Branding: The Story

EDIT: Since having written this entry, I did a lot of soul-searching. Now, in rereading, “her” gives me a bit of an “ick” reaction. So, I fixed it to reflect my true self better.

My brain is firing on different cylinders again. It’s like I’m being pulled in different directions, wanting to work on a bunch of different projects, feeling excited to work on a different bunch of projects, and then—oops, where the fuck did the time go? I’m trying to pin myself down to one project—ONE—right now in this second, so I can feel like I successfully completed something. That’s the problem with my void. It is so vast and seemingly empty that I could fill it nonstop with so many projects. And is that normal? Is it? Or is it just me?

I am suddenly filled with this unbridled rage about being mentor-less. Or is it a therapist I need? Fury. Just white-hot, righteous fury bouncing around in my head behind my eyes. I’ve never had an authentic conversation with another writer and I’ve never found another writer who I feel has the same struggles I do. This is perfectly on-brand for me—finding somehow, some way to twist this into an existential problem for myself.

I really want to try streaming on Twitch. I have no hopes or plans to be an influencer. Is it a fun little lofty desire? Yes. But I think I want it to be a hobby and a chance to socialize. That’s not Twitch’s purpose whatsoever, and everything around me is just a constant bombarding message of “SELL. SELL. SELL. MARKET. MARKET. MARKET. CONSUME. CONSUME. CONSUME. BRAND. BRAND. BRAND.” My authentic want, however, is to find another outlet to express myself and be heard. I know in the past I tried haphazardly to be a YouTuber, and I tried to angle myself in the SFX/Cosplay category but… I don’t know, to be entirely honest, I don’t have a “face” personality. When I am not my authentic self, I find myself to be cringe-y (and very robotic). But I also find my authentic self to be unpalatable in hindsight? Or is it the other way around? I’m niche. Very niche. At least that’s what I perceive. The anxiety and fear of never succeeding and never being good enough are rearing their ugly head. I think I made peace with the fact I need another job, a day job, and to bring my writing back to a more… fun activity? When I recall an exercise, I did in grad school, we were told to write out what success meant to us. Somewhere in my notebooks, I still have it written. But here, right now? I need to survive in this capitalist hellscape, and then turn the stories that have haunted me for years into fanciful tales of escapism. That’s what they were for me and still are. I might have just discovered my disconnect with all the creative writing programs I’ve been in. It is more important for me to get things out there instead of holding onto them and waiting for them to be perfectly polished. It would be nice to make money off my art, but I don’t have the lifespan to wait for survivable money to roll in. So, just make the stories and shove them out into the world. Things will sort themselves out.

Authenticity.

Who am I? I’ve been thinking about branding lately and what that looks like for me. I’ve always been drawn to the darker things in life. I was pleasantly and decidedly edgy in middle school. It started in elementary, but in middle school, I had more freedom to explore the depths of my own emotions. In high school, the people in my life reigned me back in. Then I toed the line and paced back and forth, hungry for something I yearned but was not allowed to claim. I lamented. I grew bored. I forgot. I tried to live in the liminal space I thought people wanted me to be in, and I began people-pleasing, much to my dissatisfaction. I could take a whole chunk out of this meditation to talk about the parallels that I see between my personal life and my creative life, but I don’t want to talk about it. Just know, dear reader, I am aware, and I wanted you to be aware too. Anyway, trying to desperately earn praise from mentors, teachers, and peers alike, while trying to bend the rules, my creations felt clunky. Abominations stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster.

I don’t like literary fiction. Science fiction is not something that I like. I like Victorian aesthetics. I like vampires. I like monsters. The mind-breaking and unfathomable is what I like. I like noir. The aesthetic of the 1930s and 1940s are appealing to me. I like terrible things. I love spooky things. The gothic is something I love. I love horror.

So, here is an idea.

The Writer lives in a house, and they’ve filled it with everything they love. They are eclectic and strange, unusual and uncanny. They bake ghostly sweets and spider treats and are the monster-maker extraordinaire. The Writer is quiet and pleasant, but exceptionally moody and prone to bouts of despondency. A conduit for existential dread and transitional unease, they are not wholly right. The edges of their person that are wrong make others profoundly uncomfortable, and so they regularly attempt to make light of their not-quite-humanness with gentle jokes. They try, they really do. While a smile can be charming and disarming, it doesn’t quite hit the center of their eyes where the painful truth sits.

Transience. Impermanence. Mortality.

The future is stressful, and one night they looked far too long into the darkness and saw the future would continue to be stressful. Everything lost its meaning and gained meaning simultaneously. The world is absurd and it may end in silence, but the rushing and roaring of physics, of the sheer magnitude of the universe chugging forward, they found they could drown in the wake or cling to a buoy until everything calmed down. And then they’d start again, not a drowned corpse, but something other—life stubbornly clinging to flesh and blood. That is who they are. That is who the Writer is. They are bursting at the seams with untold universes and frantic voices, all vying for a chance to exist and breathe. They sequester themself into the Void, a space they found between here and there, the bed and the floor, and slowly lets the ghosts out, their body a sieve for stories and philosophies. The stories fill the house they live in, giving them restless spirits and hungry bugbears for company. The act of letting the stories out twists their body in strange ways, and stepping outside of the Void is painful and exhaustive. So, The Writer takes care to appear only when they feel like they need to. They have a lot of work to do, but at the very least, they are tenacious and ambitious about getting most of it done. Sometimes, though, it just takes a while to translate everything from one tongue to another.

That’s the brand. That’s the identity. That’s my story. Over time, and as I gain my skills, it’ll refine itself, but that’s me, the Writer, your local eldritch horror, trying to make it work as a creative soul and writer of the Gothic. So long as I embrace that part of my nature and surge forward with it, I’ll find the soul-satisfying success I’m looking for.