In the beginning, we created to understand what we were experiencing. We used the process of creating an image or text to capture and make clear our experience of the world, or something in the world, and then also to explain it to others. We wanted to take what was happening in our heads and make it real, so we could know it and share it.
These days, however, because of social media, it seems like creativity has becoming about creating to be known. A lot of expression is tied up with identity, and identity has been usurped by marketing as a channel that feeds into consumerism— buying so that people will know who you are, buying certain things as a way to express who you are.
How many times have you heard yourself or someone else respond to any interesting thing that someone does or say with, “You should start a blog/Instagram/podcast/website!”
Just this last week, I was at an education conference with teachers and principals talking about “branding yourself”. I know that branding can help— I’m not knocking that— but I have begun to question this knee-jerk reaction.
The funny part is, we’re creating these things to be known but do we even know who we really are? I am sure that the answer to this can be on a spectrum, with some people who are adept at branding themselves because they truly do have a clearer idea of themselves or at least are just able to play the game of branding enough to separate from their actual messy selves and their branding efforts.
But then, I think there’s also a lot of people like me, who don’t feel comfortable at all with branding because we’re still getting to know ourselves.
You all are the ones I’m talking to. For us, when we are truly creating something, it does not follow a linear or clear vision all the time. It goes in spurts and stalls. It has a pop of color here and a pop of color there. I’ve always likened it to either identifying stars in a random sky that you can begin to see your own constellation made up of, or a swirling eddy of frothing water that you are hurtling towards the center of, pulled in by some center of gravity beyond you.
For you all, creating a brand too early on means you end up creating content just to fulfill your pre-maturely-decided-on brand. Instead, maybe you’re like me and prefer that the “brand”, if it exists at all, arise organically. That means it might take a lot longer than you wish to be fully realized.
But you don’t want to go around signifying just to signify that you’re here, when you don’t even know who you really are.
I also think, beyond just the tension between time it takes for some of us to congeal our personality and the pressure to brand, there’s something deeper going.
I’m going to pull on little known but incredibly critical media theorist Vilém Flusser to illustrate my point:
Images signify...something 'out there' in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstraction, reductions of the four dimensions of space and time to two surface dimensions...The world is not immediately accessible to [human being] and therefore, images are needed to make it comprehensible.
However, as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings. They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing the world, they obscure it until human beings' lives finally become a function of the images they create.
Human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world 'out there', which meanwhile itself becomes like an image - a context of scenes, of states of things. This reversal of the function of the image can be called 'idolatry'; we can observe the process at work in the present day: The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our 'reality' and turning it into a 'global image scenario'.
Essentially this is a question of 'amnesia'. Human beings forget they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned into hallucination.
I think Flusser’s point is critical because he’s illuminating what’s really happening here with all this branding and social media obsession: we’ve become confused that the images were supposed to make reality more understandable, and instead, we’ve come to orient our lives around living up to the images we see.
All of us have heard that quote:
“The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”
That’s exactly what he means by saying that the images have created more of a screen that blocks reality than it does explain and clarify it. Instead of helping us be more real, these images that we are surrounded by are created just to build some artificial idea of a person and his/her life, and then we all try to match that either in reality or just settling for conveying it in our own social media/branding.
Now by no means am I saying this is an absolute across the board. There are so many examples of media that I believe have served the original function of creativity, which is to make known something that was unknown otherwise.
I love how many accounts in Instagram, for instance, have shown me images of people and ways of living that I never imagined before, and broke open my clouded understanding rather than made me more detached from reality.
But because those exist, that’s exactly why I’ve become that much more aware of the same danger in those images, that they can be so powerful that we want to live life according to what we see in them, forgetting that they are not actually reality but simply signifiers and abstractions of it.
The other day, for instance, I was walking in New York City and I saw a girl take a very posed photo and literally collapse in a sigh of relief when it was over from the strain of holding her pose. It’s ok if she just wanted a hot picture for its own sake or to try it out, but its another if she wanted it because she believed that she should be living a life where she is capable and has produced images like this.
That’s why it’s really about intention. I keep coming back to that. Clarissa Pinkola Estés says:
“Your worn-out idea or endeavor can shine more brightly if you will take some of it and throw it away...As the sculptor remove[s] more marble in order to reveal more of the hidden form beneath. A powerful way to renew or strengthen one’s intention or action that has become fatigued is to throw some ideas away, and focus.
