attention

I’ve done a second draft of my artist booth, and it’s gotten only positive responses so far. I felt excited about it too, until I made the mistake of going back through my pinterest inspiration. I deliberately decided to pivot away from visual density, but seeing all those people at the top of the game doing it that way shook my already shaky confidence. 

I also had a slight sinking feeling as I put it together – the reality of what I was working towards hit harder. There’s a terrifying vulnerability in putting myself and my work physically in front of people. My beating heart laid out bloody on the table, a death by a thousand cuts with each disinterested glance. Meeting radio silence on social media is one kind of soul crushing, but I fear how it will shatter me in person if I don’t work more on my distress tolerance. The corollary to that is,  it can feel much more rewarding to have people compliment your art in person. There’s a real human connection in standing in front of someone who wants to put money down for what you have created. 

The part I agonize the most over is my youtube fan art… I don’t know why I’m trying to be coy, I mean my fan art of danny. I had a tarot reader in Sedona tell me “All the lies by omission you do to save face run completely contrary to what you are trying to build – also, you’re terrible at it.” So this is the real truth of it – my work of him has been a circle I have tried to square quite literally since I picked art back up again, since he commented on one of my first tweets. 

From that moment, I’ve struggled with the moral anxiety of being perceived as a clout leech. Even if I knew my own intentions, I was deathly afraid of coming across that way. I would create rules for myself – Avoid doing things that ask for time or attention, tag sparingly. Don’t constantly use his hashtag, or put his name in the tweet. If you are good enough, people will find you. He saw my work in one of his reddit videos, and I was floored by the kindness of him shouting out my name specifically – but I can’t tell you how ice cold my blood ran when he opened my reddit history and commented on a drawing of Drew. “Posting on Drew’s subreddit as well I see, interesting…making the rounds.” I know it must have been a comment he didn’t think twice about, but my gnawing neurosis that looks for any scrap of negative validation was on full blast. 

I was wrestling with this as recently as a few days ago (though not with danny) when I made a video response to Kurtis’ recent one on time travel. I didn’t want to put his name in the title – I just put the youtube link on his reddit, and signed out of my account on every device. My alt account was unkind enough to put the video on my fyp, where I could see the piddly 8 views. 

I had to say to myself, Robyn. Do you care about views, or not? Are you still using it as a measuring stick for the quality of your work? The most talented artists and entertainers on the platform, with huge and well established followings, are still groveling at the altar of the algorithm. What delusion and ego to think you somehow have a direct line. Why would this procreate doodle + woowoo philosophy video you edited in capcut be so overwhelmingly compelling that you could just forgo prostrating yourself? You won’t put “Kurtis Conner” in your title because you think if he saw it he would get the clout chasing ick? That would be an insane level of hypocrisy on his part. Nonetheless, that’s the emotional reality I live in, and ironically it’s harder to escape than the physical one. 

With danny, there are more layers. Since most of the people who followed me early on were his borrowed audience, some part of my online identity became tied to him. I think I may have developed a subconscious kill switch in my head that would go off any time I caught a whiff of exposure. To be clear, I’m not fully blaming self sabotage for my growth stagnating, but I know part of me feared how he might be impacted if I had more attention. Especially since he’s pulled back from public social media completely, my worst nightmare was becoming yet another way his chosen career disrupts his peace. 

That may be part of why I stopped using my main instagram account and PandaPukin as my preferred handle. It gave me a chance to reset and redefine, but it’s come back full circle as I’ve had to decide on my branding for art markets. You can see from the pictures, I did go with PandaPufkin. The main thing is just SEO (and no other new names came easily to mind), but there was one other thing. It takes a slight tangent to explain – 

As many young to middle age women do, I’ve been using Stardew Valley as a form of therapy. In this particular case, it’s for the OCD tendencies. In my save files, I had 6 or 7  that never made it past the first week. There would be a chain of little failures that set me off and push me to restart. Sometimes I didn’t catch enough fish on day 2, miss the upgraded rod on day 3, which delayed the backpack upgrade, which made the first trip to the mines less lucrative, which… etc. etc. I don’t know how people relax playing this game, for me it is pure and addictive stress. I did have one save that was just starting year 3, actually an ideal save to explore the new updates, and yet I never felt comfortable using it. It was some combination of “It’s pretty good but I know I could have done it better” and also “it’s been so long, I’ll mess it all up because I don’t remember what I was doing.” This week I’ve made myself play that save, and I’m realizing how silly it was that I left all that progress on the table, just to chase a perfection that could not matter less.

Maybe you see the analogy to my art situation. I certainly didn’t do things perfectly in my first 2-3 years online, but there was a lot of good and also a lot of good will from people I admire. I think there’s enough distance from that version of myself that I don’t need to have a self-inflicted and illusionary sword of damocles over my head. 

Unrelated but I’m too jazzed not to share – I’m going to see Drew and Eddy do improv on the 25th in LA. I snapped up tickets the instant I saw Eddy’s IG story, and it will be the first time I’m driving Phoenix to LA solo. The last time I drove by myself in LA traffic, I did completely crunch the front of our ‘98 corolla on a pickup (the truck didn’t get a single scratch on it, of course). I was 19 and funnily enough I was also seeing a comedy show – Stephen Merchant’s first (and only?) big stand up tour Hello Ladies. I would have flung myself into the sun before I missed it, so I drove my busted ass car the rest of the way there and back the 40 minutes to my aunt’s house. Ideally I won’t need to go through that kind of gauntlet again….maybe I’ll just get a hotel close to the venue to avoid tempting fate.

Fate may be on my side with this one, though. I intend to resist my usual urge to leave some kind of artistic overture, but serendipitously as I was digging through my stickers to set up my booth, down at the bottom of the container was one lone sticker of Drew I completely forgot I made. It seems like a slap in universe’s face to not take it with me just in case (but I will need to print a sticker of Eddy for the sake of fairness). Both last summer and the year before when I’ve gone to LA to see the commentary boys something magical has happened, so if I can do so without attachment or expectation, I’ll indulge a little childlike over-excitement.