When People Tell You What to Share (and Why You Shouldn’t F*cking Care)

Authenticity vs Marketability: The Ultimate Creative Conundrum

Artists don’t create works in a vacuum; everything we make and put out in the world comes with the understanding that it will cause a ripple in the pond of human collective consciousness. Which is all fine and good. Feedback is exactly what we are looking for. We all know it comes in many forms, including affirmation and criticism.

That being said, validation does not just mean people telling us we are correct. It can also mean people simply listening to what we have to say and letting us know we are heard. Sometimes we need to externalise our thoughts or we will go crazy inside our own heads. I think relieving ourselves of this mental and spiritual burden and having the outlet to do so is the least we deserve.

So imagine how crushing it must be to be told indirectly by faceless strangers hiding behind a keyboard in what we thought was the place to seek such relief that this is not actually the case.

For me, that place was Instagram. But in March 2020 (do we all remember what happened then?), I discovered that I couldn’t express myself as freely as I thought I could. Facebook is a bulletin board I update twice a year, LinkedIn is a curated list of professional accomplishments, my website is my portfolio. But Instagram is a fun, experimental, slightly aesthetic mess where I can quickly and easily share my works and WIPs, interact with my friends, seek inspiration, blurt out my thoughts, and everything else that is necessary to the creative process – all at the same time.

I’m using the present tense because I’ve decided that is how it is going to be from now on, a certain financial analyst and overly cautious father of two be damned. But I digress.

When Covid-19 turned our lives upside down, costing us our jobs, plans and sanity, my family and I scrambled to find a source of income, anything to tide us by. Freshly unemployed with only a few months of job experience to show for, I put out an ad on Facebook offering art tutoring services on Zoom.

A man I would henceforth refer to as Brontosaurus reached out asking me for my rates, my CV, a letter of reference and a lesson plan for kids under 9. Ok, fair enough. I’m only charging $45 for an hour and offering to distract your kids during lockdown, but you’re a detail-oriented Type A guy and we all got time on our hands. Besides, this is good practice. My literotica can wait.

I send him everything as requested. I have a feeling it isn’t going to happen from the vibes I’m getting from this guy over email (brontosaurus vibes, if you will) but the manner in which he went about making his decision was something that I really didn’t expect and it baffles me to this day.

Not long after this interaction, Eric, my previous employer whom I listed as a reference forwards Brontosaurus’s email to him where he asked him what he thought of a doodle I posted on IG last year. ‘I think it would help to be more mindful about what kind of content you put online…’

I can’t find the original image anymore, so here is a faithful remake of it:

Isn’t it beautiful? This was me on Christmas Eve finding out over Facetime that someone I thought was our friend was a backstabbing, hypocritical, two-faced c*nt who tried to get my own mother to believe I was blowing my allowance on booze to justify withholding her salary. If you know me in real life, you’d know how outrageously insulting that is.

To add injury to insult, Brontosaurus is now trying to weasel his way out of committing to me as a teacher by asking someone who doesn’t even follow me on social media, someone I like and respect and have built rapport with, to justify this random drawing he has nothing to do with. In doing so, he embarrassed me in front of a mentor figure I looked up to and made me feel ashamed of my confessional cartoons, a silly but no less genuine form of therapy that got me through the tough times in life. Swallowing my mortification and the urge to curse out Bronto more colourfully than the two-faced c*nt that inspired the comic, I ask Eric, ‘Hey look, really sorry about this [apparently he had spent time trying to persuade Bronto to give me the job] but is it just me or is this kind weird?’

‘Yes it is weird lol, but people in life can be very weird sometimes. My advice to you is to not waste any more time on this guy and find someone who can tell the difference between art for kids and art for adults,’ he kindly replies, adding that Brontosaurus seemed like he was finding any reason to say no to me. And has succeeded.

