The Eternal Surprise Party [That Is Only Sometimes] from Hell (Part Two)
Not everything about personal branding is Satan's handiwork.
Read Part One first.
The first thing any social media expert will tell you about growing your online audience is that you need a brand.
In its worst iterations, branding yourself is about polish and profit. It is about finding a billion shimmery ways to say and do the same thing, all in service of vanity, fame, or capitalism.
There is, though, an aspect of branding that I felt was suddenly calling me out. The first step in branding is knowing what you are about.
Let me give a little backstory.
My sister and I both started new businesses early in the pandemic. Everywhere we turned, another well-meaning entrepreneur told us we needed “online presence” if we wanted our businesses to make it. We both rolled our eyes; we had too many responsibilities in the real world to spend time posting selfies. Our businesses were about changing the actual world, not selling things. Moreover, we were the kind of people who got annoyed with all the digital navel gazing and attention seeking. We were hardly tempted to add to the noise.
As America crept ever-closer to the 2020 election, my sister and I talked often about the sociological shifts in our country. Our conversation often turned to all the negativity online (it’s hard to recall now, but in mid-2020 this was a new-ish phenomenon.) “I just wish someone was saying this and this and this,” I found myself saying one day. “No one is balancing the conversation.”
Staring at me, my sister said, “So, you do it. Maybe you could bring something different to the conversation. It’s okay for you to have a voice, you know.”
I have known I was a writer most of my life, but I knew just as clearly that writing was secondary to keeping everybody happy. I wanted to do the Right Thing, and I still thought that meant not making people uncomfortable. [insert maniacal laughter for some foreshadowing]
Around the same time I had that talk with my sister, a therapist gave me a quotation that I swear she attributed to Goethe:
Make good thy standing place, and change the world.
The therapist pointed out that I had been deeply unmoored for many years and that it was evident to her I need to reclaim a solid standing place after all my intentional unraveling (some people call this deconstruction, but we’ll come back to that). Those words, by the way, weren’t even Goethe’s—but I don’t care if she made them out of refrigerator poetry. Combined with my sister’s gentle prodding, they did the trick. People everywhere seemed to be encouraging me to say the things I craved to say. I’d have to face the fact that, in 2020, online was the place to say them.
Having been primed for this permission by both a decade of deep work and a subtle loosening of expectations that resulted from the pandemic, I showed up on Instagram for the first time in ages, all the while chanting silently to myself It’s okay for you to have a voice, It’s okay for you to have a voice. (It’s odd to me now that I thought I’d somehow be a functioning writer in the world and not have a public voice, but our brains can be tricky places, amirite?)
Privately, I had spent the past decade redefining and refining my values, my politics, my faith, and my goals. Ten years of wandering, crying, and beating my head against a wall. Ten years of confusion, pain, and upheaval. In 2020, I was finally settling into my new self. The voice in my head had always insisted, Who are YOU to say anything? But when I looked back, I could see I had done so much hard work. What if—and I still struggle with this every day—what I had to say wasn’t just noise?
I did know what I was about. If someone wanted to call that a brand, let them.
I started slowly, testing people’s reactions. I’d pop onto Insta, say something “scandalous” (keep in mind that my family and friends had been around much longer than my identity crisis), lie awake all night worrying about it, and then either delete it the next morning or disappear for a week (or both).
Some people were wildly receptive; some were pissed. The more I tried it, the more evident one thing became: If I was going to exist in online spaces, I had to acknowledge a simple but unbelievably difficult fact. I could not make everyone happy.
Which is to say, not everyone was going to like me.
Every month—as protests continued, misinformation abounded, and glaciers slid silently into the sea—I became more okay with not being liked by everyone. In late 2019, I had read this book and subsequently banned myself from the evils of social media forever. In late 2020, social media became a major player in my (overdue) self-integration as I was forced to reconcile who I had been with who I am now.
Now that’s ironic.