Alienated Impostor

Leaflet Preface

I was debating mirroring this one to the Leaflet. The blog already has a few since-I-made-the-Leaflet posts that have not been mirrored for one reason or another.

But as we all know, personal sites don't have that Attention-Trap™ reach. And, I've been told my Social Media struggle posts make other people feel like they aren't crazy. Or, they make people go "wow, even a person like that can feel that way about Social Media?! Wow…"

So, bone-apple-teeth—another Social Media struggle-post hot off the personal website presses. Also spews my RSS > timeline propaganda at you real quick. Ok go.

I've been saying it over and over, but with depression stank all over the words. Now I think I can say it "sober" (so to speak… I'm a soft-drink-Susie—what do I know).

My achievements feel like prisons.

My achievements: feel, like, prisons.

That's why my website feels so safe. There are few marks of achievement here. The only real one is the hit-counter, and that's not really an achievement, more of a mark of site age.

Social Media

My advice to anyone would be: never blow up by accident. Ideally, your social media account should slowly grow for the one merit you want it to grow based on. Or else, you might lose your mind.

I blew up on accident. It's dumb: I hated how much the Twitter and Instagram audiences/algorithms were loud and proud for pop culture fanart, but went cricket-silent for Original Characters (unless you were a beloved fanartist who pivoted into creating OCs). So I guess I was "smart" or whatever for taking the opportune time and place of a new platform with "build-your-own-algorithm freedom" and making multiple Original Character and Comic-Centric algorithms for people to discover work and connect to creators with the same type of creative muses (OCs!) as them. I also made a couple OC/comic-centric art shares… I dunno. Back when I was a peaceful, 300-follower Andy, I said if I ever "made it" or whatever, I'd uplift others because being a 300-follower Andy was lonely. So I uplifted others… and it hella inflated my account.

But, y'know, "yay! Kumbaya! Peace and Love on Planet Earth!! We are all holding hands and spinning in a circle, because now Original Character art isn't as forsaken as it was on peak-Twitter and peak-Instagram. HikaTamika™ has successfully made it easy to share and find OC art on Bluesky, just in time for Bluesky to open its doors to the public.

And then people started to recognize me as one of the key "community builders" of early art-and-OC-Bluesky and followed/respected me for that. Then, when Bluesky introduced Starter Packs, follow-all lists for new users to quickly fill up their feeds with, people started including me in those out of that aforementioned respect or whatever, for being an early ArtSky pioneer. Or, for my various minority statuses in order to promote equality (not a bad thing).

But now, I hold an account that has rocketed up due to respect for my nerdy code competency, community-building, and my held minority statuses, up as a quality standard for my art to achieve.

I have to make 7,500-follower-quality art that gets 7,500-follower-quality engagement metrics, or else I'm a fraud, even though art isn't the merit through which my account inflated up in the first place. If I have 7,500 followers, I should be able to start a 7,500-follower-quality shop with 7,500-follower-quality items and get 7,500-follower-quality sales numbers… or else I'm a failure. Surely someone with 7,500 followers should be able to make 7,500-follower-level money, whatever that is. And if they can't, it's just cause their art isn't 7,500-follower-good enough. Uh-oh! My art isn't 7,500-follower-good enough… I am… a failure…

This is the trip-and-fall journey my mind took… despite me never having 7,500-follower-quality art in the first place. Just 7,500-follower-worthy art feeds for people to use. Hell, do people even use any of them anymore? (I wish I could get metrics for that, so I could just delete them if it turns out no one really uses them anymore anyway.)

Graphic Design

Ah, my degree. The "IRL" bars of this mental cage.

I was never the quiet student who could coolly and effortlessly produce work that both followed the laws and logic of graphic design and was aesthetically Silicon Valley appropriate, but boy, was I passionate about those laws and logic. And the software. And the printing/manufacturing process. And just learning more about graphic design. ASD superpower go brrrr.

