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Find me on Cara!

Writer's picture: Natalie SnyderNatalie Snyder

I have been on “social media” since the days of live journal. I learned quickly in adulthood how speaking off the cuff online could have disasterous consequences. And I was there at the birth of MySpace, facebook and twitter. Twitter was the spot of the future though.

In our twenties we flocked to the site, feeling on the cutting edge of trends, being cool, hip and tech-y, and also feeling like we were the next generation of heroes with our hashtags for justice and mobilizing protests that I don’t think most of us even knew how to do properly. I think back on it now, with how many marches I went to in my youth where we just kind of walked to a place and then dispersed. We had entirely missed the point of what MLK was doing in the 60s. Apparently you march and then -do- something. Like sit at a counter you weren’t allowed to or maybe blockade around a political office until the official promises to break with a tyrant and support the people.

But those places, instead of being fun ways to connect and laugh, gradually became toxic pits. I have tried to break up with facebook a million times. Like an abusive ex, I crawled back to it thinking I was nothing without it. I changed phones a million times and lost numbers, but my friends and family were always there, the only way to keep in touch. But I guess sometime in Obama’s second term it became something else. I read the most unhinged posts about things easily fact checked away and when I engaged with a cousin with the context of a photo or verbatim quotes and studies that disproved it, one of two things would happen: they would delete that post and just put up a new one still committed to the same misinformation or completely ignore me.

I have always been a deeply factual person. I do research on just about everything just for fun. I do extensive research on the things I create art about and the worlds I create can get bogged down sometimes by trying to make them exist in the confines of the laws of physics and the limits of human capability. Magical wizard? Must use the principles of science somehow. I have let a voice in my head begin to say “this is fiction, you don’t have to have rules” and I think my work has become better for it. But in real life, everything does have to exist within the confines of truth. To not be a complete hypocrite, I also researched posts that I happened to agree with and routed out dishonestly there. It became a chore and exhausting, but also deeply troubling. Why would people continue to believe things so factually wrong?

Everything was also so extreme. Everything was about mass graves and the return of some extremist belief system to the United States. There was a war on Christmas after all! But it all became noise. Perhaps that was the plan all along. Because when those extreme headlines became increasingly accurate it was so easy to just disbelieve them. We heard it all before and it we were all fine, why believe it now? Why bother even looking in to it?

But that’s the truth of it for me. Facebook, instagram, twitter— they were just a place of constant static-y noise. I couldn’t break through any algorithm to escape it. I took classes on how to instagram, followed rules on what time to post on twitter and paid for ads on facebook…and I had a void. Yelling into a void, dropping art into a void. Instead of creating art, social media was my job. Post consistently, three times a week, study the analytics, jump on trends, only use so many hash tags. Instead of creating what my heart wanted, I was trying to churn out work as fast as possible beholden to the algorithm and I could never get there quite in time. I felt sure that everyone finished their Mermay work in February and lied about it. Inktober and 24 hour comics day, were they doing nothing else? And so I was deeply unhappy. I had no interactions for all this work and a portfolio I wasn’t proud of.

And then I deleted it all. I had been doing the con circuit for two years and that was the best moments of my career. I had a line at one of booths, people asking for signatures, real tangible buddies seeking me out at each one. I had a fan say they wanted to cosplay one of my designs, I got a Figuroth friendship bracelet, I met Aabria Iyengar and told her with my full chest I wanted to work with her one day and Erika Iishii gave me a tiny frog friend that stays seated beside me at my work desk. Tangible human people. Real conversations. It felt like water in a drought. Had I really been missing all this? I sold things and got commissions in person while online I was just a vibrating spec in the white noise of a screen.

Unfortunately you can’t completely disengage and live in the woods. (*wistful* one day) but I found the opportunity to start again. I joined BlueSky which is not yet too noise-y. I reached people finally though still a tiny little pocket. But alas, I missed the grid. Looking though my instagram would give me a sense of satisfaction. Look at my curated little gallery of work! I often feel like I do nothing and my little boxes reminded me that I had. I could see my growth from college to now and it was a hit to endorphins. BlueSky for all its engagement is still figuring itself out and seems to be a new twitter or TikTok or some Frankenstein-ed version of both. But then a mutual showed me a new little spot: Cara. The return of my cute little grid.

I don’t know if I will ever truly get through to an audience. After the umteenth comics job that paid next to nothing that some guy would disappear with and I would never see a product, I gave up and started self publishing. I stopped waiting for someone to give me a job and just gave them to myself. The most important thing now is that I make the thing, complete and tangible. That’s the victory. If I am lucky, maybe someone will want to pay me money for it, but the point is it exists. I have a lot of plans, way more ambitious than is probably reasonable. I made my own little universe here to type out my brain to everyone and no one, but I also have little places for you, fictional reader, to find me and follow along if you so choose.

For now I sit here with drink in my mug and cute winter boots on my feet, looking toward the future of myself and everyone else as well. I hope we all find the contentment in disengagement and find the ways to touch each other in ways with meaning.

Stay safe out there

-Celes

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