Are Influencers People? (the answer may surprise you:)

an open letter to anyone thinking about starting a blog

When I first started writing the idea of being seen wasn’t sickening because I didn’t really know what it meant. Little girls with abstract ideas of success and what it might mean to be a writer think of pretty scrawling script and candles that burn low, very Jane Austen, very Emily Bronte, very Mary Shelly Virginia Wolfe Zora Neale Hurston. Young women who start writing on like have abstract ideas of success too— maybe this will turn into something, maybe someone will read what I’ve written. Our daydreams are always the best part of our imaginations.

(To me right now, the glass of water on the table looks slightly sideways and I will spend the next half hour proving that it is. Most of the time, this is how writing looks now.)

From the driver’s seat of my car headed north I imagined that one day I would write and be read. I imagined that when this happened— when I got published or when I had a blog with a following, when I was able to get sponsored posts, when it was part of my income, when I hit these invented milestones I would be successful and feel it.

This is what I want to do, I thought, my first winter driving north with all the snow hanging on the trees. Sit at a desk in a cabin somewhere, or at a coffee shop, write something and edit and publish it. That’s what I want.

(I’m thinking about pulling up Zillow right now to browse cabins instead of writing. I think the Keweenaw Peninsula would be the perfect place to live in the woods and the snow and be mostly quiet and hard to find. To chop wood and cook dinner and read books and maybe have no wifi or cell service, to work in a diner or coffee shop and then go home. I think then, if I lived far enough away, I wouldn’t feel so observed.)

When I first started blogging it was to no one; there were no eyes, no comments. Just me sharing words and it felt good and cathartic, like sharing something just for me.

(A journal, that’s the thing you’re thinking of.)

When I first started getting readers that felt good too. It felt like I was connecting to strangers who liked to read what I wrote. Then a man I knew who read my words and liked my photos convinced himself he was in love with me and and we were a perfect fit and I should give him a chance.

(He was the first of three).

When I had a few videos go viral I started getting comments and DMs, sometimes by the hundreds. When I started sharing more personal writing, had a few articles make rounds on the internet, I got comments on those too, people who would email me directly their thoughts. When I started writing trail guide books, I had a few people in the community I lived in who didn’t know me (or actually read anything I wrote) make it their job to disparage me to anyone who would listen. Then I started getting recognized— on the trail, at the grocery store, grabbing coffee. Not often. Just often enough to feel watched, everywhere.

I once posted excerpts from an essay I wrote and someone commented to tell me it was garbage and clickbait. Clickbait, of course, being the highest insult to someone who has organized their entire life around the chance that they might one day be able to write about outdoor adventure for a living. Clickbait, as if I would write for the purpose of keeping your eyes on a page and nothing more, or pose a question I have no intention of answering, or include the phrase “the answer may surprise you “ in a title.

Hm.

Relatively speaking, my blog and social media presence is small, and still it has damaged my sense of privacy, ruined the way I look at the world and the way I view myself. I can’t begin to imagine the damage inflicted on someone exposed to a much larger following. I can’t begin to imagine the damage inflicted on a child, used by their parent for content.

Along with gaining a following and eyes on your work, no matter how relatively small, comes first a perceived sense social power; while you see yourself a nuanced person deserving of empathy and benefit of the doubt, from the outside you are perceived as someone with social power who should be held to a higher standard. You act defensive, and fight back against the people who are critical of you. From the outside, defending yourself is seen as punching down. How could you, someone with so many followers, not see that it’s inappropriate to go after someone so relatively small?

(I could do a separate 2,000 word essay on how “drama” feeds in to the social media machine, how the machine incentivizes controversy and vitriol, and how creators with larger followings can and do weaponize this to increase engagement, how controversy on these apps is broken down into black and white morality; if you do this you are good, if you do not you are bad. There is no space for nuance; quite literally nuance is squashed by character counts.)

The truth is that our online presences are not people and ipso facto critiques of your online presence are not actually critiques of you as a person. Those people do not know you— they glanced at a page on the internet and felt something. Everyone’s social media page— your’s, mine— is a reflection of how they would like to be seen and not who they actually are.

