants, doctors, dog-sitters, and stay-at-home mothers.
And you know what? I think that’s fucking amazing.
Social media, by its very nature, is curated. We are the agents of what we post. For the most part, nothing gets out without are express, selective consent. It is one of the most damaging things about social media — but, I’ve come to find, it’s also one of the most beautiful. It’s selectiveness empowers us.
I’m aware that not everyone feels the way I do about their creative identity. For some, it’s a scary thing to step out into the world and announce, “I AM A CREATIVE SOUL!” Some people have very real life circumstances that prevent them from saying, “I write faerie smut!” or “I’m working on a sapphic novel!”
But places like Instagram…they’re not safe, exactly, but they are curated. They allow for a degree of compartmentalization and selectiveness. People feel more comfortable expressing themselves there. When I look at an author’s profile, when I watch their reels about their favorite book boyfriends, I don’t have any of the context of their real life. I am simply an audience of the creative stage they’ve crafted.
So, my conclusion after about a week of this whole social media think:
Social media kinda sucks. But also, it’s kinda…awesome?