Before you get on my case about the fine line between creativity and professionalism, and how that I, as a 20+ adult who has been practicing illustration for a few years now I should be able to strike a balance on this tightrope, let me save you the trouble by saying: I know. I know that in this day and age, image is everything and it is also extremely accessible. I know that recruiters go through social media accounts and things that would normally be none of their business with a fine-toothed comb as part of the protocol. I know that we live in a world where this one lady got fired for posting a picture of herself wearing a bikini on the beach on IG. I know that you are responsible for the eyes that land on the content you put out there and that is likely 80% of people’s first impression of you. I know that parents can be overbearing and overanxious sometimes, and in their zeal to make sure their kids are always safe in a carefully constructed bubble of wholesomeness, they put the onus on others to accommodate their child’s delicacies.

I know, and I’m fucking tired of it. Plain and simple.

It might seem like a small, petty thing, this comic that offended Bronto so much. Which is precisely why I was so upset. I can’t joke about an event that that caused me pain through a silly comic on my own IG account without losing a client? I can’t turn a sad and humiliating situation into a humorous picture-story without it undermining my all qualifications and achievements? Christ, I worked as a facilitator for kids and family programmes at an art museum before this. Call me childish, but the first thing that popped in my head when I saw Brontosaurus’s blatant attempt at virtue-signalling through that tattling email to Eric was, ‘Really? Not even this one thing? I can’t have this one fucking thing?’

Anyway, that is my own personal story about social media censorship and feeling like I was being silenced even if Bronto never confronted me directly about it (which he should have done in the first place rather than put my ex-employer in an awkward position, if it was so important to him to find an explanation for my content and probably my morals, by extension). I deleted the post and since then never shared anything as explicit even though I was no longer looking for teaching jobs. I privated my personal IG. I didn’t react to the hot button topics when they were trending on social media, even the ones that I felt strongly about. Whenever I thought of a funny story or incident that has happened to me, I would draw it in my sketchbook but refrain from sharing it online, thinking about the possible rebukes and judgment I’d draw not just from the rigid likes of Brontosaurus but from my family, my teachers, my mentors, my colleagues, my associates, and just about anybody else who follow me that I don’t necessarily want to share my mess with. Because, I felt, I couldn’t trust them to tolerate my mess.

It didn’t seem like a big sacrifice at the time. After all, I am protecting the easily provoked and their children, if they have any, from the truth of how fucked up life can be. I am shielding my dark side from those who would be concerned, like my family and friends. I am not alarming or annoying my followers in general, and I am not hurting my chances of employment if I, for some reason, decide to apply for a position at a conservative company that believes that my comedic use of expletives and dark humor in art affects my ability to perform tasks at work.

Then over time, little by little, my small sacrifice began feeling like an insidious ice pick chipping away at my essence, my core values, who I really am. Dramatic, but true. It came with the dawning realisation of one thing - what kind of storyteller am I if I am afraid of telling goddamn stories?!

I am not doing myself or my fellow artists, for that matter, any favours with these insistent, paranoid and frankly gaslighting reminders that I am not suffering from the more “serious” type of censorship that has gotten social activists thrown in jail or threatened with violence and death. Not to compare my besmirched sense of free speech on Instagram to the plight of war refugees or political dissidents, but the act of silencing a creator is a highly important issue of its own that warrants a resounding outcry from the community this affects. The constant undermining and silencing of an artist’s work leads to the degradation of high-quality content, discourse, knowledge and culture; it has been happening since the beginning of time, plaguing artists as long as art and its critics have been around, and I cannot believe I didn’t recognise this for what it is when it was happening to me.

I see it happen all the time on Youtube, with many of my favourite commentary channels getting demonetized because no one wants to place their ads on videos that honestly discuss crucial topics like child predators on the Internet and war in foreign countries and sexual assault. I see it happen with my friends, many of whom are also artists and content creators, with their posts getting taken down or reported for the most arbitrary reasons. Taking this beyond the virtual world, we all see it with established artists from certain countries when authorities get involved, demanding that their controversial shows be closed down for fear of radicalisation (Burmese painter Htein Lin and his 2019 show in Yangon come to mind); we see it with writers, too, with their books getting banned and burned and the authors themselves barraged with death threats (like Salman Rushdie after the publication of Satanic Verses).