An influencer is not a person; it’s an account. Influencers are not people in the same way that social media will never truly sate our need for human connection; the online landscape is inherently fake. Online interactions give the dopamine hit of real connection but none of the physical warmth; it feels good, but empty.

(I’m sipping coffee now, my second cup. It’s gone lukewarm. I can’t help but think of you, the reader. Writing about ourselves always feels a little self-indulgent. Aren’t you bored of me yet? I’m bored of me. Yesterday I typed most of the day. I have bad posture and my wrists hurt. My grandma used to tell me that if I keep sitting like this my spine will get stuck like that. Someone once told me they like my writing because it seems like I am one of the few real people on the internet. How can I be real if I am worried about being likeable? The best part of about humans, the interesting part, is that most of us are flawed, and struggling every day, thinking big and abstract thoughts, and sort of unlikeable a lot of the time and living out tiny redemption arcs every single day. By the time I reach this part of the paragraph the coffee is cold.)

Today it feels like parts of my life are public domain. When I write I imagine a critical reader. When I read I consider what the book says about me, how it makes me look to the stranger watching me read. I don’t put stickers on my laptop anymore because I don’t want to send signals to the world about myself, as if I could be defined by aesthetics I choose, as if the brands and things we purchase truly say something meaningful about us, and here in the concrete world I would like to be undefined. I care less and less about what I look like because I simply do not wish to be seen. When I go for walks I see photos I should take, think slivers of my life I should share on the internet as if my life must always be marketable.

(social media has corroded our sense of self and ability to se ourselves without first imagining how an audience might see us— we are the masses watching ourselves, constantly evaluating the ways we might be perceived. I drank the cold coffee anyway. I’ll pour another cook and I’ll drink my first sip too hot and scald the roof of my mouth. Scared of getting burned again, it’ll sit next to me until it’s cold. I’ll pour myself another cup.)

Before you start a blog, ask yourself if it’s worth your privacy.

If you’re going to start a blog anyway, here are a few things I wish I knew:

• You don’t have to reply to criticism, especially bad faith criticism. You can just let it be.

• People will demand access to you. You don’t have to grant it. Block people, delete emails. Don’t share where you work and places you frequent. Trust your gut. If someone seems off, they are.

• If something on the internet is making you angry, set your phone down. Oop. It’s gone. Just like that.

• Put energy into things you are proud of. Lately for me that has meant spending more time here, on this blog and less on social media.

• Look into a combination of Wordpress and Substack. SEO-optimized articles don’t need to be delivered to someone’s inbox, but generate a lot of long term leads. Substack is flexible and user-friendly, and a good place to migrate things you might otherwise post on social media. You own your subscriber list, so if you decide to switch platforms you can download the list and leave.

• Blogging and writing is a long-term investment; social media is not. While on social media you get relatively instant gratification for your work in likes and comments the day of posting, writing articles will continue to generate reads long after publication. Reads on a blog post are also more meaningful that views on a social media post. The marketing way of thinking of this is that people reading an article are closer to purchasing something than people on social media, and so those page views and ad-space literally have higher monetary value. I like to think of it like this; people are on social media while they are watching TV, or laying in bed half-asleep, or literally on the toilet. People are reading articles with a cup of coffee in the morning, or sneaking a quick read at work, or winding down in the evening, or searching for information on something specific. Reading takes more of your brainpower, and you have a better slice of someone’s attention.

• Create art, not content. Content has become a gross word to me. Content is fluff designed to keep you on a page and sell ad-space. I don’t want to sell anything. Currently it seems like general disillusionment with social media is growing, and I predict we will see people shift away from platforms like Instagram and TikTok, away from content, and towards platforms like Substack and Patreon that support art without an algorithm. Now is a really good time to think about how you’re allocating your creativity and consider how much energy you’re putting into apps that are using your work to sell ads and exploit addition psychology in order to keep you on the app.

