“Post Panic Attack Erotic Cuddling” is the title of our sex tape

A comic of me standing in front of a locker in which I have stuffed my eating disorder, who is complaining about eating a banana while I tell it “Shut up, nerd”

I used to have a patreon like you, and then I took an arrow to the knee.

I want to be part of a slow crafting movement. I reject the idea that I should be making stunning work in rapid fire succession. I now understand that the algorithms deprive creators of attention, specifically so they go seeking it harder and more intensely, attempting to win the algorithmic lottery through sheer force of will. Social media sites these days are intentionally designed casino-style: meant to suck all your time and money away from you, leave you unsatisfied and wanting more so you keep pumping currency, both real and social, into their platforms.

All of this makes me sound like I’m bitter and jealous of the people who’ve “made it",” who have a stable enough and large enough audience that they can’t be ground to dust in pursuit of virality. In a sense that’s a fair assessment, but that sense in which that is fair is the sense in which humans crave stability and to have their basic needs met and get extremely stressed without those things in their lives. I am jealous of the people who make it work in an obscenely hostile environment, because it will never be me. I value my time and my sanity and my rest too much to keep pursuing goalposts that are intentionally moved to keep people from reaching them. Just tantalizingly out of reach so we all keep reaching.

Until burnout. These apps are designed on purpose to cause burnout so they can gather the remaining few who can survive such a grueling expenditure of their precious resources and exploit them harder. I wish they were better regulated, but I have to live in the world I live in, not the one that I wish I lived in.

The wild part of this is I actually do enjoy producing “content.” I object to calling all this work content, because that’s a marketing term coined by those same energy suckers that designed algorithmic viewing to degrade and devalue the real work people are putting into their platforms, but lacking a better catch-all term that isn’t also extremely pretentious sounding it’s the one that best describes what I’m talking about. But I like making videos, and learning how to make them better, I like doing a little song and dance and tip of the hat routine. I like sharing how I make stuff, because making stuff is really really cool!

All this raises the question — how do I keep doing the parts I like doing, the making and the filming and the editing and the sharing, without the burnout?

The answer for the past couple years for me has been to quit trying to make much at all. Burnout sucks like that. And every time I approached the idea of making stuff to share online again, I would skitter away like a startled lizard, hissing and angry because I was still in pain from how much I gave and how little I got back. Just peeling off chunks of myself to feed to the machine, and I hadn’t entirely healed from that.

I don’t know if I’m entirely healed now. But there is a progression to healing from sustained injuries, and one of those steps is slowly and carefully trying the activities again but this time without overdoing it and hurting yourself.

Slow crafting. It takes time to rebuild a building into something someone can live and love in, and it takes time to rebuild myself into something that can exist while sharing the things they love to make. I want to go slow, I want to appreciate the steps along the way, I want to get out of the habit of machine gunning “content” into the social media spheres in the hopes that someone will catch my strays and make me famous for doing what I love with great enthusiasm. It takes me weeks to make a set of dice not because that’s how long it takes, but because that’s how long it takes me. And I have to be okay with that, and with sharing that, and not get sucked back into the everlasting swirly that is algorithmic content.

I am slowly planning a return to patreon for this. This is only tragic in that I am no longer grandfathered in to their previous fee structures, which to my understanding have degraded pretty significantly since my exodus. However, I’ve finally started to figure myself out, and how to do le social medias without absolutely crashing myself straight into the ground trying to Get Popular or Go Viral. Looking forward to trying again.

xoxoxo,

Jaydot