KEEPING IT REAL

When you just want to be the Undertaker so badly.
Also, “Country album dropping soon.” I couldn’t decide which phrase should be my opener, but I’m giving you both ’cause I can. I also had something vape-related, but I’m going to spare you from that one. You’re welcome.

Kane recently put me onto a photo-editing app called “Lens Distortion” that, well, adds lens distortions to your images, and this fog filter over the photos gave me life, so here they are.

I’m trying to go back to how I used to blog and share photos, before Instagram and algorithms and (trying to be) an “influencer” was thing. I used to basically art direct myself, all for a new profile photo to use on my Friendster (does anyone remember Friendster??) account, and I kind of miss that. I wasn’t really trying to show off an outfit, but rather, I was just trying to be creative.

Lately, I felt like I was editing the shit out of my photographs, not for fun, but just to get it to suit my Instagram aesthetic. Never Not in Black was a means to document my wardrobe, but my life certainly isn’t monochromatic. I was getting tired of feeling like I couldn’t post a photo because it didn’t suit my feed. I was especially getting tired of feeling disappointed when something I wanted to share didn’t come with its own black and white backdrop. For a hot minute, I questioned if I still wanted to keep blogging at all, because while I still consider it a hobby, it started to feel a lot like work, which was no bueno.

I read an article recently that made an interesting point about people who used social media to promote their personal brand. They said that a lot of these people (myself included) have a secondary private account where they post more of their “real life” moments. This results in their public accounts feeling more fake. In an effort to reclaim my joy, I even gave the new social media platform Vero a shot. However, I’m not totally sold on it yet, and the shady business that was published about the app and its CEO are making me weary about keeping my profile at all. So, back to the drawing board.

For the most part, I think we all know by now that social media can often be a manicured version of reality. Even so, it’s still really easy to peruse someone’s feed an feel like your life isn’t as exciting or fun or glamourous as theirs. My life isn’t always exciting or fun, and it sure as hell is rarely glamourous. I’ve always insisted that no matter how involved I am in social media, that my personal brand will always be about staying real. I feel like what you see on social media should be what you get IRL. Basically, I’m trying to stay true to that idea.

A lot of the influencers I follow, and whose content I genuinely like/enjoy/learn from, are able to curate their feeds in a very cohesive way, down to the (literal and figurative) tone of their images. I however, realized that I am just not build for that life. Sure, I’m always going to love a monochromatic moment—I am Never Not in Black, after all—but I really want to keep it really really really with you. The reality, for me, is that staging my photos for a cohesive feed just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I’m really enjoying the slight disarray of my feed currently, because it’s more of a reflection of the randomness of my day-to-day life.

That’s it. Resuming usual content now.