i am overly perceived 🌀

the pressure of paywalls or just the pressure of an audience. Hiding our best work and showing up being scared to be bad.

perceiving myself on the family cam corder 2003-4ish, tumblr era perceiving 2011, me today sitting the park today taking photos to be percived

I wake up and monitor my flesh suit in the mirror, what new grey hairs have appeared on my temple? During zoom calls I switch off “self view” only to watch my reflection in the monitor. The doctor pulls my right breast out of the gown to examine and covers the left. The play of modesty. I report on my digestive system to my naturopath and name each time I understand the expression from a list of eyes and eyebrows to the psychiatrist in charge of telling me about myself today.

I am feeling overly perceived. To be a person that writes online is already personal, I don’t want whatever I publish to read like my morning pages. Both because those are my paper cuts and open wounds, the things that sting to have looked at and commented on, but also because that would make for some seriously bad writing. To be a bad artist is any artist's worst fear.

I have an essay out in the world right now. It’s an essay I worked really hard on. Paid to be in circle where it could be workshopped, took it to my peers, had conversation and time spent in discussion, submitted it to a contest (also paid) and won. It is by all objective measures a “good” or maybe “successful” essay. Something I wrote that felt really hard and honest to write, something I wrote in early days of my Autism diagnosis where I was really struggling to be ok with my “new” reality. I wrote it at night in bed when I couldn’t sleep, spending weeks replaying the last 30 years of my life on a loop with a new perspective. To call the experience “crazy” is to put it extremely lightly. 

The only way for you to currently read that essay I poured over, is behind a paywall.

Part of me needs the safety of that paywall to show up and say the things I want to say right now. The part that feels overly perceived and poked and prodded by medical professionals and the DM’s from women I went to highschool with that feel comfortable sending to me their thoughts on my work. Other parts of me want my work shared widely. To stand on the page bleeding like any Tumblr era thought daughter Joe March-Carrie Bradshaw-Hannah Horvath embarrassing white waif phase. To be a quite terrible-not-very-good-writer, actually.

In the ever hanging question “what do I stick behind a paywal?” I can never land on something concrete. The balance of safety and the desire to be seen. I have been an artist online, making money from my work for a decade. I am not a viral or overnight success, I (hope) am still early career. No longer an emerging artist but something where I have stepped out onto the stage enough to get good stepping onto the stage. I have tried and experimented in 582 possible ways to make money being an artist, and in the current configuration I have cobbled together – it is working.

There is a certain safety in the exchange of money for art I feel and a certain pressure. I want to be an artist that gets paid to write, which is the reality of my life as an artist now when I let people pay me for my words. I speak to artists everyday and they all say some iteration and version of “I just want to get paid to be me”. I want to get paid to write. The joy and validation I feel from getting paid from my art is very real, not something I am interested in pathologizing. It doesn’t make my art better, but I can tell you paying rent with your art when your Dad sat you down at the dinging room table explaining to why being an artist is a “bad financial decision” – feels fucking good.

I also believe it’s important for artists to get paid. I don’t know how to convey to the world that artists are worth supporting. That the inherent value in cheering on another artist is worth it, valuable. Artists are left to dance around to justify their value, why the cost of something costs what it costs. But I also dislike the argument of “we’ve all got bills to pay” to be a justification for paying someone for their art because… WE have ALL got bills to pay. Including you. Including me. My need to survive is not different, we are all living under capitalism where for some fucking reason we need money to pay to live.

Simultaneously the pressure to be good mounts when I ask for money. To feel worthy and good enough to be in exchange with an audience. To deliver something I feel proud of and pay my rent with. 

I have been told by countless friends that have been through the diagnostic process “you’re gonna feel crazy for like a year or two”. I have learned a lot the last 8 months, what my body needs to be ok. My biggest goal in January was to find a way to lessen my meltdowns. Something I feel terribly embarrassed to even write down in this newsletter. Meltdowns are the least talked about part of Autism and something I live in a lot of fear of. Not just because they are wildly unpleasant to experience (they are) but because of what they have done to my relationships, the people around me and the hyper vigilant state I live in to not have a public meltdown that may find me hospitalized, institutionalized or dead. 

I will have been in therapy for exactly half of life this year. Half of my life showing up to sort through the gnarliest bits of myself with someone else. I have been a writing a blog since 2016, 8 years of showing up and sorting through the the less gnarly bits with an audience to share with. Decades worth of being perceived. 

The past 8 months I have taken me really seriously, I stopped drinking, took my vitamins, crafted routines, rested often and committed to only one social outing a week to give my body time to recharge. And I find myself in the familar place of burntout, exhausted, on my couch, eating plain food.

Artists need the freedom to fuck around, potentially never find out. To really truly create terribly horrible art and I think that can only happen behind closed doors. I don’t know where the line of sustaining a career as an artist and giving yourself space to hermit and hide is. The pressure of goodness and the wanting to be great. In the landscape of great writers on substack, asking to be monetarily compensated for my work and wanting to respect the people that have hit “subscribe” to my inbox. 

I am also of the mind that I trust people, I trust my readers know they want to be here and how they want to spend their money, that if they want to hit unsubscribe they can (and do). And that it’s not my responsibility to tell people what to read and how to feel. That this can be a space of not-goodness.

I haven’t had the space, to truly “wonder” to stick my feet up and as my sweet Anaïs Nin said “taste life twice”. 

Right now I want to commit to no schedule. To have the freedom I created this place for. To be the terrible-thought-daughter-tumblr-rebloging-gremlin-teenage girl-sequesteredto-her-bedroom my heart desires, and really actually needs right now. To find space in between the hypervigilant state I live in to not appear monstrous, blunt, rude, or what I have been socialized as “too autistic”, disabled, othered. To live life away from the constant perceiving my phone allows. 

All of the above is a slurry and mixed thoughts. But I do think what we’re contending with really actually isn’t new. I think of my artists ancestors, and have to assume the merchants an the crafts people before me struggled to find the line between commerce and pleasure and exchange and visibility. Now there are just more men living inside my pocket to profit off of it. 

I will be leaving my paid subscriptions on so folks can access paywalled content, and as a source of income to support me as I write my book (I have been workshopping with editors and folks to help bring this together so wish me luck!) I’m not leaving. I am just releasing myself from a TON of shoulds, specifically the ones I placed here.

I love you all

thanks for being here ✌️

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

P.s The essay in question can be found here and I am trying really hard to not put my subs on sale and instead just allow for the grace of people paying me for my art to wash over me 🌊

A Good Woman

Thanks for reading the Weird Girl. Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and breaking up with the wellness industrial complex. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