• Create art outside of the trend cycle. It’s really easy to confuse what’s popular with what is good. Don’t let what is currently popular convince you that there is a right or wrong way to do things. Just because short outdoorsy videos with text on them are in doesn’t mean you have to make those videos or even that those videos are good. More importantly, art has longevity and trends die quickly. This is something I’ve really struggled with on social media, and has been something that’s lead me to migrate away from photography and more toward writing. With writing, I know what good, artful writing looks like. With photography, I’ve had a harder time distinguishing what is art and creative energy and what is just a trend or “Instagram photography”.

• Probably you will not make tons of money. I’ve been blogging for five years and on my fourth iteration of this blog. Just last year I started making money from it, thanks in large part to Substack subscriptions (thank you all, you’re the best!). Still, most of what I make through social media comes from people who find me through my portfolio blog or social media and hire me for a project and book sales. I think a lot of people don’t talk about that you don’t just go viral and get rich, and a lot of the videos posted online make it sound like blogging is really easy to get into and make money, and while some people get lucky, in general that’s just not true. People who are making money off blogging and social media are usually putting in hundreds of hours with no compensation to set up a portfolio, create a reliable history of great writing and photography, demonstrate a working knowledge of SEO, and get small gigs along the way so that the infrastructure on their blog is already there to support a sudden influx of views and to convince people they’re worth hiring. 

• If it’s something you really like, and the idea of working in the outdoor industry in this capacity is something you really want, go for it. Just start writing, start sharing, ignore comments you don’t like. Get jobs that let you travel. Look into guiding jobs; a lot of places train and provide housing. Look at teaching abroad, or getting a TEFL certificate and teaching online so you can travel. Look into working in a resort town seasonally. If it’s something you want, and you know the amount of work that might go into it, and know that it might cost you your privacy, and you still want it, then go for it.

The good news is you can always delete your social media and fade very quickly back into the beautiful obscurity of the real world. 

Andy made me a hot chocolate but accidentally put cumin on instead of cinnamon. And also some mittens I’m knitting. These ones are giving me a hard time, and I accidentally made the second of the pair a size too small because I wasn’t paying attention. I’m taking a break from them, as they are currently not “sparking joy”, only rage.

The last decent sunrise what feels like eons ago. Every year it seems like I forget that the majority of winter is gray and mid-cold but not pretty cold, and I’m struggling to find motivation to do pretty much anything. I spent all of November telling myself December would be pretty, and all the things about winter I love. I spent December telling myself it would be January. Now I’m telling myself March. In March the clouds go away and it’s 20 and clear. Right? Don’t they? I’m so busy looking forward to the next thing, all of the things that I will do when the time is right that I’m missing the chance to do things now.

Sunrise & sea smoke. The only good news about the warmer weather this winter is that the sea smoke will be really impressive when the temperatures finally do drop back down.

some photos from when I first started taking photos:

One of the first photos I took on my Canon camera. After school wrapped up, my sister, her boyfriend and I took a trip through the Red River Gorge and parts of the Smokies.

A flower in the forest. By the Kellogg Biological Station. With a mosquito.

Summer in Montana. I first got my camera about a year before this photo, and it took me a while to figure out how to use it, and what decent photos looked like. I was a full-time student with two majors, so I didn’t have a ton of time to figure it out until that summer. I don’t actually know where all the photos from the first fall and winter I had that camera went— I know they were pretty bad and I can imagine what some of them look like in my head. When it was slow at work I would read photography blogs. On weekends, friends and I would go and drive a few hours to find a spot to hike. I don’t have the pictures anymore, but I have really wonderful memories from the times we got outside my last two years of college. In school, it felt like grades were the most important thing in the world, and like I was falling behind and a waste of a smart girl if I wasn’t getting perfect scores. Outside though, it felt like that was the real world and my whole life was ahead of me and there was so much to see and I could see it if I wanted to.

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Wow, thanks for making it this far! This post was long. It started as two separate essays then I kind of found that what I wanted to say was somewhere between those to topics and they merged into one. Thanks for sticking it out all the way to the bottom! Your time is valuable, and I appreciate you spending it reading something I wrote.

-Maddy