NOTES ON BEING A TWENTY SOMETHING CREATIVE.
SOMEBODY TELL ME WHAT TO DO, PLEASE.
There’s something about sitting down to ‘figure your life out’ that makes you suddenly feel like you haven’t known a single thing in your life, ever. It is the ultimate ego-death. I wrote the piece above in an absolute fit. Truthfully it was just another attempt at procrastination in the midst of job application induced tail-spinning - it was either that (thought vomit into my notes app), or rage eat another bowl of cereal. Turns out it resonated.
For my small to medium Instagram account, I wasn’t expecting the engagement on this post. Nor did I write it for that purpose, it was an act of frustration - merely screaming into a digital void. But it seemed to hit a chord; nearly 600 likes, 21 comments, and 259 saves - well above my average. Not that Instagram engagement is anything to go by these days, with an algorithm acting like a corrupted politician who insists they’re ‘for the people’, but it proved a point. There’s a lot of us out there going through it right now. And being honest about it is the only way to not feel totally alone.
Statistically I know I’m not the only one who’s felt like this, but when you’re sat staring blankly at your CV and wondering what it is you’re actually capable of doing, there’s nothing more isolating. That feeling is only perpetuated the moment your brain checks out, hand automatically reaching for your phone, and you spend the next 30-40 minutes doom-scrolling through social media. The feeling festers, with each passing Instagram story of your friend, or your friend’s friend you met once, or even a person you’ve never met in your life, all seemingly doing much much more than you. And looking great whilst doing it. Instead of rationalising that these people are only showing a carefully curated version of their lives, you turn your judgement back on yourself and question ‘Why haven’t I got my shit together?’. Then you go back to pretending like you do. For social media smoke and mirrors.
When you’ve used your social media account as a platform to build an online, likeable, followable, employable persona - one that is always busy, put together and purposeful - the last thing that feels natural is to reveal that you really don’t know what you’re doing. In a success-oriented, workaholic, youth obsessed culture where you’ve only truly achieved notoriety if you’ve done it before you’re 25, where does it leave the rest of us still trying to figure it out? Perfection, or the aspiration of perfection is so toxically twisted into capitalism and social media, that we cannot escape the fear that if we dared to share our vulnerabilities, we will be kicked out of the tribe. Judged and broke.
With every year I get further away from my graduation, the voice inside my head screams louder that I haven’t made it yet. I look to my left and see other creatives my age, or in most cases much younger, reaching their ‘potential’ with great speed and critical acclaim. I look to my right and see jobs and roles I wished I could be doing right now, but feel out of reach. We live in a world of contradictions; how can I get to those positions when they require the experience only acquired from doing said job? How can I have years of work behind me and still feel like I am under-qualified? In rolls the insecurity and uncertainty.
And yet I know that from the outside, for the most part, it looks like I have reached a ‘made it’ point. Because I made it look so. It’s far too easy to curate 5-10 Instagram stories documenting your day, whilst truly saying nothing at all. This detachment of online persona versus reality has increasingly made me feel like a fraud, I’m just pretending to be a version of me just for validation from strangers. And perpetuating an unrealistic standard for everyone else around me, viewing this curated version of my life in comparison to their own.
So this is me once again, saying I don’t know what I’m doing. This time a little more publicly. I’m not saying that I’ll stop curating 5-10 Instagram stories per day, because there’s a large part of me that enjoys the curation, as an act of creative expression. It just needs to be balanced out with a large, humbling amount of honesty alongside it.
This wasn’t intended to be a motivational piece. And I’m not by any means saying that I have it bad in life, in fact I’m very privileged to be able to sit and write about feeling lost, whilst in a limbo period of ‘trying to figure it out’. But every person is going through their own shit, it’s no good playing the who’s got it worse game. All you can do is find some comfort in a sense of mutual understanding and community. I know I suddenly felt less alone when I thought I was screaming into nothing, and a whole bunch of people screamed back.
