Out With the Aloof, In With the Earnest
Or: This one goes out to my fellow Try-Hards
Story time:
As much as I hate to say it, middle and high school me used to claim she hated pink.
Now, if you’ve met me as an adult and/or seen any of the outfits I choose to wear or the photos I post, you may be thinking wtf Kat, you seem to be riding the pink train big time. That’s true now, but it wasn’t always.
As a kid who desperately wanted to fit in (and was raised in a society where the likes and interests of girls and women are constantly diminished and belittled!!), I decided to go the pick-me girl route and broke up with pink for many years. Thank goodness I’ve since worked through my internalized misogyny and seen the error of my ways. (Honestly, reincorporating pink into my life has been a massive exercise in healing my inner child.) Now I’m 💗proudly rocking pink💗 once more. In fact, the color is a huge feature of my website and much of my personal branding,
PS thank you to Greta Gerwig and the Barbie movie for helping us all embrace the color and all things “girly” for an epic Pink Girl Summer.
See, the problem with suppressing who you are for social cache is that it rarely works — people can smell inauthenticity a mile away. (Case in point: I eschewed a favorite color as a teen and still didn’t have many friends to show for it.) Our well-honed spidey sense for fake-ness makes sense, given how chronically online my generation is. When everything is documented and shared, both candid and not, it becomes easy to spot half-truths.
The fear of being found out (hello, imposter syndrome) coupled with how quick the folks of the internet are to deem just about anything “cheugy”, “basic”, or “millennial,” is enough to make anyone shy away from sharing anything at all. Why bother to share your joys and your gifts if you could be found guilty of being cringe in the court of public opinion? And most often, “cringe” is synonymous with any action not perceived as effortless. Show you care and be crucified. Your cool factor depends on how above-it-all you seem.
This environment provides a constant struggle for creatives trying to share their work online. Sharing and promoting your artistry publicly inherently requires a level of visible caring. The act of creation, whatever your medium, is already a raw and vulnerable experience to begin with, without culture vultures swooping in to peck the fruits of your labor apart. Being a creative online, or worse, a creative entrepreneur, feels like a constant balancing act between doing what feels authentic and aligned while managing to stay on-trend and on-message (and the overlap of that Venn Diagram is sliiiim baby). Being deemed “cringe,” or as the kids used to call it in my day, a “try-hard,” feels like the nail in any creative’s coffin.
This is why we have some important things to put into perspective as we embark on building a creative presence online. This perilous journey has been dubbed by TikTokers @erica_mallett and @courtney..johnson (among others) “Climbing Cringe Mountain.” The most important part of this analogy is remembering that on the other side of this mountain lies the kind of success that will give everyone selective amnesia that you were ever just getting started and slightly cringe-worthy.
As has been oft pointed out: the only people who will judge you for being “cringe” in your self-promotion are people who have never climbed cringe mountain themselves. You know the type: they might have creative inklings of their own, but are clinging to fear and shame while lacking the courage to share themselves, so instead they sit around judging the people who aren’t afraid to be seen trying (or who are afraid as hell and choose to do it anyway 😉). These are not the people whose opinions you should let hinder you.
That successful podcast host you admire? They’ve scaled cringe mountain already and wouldn’t dare make fun of you for doing the same. The painter whose work consistently goes viral? That travel lifestyle blogger you envy? Yeah, they too would likely applaud your early efforts if they could. If I can impress anything upon you, dear fellow creative, I want to tell you to have the courage to be seen trying.
The people who would judge you probably secretly wish they were as brave as you. Meanwhile anyone who’s already done it gets it, and they’re the ones who’ll help and encourage you on your journey.
Thankfully, it seems at least in some pockets of the internet that we are moving away from curating ourselves into teensy, digestible pieces devoid of humanity for the sake of aesthetics. (The prevalence of #nofilter “photo dump” style Instagram posts is a promising trend, but also begs the question: are we merely curating our wholeness in a new way to fit a more “casual-seeming” standard?)
Being a person and a creative in the age of social media is a zoo and it feels like the goalposts are always moving, but I know I am personally over trying to seem nonchalant and aloof, as if nothing takes effort. I’m a passionate human! And I am officially declaring that owning how you show up in the world is cooler than any fleeting trend could ever be.
Listen up: Earnestness is in, people! Cooler-than-thou posturing for the sake of socials is out. (And like Stephanie J. Block in her big 11 o’ clock number, I’m screlting for it to get out and stay out.)