If you’ve lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away and it will renew itself. ”
While you can read this as being about cutting out some fat and excess from your story, I find that its impossible to do that without also cutting out fat and excess in intention first, for how can you know what to cut except to have an honest conversation about your first priority with your creation?
How this links back to where I started with Flusser is that I think for some of us (all of us, if I’m honest), our most powerful creativity is held back when our primary intention has somehow to do with achieving status or acknowledgment in a mainstream system. If we just want to be understood, get likes or attention, we will have to resort to using already-existing symbols and to crafting ourselves to fit within the current system of images. Most likely, we will create in a way that is unsustainable, and will leave us feeling unfulfilled because we did not actually end up happier or more loving or more in touch with ourselves than before.
However, if your primary intention lays in understanding something for yourself— specifically, your own self— things change. You can express something deeper, draw from something beyond what’s currently acceptable or acknowledged, and free yourself from the adherence to certain specific forms or styles that are have social currency. As I’ve been saying these few posts, there is so much work that we have to do around using creativity to fulfill our egos, especially with the media all around us now showing “creativity” that is essentially identity-based consumerism.
What’s beautiful today is how deeply we can create pulling from all kinds of images. We are not limited to current ideas because we have access to the entire world of human creation, across all of history and all of the variety that exists in this very moment. We also can use creativity to delve into self-knowledge, because we have so much room and space for expression around identity.
However, we can also get too lost in using this opportunity and tool as a way to simply fashion ourselves even more deftly, manipulate others and our own images of ourselves to reach some kind of acceptance, belonging, and power that we secretly wish for.
Personally, I go through continuous waves of working through these issues. I will get caught up in imagining what kind of attention I will receive, or making choices based on some greater system and structure, and then I become blocked, strained, and frustrated. I wake up depressed, feeling unable to live up to what I want because I’ve chosen to aim for a Netflix television show when I haven’t even written a script, because I fear that if I don’t aim for that, no one will ever care about my work, my work won’t be validated, and it will be useless.
But that’s not true. What if I had different reasons for my work? The reality is I wouldn’t want a hit TV show that was inauthentic, that taught me nothing about myself but only used my ability to “give the people what they want” or “tell a good story”.
There’s this aching part of me that underneath it all, just really wants to be connected with myself again. There’s a part of me that I have hid away, that seems very different from the rational day-to-day world we live in, a part of me that comes alive at night, and I can’t see it. I have not explored it.
I lost touch with that world over a decade ago, and since then, I’ve become a complex individual with a whole complex universe growing inside of me that I don’t know at all. That is the sadness I feel when I am alone— the feeling of loneliness from not knowing the only person you are with all the time.
Underneath all my ego cravings for understanding, acknowledgement, respect, admiration, and belonging from others, I really just want to receive and give those things to myself.
So when I come from that place, I am able to see a different way to approach my creativity. Rather than using my imagination to create a fantasy world to impress others, I can use my imagination to create a world where the main character— who is someone like me— belongs, is accepted, understood, and respected.
For instance, I struggle to know what my gifts are. I know they are quite powerful and important, but they aren’t the obvious ones that we usually talk about on resumes, and while I have had people who have noticed something special about me, even fewer have been able to really name it. So if I work to figure out what kind of a world/situation someone like me would be useful and meaningful in, and the role that she would play, it is healing and informative. It tells me I do have gifts that matter and it helps me clarify what they might be. It’s like finding a hammer and inventing the nail, I suppose :)
While creating with the intention of impressing others wouldn’t have completely blocked my ability to create authentically and in a fulfilling way, I know from experience that it didn’t open it up enough for it to be sustainable. And if I can’t finish it and keep it up, it doesn’t matter.
I am past the point of settling for spurts and sputters just so I can stay in the confines of what I think might be guaranteed to be understood and accepted. I also don’t want to settle anymore for creating things that don’t deeply fulfill me, first and foremost.
Though I continue to fall into the trap of creating for my ego, I am making my best effort to continue to bring it back to a place where understanding myself is the primary intention. I have to deal with the fear that if I don’t create for others, I won’t be successful, but then again, I am also shifting the very idea of success as I shift my intention, so it works out.
