In Consideration of a Public Diary and the Concern to Perform.

Dear Diary, This is my third entry to you and I already fear I’m growing repetitive. I caught myself worrying about you getting bored, and that felt like the perfect reason to write. As I do with all of my projects, I fear growing stale. One of the hardest battles I face as a creative person who has achieved relative success and admiration for my creations is that this, whatever this may be, will be it. This will be the moment I peak. This will be the thing that makes them realize they’re no longer interested in what I have to say. This is all this was meant to be, nothing more. Seems like a silly thing to feel when writing a diary entry as it is for myself alone. Realistically, I understand imposter syndrome, and funnily enough I never once considered it to be something I face until I began writing to you. I am a logically oriented person. Logic first. Then emotion. You know how they say some people are left-brained which I think means you’re supposed to be more logical, more analytical. Right-brained people are supposed to be,, uh,, emotional?? Creative?? That feels rather unbalanced but nobody asked me. While I’m pretty certain this is a myth,,, actually, you could dissect someone’s brain in front of me and show me a calculator sitting in one half and a banjo in the other and I still wouldn’t believe this. I would however make my way to the nearest psychiatric care facility but that is neither here nor there. Anyway, when I first heard this, I thought it meant I had a creative arm and a smart arm. I had a sensitive leg and an organized one. I thought it literally meant half of me was logical and half of me was creative down to individual fingers. I blame that partially because it’s a dumb unclear thing for anybody to say to a child and also because I have always felt a near physical split between those two opposing forces in my body. All my left-brained body parts in suits and ties and my right-brained ones on unicycles all collected together in a form of Lila city council enacted to determine my every action. I think sometimes it’s an incredible gift to be able to approach my creative endeavors with the logical backing to navigate them efficiently, which the creative brain then proceeds to ignore because that way simply is not at all very fun or silly, but the thought counts. On the other side, I think it is one of my greatest detriments, as my overbearing rationality gets in the way of my antics. I never intended to pursue a creative field because my logical brain was far too aware of the lack of job security, stable income, and consistency, but the funny thing about being a creative person, an artist, if you will, at least for me, it was never really a choice.

I have an overflowing laundry list of creative endeavors I daydream about, and this year is dedicated to creating things. It doesn’t matter what I create, if I am happy with the finished product, if it’s good, it matters that I start and finish. I have spent a lot of my life doing the first 30% of a lot of things. That analytical brain tends to seek perfection, I know what I should have done differently to get a better result, I should just scrap it and start over with a better foundation, this didn’t live up to my standard of quality, etc. etc. etc. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m supposed to be doing, which unfortunately for me is quite difficult, being that the career path in my head is one that has never really existed and has no real blueprint for. Logically, that is a nightmare. I am constantly trying to figure out how to optimize what I’m posting and where, and what will grow my platforms or make me enough money to get the equipment I need to help me produce higher quality things. I find very little on this Earth more annoying than “use this sound to grow your account” and likewise social media hack things. Not because they don’t work, I would probably be willing to bet they work, but I also think getting a handful of followers isn’t hard if you follow the “influencer” formula. I don’t think it holds any real longevity and it lacks creativity, but that’s not the point for a lot of people. Those videos make me so unreasonably mad because I want a cheat sheet so badly. There are entertainers, comedians, influencers, content creators, out there who assuredly have paths I could attempt to follow, but that would never satisfy me. One part of my brain, the creative part, the part that is really good at getting its way needs to carve a path completely uncharted. The other part thinks that sounds mighty hard and inefficient. Alas. Right now, as I attempt to not crush myself under self-imposed goals and the weight of desperation not to “waste this year”, (something about this year feels so important and monumental for me, and it is all quite scary and looming and confusing I have some stuff to work out in my head I know I know) I’ve been catching myself with really unattainable expectations for my output. In my mind, it is not at all unreasonable to put out daily Instagram and TikTok content, and who knows maybe written work as well, not to mention a weekly podcast and youtube. I know damn well the amount of hours that go into everything I produce makes those goals literally humanly impossible, yet I can’t help but feel like that’s what I need to be doing. Social media rewards quantity over quality so heavily that it feels like running in place to try a lot of the time. Unfortunately, even though I think making more bad content would probably make me more “successful” and certainly more money than less frequent higher quality content, I see everything I create through a scrutinous artistic lens. That means I can’t just say fuck it when I post. I can’t bring myself to attach my name to stuff that has no bones. Even the shitty stuff I post, like that youtube video that was a monster to finish. I spent easily 10 hours a day for a week on it, but has so many technical issues that when I finally got it uploaded only to realize it was the wrong draft with botched audio and missing graphics, I still stand by it, because I think at the very least, the script was good enough. Having artistic integrity sucks. Realistically, I know at this stage I can’t research, script, record, and edit a youtube video in a week if I want to get a single other thing done, so now I have to make a decision: Do I do only one thing and hope it doesn’t suck, or do I do all the other stuff that I think rarely sucks? Seems like an obvious choice, but then I have to consider which one makes me happier, what feels more fulfilling to make? Probably long form, I love really zoning in on one thing uninterupted, and I am often more proud of it because it has so many hours behind it. So do Youtube, obiously. But then we have to consider monitization, which is easily the most complicated. In theory, I do what makes me happy and it all works out, but in order for me to create full time I have to make money from what I produce. Youtube does not make me any money yet. Instagram does. Tiktok does. Butttttt, then we have to consider how much money, because in theory, I could make more on youtube than I could everything else, so isn’t that the obvious choice? It’s an investment, right? Yeah okay maybe, but I still have bills to pay, I can’t just not make money under the assumption I will soon.

An interesting aside, as I write this, every few lines I scroll up to see how much I’ve written and I worry again, that this will not appease my reader. That this, my diary, is too long and monotonous and unrelatable. Get over yourself, Lila. Just write the damn thing.

I don’t think there is a right answer to the questions I’m asking. I’m sure the best option is maybe to do everything in moderation, but at the same time arguably not because algorithms will put you in timeout if you don’t feed them regularly. One thing I have learned on social media is that there is never any winning, there is only not losing. I try to keep my heart out of it, I don’t check analytics ever if I can help it. I try not to put my value in the numbers on my phone because I have learned how dark and obsessive a wormhole that can be. I sat down originally not to write to you, no offense, but to create a spreadsheet of everything I think I need to be doing weekly and I didn’t even get the page open before I realized that in the year of doing this every Sunday, never once have I met my goals. I can’t assume how long a given project will take me, sometimes it takes me 3 full days to get a single post on Instagram, somedays I do it in an hour. Some weeks, I can’t be on camera, it just isn’t happening for whatever reason. I spend so much time worrying about what I’m producing, if it’s optimal, it it’s interesting, how it will perform, if people will like it, and I wonder if it’s not time for a new approach.

I don’t have one for you, not just yet. Perhaps over the next month, I’ll try some new things and detail how they’re going. Maybe I will forget to do that. This diary entry is messy and unclear it would really benefit from perhaps being entirely scrapped and redone now that I have more direction. That is simply too bad. Diaries are messy, and I am saying this for my own sake, even though I am partially saying it so any reader who finds this less articulate than expected goes “oh, of course, she is still perfect and a wonderful writer and she sees the faults in this as well. Carry on.” Which is a crazy thing to add to a diary, but in my defense, I would write that disclaimer in any journal entry because you never know who might read it, and the only thing more embarrassing than someone reading your diary, is someone reading your diary and the first thing they think is, “wow they’re a shit writer.” With all my love and a tenuous finger over the publish button for writing that feels less than concrete, Lila