These are all people who are far braver than I am. What about those who don’t have as big as a platform or as loud as a voice, those who do not have much support backing them or even enough confidence or self-esteem to stand their ground?

After my own experience, I can confirm that all it takes is a single criticism from a stranger who didn’t bother to get to know them to quash that voice. Never mind about my stupid comics – what about those other people whose messages we didn’t get to hear because they had their own brontosauruses going after them? Messages that might have raised awareness on an important issue, inspire us, generate discussion, make our day, perhaps even change our lives?

I’m not arrogant enough to think my doodles have that sort of impact, but there are definitely things out there that do, and the mere fact that they are being prevented from coming to light by old fogies who needed to have things their way all the time is, honestly speaking, criminal.

And I am complicit to that crime by letting myself, a self-professed storyteller and advocate for the arts, be silenced by some dumb old fart who just didn’t want to work with me and would rather bother my previous employer over dumb, irrelevant shit rather than just tell me nah.

It really is the ultimate creative conundrum: do we say fuck it and stay true to ourselves or sell out to get more likes and pay rent? How do we express how we really feel during an age of obsession over clean language, wholesome vibes and appealing to all sensibilities? What happens if we just want to speak the truth?

This is something for every creative individual to answer for themselves, but here is my own conclusion.

In the age of the Internet and hyper-capitalism, I concur that artists today do have to think of themselves as brands to an extent just to differentiate their work to an audience and freaking survive, but we are first and foremost human beings. This has always been the case and this will never change, no matter how conscious we are - or rather how conscious society has made us - of our marketability. We are people capable of complex thoughts and emotions who happen to also be gifted with the ability to articulate our ideas through visually creative ways (at least, when the self-doubting and agonizing part of the creative process is over). We are messy, dynamic, nuanced and experimental in our approach to life as well as our art. We think in the abstract, seeing beyond the structured rules and the superficial markers of value guiding the practical. We act in fits and bursts of inspiration, epiphany, and despair.

Ok yes, some of us are insufferable and pretentious morons too, but for the most part we are a decent bunch who throw awesome parties and support the hell out of our friends at art shows.

I think rather than trying to control the creative products or outputs of those you don’t understand, an option you can explore is to learn to accept that people – all types of people, not just artists - express themselves in certain ways to navigate what they are experiencing. Or, if you really can’t do that, manage what content you consume. What you don’t do is tell the person responsible for evoking a certain emotion out of you is that they are wrong for doing it.

Which is not to say that Brontosaurus was – gasp – completely in the wrong here. He is entitled to his opinion and, as he would argue, there is a degree of culpability on my part, too. I knowingly applied for a job involving teaching kids under 13 while having certain inappropriate content on a public page where a stickler parent like himself could stumble across it and be startled by what he finds there. It just didn’t occur to me that it would matter, because in my mind, teaching kids the fundamentals of drawing and the comics I make on the side for my friends’ entertainment are two separate things, and I am also not wrong for thinking this way. I thought it was clear that my Instagram is not for kids because kids should not be on Instagram and I should be free to express myself as I wish there even when marketing myself as an educator on other channels.

Which is why I recommend the option to keep learning and exploring: who knows, it might expand your horizons and open your eyes to the rich, colorful, noisy and textured world we artists occupy and help shape with our empathetic touch. Learn to differentiate the many contexts in which art is made, as Eric suggested. Fully appreciate the wide range of complexities we are capable of as human beings, and revel in the myriad of visual expressions that are generated from these multihued existences.

So in the spirit of reclaiming my artistic autonomy and personal voice, here are some more stupid and inappropriate comics I’ve made recently – and will post on social media soon.

Enjoy!