Counting down the days until I turn 30 is underwhelming. Anti-climatic.
Maybe I’ve already processed it; I’ve certainly overthought it the past couple of years and now nearly the eve of my next decade, I am not overly concerned.
I do wonder though, what’s next for me? Where will I go? What can I do for myself? How can I get to know her—this grown woman I’m becoming—better, deeper, more intimately?
One thing I’m pretty confident about (though I reserve the right to change my mind) is that I can’t sellout now.
Not out of spite or hubris or pretentiousness or signaled virtue. No, I think it is because I am probably too lazy to sellout now—to hustle, scheme, grind.
I have been watching you all for years now. You all being the collective blob of us taking up space online, stuffed into the seams of social media platforms, drinking in the internet.
Some of you, golly, have me really concerned about you. Others, well, you give me hope. Then there are some who prove every point I have made.
My day job requires I tell people to niche down, to identify their target audience and infiltrate the spaces where that audience collects. I tell them not to be so wary of social media, to be the expert in the thing they want people to buy or learn from them. I hope to instill confidence and impart enough knowledge so they will go out into the world with curiosity, focus, and unbridled hope for their success.
I don’t think I am a phony. I don’t feel like an imposter. My role and the extent to which I can help them is pretty clear to me.
But many of these people are not successful.
Why? It’s usually one of two reasons:
Their expectations are disproportionate to their reality (she needs to sort out her priorities)
They believe they are above doing the work/believe they are the exception to the work
The ones who are successful (maybe not by metrics but by personal satisfaction) are those who are ready to take on the reality before them, push themselves (within reason), and are hungry to try well.
Do I take my own advice? No, none of us do.
Maybe I’m a little jaded. I’m definitively tired by it all. But I do know what I need to do to be like my success-poster-children:
I need to adjust my expectations in relation to the landscape around me.
I must be ready to do the work and understand if I am unable to, I must accept it as not traction forward but something to be addressed within myself.
What I am not going to do is talk myself out of my goals and desires, but I need to be honest with myself.
I am a writer who has not made a ton of consistent effort over the years to establish myself in any particular community or position myself to grow my accolades.
While I have felt childishly foolish every time I put myself out there to lackluster acclaim, I can’t stop trying. What I need to do, what I should do—and the advice I would give to another—is to try something different.
Writers don’t just live and die on social media. I know better than to believe followers and engagement are the sole measures of success. I’m constantly coming across writers and artists who are kind of a big deal, but how funny, they have less than 10K on Instagram. Would you look at that?
When I have less than an avalanche of praise and engagement when I do publish anything online, I must understand that:
Algorithms suck and they love constant posting.
I do not post often or consistently enough for the algorithm to know what the fuck to do with me.
Feeds don’t show people everything anymore and they haven’t for a long, long while.
It’s not my fault, it’s not something I should shame myself about, but it is the state of things and evidence of where some work can be applied. And I’m ready to work, but I will be in no hurry to do so. I will continue to try and try well.
All my teenage years, I was in a rush to grow up and be independent. My early twenties were spent languishing in newfound semi-freedom and wrapped around the finger of toxic, counterfeit love. My mid-twenties were washed and sunbleached by the pandemic.
Now—fuck—I really don’t want to be in a rush. I don’t want to hurry up to anything at this point. I have a list of promises to my teenage self I want to fulfill because I still want them: to leave this town, to see the world, to find satisfaction and challenge in what I do with my time.
But I can’t rush anymore. It hasn’t gotten me much of anywhere. I watch my friends with their babies and their lives and I think, I’m excited to be there in a few years but I’m not going to rush to that future anymore. Now give me that kid of yours to shower with love so they’ll babysit mine one day.
I think the mental hurry I was in for all those years had me distracted. Or I used it as a distraction—the relationships, the drama, the idea of it all, the order things should happen in.
So, I’m done with that. And as I move forward, I can better discern what isn’t working for me.
Spoiler alert: one of those things is the hustle of the creator economy.
We’re entering into strange times on the digital landscape: it is bloated with bots talking to each other, placed ads are inescapable, and there is a generation of kids who aspire to be content creators when 20 years ago that “job” didn’t exist.
Last year, I predicted the internet would become quieter and more analog technology would be romanticized again (think blogs and fully tactile keyboards over apps and smudged phone screens).
Artists are revealing themselves and we are starting to slow things down after the ten to twenty year sprint to capitalize on the promises and opportunities the internet and social media had to offer.
We are slowing down and we should savor it. We should not fear it or believe we will get left behind.
How often does the car that just passed you going 50 in a 35 end up waiting for the same red light you’re stopped at now?
To rush, to hurry is human. But to want the peace more than the belief that we need to be some 50-odd steps ahead by tomorrow, that’s what it is to grow up.
Till next time,
River