If I was able to choose my career with a 100% guarantee that it would bring me enough money to live comfortably off of (enough to pay my bills, upgrade my phone every few years, actually save money to buy a house by the time I am 35, you know, the things we daydream about…) I honestly think I would have chosen to be a writer.
I have always loved writing. It gives me the space I need to think about my thoughts before they just come spilling out of me. It might sound weird, but I often find myself saying things I don’t actually believe. I will tell these lies because I needed to fill the silence. But once they are said aloud, I can’t take them back, and I hate that. I like being able to take my time. I like being able to read the words in my head and then out loud. I like being able to backspace and use a thesaurus. I like my words to be interpreted exactly as I intended.
A little fun fact of mine is that two of my essays from my English 101 class were published. It was a small, independent magazine run by some folks in the U.K. called The Heretic. Nothing major. Unpaid (of course). But they were published nonetheless. One of those essays was quite literally the first essay I ever wrote in college. I would say they got published because when I wrote them, I was not just writing for a grade, I was writing because I wanted to write; I was writing for me. So yeah, I would be a writer for a living if writing could make you a living.
Instead, I chose a different artistic route for my career. Instead of putting my thoughts into words, now, I put them into pictures that I post online. Well, some of my thoughts at least. A very very very small fraction of what I think about am I able to put into my drawings. That’s just how the social media wheel churns. You either pigeonhole yourself into an artistic niche or you never gain traction in the algorithm.
Which brings me to the focus of today's essay. Since growing my Instagram account people constantly ask me “how did you do it?” They want to know how I managed to gain tens of thousands of followers in the span of a few months. And I understand their curiosity, I really do. But before I tell anyone to start posting every day for a month, I would ask you, are you ready to create an entire persona of yourself? Are you ready to have people engage with who they think is you, but what is really just a teeny fraction of who you actually are?
That’s what being a creator on the Internet is like. You create a shadow of yourself that you post online. Your shadow is all the best parts of your life. It’s all the best art you have made, the biggest sales you have done, the highlights of your days. That’s what you share. Even if you post the sad times too, you don’t post all of them. You can’t unless you want people to stop following you because you’re bringing down the vibes of their feed. If you want to grow an audience on the Internet then being happy is the default and being sad is only allowed if there is something to be gained.
This idea of a “shadow self” was my biggest hurdle when it came to starting my art account. I wanted to start posting my work so that I could eventually be an artist for a living. But I was so frustrated at the fact that people would only ever get to know a tiny fraction of who I actually am. Or even worse, as an artist, people would only get to see a fraction of the art that I am capable of creating. It pissed me off to no end. It still does, in fact, but I’m dealing with it. I mean, writing this essay is just one way that I’m coping. I think my writing is able to portray so much more of my character than just my illustrations. Of course, only a very small percentage of my Instagram audience will even read this, and so my “shadow self” still acts as a stand in for the real me more often than not.
So, again, before you ask how you can grow your art account, ask yourself “Am I ready to create a persona of myself?” Because if you aren’t ready to accept the fact that 99.9% of the people you engage online will never know the true you, then you are not ready to actually take the steps required to really grow an audience.
Now, if you are ready to do this and you’re still curious on how to grow a following, then stay tuned because I’ll talk about the in’s and out’s of that another day ;)
Thank you so much for reading all my yapping if you made it this far. Since this newsletter is free, if you want to support me you can send a tip to my venmo (@tannin-arceo) or consider subscribing to my Patreon (patreon.com/tanninarceo). I hope you liked what I had to say and feel free to DM me your thoughts on Instagram or email me them at info@tanninarceo.com !