I recently shuttered most of my public-facing social media accounts. It wasn’t a last minute decision – I’d been burnt out for a while, and it wasn’t getting any better as I reached wider and wider audiences. Sure, the wider audiences were great for business, but the people in those audiences were terrible for my mental, emotional, and spiritual health. The time demand from increased ‘engagement’ was also horrible for my work. The time needed to manage the messages and comments and content creation was eating up so much energy and mental bandwidth, I was too frustrated and exhausted to get much work done – it was that demoralizing to have to regularly wade through what ended up in my inboxes on a daily basis.
I’m not doing it anymore – I can’t.
My DMs are closed.
This seems counter-intuitive. The work to build an audience was paying off! That’s the goal! Only, it wasn’t for me. I do not want a massive audience or fame or even popularity if it means I personally have to be in the spotlight. There are days I felt weirdly intimidated by the sheer number of comments I had to respond to. I don’t want to get to know All The People personally – I was really just there to share my work and the factors behind why I did it.
Look, I write because I have to, I create art because I need to, I make things because I love to, and until very recently I did that in obscurity and moderate anonymity. I am always glad when what I do resonates with people, and I get very excited that it might make a positive difference in people’s lives… but I am very good being over here by myself for the most part. So much so that when I donated artwork to a local arts center auction, I didn’t even let people know I was the artist or there at the auction event until after it had closed. Please let me be the creative toothfairy or Santa Clause – leave words or art or something pretty or interesting, and then vanish.
I know, I know – it’s weird. I just really don’t like the direct spotlight.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve been contentedly single out in the middle of nowhere since Steve died. It’s just my adult kids and my work and the occasional trip to see my best friend or art events or pen friends, the people who know I’m a weirdly quiet, oddly private workshop gremlin. It’s one of the reasons that even at my own solo show I hung back and only introduced myself when asked.
That reason is that, if I’m bluntly honest, I have major trauma around attention. It sets off alarm bells in the worst kind of way – it’s related to intimate kinds of assault and violence, and is heavily tied to the way I’ve experienced attention being quid pro quo. Having to spend hours a day performing for attention was eating my soul and sanity, especially since most of that attention wasn’t the kind I needed or wanted. (Meaning, it wasn’t questions about… my work.) I avoid attention whenever possible. No one paying direct attention to me and needing a response means that I’m not going to get hurt. No direct attention means I’m safe.
I’ve gotten very good at being invisible and at the Irish Goodbye – except for the hosts and good friends, because Southern Manners are Southern Manners, after all. But even then, my good friends know me well enough to know that if I’ve left, I hit my limit.
Which is pretty much what happened with social media – after almost 20 years of being terminally online, I hit my limit. I had to limit direct access to myself because it was triggering old wounds of being taken advantage of without consideration or consent. So I withdrew my consent, and locked my accounts down. I still got some messages and one very self-centered email, but I didn’t have to reply anymore. It was like getting divorced, just from the person people were expecting me to be for them.
The accounts I kept are lesser known, and I take a pretty hard line on what I tolerate – the blocked list is very, very long. If you can’t remember that I am a person you don’t actually know behind the username, you don’t get access to me.
In other news, I’m getting work done again and it’s good stuff. I’ve missed having that bandwidth all to myself.