every time i heard the term 'brand' in the sense of turning your image and content into a marketable product, i just associate it with austin powers
lately I've been anxious about the prospect of being a Person Posting on the Internet while also having a publicly facing day job. like at this point no one really reads this blog and i have less than 10 followers, buuuuut i feel like there's this. conflict? perhaps?
like:
so what happens if you're an artist because that's the essence of your being, you're not a career artist because that would kill your motivation, so you chose a Career that's about being socially perceived and interacting with people, but also you're autistic so you interact with people Weirdly in a Clinically Significant Manner, but also no one's expecting an autistic adult to work in these care fields so your weirdness is just attributed to personal incompetencies all the time..
sorry. i'm feeling insecure and paranoid these days! i don't feel good about my work persona but i also feel like i have to maintain and protect my work persona, and then i feel like i have to keep my friends & family persona private and invisible, but also how do i use the internet to connect with people and share my art (presumably where Anyone can view it)???
i have friends who do Arts Career Work that sometimes involve, like, teaching teen art classes at community centres n stuff, but i feel like i have to be my Institutionally-Friendly Work Persona first and then everything else comes second. and that feels stifling and like i'm giving up opportunities to have people read my writing and enjoy the silly lil things i make.
i never want to be an Influencer or an Online Personality. my friends who have had that kind of status (or known people who have) have largely found it miserable and stressful and leading to shitty interactions, and i'm terrified of that. but we kinda morphed our Celebrity Culture into the online world and started getting weird and parasocial to people whose accounts we can follow and i think it's hard to picture an alternate way of following and appreciating a person who Posts things You Like.
at some point i wanna rewatch serial experiments lain, maybe with someone who watched it decades ago when it was still new and speculative - it first aired when i was about a year old (!) so it's like.. by the time i gained consciousness and started using the internet, the social impacts of the internet were already starting to form and influence the development of my identity and relationships and self-perception. and i feel like when i'm talking about all these different versions of myself (the version i am online, the version i am in my "personal life" which i have to compartmentalize with the "professional" version, the latter only existing so i can maintain my income and continue being housed n shit) - it's like in lain where there are gradually different versions of lain that develop and eventually the 'reality' in the narrative dissolves completely, so you stop asking yourself which one is the 'authentic' lain because what does that even mean anymore?
i mean like... that's an intense metaphorical way of putting it, but it's also a Mood. idk who i am and i know i don't want my work persona to absorb the other ones, but i also don't know if i can keep the other ones alive and connected in a way that doesn't take away the agency i have over my work persona