Yeah, whatever—I feel like they should have failed me more. Being passionate and loving learning isn't enough. Is it weird that I feel like it's not a university's role to give me gold stars for learning, but to instead prepare me for whatever hellscape workforce awaits me after my degree is finally in my hands?

Yeah, yeah, I can design things that communicate clearly and effectively, and follow a certain logic and visual hierarchy, and convey both objective information and the subjective atmospheres and vibes that a client would want to communicate to their audience.

Although I can chameleon my design output to any established (or yet-to-be-established) brand or vibe, I have such wackadoo personal branding and vibes that… it makes people not want to hire me, I think. I have experience, but it looks so chaotic on a resume ("freelance here, employee there, what's this gap about?") instead of a steady stream of downtown-metropolitan design agencies, and again, I feel like it makes people not want to hire me.

So, given those issues, my silly bachelor's degree feels like a noose around my neck.

I get a 9-to-5 office job as a graphic designer, and work hard, and finally feel like a Real Adult™, only to be unceremoniously laid off without any stated fault or failing when it's time for me to get access to my employee benefits, and I figure, "that wouldn't happen to someone actually deserving of my degree".

My current main, stable source of income is being the guy that prepares (real) photos and makes (handmade) social media graphics (← that's me, that's the bounds of my role) to go with someone else's chatGPT captions that are then marketed as part of a "Social Media Management package" to small businesses (← I only found out once I was entirely financially dependent on the gig). And I feel icky and gross because I figure "someone actually deserving of my degree would get hired to do more fulfilling work at somewhere that actually respects every part of the creative process! (Including writing!!)" But I apply for different jobs/gigs and get rejected/ghosted like clockwork over and over again.

I apply for retail. And most times, I get rejected because they figure I can "do better"!! Because I have a bloody graphic design degree!! But when I do make it to an interview, I feel bad, and dumb, and stupid, because I "have a bachelor's degree" and therefore "should" be able to do better, but no, instead I let my family down… because they supported me through this whole college thing. Only for the college to let me through to graduation because I was so "bright" or whatever, and passed the classes, and loved to learn, and loved graphic design so much even though I seemed incapable of making anything the job market would actually want to pay for.

And So

It all makes me wish I had never obtained a bachelor's degree or 7,500 followers in the first place.

I wish I could post art without it having to be art that would make me deserving of having 7,500 followers as an artist. I wish I could do work without it having to be work that someone with a bachelor's in graphic design would/should do.

The stoic reader might say, "Just do it, 5head. Just post the 'bad' art and do the 'bad' jobs. People get things they don't deserve all the time!" But I can't. I wouldn't call it brain jail if it wasn't brain jail. I need all my followers to go through my media tab/art tag and really stop and think like, "Am I following this guy because I like their art, or is it an OCsky-feed-respect thing?" I can't stand 15,000 eyes on me—me who can only make/post bad art, with it just being a matter of when my followers find out. I need my bachelor's degree to disintegrate into thin air like a Thanosed Avenger. So I can accept retail, and retail can accept me instead of passing me by because they think I'll ditch them in due time for an industry that doesn't want me anyway.

I want to feel free to be "mediocre". I want to feel free to not live up to my accidental accomplishments. I want to feel free to just be. But I feel like I can't, IRL or on the Social Web. Maybe I can begin to feel free IRL if I just stop telling people I have a design degree; leave it out of my resume. But online, the way I draw and the characters I have are tied to my identity (and I don't want to abandon my OCs, or my art style), so I'm stuck as HikaTamika. The 7,500 Bluesky art guy.

What bewilders me is the people who have followed me, like, after posting my last art piece had already made me lose my mind and relatively disappear. (Mind you, I haven't shared new art on Bluesky since.) Like, where did y'all come from? (Starter Packs, most likely.) What are you here for? (Starter Pack button-press, I assume.)

I didn't land this thought plane as smoothly as I got it into the air, so: end post.