Don’t Call Me a Content Creator (part 2)
“I hope to create content that speaks to and awakens people’s highest selves. Content that allows people to view the world and the human beings who inhabit it with more compassion, love, and lightness. Content that evokes people to demand more from themselves and the world around them. Content that requires me to be thoughtful and thorough. And, most importantly, content that I simply have fun making.” — Don’t Call Me a ‘Content Creator’ (part 1)
At an internship I had a few years ago, my coworkers reacted to a blog post that I shared with them in an introduction meeting in a way that left me feeling like the kind of writing I most enjoy doing would be a distraction or wouldn’t be taken seriously in a professional setting.
As I’ve thought about what it might be like to have a more traditional career in media, I still feel like I’ve spent a lot of time and energy over the past few years on projects and goals that served others’ visions, or that hindered my own vision by being consumed by how I thought other people would perceive it and whether or not it, and I would be taken seriously.
On top of that, leaving school for the first time in 2019 and then learning I have ADHD before I left for the second time in 2021 further unraveled the attachment of my worth and value to worldly success. Which lead to the unraveling of major parts of my identity — who I believed my self to be, for better and worse, and what my priorities were.
Through all of those moments — which on deeper reflection pointed to a lifetime of experiences — I recognized that I internalized a really powerful and pervasive inner critic out of fear of facing the possibility that maybe those people were right: that my authentic self and contributions are actually not good or worthy or needed.
Before college, I started a blog to create a space to have more control and intention with how I shared my voice and, really, my self. It was a way for me to document (albeit publicly) my process of self-discovery by expressing my thoughts and feelings about a variety of topics.
Through journalism, I was able to extend that approach by covering topics that I found interesting or that resonated with me, bringing awareness to things happening in Black communities, and learning from community leaders working to address them in the process.
These roles of being someone who cared deeply about my agency and individuality when it came to my voice, coupled with my aspirations of being taken seriously as a writer and media professional — lead to the idea of having to center my self publicly to bring attention to my work feeling icky and unnecessary, but I also recognize that the things I wrote about and shared matter because I wrote them, just as much as what I wrote in and of itself.
I remembered how powerful a tool that writing is for me to simply gather and explore my thoughts, feelings, and ideas. When I decided in 2019 to write a book’s worth of essays the writing process was for me to work through present and past emotions and experiences. I spent a lot of time unsure if I would actually finish it, or if I would publish it if I did.
My fears about writing again and putting out this book ring true to my fears about showing up fully and authentically as a human being: How deeply are people actually willing to engage me and my work? What if people don’t think it’s good? What if it’s not objectively good?
Especially today, with the lines between “content creators” and writers and journalists and communicators being blurred significantly.
Not that you have to share things about your personal and private life to build a brand, but the requisites for grasping people’s attention on the internet today feel exemplified by oversharers on TikTok, YouTube lifestyle, podcast bros, couple and family vlogs that inevitably end in joint breakup video statements, and anxiety about whether your close friends content is interesting enough to warrant people’s attention.
While this has allowed more people to have access to the tools and knowledge to make creative content, it also hasn’t necessarily come with editorial standards including things like fact-checking that also fuel misinformation and enable shitty media literacy and consumption practices. Much of it is what will grab people’s attention fast, even if it’s flagrant and inflammatory, or just blatantly not correct and people think they’re amplifying accurate information.
I also think this world and society, by and large, do not teach us the importance of — or even how to — explore and discover ourselves, and see that as a separate endeavor from doing what you need to do to survive or meet a basic human need for attention and love and belonging or achieve material success.
I’m very much still exploring what it means to be human and be a writer, let alone what I want a career as a writer to look like. I know that lives and careers — both practices — take time to build.
What I want is to not feel afraid to take up space within my self, my life, my relationships — and to allow that to anchor me as I explore how I want to take up space elsewhere in the world.
I’ve done a lot of work to enjoy the journey of living for living’s sake, rather than living solely to get interesting content. I still want to document my life and my journey, but it doesn’t feel as necessary as it did before. Now it just feels like work — and there are parts of that that scare me, and other parts that remind me of the dreamer I knew my self to be two or even four years ago.
I know that at that time, I wanted (and needed) to seek clarity, explore my ideas and curiosities, and potential, at a pace and in a way that I could decide and have control and agency over. But I also subconsciously was overcompensating for and hoping to one day receive validation that I was on the right path, and ultimately I think for that deeper connection and belonging. Whole time, that was never God’s intention for me and I did my self a disservice by cutting off my mouthpiece for me to connect directly with my readers, human to human, and not founder or employee or board member to market. If I waited for the validation and approval of other writers, publications or publishers, readers, and even my loved ones, I would have done nothing and gotten nowhere.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to get back into writing for my self creatively again, but also about what it would mean to build an archive of my work. I dream about building and facilitating community spaces online and offline not only for the production of content and storytelling, but to talk about and engage more deeply with the work and ideas shared in said content.