These Are a Few of My Favorite Things (this week)
This is where I’m gonna be sharing assorted cool shit. It’s also a place for me to put you onto some of the coolest people I have the pleasure to know, pay it forward, and give folks their flowers. You can always scroll to this part if you’re a TL;DR type of person. I won’t judge.
💃 Speaking of social media and girlhood…
This Vox article got me thinking more critically about how our culture turns everything aesthetic into a trend, and how we sometimes feel inclined to find the box we fit in best — lately this is extending to figuring out what kind of “girl” you are. As someone who also works in the beauty industry, in makeup looks for this spring/summer, we’ve already seen trends named “strawberry girl,” “tomato girl,” “latte girl,” “clean girl,” and more. And of course in July we all transformed into Barbie girls.
This feels like a fun and harmless way to try on a new identity for a spell, but is it really just a new way to package girls women (yes, women, ahem) for easy public consumption? I don’t find these trends all that insidious but it is funny (not funny “haha”, funny *weird*) to me that women are the ones creating trends like “girl dinner.” We want to share our experiences online and commune over the often humorous ties that bind our experiences as women and girls. A natural inclination! However, in meme-ifying our experience for maximum share-ablity, more opportunities arise for people across gender lines to pick “girl” trend and the human women behind them apart. Give the article a read and weigh in with your thoughts below! I’d love to discuss.
🌳 The perfect Central Park date for lovers of the Bard
If you thought I was gonna say the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park — psych! (I mean yes, that is awesome too, and you should go if you can get tickets.) The Central Park Shakespearean experience I am speaking of is the unrehearsed production of A Midsummer Night’s dream I saw (for free!) last weekend that had me belly laughing beside a crowd of strangers so enthralled that we collectively ignored the August heat. The Unrehearsed series is produced by Barefoot Shakes and puts actors who have not rehearsed the show with one another, who are just barely off-book, together in front of an audience. Featuring line “referees” blowing their whistles when an actor went off-script, a dollar swear jar, act-break mini games, and even a guest appearance from Demetrius’s crying baby, suffice it to say hilarity ensued.
In addition to seeing my acting class pal kill it as Oberon (hey, Laurel!), I was simply having the best damn time enjoying one of Shakespeare’s comedies as it was meant to be performed: in the open air with silliness and gusto. It made me miss my outdoor Shakespearean theatre days and made my heart smile more than any other recent theatergoing experience. If you’re reading this on Saturday, September 2nd when this is published, there is a second performance TODAY at 4pm in Central Park at Summit Rock (W 85th St entrance) that you should get your cute booty to!
🎸 The best damn debut album I’ve heard in a loooong time
I know I’m a few weeks late to the party, but I was finally able to listen to Reneé Rapp’s full-length debut album Snow Angel this week. It knocked my fucking socks off. Sorry to my Olivia Rodrigo stans, but the vibe of this album is essentially what I wanted Sour to be. Don’t get me wrong, there are tracks on Sour I adore, but Reneé managed to record a no-skip heartbreak/coming-of-age album with superior vocals and lyricism and I cannot get enough. Like, I texted my friend comparing it to Alanis’s iconic fuck-you album Jagged Little Pill. Time will tell on that prediction, but I think this album has the makings to secure Rapp’s launch to pop stardom. My angsty-music-loving soul is gonna keep drinking these tracks up on repeat, baby. (PS, Reneé gets extra credit for writing Pretty Girls, which is officially the queer anthem of the year in my book 💅🏻🌈🦄)
Crafting Connections
This is where I’m gonna leave you with a big ol’ question. Something to ponder, have a moment with your journal over, or to connect about with me & other creatives in the comments. To not only (hopefully) connect to one another, but to connect the dots between the seemingly unrelated, and connect to yourself in ways you may not have considered yet!
What is something you used to love that you stopped doing/being for fear of others’ judgement?
Bonus: I challenge you to find a way to incorporate that old creative flame into your week. (Rock that novelty piano tie! Sing in the shower at the top of your lungs! Go to the park and make terrible drawings with chalk or pour your heart out into a mediocre poem! Your creativity doesn’t have to be “good” for you to get something out of it 😘)
I can’t wait to hear your thoughts & musings! Also feel free to share pertinent moments from your trek up cringe mountain in the comments 👇
xx
Kat