I’m not a performance artist.
When it comes to business, I'm always on. Ready for the next question, the next brief, the next "aha!" breakthrough. Professionally, I know how and when to perform, and I show up to do it well.
But when it comes to my own personal brand and how I approach creativity? ((((UGH)))) I'm just not a performance artist in the same way.
Without dragging my therapist into this, let's just say I find it inauthentic and performative as hell to package my story, my process, and my thinking for public consumption. So I built a bubble. Years in the making. A little place where my life and my creativity and my thinking get to just exist, unbothered and very uninterpreted. It keeps me present. It keeps me from being misread.
But the biggest part: Yes, I'm dope as hell. But my day-to-day ain't THAT interesting.
That's what I told myself, anyway.
I was talking to my brilliant friend Alexandria the other day, and she was in the same struggle. "I don't find the things I do interesting enough to share." Now, as an outsider looking in, I was about to point at her and rattle off the long list of cool things she does on the day-to-day that I know of. But three fingers would've been pointing right back at me. Pot, meet kettle.
And that's when my strategic, pattern-seeking autistic mind caught the lie. Two things were tangled up, and I'd been referring to both as "protecting my peace."
One was real: I deflect the public eye to protect my peace and keep from being misunderstood.
The other hiding underneath: I'd quietly decided I wasn't interesting. I was devaluing myself. (((GASP)))
The "I'm not interesting enough" feeling is almost never true. It's simply fear wearing a terrible disguise from SHEIN. Most of us creatives are sitting on goodness worth sharing precisely because it feels too ordinary. Spoiler: your ordinary can be someone else's validation.
Now here I am, putting my POV out anyway. Imperfectly. Never the performance artist. Because sharing real shit is quite the opposite of performing.