For me personally, social media is (and I believe, should be) about the promotion and distribution of my work and a means to connect with my audience, rather than the sum total of my work itself. At this point, I don’t mind just sharing that work in the void and hoping other people find it valuable and important. I really just want to create and share. I guess going viral isn’t the point, but I also would love for my work to reach and have a positive impact on as many people as possible.
It feels incredibly fickle to aspire to work endlessly to contribute my limited human time and energy to create things that dissipate into the digital atmosphere: I did that with pieces from the blog I started in high school, along with bylines from my earliest internships, however, most of them just disappeared with website re-builds or with people just deciding the pieces were no longer relevant. There are memories associated with those pieces, along with burnout that has had real-life implications on my health (more than it should for my age) and time spent that I’m not going to get back — even though I may be “young with a whole career ahead of me.”
So much of my early 20s and early career experience has left me feeling like I was seen and positioned as a machine that is expected to constantly produce content. There was little to no room to sit with and explore ideas, think critically about what you wanted to say and why, research, or focus on the selection and use of each word and phrase to find the perfect one. Just the final product of content.
I have never had the desire to and now I definitely don’t have the capacity to constantly cater to manufactured “short attention spans” and people simply not wanting to read and engage thoughtfully with ideas. I absolutely am committed to finding creative and innovative ways to make my written work more accessible and baking that into my process. But I am done uncritically bending to ever-changing social media and digital algorithms and expectations that cater to the attention economy and a culture that enables shitty media and information consumption practices.
“The attention span of everything now has even gone into mediums like a TV performance. Where they’re like ‘No, we can’t lose the viewer so we have to cut and do this.’ But like — this piece is gonna live forever, I don’t give a fuck about the viewer. This piece is gonna live forever. I’m in this. It’s just me, we’re gonna make this good. I want this good for my standards — good. I don’t care about an audience, I don’t want to get Lil Cha-Cha’s fucking reaction.” — Tyler, The Creator Interview with Fast Company
Sources of satisfaction for me in my writing include discovering and claiming my autonomy, agency, and ownership of my work and contributions. I find it in exploring deeper levels of my identity and lived experience, in using my writing as a way to connect with people authentically through the creation process and through the final piece. I love exploring how to connect my own personal experiences and pop culture moments to larger social issues or universal experiences in the human condition.
I want to have more positive experiences and memories associated with getting to explore ideas, dig into writing, express my self, and connect with other people who like nerding out on their crafts and ideas, processes, etc.
And I want to create a body of work that represents my interests and curiosities, that punctuates my growth as a human being and woman, that illustrates how certain things change and evolve but the essence of you stays the same throughout all of that.
With that, I’m excited to share that my self-published debut book, The Morning Always Comes — reflections on being and becoming, is on its way (ideally by June 30, 2023). The book is a collection of essays on identity and coming of age through the lens of a young Black, neurodivergent woman from the South.
I used to feel like I didn’t have the time and space to write about topics and issues that I care most deeply about — specifically pieces that find a balance of creative writing and cultural commentary on sociopolitical issues, rather than hyperfocus on social justice issues in a way that feels boring and like posturing, rather than finding new angles in that resonate more deeply with people. But I realized, especially after beginning the journey to write these essays, that I was giving my self space and time to think about and come to — not necessarily conclusions, but my truth or clarity in my own perception — about those issues as it relates to the vantage point of my lived experience.
I believe I have done a good job at beginning to work to rebuild a healthy self-concept beyond my aspirations, and beyond what the world says about young neurodivergent Black girls from the South, the journey to which is documented in the essays of this book.
Now that I’m essentially at the finish line, I also feel like I have limited my self in some ways out of fear of being that same naive dreamer that I was, so this book is also a transition point for me to get back to the work that I most deeply enjoy — the work of being human, and exploring that work through my own creative writing.
I have appreciated the time and space over the past 3 1/2 years or so to think about who I am and am becoming, as I write and work on this project. I believe I am now transitioning into a time of more sharing, and I’m ready to make space for newer ideas, feelings, and experiences.
To stay up to date on the book rollout journey, be sure to follow me on Instagram @kesifelton to be able to see and share upcoming content, subscribe to my newsletter below, and fill out the distribution and pre-order interest form here if you already know you’ll be supporting the book (thank you so so much in advance!!).
I’m excited to begin this next part of my journey with y’all: Pre-sale will open on June 12, and the official book launch will (hopefully) be on June 30. As I’ve touched on, being a writer in a content creator’s world is weird, so I’m excited to also be able to share a series of photos that I collaborated on with Atlanta-based photographer Daniella Almona to bring some themes and concepts from the essays to life in a beautiful way (and that will also be more palatable to the feed). Stay tuned — the TMAC takeover begins now 🌤️ — kf
Learn More: www.kesifelton.com/themorningalwayscomes
