227. Going Back to Go Forward
getting over instagram, starting this newsletter, and the importance of a good pivot.
Dear reader,
Last week, I spoke about leaving halfway through a PhD in Neuroscience for the glamorous life of an independent writer and cartoonist. For a while after, I described myself as a writer and cartoonist. As the comics fell away, but I drew more and more, I bashfully began to use writer/artist. Then, just artist. Not knowing people who know people, I had only social media to reach an audience. And by algorithmic design and public mood, the space for words appeared to shrink every day. I had no choice but to play along.
A part of me remained dissatisfied by this turn of events. Art has power. Lines and shapes have power. But words have always had power over me. After all, words are also lines and shapes, arranged in a particular sequence, to evoke a particular response. In so many ways, drawing and writing are the same thing!
In today’s post, I want to talk about going back to words, and the need to pivot in the face of great adversity.
The SneakyArt Post is a publication of secretly drawn art of the world. Every week, I share the latest drawings from my sketchbooks and thoughts & observations from my journey as an artist and writer (and parent!).
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Going back to Go Forward
This newsletter began as a response to two enormous adverse forces in my life.
COVID-19 was the first. The pandemic crashed into my life, as it did yours, like a tsunami. It obliterated my sweet, sweet plans, cancelled many lucrative projects, and left me adrift. I could not go out to draw. I could not be in crowds. I could not be around the peers from whom I had learned so much.
Instagram was the second adversity. Enforced isolation and existential anxieties drove us deeper into our devices. Social media corporations (and streaming platforms) made big money off our fears and scrambled attention.
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Writing helped me confront my thoughts and dwell on the ideas that interested me. Working with words was like talking to myself. The more time I spent writing about my art, my inspirations, and my observations, the more space they occupied in my mind. The more space I gave to these things I valued, the less room I had for vagrant, intrusive thoughts. Less room for the distractions of my various screens - gloom and ticking numbers on some, and saccharine escapism on others. Writing helped me regain my time and attention.
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As a self-taught artist, as an immigrant in the US, as a person who does not know any people in the right places, does not hang out at the cool parties, I could not have anything without social media. Sharing my drawings online was my only path to building an audience. Making posts and stories and reels was the only way to communicate what I was trying to do, my journey as an artist, and my discoveries about my world and myself. At the same time it is an awful way to reach and connect with people.
Instagram is not a marketplace, it is closer to a Las Vegas casino. The lights are always on, some people wear costumes and play tricks, everyone is pretending to be someone else, and the spotlight is always searching for the next big thing. Most importantly, the house always wins.
As an artist, you do not have free access to the people who want to see your work. You do not have a way to communicate that is not mediated, managed, curated, and throttled by the corporation. Your interaction is channeled into narrow forms of expression that restrict your freedom. Your work is placed on a fast-moving carousel that trains users to swipe, swipe, keep swiping. We are all just prisoners here of our own device(s). Only the house wins.
Even acquiring hundreds of thousands of followers did significantly improve my experience of this ecosystem:
It locks us in a race that nobody wants to run, but nobody wants to lose either. We are racing against each other, because the likes must go higher and higher. But the likes are kept scarce in an artificial manner - a starvation diet maintained by the algorithms.
The like button is a tyrant, not a liberator.
Writing every week is a way to reclaim my attention and respect yours.
A newsletter is consensual on both sides of the equation. I write and publish when I am able, at a pace that is comfortable to me. You open the post when you decide. Until then, it waits (in chronological position) in your inbox. There is no need for tricks.
Writing in this way allowed me the space to think about my words. It gave me the opportunity to think about what I was doing and why. For a long time I thought the artist-self was at war with my writer-self. That both could not coexist. Now I see them in harmony. The process of art is driven by the subconscious. But writing must be more deliberate. The words are a way to explain things to you, and also a way to understand myself.
I sat in front of a tree to indulge in what critic Walter Benjamin called “free contemplation”:
Walter Benjamin spoke about an audience being unable to fully immerse themselves in art. But the crisis today might extend to the audience’s inability to fully immerse themselves in reality. We are pulled in different directions, toward things that are not real, people that do not belong to our world, and events that have nothing to do with us. The great struggle is to reclaim our attention from the vultures trying to monetize every waking moment... [continue reading]
It is easy to pivot when you are free. It is easy to pivot when you are light and agile. Being an independent creative makes me light and agile and free. It is one of the few advantages of working this way, but it is very precious to me.
Freedom was the dream when I quit my PhD program and academic life. Following that path of curiosity has brought me here, with these words and lines, to your inbox. It was the dream I clung to even as a small IG account - refusing to obey trends, not drawing what others did, not presenting myself the way others did. It is why I draw the way I do. It is how I have my style.
The dream behind this newsletter is the desire for freedom. By giving me a space in your inbox, and a share of your time and attention every week, you help make it possible. This equation has produced some of my best writing:
🐣 Parenthood, and thoughts about the dreamscape of Rohan’s mind as I watch him sleep
🤳🏼 A status update, and reflections on becoming a huge Instagram account
✒️ Good lines, and other reasons to use a fountain pen
🤖 Skepticisms, and observations about Art and Artificial Intelligence
🖼️ Why everyone should own art and what I am doing to make it possible
My best writing is enabled by readers such as yourself. But SneakyArt Insiders allow me to share it with everyone, without worrying about aggressively paywalling my content. Insider support helps me open the gates and unlock the commons.
If you believe in my mission to follow my own compass and share what I find with as many people as possible, take this spring offer to support the dream.
Thank you, again, for your time and attention. I am glad to be able to speak with you.
Art is therapy. Social media corrupts the artist. Art then becomes a cyanide microdose. The therapy becomes a self-imposed expectation that lacerates where it should heal.
There are consequences to going public with your language.
This resonated SO much. That reminder that the house always wins just further confirms for me that it is best to invest my energies somewhere with more depth to connection and less bias towards the IG algorithm. Thanks for the reminder!